This is the government as a money laundering operation, one hand washing the other on someone else’s dime, and sadly that appears to be the modern progressive way. If caring for the poor, disadvantaged, and disabled was as important as they claim, none of this would’ve happened.
In principle, every fair minded person should be outraged at the massive amounts of fraud perpetrated by primarily the Somali community in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Based on what we know now, billions of dollars have been stolen from various government programs at the state and federal level for more than a decade. FOX 9 News in Minneapolis began reporting on the matter as early as 2013, when they discovered that Yasmin Ali, the owner of Deqo Family Centers and Ali Nations Home Health Care had been recruiting parents to work at her center and enrolling their children, bilking that state out of at around $4 million. Though she was arrested for swindling and racketeering, a judge lowered her bail, she fled before the trial, and has avoided justice since. Afterwards, FOX 9 also learned that she was using public money to pay for meals that she was funneling to her brothers, who supposedly ran a catering company. By 2015, FOX 9 discovered fraud in other day care centers, where at least four metro operations were billing for children that didn’t exist. According to an analysis of footage gleaned from hidden cameras, at least 30% of the children enrolled in the centers were fake. In one instance, none of the 34 children who were supposed to be there showed up that day. In 2019, FOX 9 was tipped off about the potential of up to $100 million per year in similar fraud. The figure was based on potential over-billing for 12,667 children across 15 centers that receive more than $56 million annually, extrapolated to over 1,000 centers in the entire state. “We believe that there’s a scope of fraud out there that we really need to get our arms around and ensure those dollars are going to kids that really need them,” Chuck Johnson, Acting Commissioner for the Department of Human Services said in 2018, but even then some were downplaying the scope. Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles told lawmakers, he could not corroborate the figure and suggested the scale was much lower, “We are trying to get to the number of $100 million in fraud. And we couldn’t get there. We couldn’t find evidence to substantiate $100 million in fraud every year, we couldn’t find any reasonable estimate of fraud.” Somehow, however, FOX 9 was able to find Fozia Ali, who spent two months abroad in Dubai and Kenya in expensive hotel rooms and charged the state for childcare while she wasn’t even in the country. The total was some $1.5 million in restitution. The network also found that the Department of Services was notified about the potential for a massive fraud in the program. They responded by legislating more money for investigators, while doing little to nothing to address the root cause of the problem.
By 2022, the fraud had spread to the Feeding Our Future program, created during the pandemic to provide for low-income children. Though Attorney General Keith Ellison confirmed there was an ongoing investigation and declared that the officers and directors of the program had “failed to properly administer and use assets for charitable purposes; failed to comply with statutory requirements for non-profit corporations; made false and/or deceptive representations in connection with the solicitation of donations; and breached fiduciary duties,” a secret video recorded in 2021 suggested that he slow walked the case at a minimum, ultimately prosecuting some 48 individuals when there were believed to be many more involved. By 2025, the fraud spread even further to funding for people with learning disabilities, primarily those on the autism spectrum, another instance that was described as “running rampant.” This time, at least 11 service providers are believed to have billed the government for services that were never provided. While we can appreciate FOX 9’s long term effort to bring these stories public attention, it appears to be yet another instance where the national media largely ignored what was happening even though Minnesota Governor Tim Walz ran as the Democrat Vice Presidential candidate in 2024, when it rightly should have become a huge scandal. Instead, it wasn’t until a November 19 piece by conservative journalist and activist Christopher J. Rufo that the story really exploded. Writing for City Journal, he declared, “Minnesota is drowning in fraud. Billions in taxpayer dollars have been stolen during the administration of Governor Tim Walz alone. Democratic state officials, overseeing one of the most generous welfare regimes in the country, are asleep at the switch. And the media, duty-bound by progressive pieties, refuse to connect the dots. In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab. As one confidential source put it: ‘The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.’” Mr. Rufo focused on yet another program rife with fraud, Medicaid Housing and Stabilization Services, a first of its kind effort in the United States to help seniors, addicts, the disabled, and the mentally ill secure housing with intentionally “low barriers to entry” and “minimal requirements for reimbursement.” Initially budgeted at $2.6 million per year in 2020, the program ballooned to $104 million by 2024 and looked to increase even further after having spent $61 million in just the first six months of 2025 before it was scrapped by the state after credible allegations of fraud. On September 18, Joe Thompson, then the Acting US Attorney for the District of Minnesota, issued indictments against eight individuals while promising there were more to come. “Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” he said. “These are often just purely fictitious companies solely created to defraud the system, and that’s unique in the extent to which we have that here in Minnesota.” Days later, he expanded his indictments to other programs including many mentioned earlier. “This is not an isolated scheme,” he wrote in a press release. “From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money. Each case we bring exposes another strand of this network.” So far, some 90 people have been charged.
Late last month, conservative influencer and citizen journalist Nick Shirley published a viral video of his efforts to investigate fraud on the ground in the state, claiming he identified some $110 million in fraud on his own. The video had a simple premise: Visit some of these day care centers in person and find out what is actually happening on the scene. Are they chock full of kids or as the US Attorney claimed purely fictitious companies? In a moment that encapsulates the sad absurdity of the entire escapade, one of the centers he visited had misspelled “Learning” on the sign, rendering it as the “ Quality Learing Center.” In addition to the misspelled sign, which the operator blamed on the graphic designer, Mr. Shirley found no kids inside. The same was true of many of the other centers he visited, lending credence to US Attorney Thompson’s belief that these are “purely fictitious companies solely created to defund the system.” If anything, the “Quality Learing Center’s” story got even stranger afterwards when Mr. Shirley’s reporting was enough to prompt a reply from the state itself. “While we have questions about some of the methods that were used in the video, we do take the concerns that the video raises about fraud very seriously,” explained Tikki Brown, commissioner of the new Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families. “There have been ongoing investigations with several of those centers. None of those investigations uncovered findings of fraud,” she assured everyone while claiming the absence of children at the Quality Learing Center was because it was shut down the week before. The only problem: It wasn’t. After these statements, bus loads of kids began almost magically appearing at the center. A local resident spoke to the conservative Post Millennial website, claiming “We’ve never seen kids go in there until today. That parking lot is empty all the time, and I was under the impression that place is permanently closed.” How the state could not be sure whether a licensed center receiving government funds was open or closed remains unclear, but the state is not the only organization claiming there was no evidence of fraud. Shortly after, CBS News chimed in claiming it “conducted its own analysis of nearly a dozen day care centers mentioned by Shirley: all but two have active licenses, according to state records, and all active locations were visited by state regulators within the last six months. One, Sweet Angel Child Care, Inc., was subject to an unannounced inspection as recently as Dec. 4. CBS News’ review also found dozens of citations related to safety, cleanliness, equipment, and staff training, among other violations, but there was no recorded evidence of fraud.” What that “recorded evidence of fraud” means was left equally unclear – did they think the centers themselves would have records clearly identifying fake children? – but even they couldn’t get in touch with anyone at these centers, “CBS News visited and called several of the day care centers on Monday but received no responses.”
Regardless, the investigations conducted by US Attorney Thompson, Mr. Rufo’s reporting, and Mr. Shirley’s viral video prompted President Donald Trump to take further action. Since then, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security have surged resources into the state, estimating the total amount of fraud to be somewhere between $9 billion and $18 billion, and halted funding for childcare programs in Minnesota. As Fox News described it, “Federal authorities are launching a ‘massive operation’ in Minnesota on Tuesday to ‘identify, arrest, and remove criminals who are defrauding the American people,’ the Department of Homeland Security said. ‘Our investigative agents are conducting a massive operation to identify, arrest, and remove criminals who are defrauding the American people. We will root out this rampant fraud plaguing Minnesota,’ the agency wrote on X. FBI Director Kash Patel described the findings so far as “just the tip of a very large iceberg.” At least some conservatives have taken this to mean that state and local officials, potentially including Governor Walz himself, were both aware of the schemes and to some extent either allowed them to happen or participated in them. They find at least some evidence of this in the fact that many of these suspected daycare centers donated substantially to Democrat candidates, some $35 million over the past two years alone. For their part, Democrats have responded to these allegations by veering wildly between taking responsibility and blaming Donald Trump, believing he is intentionally targeting the Somali community because it is Somali rather than because many among them have been defrauding the US taxpayer for more than a decade. “The governor has worked for years to crack down on fraud and ask the state legislature for more authority to take aggressive action,” a spokesperson recently said. “He has strengthened oversight — including launching investigations into these specific facilities, one of which was already closed,” adding he has also “hired an outside firm to audit payments to high-risk programs, shut down the Housing Stabilization Services program entirely, announced a new statewide program integrity director, and supported criminal prosecutions.” At other points, however, he has likened the investigations to “white supremacy” saying, “This is what happens when they scapegoat, and this is what happens when they no longer hide the idea of white supremacy.” The governor has since withdrawn from running again, suggesting that the scandal is likely to get worse before it gets better. Others have rallied to the defense of the Somali community or prostrated themselves before it depending on your perspective. Beyond almost every Democrat inside or outside Minnesota rallying to their defense, a smattering of recent headlines includes “Scorned by the president, Somalis in Minnesota are embraced by the state that took them in” (CNN), “Trump’s targeting of Somali Americans is having an effect in Minneapolis” (MSNOW), and “‘Where would America be without us’ A community of refugees is stunned by White House limits” (Associated Press).
To me at least, two things are evident that are endemic to progressive governance. First, there is no doubt that the Somali community is a powerful voting block in Minneapolis and throughout Minnesota. As NPR recently noted, “Somalis have become a force in Minnesota politics” strong enough to elect members of their own such as Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar and other local leaders. They have also been Democrat friendly until very recently. Prior to last year’s Presidential Election, Democrats counted on close to 7 in 10 Somalis casting votes on their behalf, but in November, the percentage dropped about 14 points while support for the Republican candidate shot up 10 points. While Minnesota is a left-leaning state, the margins are close – Vice President Kamala Harris won in 2024 by barely over 4 points. Therefore, Democrats are terrified of losing anymore Somali support and are more than happy to pander to them to keep the coalition together. Rather than rightly asking the upstanding members of the community to help root out the corruption in their own ranks, trusting that the overwhelming percentage of Somalis are good citizens and wound not want to be associated with corruption, they were happy to pretend it didn’t exist at best, or wasn’t a part of the community itself at worst. Second and more insidiously, it’s hard not to get the sense that some of these programs were designed with fraud in mind, or at least so poorly designed fraud so easy, it’s inevitable. Beyond the fact Minnesota politicians bragged about the low barriers to entry for one of the programs, all of them are essentially self reported, as in the center in question claims a certain number of students and the taxpayer simply pays, making it incredibly easy to bill for people that do not exist. Even knowing this, leaders in the state failed to order a complete audit for year and demand a full accounting while the rolled out additional, similar programs with the same fundamental flaws, and at least part of that must’ve been because these same centers were putting money back into the politicians pockets. This is essentially the government as a money laundering operation, one hand washing the other on someone else’s dime, and sadly that appears to be the modern progressive way – witness President Joe Biden spending billions on unnecessary funds to pay off the teacher’s unions under the guise of the pandemic. If the principle of caring for the poor, disadvantaged, and disabled was as important as they claim, none of this would’ve happened. Democrats would’ve demanded every dollar go where it was supposed to. Instead, power appeared to be the motivating principle, and if those they claim to care about were harmed in the process, so be it.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 