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The Trump administration, in recent months, has latched onto news of a large-scale public benefit fraud scandal to carry out immigration raids and harsher policies targeting Minnesota’s large Somali migrant community.
Federal charges have been filed against 98 people accused of embezzlement of public funds, and as Attorney General Pam Bondi stressed on Monday, 85 of the defendants are “of Somali descent.”
Fifty-seven people have already been convicted in the scheme to divert $300 million in public grants intended to distribute free meals to children, but the meals never existed, prosecutors said.
Republican officials and federal prosecutors accuse local Democratic authorities of disregarding numerous warnings because the fraud involved Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the country, with around 80,000 members.
Democratic Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s 2024 running mate, rejects the accusation.
While the case became public in 2022, prosecutors ramped it up again this year with hotly politicised revelations. Right-leaning YouTube content creator Nick Shirley reignited interest in the case over the holidays with a video he claims shows daycare centres siphoning public money.
The video, which blew up on X with 127 million views and played repeatedly on Fox News, resonated with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) circles, who are opposed to what they deem to be overly generous social and immigration policies.
The Trump administration responded immediately to the outcry, with Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin telling Fox News that hundreds of investigators were targeting local businesses in Minneapolis. As part of the crackdown, federal health officials announced a broad funding freeze in Minnesota and nationwide.
“We have frozen all child care payments to the state of Minnesota,” Health and Human Services (HHS) deputy Jim O’Neill wrote in an X post Tuesday.
Minnesota congressman Tom Emmer, a leading figure in the Republican majority of Congress, called for mass “denaturalization and deportation of every Somali engaged in fraud in Minnesota.”
President Donald Trump preceded Emmer’s call with similar sentiments at the end of November, when a conservative outlet claimed money embezzled in Minnesota was being used to fund Somalia’s Al-Shabaab, an Al-Qaeda linked Islamist militant group.
The prosecutor has since denied that accusation in the case.
But the US president was quick to accuse “Somali gangs” of “terrorizing” Minnesotans and ended their Temporary Protected Status, a program that exempted Somalis from deportation to their war-torn country.
A week later, Trump escalated the rhetoric, saying Somalia “stinks.” And in a social media post on New Year’s Eve, he again attacked Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is of Somali origin, as a “lowlife.”
