Federal officers increased their activity in Minnesota as investigators pursued new allegations of fraud involving day care centers run by Somali residents in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, the Associated Press reported. The stepped-up enforcement came after President Donald Trump previously tied his administration’s immigration crackdown on Minnesota’s Somali community to a pattern of fraud cases involving government programs.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and FBI Director Kash Patel both announced the increase in operations in Minnesota this week, according to the AP account. Noem posted on social media that officers were “conducting a massive investigation on childcare and other rampant fraud.” Patel said the intent was to “dismantle large-scale fraud schemes exploiting federal programs.”
The AP report said the move followed a video posted Friday by a right-wing influencer claiming he had found that day care centers operated by Somali residents in Minneapolis had committed up to $100 million in fraud. Tikki Brown, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families, said at a Monday news conference that state regulators took the allegations seriously.
Minnesota has faced years of scrutiny for fraud involving public benefits, including Medicaid-related cases, the report said. One prominent example cited by the AP involved a massive $300 million pandemic fraud case tied to the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, which prosecutors said was the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud scheme. In that case, prosecutors said defendants exploited a state-run, federally funded program intended to provide food for children.
The AP reported that during President Joe Biden’s administration, 47 people were charged in 2022 in that broader investigation, and that the number of defendants later grew to 78. It said 57 people had been convicted through guilty pleas or trial outcomes, and that many of the defendants were of Somali descent, while other fraud cases were also under investigation, including additional child care-related allegations.
The latest round of federal scrutiny has also intersected with Minnesota’s political landscape, the AP said. It described Trump’s immigration enforcement in Minnesota as focusing on the Somali community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which the report called the largest in the country, and said Trump had labeled Minnesota Somalis as “garbage” and said he didn’t want them in the U.S. The report also noted that Republicans have tried to blame Gov. Tim Walz for fraud, citing comments that fraud will not be tolerated and that his administration will work with federal partners.
Walz, according to the AP, said an audit due by late January should provide a clearer picture of the extent of the fraud, while also allowing that a $1 billion estimate could be accurate. The report said Walz stated his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud and that he has defended the way his administration responded. Minnesota’s most prominent Somali American Democrat, Rep. Ilhan Omar, urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a relative few, the AP report added.
Separately, the AP report said that among those running alleged schemes to obtain funds for child nutrition, housing services and autism programs, 82 of 92 defendants are Somali Americans, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Minnesota. It also cited prosecutor Joe Thompson’s estimate that total losses from all fraud cases could exceed $1 billion and referenced a federal allegation earlier this month that half or more of roughly $18 billion in federal funds supporting 14 programs in Minnesota since 2018 may have been stolen.
Sources used in the investigations and the case figures discussed in the AP report were part of an ongoing set of prosecutions and audits that predate the new allegations focused on day care centers, with officials and politicians framing the enforcement as both a law-enforcement matter and a potential campaign issue.