In the autumn glare reflecting off the harsh glass façade of the Minneapolis public library, temporary fencing encloses a once-welcoming arc of wooden planters and benches. During business hours there is an edgy assortment of dazed, hunched-over, or mumbling manifestations of Minnesota’s social wreckage fogging the sidewalk between the library and this little park. Either the fear or reality of their behavior has seemingly denied the broader public of the opportunity to use it. 

The library itself, a César Pelli-designed modernist ice cube that opened with great fanfare in the faraway year of 2006, is equally a relic, a monument to the bygone days when Minnesotans could read. “Minnesota nice, Mississippi smarter” goes a billboard around the corner on Washington Avenue in the heart of the yuppified postindustrial North Loop, the work of a local education-focused nonprofit. Only half of Minnesota schoolchildren now read at grade-level.

Symptoms of the state’s catastrophic decline, which is centered in but hardly confined to the Twin Cities, are impossible to avoid. Some have a poignant Minnesotan cast: “Need assistance walking to your car?” ask seasick-green notices plastered onto the trashcans in the deadness of central Saint Paul. “Call or text the downtown ambassadors.” The posters helpfully include a QR code to summon these benevolent neighbors, who are kind enough to assist in warding off lurking danger, yet strangely incapable of equipping a police department that can keep the business district of the state capital safe.

Over in Minneapolis the headquarters of the third police precinct, which rioters gutted shortly after George Floyd’s killing outside a corner store in the summer of 2020, remain a burnt husk over five years later, though the City Council recently authorized a plan to turn it into a “democracy center,” whatever that means. Minneapolis had 58 percent more murders in 2024 than it had in 2019, and both assaults and vehicle thefts remain high above pre-Floyd levels. The state itself lurched from rude financial health to impending brokenness. In 2023, Minnesota’s state government foresaw a $17.5 billion budget surplus for the next biennium; current forecasts instead show a $6 billion deficit by the end of the decade. Budgetary matters seem trivial compared to the June murders of state representative and former House speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, alleged victims of a globe-trotting 57-year-old Christian supremacist and ex-missionary whose bizarre history included a long stint in central Africa and appointments to the Minnesota Governor’s Workforce Development Board under Democratic governors Mark Dayton and Tim Walz. 

How did so much get so terrible so rapidly? One simultaneous cause and consequence of the Minnesota swoon is outright fraud, the rotten fruit of a partnership between some of the state’s leading politicians and sectarian interests that understand government not as a society’s shared instrument to address its problems, but as a storehouse to pillage. 

Attorney general Keith Ellison, a Democrat, is Minnesota’s highest law enforcement officer. In December of 2021, business leaders in the Twin Cities Somali community met with Ellison in his office in Saint Paul. Bill Glahn, a fellow at the conservative Twin Cities-based Center of the American Experiment and the former deputy commissioner of commerce for Republican governor Tim Pawlenty, obtained and published a recording of the meeting earlier this year. Its contents reveal how different the actual workings of Minnesota’s government are from what the citizens of any fair and generous and functioning society would probably like to believe.

Ellison’s guests were concerned that government moneys for a Minneapolis nonprofit called Feeding Our Future (FOF) might be in jeopardy. In late 2020, the nonprofit had sued the state, claiming the Minnesota Department of Education had been discriminatory in delaying and in many cases denying funding to a Somali-run group affiliated with FOF. Organizations working through FOF claimed to be providing tens of thousands of meals a day as part of a federally funded but state-administered COVID-era food-relief program. With even a little investigative initiative, Ellison’s office could easily have proven that Feeding Our Future was a $250 million fraud against taxpayers. Many of the nonprofits collecting state reimbursements under the FOF umbrella simply didn’t exist, and even those with some basis in physical reality invoiced the state for implausible numbers of meals. By December of 2021, Feeding Our Future had actually won its case in state court, with a judge determining several months earlier that the state had no basis to impede the flow of money to the group. But the ruling didn’t actually require the state to resume all payments. In December, Somali groups and FOF still complained that funding wasn’t coming in quickly enough. 

In the meeting with Ellison were Salim Said, co-owner of the Safari Restaurant in south Minneapolis, and Ikram Mohamed, a consultant for Feeding Our Future. Both eventually faced federal indictments for their alleged role in the scam. (Said has been convicted on 21 counts of fraud, while Ikram is awaiting trial.) Ellison assured his guests that the money would continue flowing through FOF. It was the state government, which Ellison in theory represented, that would soon be on the defensive, the attorney general told them. “[Governor Tim] Walz agrees with me that this piddly, stupid stuff running small people out of business is terrible,” said Ellison. “Let’s go fight these people,” he declared, “these people” being rightfully cautious state officials. Ellison suggested that Salim “send the names of all these people who are hanging on by a thread” — the Somali businesses and nonprofits that existed at the public’s expense, many of them through fraud — so that he could personally needle senior bureaucrats into restoring their funding. 

Ellison might not have extended such generosity out of pure nobility of spirit. Nine days after the meeting, Ellison’s reelection campaign received four donations at the legal maximum of $2,500, one of which came from Ikram’s brother, who also became a Feeding Our Future defendant. Salim Said made a $2,500 donation to the campaign of Jeremiah Ellison, Keith Ellison’s son, then a Minneapolis city councilman. In total, Glahn found that Ellison received $15,000 from FOF-linked donors. At the time, the state remained happily oblivious to the Feeding Our Future scam, which only broke open when FBI agents executed scores of simultaneous search warrants in January of 2022.

Ellison’s job is to be the top legal advocate for the government and the people of Minnesota. On the recording, “he’s sitting with people who were suing his clients, the state agencies, and talking about how he’s going to fight his own client,” Republican state representative Walter Hudson, a member of the House of Representatives’ Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, explained when I met him at the Capitol in Saint Paul. Ellison, he said, “was downplaying very clear evidence of massive amounts of fraud in order to gain political patronage from the Somali community, at minimum. Now, from there, you can speculate all sorts of things.” 

Being a place where the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) has won every election for statewide office since 2006, Minnesota is awash in public service swindles of humbling vastness. Feeding Our Future is merely an average-sized 21st-century Minnesotan fraud. Minnesota was the first state to offer housing stabilization services for the homeless and transient through Medicaid, a program that the state originally projected to cost $2.6 million a year. It has instead cost $310 million since 2020, with the first federal indictments of alleged Medicaid housing scammers coming down in September. “They can hardly find anyone who provided bonafide services under this program,” Glahn said to me over the phone. 

A whistleblower in Minnesota’s Department of Human Services claimed that one in five autism centers in the state are currently under investigation for allegedly fraudulent activity. The people who run these centers do not have to be licensed, and there is no standard for determining the recipients’ eligibility to receive whatever services the centers claim to provide. Unsurprisingly, given the overall lack of fixed standards or accountability, the bill for the state’s Medicaid-assisted autism-services program has ballooned from $6 million in payouts in 2018 to $192 million in 2023, a time in which the state went from having fewer than 50 autism service providers to over 300. The first federal indictment related to Minnesota autism graft came this past September. Perhaps relatedly, the state isn’t sure where over $200 million of $500 million from a program aimed at compensating frontline workers for their service during the COVID pandemic actually went. “Our state is far and away the leader in fraud now and everyone sees it,” acting US Attorney Joseph Thompson told the editorial board of the Minnesota Star Tribune in 2023. 

The costs of the Minnesotan frauds go beyond bushels of wasted taxpayer money. “The most marginalized are going to be the most impacted,” Latonya Reeves, a member of the Democratic National Committee who is also the president of the Hennepin County parole officers’ union and a prominent activist in the Minneapolis DFL, told me when we met in the city’s downtown. “The people that really need these services are not going to get them because a few took advantage of the system.” 

In discussions of the Minnesota frauds, everyone tries not to be too explicit about who these “few” people are, although Reeves at least hinted at the underlying sensitives in any discussion of wrongdoing located in the state’s Somali community: “To me, it’s not racist and discriminatory to ask where taxpayer dollars are going.”

If one chooses to inhabit a fact-based world, it is impossible to ignore that the most thoroughly proven frauds, the ones that have dollar amounts and dozens of federal prosecutions attached to them, involve the distribution of social services through organizations serving Somali-Americans. All of the people indicted over alleged housing-stabilization and autism fraud, and all but two of the 73 Feeding Our Future defendants, are Somali. Statewide, Somali children are seven times likelier than their non-Somali counterparts to receive autism treatment, suggesting that Somalis either have far better access to a specialized medical service than the average Minnesotan, or that Somali operators are illegally billing a large volume of phantom services to the state.

Still, explanations that attempt to pin blame solely on the nauseating corruption of Minnesota state government, the one-party rule of the DFL, the malfeasance of specific politicians, or the local Somalis all fail to fully capture how deep, how broad, or how far back the mass immolation of the people’s money goes. Picking on the Somalis tends to obscure as much as it reveals. American urban history is a grand pageant of ethnic mafias: For the newly arrived immigrant underclass, community-wide criminal activity has always been an engine of wealth, social cohesion, and protection amid the exclusions of an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile society. The Somalis are following a trail that Irish Catholics, Italians, and Jews all blazed. And what’s more American than fraud?

Such a neat accounting of our country’s rich criminal heritage is only reassuring if mass wrongdoing can, when squinted at retrospectively, look like a contribution to an inevitably successful national experiment in figuring out how to live together. In this hopeful interpretation, the criminals’ children always go straight, so straight that their forefathers’ feloniousness becomes a tragically necessary step in that uniquely American process through which belief in a civic ideal comes to triumph over the older, more atavistic connections of chauvinism, omertà, and tribe. 

Alas, no compelling theory of the common good appears to be in operation these days in Minnesota. What’s replaced any firm notion of civic life is the unspoken hope that the mountains of free money that the tribunes of the DFL dole out to their tribal clients might make everyone ignore how bleakly incoherent things have gotten — at least until the bill comes due.

The first serious rumblings of public-service fraud within the Twin Cities Somali community came almost twenty years ago, when officials at the US attorney’s office in Minneapolis began receiving reports that Somali-owned medical-transportation and translation companies were systematically overbilling Medicaid-funded state programs. However, the reports were too vague and the amounts too small to justify a full-on federal prosecution. More importantly, as the government learned from its 2015 case against a Twin Cities cell of Somali Islamic State recruits — products of the largest ISIS conspiracy ever uncovered on US soil — it was a difficult and time-consuming process to get area Somalis to cooperate with federal prosecutors even on matters of national security. Going after a few mid-ticket scammers for what amounted to peanuts hardly seemed like a way to build trust. 

The Twin Cities Somalis, who number somewhere around 60,000, are largely a refugee population that arrived during and after the 1991 collapse of their homeland into tribal warfare, foreign military adventurism (including the well-meaning and clueless American variety), and jihadist mania. The community is the result not of a voluntary movement of ambitious people seeking a new life in America, but of the US-government’s mass resettlement of entire families at once, including those who served the American-allied regime of military dictator Siad Barre, overthrown in 1991. Minneapolis congresswoman Ilhan Omar, the world’s most famous Somali, is the daughter of a former senior officer in Barre’s army. 

The Somalis brought the language, culture, and complex clan system of their shattered homeland to Minnesota, a frigid oasis of high social trust then overwhelmingly white and Christian, and thus the social and geographic opposite of a place they’d never planned on leaving. In Minneapolis, former regime henchmen like Omar’s father lived alongside Barre’s recent victims in apparent peace. But the cultural forces that allowed Somalis to resume a version of their prior lives also had the effect of walling them off from other Minnesotans. 

“The historic Somali society is a kind of Janus-faced society,” explained Ahmed Samatar, a political scientist at Macalister College in Saint Paul and the founding editor-in-chief of Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies at his skylit campus office. “On one side there is the intimacy of the local community, the family subgroup and kin group. Here there is mutuality and responsibility and respect, and certain traditional laws… But the civic culture was not part of that tradition.” After Somalia won its independence from British rule and United Nations trusteeship in 1960, it became necessary among Somalis “to extend yourself and become a citizen of a country where you don’t know everybody,” Samatar detailed. That country lasted only 30 years, less than half a lifetime. A culture of “civic virtue,” Samatar said, “died with the Somali state” in 1991. For a large number of refugees, American notions of civic virtue were never strong enough to displace the old country’s cynical and disenchanted attitude towards the public commons, a concept which enjoyed only a brief and troubled existence in Somalia before its long, violent plunge. 

“There is a mentality, therefore, that comes here,” Samatar continued, “which is: Grab what you can now because the world has almost ended for you. It is a new beginning. Grab it now, rather than banking on the possibility that mutual trust will be a way of creating a new life for yourself and your family and the future.” 

In the Western imagination, civic trust is something both natural and infinite — the product of a virtuous feedback loop, with acts in service of the common good creating bonds of cooperation and interdependence that produce additional acts in kind. Minnesota is so trusting that there are no turnstiles to enter the Twin Cities light rail, which now has prominently posted codes of conduct that gently remind riders that it is illegal to poop on the trains or in the stations. Somalis — like the vast majority of people on earth, who do not live in prosperous or stable democracies — tend to have the hard-earned attitude that trust is a limited commodity, something to be jealously guarded and reserved only for the tiny sliver of the human race with whom they share some organic, non-externally constructed bond. Compared to the clan, or Somali culture, or Islam, the state is something meaningless or temporary, or at best instrumentally useful. 

Mutual trust hadn’t worked in Somalia, and hadn’t even really been tried. A large enough number of Twin Cities Somalis continued to believe it wasn’t worth trying out in Minnesota, either. The weak belief in a shared public sphere motivated the Somalis of the Twin Cities to create an enclave during an era in which cultural distinctiveness and even cultural separatism became one of America’s leading liberal values. In tolerant Minnesota, respect for the war-battered Somali newcomers meant offering them help while also leaving them alone. 

The Karmel Mall of Somalia is multiculturalism in its most thoroughly realized form, the manifestation of the idea that true diversity lies in giving minority communities the assistance and protection needed for them to achieve their own separate destinies outside of what Americans had once widely understood to be their common culture. Here, in a cruise-ship-like high-rise on the west end of Lake Street, Minneapolis’s immigrant downtown, the Somalis of the Twin Cities shop for incense, cologne, jewelry, traditional clothing, and spices from the other side of the planet in a mostly windowless simulation of the best markets of Mogadishu, or of the heavily Somali Eastleigh neighborhood of Nairobi. 

On the complex’s upper levels, Somalis can find Somali-speaking lawyers, tax preparers, and religious teachers for their children, as well as a handsome stained-glass-paneled mosque with the rows on its green-and-white carpeting angling towards Mecca. At prayer time, the adhan echoes through the mall and its parking garage, as engorged with late-model SUVs as any other midwestern shopping center. Numerous storefronts offer to send money abroad by way of East African cash exchanges. Spicy and milky Somali tea, among the most soothing yet complex of the world’s national teas, is on offer in diverse regional forms. One travel agency has clocks showing the local times in Amsterdam, Mogadishu, and Hyderabad — the fourth-largest city in India. “All Africans go to India for medical care,” explained Jama, a community activist who guided me around the complex. “It’s cheap.”

The colorful and fragrant stacks of merchandise at the Karmel Mall re-create faraway places, only fleetingly acknowledging the surrounding culture. In the food court, where Al Jazeera English plays on a lone TV, you can eat halal cheesesteaks and halal quesadillas — Zaki’s Chicken and Waffles also serves goat, a Somali staple. The only non-Somalis a visitor is likely to see are security guards in ersatz police uniforms, handcuffs clipped to tactical vests with empty bodycam emplacements and the words “Sabri Properties” stitched on the back. 

Sabri, a Palestinian-American developer, is currently being sued by Fannie Mae for failing to make over $530,000 in required repairs on two Minneapolis residential buildings he owns. Many Twin Cities Somalis yearn for the construction of a new mall, and the liberation of a major communal nexus from its non-Somali owner. “He started as a slumlord, and now he has all this,” Jama said, speaking wistfully of Sabri’s achievements. “It’s the American dream, man.” 

In Minnesota, the bear hug of American liberal virtue, with its self-congratulatory sense of generosity and its lack of any serious demands on the people it thinks it’s helping, embraced a community with the mentality, internal coherence, and organization needed to fully exploit its hosts. The Somali enclave rapidly gained in political power, in part because of the ability of various rival clan networks to turn out large numbers of voters in low-margin DFL primaries. The Somalis became an organizing and voting force in the local DFL and began winning elections: to the Minneapolis school board in 2010, to the city council in 2013, and to the state House of Representatives in 2016 — it would take Ilhan Omar just two more years to make it to Congress. Meanwhile, by the late 2010s, the furtiveness and modest scale of existing frauds joined with the in-group discipline of Somalis to create a dense screen of protection for thieves. 

The state’s entire view of its role in society would soon change in ways that made the frauds far easier to execute. In 2016, Minnesota introduced a $35-million program that provided direct funding to state-based nonprofits working on issues of racial equity. Over the next few years, the state embraced an easily abused model of service delivery through private-sector clients, even as evidence mounted that these programs were beacons for fraudsters.

In 2018, a whistleblower claimed that over $100 million in payments through the state’s childcare assistance program had been fraudulent. The way the scam worked was dismayingly simple: Daycares and other childcare providers, which require a license to operate in Minnesota, would obtain names and identifying information for children eligible for state-subsidized care and then bill the government for services they hadn’t actually rendered. Mark Koran, a Republican state senator and former tax official who has worked closely on the fraud issue for nearly a decade and who I met in Saint Paul, said that millions of dollars in such proceeds were taken to East Africa in cash. In 2017, Twin Cities travelers declared $100 million in physical cash transfers out of the country to airport customs agents. (This is the only year for which Koran and his colleagues could obtain this number from sources in the federal government, though they have repeatedly asked for it.)

The childcare-assistance fraud involved licensed businesses using information about real children to scam the government. In Minnesota, the COVID-era US Department of Agriculture school-lunch replacement program made it possible for nearly anyone to make money just by claiming they’d fed a certain number of people each day, often without having to provide their names or otherwise prove that the people they claimed to be feeding even existed. Like other pandemic-relief efforts, the MEALS act, coauthored by Ilhan Omar during the emergency phase of the pandemic and aimed at replacing free meals that children would have been getting in school, was designed to distribute money as widely and as quickly as possible. In Minnesota, the program was largely safeguard-free for much of its existence. 

A small nonprofit called Feeding Our Future acted as a fiscal sponsor for many of the Somali-run groups seeking to access the USDA money. FOF would send its partners’ site applications to the Minnesota Department of Education, which would issue an identification number to each partner nonprofit. Feeding Our Future would receive billing sheets from these partners, which the group would upload to a state portal. The reimbursement money would go straight from Saint Paul to Feeding Our Future, which kept a 15 percent commission for overhead before forwarding the money downward. In time, authorities grew suspicious enough to want to see rosters of children but made few if any visits to any of the supposed feeding sites, some of which claimed to be distributing thousands of meals a day out of storefronts, parking lots, and public parks. 

The state was aware that many of its partners’ claims didn’t add up. As Koran recalled, a state auditors’ report found that in 30 separate instances, someone complained to government officials that Feeding Our Future recipients had falsely claimed to be handing out meals on properties they owned. Astonishingly, instead of investigating the complaints, the state referred them to Feeding Our Future CEO Aimee Bock. “They gave it to the fraudsters to resolve that particular issue,” recalled Koran. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state “continued to pay out on those 30 sites even when their owners said they didn’t exist.” 

There were other signs of fraud in the program, too. Somalis known to have modest incomes began posting pictures of new cars and houses on Instagram. In late 2020, the Minnesota Department of Education began delaying its approval of Feeding Our Future-related grant applications and rejecting a number of them outright. Sensing that the state might cut off funding entirely, Bock claimed that the rejections were the product of anti-Somali racism and sued in order to increase the pace of funding. In mid-2021, a Saint Paul court ruled that the Department of Education had no grounds for stalling the flow of money to Feeding Our Future.

Bock oversaw a remarkably efficient system for extracting state money on behalf of the Somalis working under FOF, with the group and its partners eventually billing taxpayers for 90 million meals for children in a state with only 5.7 million residents. The federal government later alleged that a mere 3 percent of the money that cycled through the group went towards the actual feeding of real children. In March, Bock was convicted of six counts of fraud and conspiracy. 

People involved in the Feeding Our Future case variously describe Bock as an insecure person who badly wanted to be a hero and a movement leader for the dispossessed, and more generously as a person who fought incredibly hard for every cent she believed her partners were legally entitled to. If Bock was the central node of the fraud, she was not actually its mastermind. The fraud spread so widely and quickly that it appeared to have no real architect. Word of the Feeding Our Future money galloped through the Somali community, which kept the secret from non-Somali Minnesota with ironclad discipline. The clan system acted as both pathway and protection for the fraud. One Twin Cities Somali alleged to me that most of the Feeding Our Future scammers were from the Hawiye clan, while a similar fraud, run through a group called Partners in Nutrition, was a Darod grift. Upon hearing this description of the frauds, another source alleged that while the vast majority of FOF scammers were in fact Darod, most of those prosecuted have been Hawiye. It is difficult to assess such claims, though they speak to the endurance of the clans as the chief organizing social framework for Somalis 35 years into the community’s arrival in free and democratic America, as well as the ease with which the clan can become a vector of corruption.

During the course of my reporting, I met with a Somali who ran a social-services organization that was investigated over fraudulent invoices related to the state’s COVID-era meals program. This person claimed that the state had repeatedly and mysteriously over-reimbursed their organization, an adult daycare center, and that a non-Somali nonprofit executive whose organization acted as a fiscal sponsor and intermediary with the government refused to return the money, saying they’d rather keep the 15 percent commission. What was striking about our encounter was that this person wasn’t conversationally fluent in English. It was possible to run what the state believed to be a multimillion-dollar government-funded relief project without knowing how to speak the language used by 88 percent of Minnesotans.

Through every fraud case, the Somali community displayed what professor Samatar described as “the solidarity of thieves.” Bad actors within the community would approach potential coconspirators without any fear of betrayal. Even the people who said no to phenomenal offers of tens of thousands of dollars in free taxpayer money didn’t inform the authorities that a major, community-wide fraud against the public was in progress. Potentially criminal oddities, like my source’s overpayments — if that’s what they really were — went almost totally unreported to anyone in government. The FBI learned about Feeding Our Future from a whistleblower in the Department of Education, and not from any of the scam’s ground-level witnesses or participants.

When COVID hit, Jama, my guide at the Karmel Mall, was in charge of a small but largely inactive nonprofit organization, and though its work had been unrelated to education or food relief, he claims he briefly provided 300 meals a day for which he invoiced the state through Feeding Our Future. “If you actually did the work it was exhausting,” said Jama. I asked him how he’d even learned about the Feeding Our Future money bonanza. “Oh,” he said, “everybody knew about it.”

Later he pointed to a storefront on Lake Street, now a checkerboard of indoor Mexican markets and halal butchers. “This guy has an adult daycare, a grocery store, and a nonprofit — in the same building,” my guide said. “It’s a one-stop shop. Two handouts, one business: That’s the game in town.”

Scamming the State of Minnesota — and the Federal government, which provides funding to state-administered Medicaid programs — was almost comically easy. One autism clinic received $13 million from Medicaid while also claiming it fed 500 children a day through Feeding Our Future. One health clinic made 250 Medicaid claims — for transportation, language interpretation, and other services — for one patient. Another billed Medicaid for over 21 hours of daily work by a single therapist. Still another clinic owner used the identity of 344 Somalis to bill for phantom services — and continued billing for 188 of them even after their company was kicked off of UCare, one of Minnesota’s Medicaid-funded health insurers.

Liz Collin, a reporter for the right-of-center Twin Cities website Alpha News, said the organization receives tips related to alleged fraud almost every day, many of which come from Somalis. As Collin notes, state websites helpfully list how much money nonprofit partners of human-services programs get from the government. Anomalies are easy for any motivated person — a state investigator, say — to spot. “I’ve checked out the addresses,” says Collin. “It’s not that difficult.”

In late September, Collin followed a tipster’s lead and observed a storefront adult daycare in south Minneapolis. There was no one behind the counter, and no one entering or leaving. She then called the daycare before a reporting visit. Thanks to the warning, the operator had been able to find “six or seven older East African women. It was a small office in a strip mall with a few chairs and tables and no TV.” The place was then empty again on several subsequent visits. The organization had received $1.2 million in public money in 2024.

A mile away from this dubious daycare was a similarly ethereal autism center with an empty parking lot and no one inside. The owners claimed to Collin that ten to fifteen children arrived after school each day. She dropped by the site for a week, and found no people of any age using it for any reason. That organization received $2 million in taxpayer funding.

What’s odd about the Minnesota fraud is its ongoing tenacity despite scores of federal prosecutions, despite these frauds being one of the state’s major political issues. “It’s likely somewhere between four and six billion a year that’s being taken from citizens feeding all of these nonprofit networks for which they’re not providing any real value to the people in true need,” Koran estimated.

The strangest chapter of the Feeding Our Future saga hints at one of the reasons the grift continues, even though everyone knows about it. In the Spring of 2024, during one of the first trials of the alleged fraudsters, five Somalis attempted to bribe a member of the jury, promising $200,000 — of which $120,000 was delivered to a family member of one of the jurors — in exchange for a not-guilty verdict. These plotters filmed the cash exchange to blackmail their target, who nevertheless revealed the plot to the FBI on the eve of the trial’s final day. The conspirators helpfully provided the juror with a list of arguments that could be used to convince other jurors to acquit: During deliberations, she should contend that the prosecutions were a racist witch-hunt against a black Muslim immigrant community.

The plotters and fraudsters are facing years in prison, but a version of their argument has become something close to conventional wisdom. “No one in any position of authority has made the connection between the multibillion fraud and the Somali community,” says Glahn. “People say we should stop fraud, but nobody in Minnesota has said, ‘the Somalis are a bunch of fraudsters.’”

That includes prominent elected Republicans. I asked Lisa Demuth, speaker of the House of Representatives, why it was that so many of the state’s frauds seemed to relate to organizations that served Somalis. “I kind of thought about that question,” Demuth said, pausing and weighing her next words, as if treating the question as a possible trap. “I don’t know. Because any type of opportunity for people to access state dollars should be available to anyone. But our internal controls need to be in the agencies.”

It is true enough that the Somali fraudsters are only taking advantage of an existing, badly decaying system that they didn’t create. The defrauded programs are all based on a delivery method for public benefits in which nonprofits bill the state for services they claim to have provided, and the state assumes that they are telling the truth. For reasons conceivably ranging from a culture of simple bureaucratic incompetence to the active and deliberate abatement of fraud in exchange for political contributions and other kickbacks, Minnesota’s government has chosen to exert little real supervision over the nonprofits, which operate under far looser rules than government agencies.

Surely, Minnesotans — no matter how liberal — care what happens to their tax dollars. What makes the programs politically sustainable is that the costs of the fraud are in fact nationalized, spread across a vast nation of 340 million people rather than a single state of 5.7 million. Feeding Our Future was funded through emergency grants from the US Department of Agriculture. Various capers involving housing stabilization, autism services, medical transportation, and translation were all funded through reimbursements from Medicaid.

More than one person described Minnesotan social-service delivery as an “honor system,” and the state has the trappings of a place that might believe it can handle such an arrangement. Representative Walter Hudson and I met in the state capitol in Saint Paul, a white marble Beaux-Arts temple to antique notions of American civic comity. Every room has a conspicuous copper plaque announcing that room’s maximum occupancy, as well as a large and accurate analog clock. The carpets and conference tables are spotless, and the walls and ceilings look unmarked by time’s passage, or by any ambient nastiness. Minnesota isn’t New Jersey or Louisiana, in other words — it is a paradise of Midwestern social democracy, without a strong tradition of political graft. “I think that what you describe as the squeaky-clean, wholesome, Midwestern, Norwegian culture of Minnesota provided fertile ground to stage an operation like what we've seen. Because who’s going to suspect it, right?” Hudson said. “Plus, we are a generous people.”

Some critics have claimed that the system was in fact built to be defrauded, and there is at least circumstantial evidence to support that suspicion. This past spring, governor Tim Walz worked with Democrats in the state House of Representatives to block a bipartisan Senate bill that would have created an independent inspector general’s office to investigate fraud in state agencies. The only state employee who has been fired over any of the well-documented fraud convictions is an assistant commissioner for housing and homeless services, who left government the day before a scheduled House fraud-prevention committee hearing that would have required him to testify under oath. It is fair to say that the systems producing the frauds are being protected and perpetuated at the highest levels of government.

David Feinwachs, an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota law school and the former general counsel for the state’s hospital system, went a step further, claiming that fraudsters are merely copying at the individual level a practice the state itself has codified over many decades — namely, the systematic use of Medicaid to defraud the Federal government. Feinwachs has alleged that Minnesota has been deliberately overbilling Medicaid to the tune of around $1.3 billion a year since at least 2015, and probably earlier. The main vectors of state-sanctioned fraud, he’s stated, are Medicaid programs operating through a waiver issued under Section 1115 of the Social Security Act, which conveys “permission to conduct experimental programs outside of Medicaid rules with no oversight, no auditing requirements, and no licensing requirements.”

In Feinwachs’s view, “Minnesota has transformed the 1115 waiver program into a license to steal.” He’s alleged that for decades the four insurance companies that handle Minnesota’s Medicaid program have reported that most of their reserves exist in the form of money that the state supposedly owes them, meaning that the insurers treat the state’s resources as money that they actually, currently possess. “More than half of what appears on paper to be HMO reserves is actually money the state has yet to pay the HMOs,” the executive director of the Minnesota Council of Health Plans confirmed in a 2015 letter to the Star Tribune, in response to Feinwachs’s claims. Feinwachs does not treat this maneuver as some sort of benign accounting trick. He believes that state government Medicaid overbilling operates as a kind of slush fund, with insurance companies and state agencies working together to confuse the status of billions of ill-gotten dollars — an arrangement from which both the companies and politicians benefit.

Feinwachs’s explanation has the simultaneous flaw and virtue of condemning everyone: The DFL uses its Medicaid-funded money-pit to maintain the party’s patronage networks and the state’s de facto fraud-based system of government, while Republicans — the party of corporate greed rather than strictly political greed — don’t want to be stuck with the political and financial bill if the scheme collapses in some future era in which they are actually in control in Saint Paul. If the fraud is so totalizing, why heap blame on any single midlevel actor or group of actors, like the Somalis?

I met Feinwachs through Omar Jamal, a former Somali diplomat, current Ramsey County sheriff’s deputy, and longtime advocate within the local Somali community. Omar spent over a month in ICE detention earlier this fall, although no one could tell me why. Jamal showed me a letter from the Department of Human Services, warning a Somali medical-services provider that a “credible allegation of fraud” had triggered a total cutoff of payments from Minnesota Health Care Programs. “It’s the state using immigrant populations as a scapegoat,” Omar claimed. “It’s like after 9/11, when they thought we were all Al Qaeda… The community is now coming crying.” If this is true, it means that even after the revelations about Feeding Our Future, autism assistance, and housing stabilization, large numbers of Twin Cities Somalis still see the state government as their only real customer — and expect the money to keep flowing.

The Somalis may be right. The Minnesota honor system might prove to be so convenient, so entrenched, and so useful for the creation of backdoor patronage systems that it can never be allowed to die. It is certainly a vast system, one that will only get bigger when the state introduces an astoundingly broad taxpayer-funded paid family-leave scheme next year. Glahn noted that the most common job in Minnesota today is as a personal-care attendant, of which the state has between 100,000 and 200,000, many of whom are paid through government-reimbursement schemes. 

Hudson theorized that a highly permissive attitude towards fraud was a way for Democrats to permanently secure the electoral loyalty of the generally religious and conservative Somali community. “They came into town and it was, how do we lock this community down?” said Hudson, who is African American, explaining what he believes the Democrats’ thinking to be. “Well, number one, we show up and we tell them all about how terrible Republicans are and how Republicans want to eat their kids and send them home. Step number two, we identify the most influential players in the community and we figure out a way to make sure they get nice and rich. Then it’ll be their job to return the favor by organizing their community to vote for us.”

Hudson’s theory is speculative, of course. However, it is hard not to notice that many of the state’s leading politicians seem to act as if an atmosphere of loose political morals works to their advantage, which means that people at lower levels of the system are stuck operating within an environment that is almost nakedly corrupt.

For example, a Twin Cities Democratic strategist explained to me how outreach to Somali voters typically works: A campaign will pay a Somali political organizer, a community fixer “well-connected in a clan or tribal system to a certain group in a certain neighborhood or building” to set up meetings that resemble political rallies, perhaps with the candidate sitting on a throne-like chair at the front of a public-housing gym or rec room, packed with voters in traditional dress. At hubs like the Karmel Mall, the candidate might glad-hand with merchants and then meet with a dozen Somali elders in an upstairs conference room, few of whom speak English. “Now what happens in the community after that meeting?” the strategist said, sounding like he was describing American advisors engaging with tribal chieftains in some faraway village in Afghanistan during the glory days of the Freedom Agenda. “You really don’t know.”

During the early-voting period in Minneapolis, which lasts 45 days by absentee ballot and 18 days for in-person voting, he continued, campaigns also pay Somali contacts to arrange rides to early-voting sites and to hand out sample ballots to the people they transport. “My understanding is it’s not strictly illegal,” the source said. He added that it was impossible to know whether the drivers being paid by the campaigns were also being paid through easily-defrauded state reimbursement programs. Though large numbers of Somali votes reliably materialize every election, no one who doesn’t speak Somali can really understand how or why. 

In the growing, indeterminate area that bridges the radically different cultures of Minnesotan niceties and clan-based Somali politics, darker possibilities breed. Ilhan Omar won her 2020 primary by a mere 2,500 votes, at a time when the Somali community was swimming in new cash, thanks to Feeding Our Future. Ilhan Omar’s close relationship with the Safari restaurant (whose co-owner Salim Said is one of the major nodes of the Feeding Our Future fraud) was a topic of discussion on the recording of Ellison’s December 2021 meeting with the accused scammers. Guhaad Hashi Said, long known as one of Omar’s “enforcers” in the Somali community and a former aide to the congresswoman, is one of the Feeding Our Future defendants. Omar filmed a video of herself at Safari handing out free meals — paid for by unknown parties, quite possibly including the US Department of Agriculture — during the pandemic. In her May of 2025 financial disclosure, Omar reported her own net worth to be between $6 million and $30 million.

While one can speculate about how exactly these verifiable facts fit together, it is safe to say that the combination of repeated convictions for frauds totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars and the torrents of loose cash continuing to cycle through community-based organizations that rely on politicians to keep the spigots open is not generally seen as an indicator of good governance. 

Collective looting of the public coffers is now the state’s solution to the American puzzle of how we all should live together. That is why no wake-up call to the state’s political class resulted when Abdi Salah, a widely respected senior aide to Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey, pled guilty to fraudulently obtaining state funds through his own nonprofit. State senator Omar Fateh, Frey’s defeated opponent in November’s mayoral race, introduced a bill making it easier for counties to file housing-stabilization referrals to private-sector companies — it then turned out that Fateh’s wife, a county employee, owned one such company. Fateh also authored a $500,000 direct appropriation to a local Somali-language YouTube channel. When the channel ran ads for Fateh that didn’t appear as official campaign expenditures, Fateh claimed he had paid for the spots in cash but had forgotten to report it. 

The summer DFL convention in which Fateh earned the party’s endorsement ended in chaos, with accusations that pro-Frey delegates had been effectively disenfranchised by pro-Fataeh convention managers affiliated with the hard-left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The DFL vacated the endorsement, and in the wake of the convention mess the state party put its Minneapolis branch on probation. Still, the DSA’s involvement was a new twist on what has become a familiar political plot. 

“The Socialists get to lead the civil rights movement and then they use Somalis for blackface,” one longtime Minneapolis DFL activist complained to me. “That’s the arrangement. Do you get what I’m saying?”