The Somali-dominated Democratic political machine in Minnesota successfully silenced hundreds of government experts who tracked the huge flow of taxpayer funds through Somali-run businesses, a top Minnesota Republican told a House hearing on Wednesday.
Up to 1,000 government auditors, accountants, and program managers were silenced by Democratic threats, Minnesota House Rep. Marion Rarick told a House hearing:
The most severe ones was that they would be fired with cause so they couldn’t have unemployment insurance, that they would be blacklisted from all state agencies… [including] Hennepin County, Ramsey County. As you know, those are Democrat-run.
Many government experts, non-government professionals, and Republicans detected many of the frauds, but their voices were muffled by Democrats who allied with the Somalians’ political machine in the state. “They don’t want a fraud unit to do anything — they want a fraud unit [only] on paper,” Steve Halicki, a Minnesota fraud investigator, told a TV station in 2015.
In 2023, state employees formed an anonymous group on Twitter to report the fraud to the public: “We are over 480 Minnesota state staff serving with pride & commitment to our people & state. We strive for a better Minnesota free of fraud. Commentary Account,” they wrote.
On January 7, the group declared:
We’ve been yelling from every rooftop possible about fraud. Few understood or listened to the scale of the problem. Systemic issues mean that someone in leadership is advising or forcing staff to commit wrongdoing. And these leaders will be NAMED.
Journalists’ clout in Minneapolis has also been shattered by the political and economic power of the Somali migrants. The result is that local politicians and cops were able to ignore multiple articles and TV segments about blatant fraud by many Somali businesses.
Citizens’ complaints were also suppressed by the political power of the clannish Somali groups in the local Democratic Party.
“Their collective message has been completely consistent,” Rarick told the House committee when describing the X group of government professionals and experts:
Instead of focusing on fraudsters, [the Minnesota Department of Human Services] leadership focused its surveillance on employees.
Since [January 2025], their expressed fear of retaliation has intensified under an avalanche of fraud in Minnesota. Their numbers have grown from 480 DHS employees, both current and former, to over 1,000 across multiple state agencies. They have told me repeatedly how grateful they are to the House fraud prevention committee for focusing our attention on fraud in the state programs, using their inside information while keeping them completely protected.
They have explained that they live in a constant state of fear of retaliation. One only has to look at what happened to Faye Bernstein to understand why. In a very recent Newsweek article dated December 13 of 2025, Ms. Bernstein, a former compliance specialist, stated: “Minnesota DHS functions in the opposite manner — employees who suggest improvements, or, heaven forbid, report fraud then face significant retaliation. The messenger is shot.”
“In 2019, Bernstein said she alerted Minnesota DHS officials to sloppy contracting practices that were not legally compliant, but it’s not what most people would even consider fraud. She says she was later escorted out of the building, faced lengthy investigation, got trespassed from all DHS-owned and leased properties, and received an involuntary transfer to another agency.”
So she says, “So today, if someone asked me, should I report fraud within DHS? I say no, no, no, it is career suicide, plus a whole lot more.”
Rarick, a former accountant, continued:
In our face to face meetings with [the X] group of whistleblowers, they revealed that [workplace] retaliation now includes threats of being fired with cause — which means you do not get unemployment insurance in the state of Minnesota — being blacklisted from all state agencies, and I would note, most likely our largest counties as well, which are Democrat-run. And then there was a veiled threat of the use of military intelligence against them.
They later informed me that it was discovered that in some targeted employees or suspected whistleblowers’ personnel files were pictures of their homes and their cars. They also described that supervisors asked them questions about their families that to them felt like a threat. One example was, “We need to know where your kids go to school and where their bus stops are.”
I will also note that whistleblowers we spoke to described many times DHS using surveillance programs to surveil employees’ emails and chat and other communications, looking for keywords like “fraud,” “double billing,” “under-spending,” and “overpayments.”
One example that the whistleblowers let me know about [comes from] Lieutenant Governor [Peggy] Flanagan.
On April 12, 2024 Flanagan comes to a DHS Health and Human Services equity conference at the Heritage Center and Brooklyn Center [in Minneapolis]. On stage, Flanagan acknowledged the X account and the fraud concerns it raised [but] publicly denounced the X [government whistleblowers] and called them weirdos and losers sitting in their mother’s basement. This was in a public setting with hundreds of participants and elicited gasps among the crowd,
Gov. Tim Walz “absolutely knew” about the massive embezzlement and theft by the Somali-run business, Rarick said.
The Minnesota defeat of the Democratic-leaning government experts follows the nationwide subordination of American tech professionals to the imported army of mixed-skilled Indian migrants.
The same process is underway in the nation’s accounting sector, where older American partners are boosting their profits by replacing American accounting professionals with mixed-skill Indian graduates. Similarly, compliant foreign doctors and nurses are being hired by hospital chains in place of American professionals.
The replacement of outspoken American professionals by compliant imported workers is a huge loss for ordinary Americans, technology, and innovation. The imported replacements have little or no legal authority to argue with their bosses, partly because many of the migrants must work for years before they can get green cards and then citizenship.
The result is that employers are freer to sideline the remaining American professionals who want to spotlight problems for the public, such as embezzlement of taxpayers’ funds, safety flaws in products, or security threats to citizens’ private data and online funds.
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