Somalis in Minnesota swindled millions in state Medicaid autism-care programs and sent the cash back to their homeland and its terror groups, investigators say.
Breitbart News reported in July that nearly 100 autism clinics in Minnesota were being investigated for fraudulently billing Medicaid for treatment of children supposedly diagnosed with autism, most of it in connection with the rampantly corrupt Somali community around Minneapolis.
But the fraud is far more widespread with far more money involved than was previously reported — all of which has been presided over by former Democrat Party vice-presidential nominee Gov. Tim Walz.
The money paid out by Minnesota’s scandal-plagued welfare schemes is monumental. The state’s failed Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, for instance, was kicked off in 2021 with expenses expected to ring in at $2.6 million. But instead, the program paid out $21 million its first year. In each subsequent year the program ballooned to $42 million, then $74, and then $104 million, respectively. During the first half of 2025, costs had already reached $61 million, according to City Journal.
Fraud is also endemic in many of Minnesota’s other welfare programs. City Journal noted that a Somali woman named Asha Farhan Hassan has been charged with defrauding the state’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program of $14 million over fake diagnoses of autism in children of Somali migrants.
Prosecutors now say that Hassan and her cohorts approached Somali families and promised them kickbacks of between $300 to $1500 a month per child if they enrolled in the state’s autism treatment programs.
The fraud in autism treatment has skyrocketed apart from Hassan’s alleged criminal enterprises. The Journal notes that “autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota have skyrocketed in recent years — from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million 2021, $279 million in 2022, and $399 million in 2023.”
Businesses are also in on the con. Autism providers soared from 41 across the entire state in 2020, to 328 by 2025 — all of them applying for and receiving Minnesota’s Medicaid funding. The theft was so deep that one in every 16 Somali four-year-olds in Minnesota had been “officially” diagnosed with autism — a rate that is more than triple the state average.
And this is all in addition to the Feeding Our Future scam that has resulted in 70 Minnesotan Somalis being indicted for $250 million in fraudulent food aide.
“This is not an isolated scheme,” Joe Thompson, the U.S. attorney, said 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.”
“Most of these cases, unlike a lot of Medicare fraud and Medicaid fraud cases nationally, aren’t just overbilling,” Thompson said at a press conference announcing the indictments. “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.”
“What we see are schemes stacked upon schemes, draining resources meant for those in need. It feels never ending,” Thompson exclaimed. “I have spent my career as a fraud prosecutor and the depth of the fraud in Minnesota takes my breath away.”
The stolen billion in Medicaid and welfare money didn’t merely go into the pockets of corrupt Somalian migrants. They also went to fund terrorism in Africa.
City Journal’s Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo have traced millions in fraudulent funding going to the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. “Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of ‘hawalas,’ informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab,” the pair wrote.
With Islam banning traditional banking and money-lending institutions, many Muslims in the U.S. conduct their financial activities using the voluntary hawala system of individual cash exchanges. It is a system that makes it difficult or even impossible to trace where money is going and to whom, which makes it an ideal method to fund criminal activities and terrorist networks.
Former Seattle Police Department detective Glenn Kerns cites having traced down $20 million in funding moving to Africa through hawalas in Seattle in just a single year. He said further investigation showed similar trends in Minnesota where a large Somali community lives.
But when the detective investigated closer, he found that millions being transferred through Minnesota’s hawalas originated as DHS benefits. “How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: This is welfare fraud,” Kerns said.
Another official told City Journal, “Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way.”
“This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” the source said.
Ten years ago it was reported that Minnesota led the nation in the number of residents who have traveled overseas to join ISIS and other terror groups. And with the millions funneled to Al-Shabaab from Minnesota’s raft of corrupt and failed welfare schemes, that has not changed a bit.
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