Even the far-left New York Times has admitted that Somalians are raised in a culture of widespread theft and graft in their country as the news of massive welfare fraud among the Somali community in Democrat Gov. Tim Walz’s Minnesota grows.
The paper’s opening line for its Nov. 29 article gets straight to the point, reading, “The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness.”
There have been an astounding series of cases of hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud in state welfare, housing, healthcare, food, COVID relief and other programs, much of it centered on members of the Somali community.
The fraud has been so endemic in Minnesota that even the usually far-left Times is joining Breitbart News and calling it out. Indeed, the paper even noted that early on many liberals waved off the fraud as a “one-off abuse,” but as each new case rolled out from federal prosecutors the sense of alarm has grown and the blame is undeniable.
“Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided,” the Times reported.
The paper does not spare exposure of the Somali community.
Macalester College professor Ahmed Samatar, a Somali native, said that the fraud among Minnesota’s Somali migrants should not be surprising. The Times added that “Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread.”
The fraud has been so deep that it has undermined all of the state’s welfare programs.
“No one will support these programs if they continue to be riddled with fraud,” federal prosecutor Joseph H. Thompson told the media. “We’re losing our way of life in Minnesota in a very real way.”
One of the first such cases centered around an organization called “Feeding Our Future,” run by a group of Minneapolis-area Somali migrants. Prosecutors say that the organizers bilked $250 million from the state in child food assistance funding.
In a different case, tens of millions were stolen from Minnesota’s autism treatment program, again by Somali migrants. There is also the case of more than $550 million stolen from the state’s coronavirus pandemic relief program.
Hellbound and Down 