Published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy.
On Friday, November 21, as most Americans were prepping for Thanksgiving, President Trump went on a tirade on his Truth Social platform. Egged on by unsubstantiated claims by noted right-wing pugilist Chris Rufo, he posted: “Minnesota, under Governor Waltz [sic], is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity…. Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back where they came from. It’s OVER!”
Less than two weeks later, on December 3, Trump announced an ICE operation targeting the Somali population in the Twin Cities, while referring to Somalis as “garbage.” This crackdown continued through Christmas, with arbitrary arrests of Somali immigrants with no criminal record and fear spreading throughout the state’s Somali community.
In recent months, there has been ever greater attention paid to a spate of fraudulent activity in Minnesota, with most of those implicated being Somali. (The ringleader of the largest fraud, Feeding Our Future, is a white American, and nearly all of those indicted are naturalized or natural-born American citizens.)
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CBS—under its new owners, the Ellison family—along with the Murdoch trinity of Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, have covered the story aggressively, at times picking up unconfirmed accounts from conservative influencers that have spun into wild charges about vote-buying and cover-ups.
The New York Times provided front-page coverage to a Sunday news story echoing key arguments made in Trump administration talking points: that a Nordic-style welfare state in Minnesota, combined with criminal tendencies inherent to the state’s Somali population, created an environment ripe for fraud. The Times also focuses on the defendants’ claims that they were being persecuted for racial reasons.
But a Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) review has found that the administration’s preferred narrative has been advanced in widespread coverage by corporate media outlets.
Changing Estimates
Prosecutors with the Department of Justice (DOJ) began filing charges in the fraud ring in 2022, during the Biden administration. At the time it was estimated at $250 million. Feeding Our Future and other groups were accused of filing false claims to the government for services under the Federal Child Nutrition Program, which provides free meals to children, despite having never provided the meals.
More indictments were filed this year, extending the alleged fraud scheme to a housing stabilization program and a health care program. CBS, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post have all repeated DOJ claims that the frauds now exceed $1 billion. Joseph Thompson, the federal prosecutor leading the case, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CMD asking for clarification on DOJ’s monetary estimates.
The only citations supporting the $1-billion claim in those stories come from a department that has been weaponized against its political enemies and is prone to “unprecedented errors” that seriously undermine its credibility.
Based on what the DOJ has actually filed in court, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune calculated the cost of the alleged fraud schemes to be $217.7 million over multiple years, while noting that the number was likely to grow.
The above-mentioned mainstream national news outlets did not respond to requests from CMD asking about the basis for reporting the $1 billion fraud claim. Meanwhile, the DOJ has since increased its estimate to as high as $9 billion.
“At the very least, newsrooms should be transparent [about] not fact-checking the president’s statistics and [admit] that he has a habit of gross overstatement,” Kelly McBride, a senior vice president at the Poynter Institute, told CMD. “But ideally, yes, they should do their own reporting, or cite another reputable news organization like the Minnesota Star-Tribune that has done the math.”
Compared to the Star-Tribune’s $217.7 million fraud estimate, the Department of Defense reported more than 10 times that amount—$2.4 billion—in confirmed fraud in military contracts in 2024 alone, which the legislative branch watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office notes “reflects only a small fraction of DOD’s potential fraud exposure.”
Complex Somali Politics
Additionally, key aspects of the November 30, 2025, New York Times article, titled “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch,” raise questions about the paper’s approach to reporting on the fraudulent activity in the state.
For example, the Times quoted Ahmed Samatar, a Somali-American professor at Macalester College, who advanced claims reinforcing the idea that the fraudulent behavior in Minnesota emerged from a particular aspect of Somali culture blended with the concept of “Minnesota nice.” The Times reported that Samatar said 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 story also quoted Samatar as speculating that Minnesota proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is “so tolerant, so open, and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.”
Samatar’s comments deserve closer examination. The Times failed to mention that the professor is very active in the Somaliland political scene, chairing a political movement in the breakaway region of Somalia. Somaliland’s independence has been championed by U.S. Representative Scott Perry (R–PA), who played a significant role in Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 election, including helping to plan congressional obstruction of the certification on January 6, 2021. The Somaliland independence cause received a huge boost by being included as part of the Project 2025 foreign policy platform. On December 27, Israel recognized Somaliland’s independence, in a widely condemned move.
In September, the Feeding Our Future scandal resulted in the indictment of the wife of the foreign minister of Somaliland, Muna Waceys Fidhin, who is also a politician in her own right and chair of a Somaliland political party’s U.S. branch. Samatar backed a rival party in Somaliland’s 2024 elections and has implied that Fidhin’s party took advantage of a “rotten” political system.
In an interview with CMD and in follow-up questions, Samatar did not clarify these points, stating: “That topic is not something I want to talk about in this context. All Somalis in this state are related as a community… Small fish, big fish, whatever they are, it’s not worthwhile to explore whether or not they are from this town or that town. I would like to leave the analysis at that level.”
Representative Ilhan Omar (D–MN), the most prominent Somali politician in the country, has taken a different tack than Samatar, contending that in the U.S. people generally “do not blame the lawlessness of an individual on a whole community.” She has also been a critic of Somaliland independence. The BBC reported in January that excitement related to the possibility of U.S. recognition of Somaliland independence had increased Trump’s popularity in the breakaway region.
Bill Fletcher, Jr., a former education director of the AFL-CIO who has written, organized, and lobbied on issues related to the Horn of Africa, told CMD that Samatar’s decision to avoid commenting on the nature of Somali dynamics was likely due to the complex internal politics and history of Somalia.
Fletcher made the case that the Somali-American community likely exhibits the same problems as any immigrant community—but that the way the Trump administration and the media have framed these problems is wrong. “Somali refugees start coming to the U.S. and get settled in Minnesota,” he said. “Nobody seems to object to that. Overwhelmingly, they [choose to] become U.S. citizens and part of the larger community.”
Fletcher argued that the characterization of fraudulent activity as inherent to the Somali community demonstrates a failure to understand how organized criminal activity typically works.
“The idea that criminal activity is a product of Nordic social services is absurd. It’s as absurd as saying that Lucky Luciano was a product of the New Deal,” Fletcher said, arguing that organized crime becomes parasitic within an ethnic community, and then expands outwards. “The kind of blame being put on the Somali community is very analogous to how Italians and Sicilians in particular were being characterized in the middle of the [20th] century.”
In a statement to CMD, a Times spokesperson maintains that “This reporting by The Times drew on a wide range of interviews, sources, documents and court records to show how fraudulent activity had spread within Minnesota social safety-net programs.” The spokesperson noted that the Times had spoken to the prosecutor handling the cases and Gov. Tim Walz, and reviewed all available evidence. “We are confident in the accuracy and fairness of this article.”
Media organizations have an obligation to report in such a way that “the audience walks away from your work with a clear understanding of the facts,” McBride of the Poynter Institute reminds us. “That means that when you use direct quotes that distort or misinform, you have to tell the audience what the truth is.”