Minnesotans, especially Somali Minnesotans like me, are feeling besieged. Our adopted home state has become a destination for right-wing tourists, who are now harassing Somali social service providers responsible for looking after the most vulnerable in our community.

Right-wing influencers from Washington state to Maine are knocking on child care center doors operated by Somali Americans, asking to see the children. This comes after Nick Shirley, a MAGA influencer and YouTuber, posted a 42-minute video on X on December 26, accusing Somali child care centers in the Twin Cities of committing more than $100 million in fraud after visiting 10 centers. That video has been viewed 140 million times, and has been shared by Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance.

As someone who has worked as a fraud investigator in the Medicaid Fraud Division of the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, I can tell you Shirley doesn’t know the first thing about this type of fraud or how to investigate it.

Fraud occurs when the provider bills the state for services they never provided. This is why investigators submit requests for claims data weeks after conducting surveillance. In Minnesota, child care fraud is investigated by special agents from the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. Fraud in adult daycare and other programs funded by Medicaid are investigated by the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud Division.

Investigators must review and document hundreds of hours of surveillance footage from pole cameras to prove how many recipients received services at a particular facility and compare that data to claims submitted by the provider to find overbilling. They then have to interview numerous recipients to find which recipients didn’t receive services.

Generally, law enforcement is conducting their investigation while the fraud is ongoing, and must not arouse suspicion for fear pertinent records may be destroyed. Prosecutors can only charge what they can prove, which is often a small portion of the overall fraud scheme.

Investigators cannot credibly state in open court that all proceeds received by a provider were fraudulently obtained because they observed no services being rendered the day they conducted surveillance, which is how Shirley tabulated the amount of fraud he claims he uncovered.

On January 14, Shirley posted another video to social media claiming to have unearthed even more fraud. This time, he visited non-emergency medical transportation businesses operated by Somali Americans in the Twin Cities and claimed to have discovered $16 million in fraud because he could not locate several of the companies, concluding that they must be operating fraudulently.

If Shirley was serious about locating those providers, he could have contacted the Department of Human Services to find the correct addresses. Shirely relied on the Secretary of State’s website, which from my experience is not always accurate because businesses fail to update their contact information.

Transportation fraud is difficult to uncover and is not as easy to detect as Shirley would have you believe. He surmises that non-medical transportation companies without vehicles in their parking lot must be committing fraud. From my experience, these companies hire employees who use their personal vehicles to provide rides to medical appointments. So it would not be a surprise that they would not be sitting at the company’s parking lot. He also insinuates that because some of the vehicles at the transportation company’s parking lot have not been moved for some time, they must be committing fraud. Again, the fraud would occur when the company bills for services that are not rendered.

(A state official confirmed to the Star Tribune that three of the five transportation companies visited by Shirley were not enrolled in the non-emergency medical transportation program, and the other two have not received payments from Medicaid in at least seven years.)

During my time working as a fraud investigator at the Attorney General’s Office, my colleagues and I investigated provider, interpreter and transportation fraud in a case known as PIT Stop. Non-emergency medical transportation drivers and interpreters from the Somali community colluded with health providers, who were in need of clients for their struggling businesses. In this scheme, hundreds of Somali Americans recipients from the Faribault area had their identities fraudulently used by drivers, interpreters and health providers.

Granted, the standard of journalistic evidence is different from the standard of legal evidence, but the principle is the same, and if Shirley had an ethical editor they would have told him his work was incomplete, at best.

A stopped clock is right twice a day, however, and Shirley does seem to have stumbled on to something, though only discovered after the fact by local media. Reporters at the Star Tribune and KARE-11 looked for ties between the child care centers featured in Shirley’s video and the Feeding Our Future fraud. That’s how we now know that seven of the child care centers visited by Shirley served as meal sites that received $6.3 million from Feeding Our Future after claiming to have served 2.8 million meals between 2018 and 2021.

The Reformer was the first to report in the summer of 2023 that nearly half of the 60 defendants charged in the Feeding Our Future fraud at the time had billed the state for other services, including child care. Since then, federal prosecutors have charged 18 additional defendants in the federal meals program fraud and more than a dozen for defrauding programs intended to provide autism services to children and housing assistance to the homeless.

This means that once again, the administration of Gov. Tim Walz failed to do the most basic due diligence by continuing to pay providers who had ties to Feeding Our Future.

Which raises the question: Why weren’t they more aggressive about stopping this sooner?

Because of politics and race. In July 2024, I explained how fraudsters leveraged the burgeoning political power of the Somali community by weaponizing race and religion to escape accountability.

Early last year, a recorded conversation between Attorney General Keith Ellision with several Somali individuals, two of whom would be charged in the Feeding Our Future fraud, was released. The audio, recorded in December 2021, was surreptitiously recorded by one of the charged individuals, and was listed in a trial exhibit.

In the 54-minute recording, Ellison agrees with the individuals lobbying him that state agencies are discriminating against East African providers. Ellison states that Walz agrees with him that too much focus on compliance is hurting small businesses.

One individual can be heard telling Ellison that the Somali community will use its votes and money to get behind politicians who will support the community’s efforts to impede state agencies who he says are targeting Somali providers.

Within 10 days of this meeting, Ellison and his son, a Minneapolis council member at the time, received $17,500 from Somali Americans participating in the federal child nutrition program, many of whom would be charged with defrauding the federal child nutrition program. (To his credit, Ellison can be heard on the audio rebuffing their offers to help him with campaign donations.)

During the second Feeding Our Future trial, one of the defendants, who prosecutors presented as a witness, testified that fraudsters used state Sen. Omar Fateh to hinder the Minnesota Department of Education’s efforts to stop the fraud by smearing the agency as racist.

Fateh, who accused state agencies of discrimination in December 2021 in a public forum attended by members of the Somali community, announced he would return $11,000 in campaign donations days after federal agents executed a bevy of search warrants tied to the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme in January 2022. Since then, he has returned thousands of more dollars in campaign donations from individuals who have been charged.

Jim Nobles, who served as Minnesota’s non-partisan legislative auditor for 38 years before retiring in 2021, gently suggested last year that political cowardice was at the root of the failure of vigilance when it came to the theft of state and federal money. Democrats didn’t want public hearings when he conducted audits that might be embarrassing for the Somali community, he wrote in an op-ed in October.

The late House Speaker Melissa Hortman “acknowledged that some members of her caucus were upset” because they “felt that Office of Legislative Auditor reports were subjecting human service programs to too much criticism, particularly programs administered by Somali community organizations.”

Paradoxically, these efforts to protect the Somali community now threaten to destroy us. Now we’re enduring a wave of masked immigration agents — sent under the pretext of stamping out immigration and public services fraud, including in the Somali community.

When Minnesota Democrats allowed fraud to run rampant in our public programs, tarnishing our state and my community’s image in the process, they started a chain of unfortunate events that led us here. God help us.