By now you’ve probably seen the 42-minute video (below) filmed by a young YouTuber, Nick Shirley, who describes himself as “politically independent” but has also been described as “conservative”. Well, his politics don’t matter at all if what he filmed turns out to be true. Shirley, accompanied by another investigator named David, went to visit a spate of Somali-run healthcare and daycare centers in Minnesota, all of which get big bucks from the government, to see if there was any sign of either healthcare or daycare going on. They posted the video on X, and as of this morning it’s been seen by 125 million people. If you haven’t watched it, do so.
As I said, Shirley and David found no evidence of any “business” going on in any of these places. There were no children, and when Shirley tried to register his nonexistent son “Joey” for daycare centers, either nobody answered the door or nobody wanted to take his business. Eventually the businesspeople in these malls called the cops, and Shirley and David were expelled. In most cases the pair had estimates of how much government money went into these businesses.
🚨 Here is the full 42 minutes of my crew and I exposing Minnesota fraud, this might be my most important work yet. We uncovered over $110,000,000 in ONE day. Like it and share it around like wildfire! Its time to hold these corrupt politicians and fraudsters accountable
We ALL… pic.twitter.com/E3Penx2o7a
— Nick shirley (@nickshirleyy) December 26, 2025
Is this fraud real? It’s hard to believe otherwise given the videos, as well as other facts, in addition to the history of social-services fraud (most pepetrated by Somali immigrants or their families) that began several years ago. For one thing, the “centers” are ostensibly aimed at the Somali community but, as Luana pointed out to me, the vast majority of Somali families, including those who have been in America more than ten years, are on some form of welfare. As she pointed out (the figures are below): “Notice that 89% of the Somali households with children are on welfare. That means the mother does not work, so they need no daycare.” Note, though, that the data don’t say anything about homes with or without children, but I think it’s a fair assumption that most of the homes getting welfare do contain children.
Here are some data divided up in the graph below into “native households”, “Somali immigrant households”, and “Somali Immigrant households that have been in America for more than ten years.”:
I just verified this and it’s 100% accurate
This is December 2025 Center for Immigration Studies official data
– 81% of Somali households in Minnesota are on government Welfare
– 73% are on Medicaid
– 54% are on food stamps
– 27% are on cash welfare
– 89% of Somalian households… pic.twitter.com/Sd1pEvOWGK— Wall Street Apes (@WallStreetApes) December 27, 2025
According to the NY Post, all these scams (and note that the majority but not 100% of them were run by Somalis) may have defrauded the American government (and that means you and me) by 9 billion dollars:
A staggering $9 billion may have been stolen in Minnesota’s sprawling social-services scam orchestrated mainly by members of its Somali community — a figure nearly equivalent to the entire economy of Somalia.
The enormous new estimate is a nearly nine-fold increase from the swiped $1 billion previously suspected, according to federal prosecutors.
It also accounts for roughly half of the $18 billion in total federal funds provided to the Minnesota-run services since 2018, the feds said — as Democratic Gov. Tim Walz continues to take heat for his handling of the debacle.
By comparison to the $9 billion figure, Somalia’s entire GDP was under $12 billion last year, according to the World Bank.
“The magnitude cannot be overstated,” First Assistant US Attorney Joe Thompson said Thursday of the tentacles of the fraud. “What we see in Minnesota is not a handful of bad actors committing crimes. It’s staggering, industrial-scale fraud.
. . .The scheme saw dozens of people — the vast majority from Minnesota’s Somali community — setting up businesses and non-profits that claimed to provide services such as housing, food or healthcare assistance and then billing the federally funded state programs for the non-existent services.
The fraud was so enormous that it went beyond the over-billing tactics typically seen in similar fraud cases and instead saw people setting up entire operations — sometimes coming from out of state — to get in on the goldrush of fraud opportunity, Thompson explained.
Charges for six more people allegedly involved in the scheme were announced Thursday, bringing the total number of defendants up to 92.
Among the latest defendants were two people who engaged in what Thompson called “fraud tourism” by allegedly travelling from Philadelphia to set up a bogus housing aid program after spotting an opportunity to make “easy money” off Minnesota’s programs.
As I wrote this morning:
Minnesota Governor Walz is pushing back, saying that he’s always investigated fraud. He doesn’t seem to realize the scale of this fraud, though. . .
Walz, as well as the Lieutenant Governor (a white woman who wore a hijab on a visit to a Somali market), seems more concerned with people demonizing part of the Minnesota community, by which they mean Somalis. And yes, one shouldn’t become an anti-Somali bigot since many are not involved in this fraud, but what seems to be happening is that progressives are downplaying this fraud because most of it is perpetrated by immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and also people of color. The trope of “Islamophobia”—and, of course, votes—seem to be more important than this fraud. Walz himself has blamed the Trump administration for “sensationalizing” this scandal and his state administration asserts that the scale of the fraud is way overstated: actually, they claim, on the order of tens of millions of dollars.
During the coronavirus pandemic, there was widespread fraud in Minnesota, with an outfit called “Feeding our Future” getting an estimated $250 million to feed kids, nearly all of which went into the pockets of scammers (several were arrested). Various versions of these scams perpetrated by Somalis have, then, been going on for at least four years.
And the criminality doesn’t stop there. Seven of the defendants were tried (and five convicted) in a $125 million food-aid fraud trial in 2024. Last year the AP reported that at least five other people, apparently Somalis, were charged with trying to bribe with a bunch of cash one of the jurors to acquit the defendants:
Five people were charged Wednesday with conspiring to bribe a Minnesota juror with a bag of $120,000 in cash in exchange for the acquittal of defendants in one of the country’s largest COVID-19-related fraud cases, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the FBI announced Wednesday.
Court documents made public reveal an extravagant scheme in which the accused researched the juror’s personal information on social media, surveilled her, tracked her daily habits and bought a GPS device to install on her car. Authorities believe the defendants targeted the woman, known as “Juror 52,” because she was the youngest and they believed her to be the only person of color on the panel.
According to court documents, the group came up with a “blueprint” of arguments for the juror to help persuade other jurors to acquit, injecting the idea that prosecutors were motivated by racial animus: “(w)e are immigrants, they don’t respect us,” the list of proposed arguments read.
The seven people were the first of 70 to stand trial in what federal prosecutors have called one of the nation’s largest COVID-19-related frauds, exploiting rules that were kept lax so that the economy wouldn’t crash during the pandemic. More than $250 million in federal funds was taken in the Minnesota scheme overall, with only about $50 million of it recovered, authorities said.
The food aid came from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and was administered by the state, which funneled the meal money through nonprofit organizations and other partners. As rules were eased to speed support to the needy, the defendants allegedly produced invoices for meals never served, ran shell companies, laundered money, indulged in passport fraud and accepted kickbacks.
Federal prosecutors said just a fraction of the money the defendants received through the Feeding our Future nonprofit went to feed low-income kids, while the rest was spent on luxury cars, jewelry, travel and property.
The bribe didn’t work because the accused target was removed from the jury. The convicted:
. . . Abdiaziz Shafii Farah, Mohamed Jama Ismail, Abdimajid Mohamed Nur, Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff and Hayat Mohamed Nur were found guilty on most of the counts against them. Prosecutors have described Abdiaziz Farah as a ringleader of the seven and faced the most counts; he was convicted on 23 of 24 counts against him.
And the NY Post strongly suggests that a fair amount of money from these scams has gone to Somali terrorist organizations:
Millions of dollars in taxpayer money stolen as part of a series of massive Minnesota welfare fraud schemes may have been funneled to Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab, according to a report.
The radical Islamic terror group, which is a longstanding ally of al Qaeda and considered a threat to US interests, has likely been the beneficiary of money stolen in a spate of scams and sent to Somalia by the criminals defrauding the North Star State, City Journal reported Wednesday, citing federal counterterrorism sources.
. . . “This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of al-Shabab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” a source who worked on a federal investigation into Minnesotans attempting to join overseas terror groups, told the outlet.
David Gaither, a former Republican Minnesota state senator, believes state Democrats and the media have ignored fraud being perpetrated by members of the state’s large and politically influential Somali community, which has made the problem worse.
“The media does not want to put a light on this,” Gaither told City Journal. “And if you’re a politician, it’s a significant disadvantage for you to alienate the Somali community. If you don’t win the Somali community, you can’t win Minneapolis. And if you don’t win Minneapolis, you can’t win the state. End of story.”
The fraudulently obtained welfare funds make their way to al-Shabab through the “untold millions” of dollars in cash remitted by Somalis in Minnesota back to Somalia through an informal network of money handlers, known as “hawalas,” the outlet reported.
“We had sources going into the hawalas to send money,” Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who served on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), explained. “I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well s–t, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: This is welfare fraud.”
Kerns said he later determined that “significant funds” were being sent from people in the US to al-Shabab networks in Somalia — and though it may not have been intentional, the terror group was getting a share.
“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-Shabab in some way,” a former member of the Minneapolis JTTF said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, al-Shabab is … taking a cut of it.”
Note that the City Journal is a right-wing site, but if you’re going to dismiss these allegations as baseless because of that, then you might as well dismiss any allegations of the NYT or WaPo because they’re “progressive” (the Post less so now). Coverage of the scandal is of course heavier at right-wing sites, but that is absolutely understandable. Nevertheless, what is not important here is race itself but the collaboration of members of an ethnic group to defraud the government. And if the al-Shabab allegations be true—and I expect we’ll find out sooner or later—it would mean that the American taxpayer is subsidizing terrorism, which is the worst part of this whole mess.
One final note. If you were running one of those bogus organizations investigated by Shirley, what would you do if you saw the torrent of bad publicity? You’d start packing the empty childcare centers with kids, maybe even paying their parents to bring them in. Because you’d know for sure that the investigators were going to come. And that may well have happened. What we do know from this site is that state investigators went back to the sites and, of course, found children—during the holiday season, a time when you don’t expect to find kids in daycare. Bolding is mine:
“While we have questions about some of the methods that were used in the video, we do take the concerns that the video raises about fraud very seriously,” said Tikki Brown, commissioner of the new Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families — which is responsible for paying federal Childcare Assistance to daycares that file claims.
Commissioner Brown says inspectors went out Monday to double-check that children, in fact, are present at the daycares highlighted in Shirley’s video. The federal Department of Homeland Security was also checking those businesses in Minneapolis.
State data Shirley used in his video show those daycares receive millions in taxpayer money.
“There have been ongoing investigations with several of those centers. None of those investigations uncovered findings of fraud,” Commissioner Brown said.
She says a state inspector visited each of the daycares featured in Shirley’s video within the last six months and that there were children present.
Brown confirmed that the daycares in Shirley’s video have active licenses with the state and continue receiving payments.
The exception — one that closed years ago, and the misspelled Quality Learning Center — which Brown says permanently closed last week.
In a strange contradiction, however, KARE 11 cameras this afternoon captured dozens of children being dropped off at that daycare with parents claiming it’s still open, and a manager saying they are legitimate.
The Department of Children, Youth, and Families has a total of 55 open investigations related to the Child Care Assistance Program.
Now why were there kids at the closed “Quality Learing Center”? Your guess is as good as mine, but I think my guess is pretty good.
Well, one thing we can all be proud of is that these Somali immigrants are carrying on a tradition many Americans hold dear. Grift is as American as apple pie, baseball, and school shootings.
I suggest Separation of Caring and State.
The New York Times published a good article on November 30…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/us/fraud-minnesota-somali.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Looking forward to the 60 Minutes expose 😊
I’m surprised that the NYT published that.
Sadly the same psychology seems to be at play here as with the Rochdale grooming gangs: don’t notice, don’t investigate, because the optics of doing something about it look (or can easily be made to look) “racist”, or can be used to “feed a right-wing narrative”. Do such people imagine that large-scale criminal behaviour can remain secret for ever? It seems they do.
It’s effectively a collective-action problem: no one wants to be the individual to blow the whistle, even when they know they should; once a breakthrough has been made, many more people will come out of the woodwork who were aware of it but now claim they were always against it (the NYT publishing the allegations about Harvey Weinstein are a good illustration: tremendously difficult to get even two or three people to put their names to the initial allegation, but within a week of doing so, 82 more women came forward).
Like the grooming gangs, this kind of large-scale fraud needs a lot of approval and participation. It’s not enough that outsiders may fear to be accused of being racist, and keep quiet. It’s also necessary that many insiders are happy at least provide cover, if not participation.
If you found yourself exposed on national news committing fraud, would your social network enable you to borrow a classroom full of toddlers to meet the inspectors on Monday? Toddlers whose moms aren’t scandalised, quite the contrary?
(At least, I think that’s what’s going on. But early days for this particular story.)
Such participation (not to say silent collusion) from the broader community is why I find it increasingly hard to swallow that we are to ignore entirely any ethnic component in these allegations of fraud.
Why is there no strong intra-community disapproval of such fraudulent activities, or if there has been, why has it not been effective?
The most generous reading is that they see the fraud as money flowing into their world from who-cares-where. Some westerners take a view a bit like that of extractive industries elsewhere (or used to): who cares what the oil company is doing in Borneo, as long as our country profits.
(I don’t really buy that, as I doubt that there’s a strong norm against cheating others within their world. Somalia does not appear to score high on peaceful co-operation. “I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins…” and all that.)
But even if you do buy it, as a reason not to judge them too harshly, it’s still a solid reason for them to be elsewhere. Having different countries is a good system! Especially when radically different societies are separated by an ocean or two.
One or two refugees is fine. They must know, face to face, the people whose generosity supports them. A million is simply crazy, why support a whole closed society? If they must be prevented from starving, we can airdrop them food… until we decide to stop.
It may be as you say, fear of the optics of racism. But there is also a suggestion of more: that it is in the interests of the Democratic party machine (or in Rochdale, the Labour party) to keep the scandal under wraps.
Looking very bad. Will be keeping up with the details. Sounds like an insular community was committing mass fraud and political correctness buried the story.
Tim Walz is full of denial but I’m suspicious now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/us/tim-walz-trump-somalia-minnesota.html
Since standards in public schools have essentially dropped to zero, there’s very little difference between them and Somalian day cares. Both take government money to pretend to educate/care for children, who may or may not be present.
The Somalian day care centers are private enterprises. Let’s make all schooling private, profit-driven and prone to seeking government hand-outs and see what happens in The Land of American Exceptionalism, a land where – despite teachers’ best efforts – way too many students – and their parents – don’t care if they learn anything of substance and worth.
Re: (among other tomes)
“Anti-Intellectualism in American Life” – Richard Hofstadter
“Amusing Ourselves to Death” – Neal Postman
“The Age of American Unreason” – Susan Jacoby
But, but…..I thought that free markets and private enterprise were the answer to all corruption and grift! That’s what the Republicans keep telling us, isn’t it?
You must be thinking of a currently-endangered subspecies of Republicans.
Is it possible that some or all of this is over-blown? It is difficult to defend that possibility. But I am confident that Tim Walz is done for, politically.
The defense is going to be that this is old news.
It’s been going on since at least 2015…
I just watched the video. Those two guys were pretty brave in confronting those “workers.” Wisely, they had security.
Not a good look for the State of Minnesota.
“Minnesota Nice” has become “suicidal empathy.”
Bloc votes via ethnic tribalism and a local fear of being called racist combined there I think. The scale of the fraud is.. amazing.
All the best Norm,
D.A.
NYC
Just finished reading the first chapter of Gladwell’s Revenge of the Tipping Point. The bulk of it was about Philip Esformes, who defrauded over a billion from the Miami healthcare system.
Apparently, Kushner and the Aleph Institute petitioned on his behalf. And Trump commuted his sentence.
The Aleph Institute looks like an interesting organization to look into.
Name a single way in which importing large numbers of Somalian immigrants has improved the state of Minnesota, I dare you.
From career politicians’ PoV, getting themselves reelected definitely improves the state.
It allows Christians to practice what they preach?
What about Humanists in Minnesota?
Shortly after 9-11, I read a story which said that Somalian cab drivers in Minneapolis refused to drive passengers who were carrying alcohol, or were intoxicated. Why? Because Muslims consider the consumption of alcohol a sin. The Minneapolis Taxi Commission came down hard on them, and said that any driver who refused a fair for such a reason would lose their hack license. I wonder how this subject would be treated in 2025 ?
Wondering why anyone would think importing lots of Somalians is a good idea (to see what sort of society Somalians en masse tend to lead to, just look at Somalia) I came up with:
1) They (or their children) will end up mostly voting Democrat, so the more the better (ditto Haitians, etc).
2) We (whites) feel guilty about having a higher standard of living than other countries, so we should equalize things by letting in lots of (black) Africans to live on welfare.
3) Blank-slatist ideology tells us that people are entirely fungible, so it really makes no difference if they are Somalians or not, since they’ll assimilate.
The last is wrong on all the evidence, culture and cultural attitudes are much more aligned with ethnicity and much more multi-generational than commonly supposed.
The famed American “melting pot” worked — but that means it worked for various sorts of Europeans. It seems also to be working fine for East Asian immigrants, but there’s no guarantee it’ll work for all cultures and all ethnicities (especially not Muslims).
In America’s early days it also imported millions of sub-Saharan Africans, and — yes — badly mistreated them for multiple generations. But even after a couple of generations of reasonably fair and equal treatment (1970s onward) they have not properly assimilated, and still have much lower levels of educational achievement, much higher levels of subsisting on welfare, and much higher crime rates — and there’s no real sign of convergence.
Several years back, I read an article debunking the myth of systemic racism in the United States. The article mentioned how numerous non White races had higher median incomes than native born Whites. One of those groups mentioned was Nigerian immigrants. So, is it the race that holds them back, or the economic and educational status of the immigrant. Or perhaps the high status Nigerians are Christian, and not Muslim ???
Also, you must consider job opportunities then and now. Back in the day, it was easy for an uneducated person to get a high paying union job, and move into the middle class. Now, not so much. Uneducated immigrants will must likely get a low paying, dead end job working at Amazon, McDonalds, or driving Uber or Door Dash. Much less likely to move into the middle class with those types of jobs.
Igbo Nigerians in particular have very high average IQs IIRC and are overrepresented in the professional immigrants to this country, I believe. They have many Igbo child prodigies too. I had a Nigerian physician who started medical school at age 15. I have had several Nigerian physicians over the course of my life and they have all been excellent.
It’s not easy to immigrate from Nigeria to the US. Those that do it tend to be the elite, well above average in ability, drive, educational achievement and wealth. Thus they are a highly selected sample, not typical of Nigerian averages nor of sub-Saharan Africa in general. It’s also the case that their children seem to be showing reversion to the mean.
I suppose it’s safe to assume that a weak tribe in West Africa that was required to pay tribute in slaves every year to a strong tribe would not bind up its best and its brightest and send them across across the river, to be sold down it, and have the survivors fetch up in Brazil, America, and the Caribbean sugar islands, lost forever to the aspirations of the tribe for a better future. Indeed, it would be the strong of body and slow of mind who would fail to realize, until too late, that gangs of their neighbours were about to fall upon them with ropes and yokes when tithing season rolled around. “Choosing sides for basketball” but in reverse.
Thinking strategically, the clever elders would see tribute slavery as a way also to get rid of physically strong but psychopathically ungovernable (and therefore very dangerous) individuals.
The ex-slave population in the Americas (or, indeed, anywhere in the world) is hardly a random sample of West Africans.
It’s interesting that Sweden also decided to import Somalians, and of course has similar problems. You can read that as saying the melting pot never worked all that well, the Swedes kept different attitudes. And perhaps as evidence for explanations 2, 3… white guilt, and a belief in the blank slate, are heritable?
Apologies if I put this here before (or twitter?) but there is a big difference between
)
)Somalia (with the “UN blue” and white star flag, and all the terrorism)
)and
)
)SOMALILAND.
Mixing them up is like mistaking North and South Korea.
article: (syndicated variously)
https://democracychronicles.org/somaliland-excellent-news/
D.A.
NYC
I’m thrilled about Israel’s recognition of Somaliland.
Not simply a “possible” conservative … here’s Reuters in a 2024 article on MAGA influencers stoking fear of immigration. “Shirley, a 22-year-old with more than 318,000 followers on social media, is among a new class of influencers supportive of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump who are helping shape the immigration debate as the U.S. election campaign heats up.” Seems very likely there is a serious issue of fraud, which may be being exploited by Republican politicians with help from people like Shirley. How, for example, could he know that he discovered $110,000,000 in fraud in a single day? Or how could a source know that the largest amount of al-Shabab funding came from Minnesota?
Why would having children in daycare during the holidays be odd? If the parents need to be at work and the kids are out of school I would think they would need to be in daycare.
I read that 90% of Somali immigrant moms collect welfare and do not work – they are stay-at-homes. So it would seem there is little to no actual need for day care among the Somali immigrant community.
I kept wondering, while watching the video, when the centers were visited, i.e., date and day of the week, but perhaps i just missed that information somewhere?
But it is unknown who the parents of the kids in the day care are and whether they are at home or at work. I’m not saying there is no fraud, I’m just trying to make sure we go with evidence.
PZ Myers who lives in Minnesota says he tuned the fraud stuff out in 2020 because it had been going on so long. In 2020. And Kamala Harris still chose Walz for her VP. I mean, LOL!
Anyone who has spent time in Somalia will be disappointed, but not surprised at all of this.
Where I live, people sometimes put big bowls of candy on their porch on Halloween. This is a reasonable thing to do primarily because people here are honest, even when nobody is looking.
I suppose in more urban areas doing this would be unwise, as people might take more than one.
In a largely Somali neighborhood, it would be reasonable to expect the first person to come by would take all the candy, and the bowl as well.
Somalis are a zero-trust society. They are unlikely to even see taking the whole bowl as wrong. To them, the fault lies with the homeowner.