MN Somali Medicaid Fraud Investigation Reveals Terrorist Link — ‘Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota Taxpayer’
Warner Todd Huston 20 Nov 2025
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.
