The Department of Justice announced criminal charges Thursday against 15 individuals in Minnesota—8 of whom appear to be of Somali descent—who allegedly looted $90 million from seven state-managed Medicaid programs in what officials called the opening salvo in the Trump administration's fight against rampant fraud in the state.
The alleged fraud was so severe that at least one of the programs, a Minnesota homeless housing fund that saw its annual costs balloon from $2.5 million to over $104 million in just four years, had to be scrapped in 2025 because the alleged fraudsters had pilfered the program dry, said the new assistant attorney general for fraud enforcement, Colin McDonald, during a press conference Thursday. McDonald said the charges included the largest ever Medicaid fraud case brought forward in Minnesota, and the largest autism fraud case ever charged by the Justice Department.
"This is the beginning of our work in Minnesota," McDonald said. "The fraud here in Minnesota is shocking," he added as he described how some of the alleged fraudsters used their ill-gotten gains to "expand their real estate holdings, purchase luxury vehicles, and splurge on expensive jewelry."
Though the 15 alleged fraudsters are all identified as residents of Minnesota in their charging documents, 8 of them have names that are strongly and distinctively Somali. That includes Muhammad Abdulqadir Omar, who was captured on video limping away after jumping from a fourth-floor balcony to flee law enforcement. He has since been captured.
Minnesota has by far the largest Somali community—largely centered in the Twin Cities—in the country. President Donald Trump has loudly denounced the Minnesota Somalis. In his State of the Union address in February, he cited Minnesota's "stunning example … where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer."
Hours before the Justice Department announced the charges Thursday, a federal judge sentenced Aimee Bock, the convicted ringleader of the Feeding Our Future fraud scheme, to 41.5 years in prison for her role in stealing more than $242 million from a COVID-era federal child nutrition program. That case has captured nationwide attention due to the scale of the fraud—82 of the 92 charged defendants in the case are Somali—and its alleged connection to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), who has denied any knowledge of the scheme and has not been charged.
The Feeding our Future scheme was enabled by the MEALS Act, a bill Omar introduced in 2020 that enabled outside organizations to participate in federal school meals programs during the COVID-19 pandemic. Omar's name appeared at least six times in court documents during Bock's criminal trial, and Bock told the New York Post last week that Omar worked with many of the suspects charged in the scheme.
"A lot of the sites were working directly with her, being that a lot of the operators were from the same Somali community," Bock said. "There were a lot of people that had been reaching out to her office and staff — and I presume her personally — to work through some of those gaps with the waivers."
McDonald said the 15 cases unveiled Thursday follow a common theme: "fraudsters exploiting vulnerable programs and vulnerable people to enrich themselves, no matter the consequences." That includes state-funded childcare centers offering kickbacks to parents to enroll their children in their programs, and autism centers receiving kickbacks for diagnosing children without proper medical justification. One of the alleged fraudsters raked in taxpayer cash after billing an in-home care program for care he was supposed to provide to a disabled individual. But he never actually performed any work, McDonald said, and the individual who was supposed to be under his care died as the fraudster profited from the scheme.
At Thursday's presser, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the physician and daytime television personality who now oversees Medicare and Medicaid, said that "the kinds of reprehensible behavior that we've identified, with individuals bribing parents to lie that their children have autism ... as a physician, that bothers me to my core."
The charges come one week after a Minnesota state house oversight agency excoriated Gov. Tim Walz (D.) in an 84-page report last week, saying he had fostered a "culture of tolerance" that enabled fraudsters to steal billions of taxpayer dollars from the state under his watch. In January 2025, Walz admitted that his administration had a "culture of being a little too trusting" of fraudsters in his state, and in January of this year, he dropped his reelection bid for a third term to focus on combatting fraud. Still, McDonald said during Thursday's press conference that the Trump administration is not satisfied with the level of cooperation it has received from Minnesota state officials in the lead-up to the 15 charges today.
"It's fallen significantly short of the standard that we are seeking to set in terms of what a strong state and federal partnership looks like," the fraud enforcement chief said.
