According to a new bombshell investigation from Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, Minnesota taxpayer dollars are being funneled far outside the state — ultimately ending up in the hands of Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-affiliated terror group operating in Somalia.
Thorpe and Rufo said they were driven by a fundamental question: “Where did the money go?” Their conclusion points to the stark reality that U.S. taxpayer funds may have directly supported a foreign terror organization.
The fraud involves Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, Feeding Our Future, and other organizations
From Fox News:
As it turned out, the Somali fraud rings sent money transfers from Minnesota to Somalia and, according to reports, approximately 40% of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. Thorpe and Rufo state that in 2023, the Somali diaspora sent $1.7 billion to the country, which was higher than the Somali government’s budget that same year.
Thorpe and Rufo discovered that the funds were being funneled to Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda-linked terror organization. Multiple law enforcement sources informed the duo that Minnesota’s Somali community sent millions of dollars through a network of money traders known as “hawalas” that wound up in the hands of the terror group.
Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force, told Thorpe and Rufo that the Somalis ran a complex money network and were routing cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia.
“We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well s—, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits,” Kerns told Thorpe and Rufo.
A confidential source told Thorpe and Rufo that “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”
“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-Shabaab in some way,” a former official who worked on the Minneapolis Joint Terrorism Task Force told Thorpe and Rufo.
More over at The New York Post:
Somali terror group Al-Shabaab ‘taking a cut’ of millions in stolen Minnesota taxpayer money from welfare fraud scheme: report https://t.co/TrPZq6K8Nw pic.twitter.com/DxfT6HBEla
— New York Post (@nypost) November 21, 2025
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