How Minnesota Became the Land of 10,000 Frauds

What's the difference between a Minnesotan and a Canadian. The amount of Labatts they ingest.

Did you know that Tim Walz is the 2nd Cousin of Doug McKenzie! I dead serious.

How Minnesota Became the Land of 10,000 Fraud

The simple explanation: The state makes it easy for criminals to get away with their wrongdoing.

By Matthew Continetti, WSJ

Dec. 5, 2025 3:53 pm ET

The numbers out of Minnesota are staggering: Three separate plots to bilk welfare programs. Fifty-nine federal convictions. More than $1 billion stolen from taxpayers. Of 86 people charged so far, all but eight are of Somali descent.

The scandal has seized headlines and put Gov. Tim Walz, seeking a third term, on the defensive. It’s huge, brazen and entangled with the seamy politics of migration and assimilation. President Trump has weighed in with characteristic subtlety: “We don’t want them in our country,” he said of Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar and “her friends” during Tuesday’s cabinet meeting. “Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.”

The massive fraud shows there is plenty to fix in America. What’s unfolding in Minnesota is sensational but not unusual. Ripping off the taxpayer has become a national pastime. The needy deserve support, but when entitlements become ends in themselves, they invite criminality and dependence.

The nobler the cause, the nastier the graft. Since 2020, when Washington turned on the spigots to counter effects of the pandemic, government-benefits fraud cases have increased 242%. According to the Government Accountability Office, from 2020 to 2023 the amount of fraud in unemployment-insurance programs was between $100 billion and $135 billion. In June, the Justice Department announced charges against 324 defendants in schemes involving $14.6 billion in healthcare fraud. Last month a Miami grand jury indicted Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick and others on charges of stealing $5 million in Federal Emergency Management Agency relief and laundering the money into her campaign. The Democratic congresswoman pleaded not guilty.

Minnesota fits the pattern. In 2022 federal investigators noticed unusual activity in a program to serve meals to children during the pandemic. Empire Cuisine & Market, a small halal grocery in Shakopee, Minn., claimed to be feeding thousands of children daily. Abdimajid Mohamed Nur pocketed close to $1 million by submitting lists of fake names and food sites to the Federal Child Nutrition Program. He spent the money on a Dodge Ram, jewelry and a honeymoon in the Maldives. In 2024 Mr. Nur was sentenced to 120 months in prison.

Minnesota became the first state to provide Medicaid coverage for housing assistance in 2022. The effort was designed to help at-risk populations—such as the disabled, the mentally ill and addicts—avoid homelessness. It became a full-employment program for fraudsters.

Costs ballooned from a projected $2.6 million annual budget to $104 million last year. In September, authorities charged eight people for fraudulent billing. Brothers Anwar and Asad Adow, who both pleaded guilty, used proceeds to invest in Kenyan real estate and lease, respectively, a Mercedes-Benz CLA and a BMW X4.

In September, Asha Farhan Hassan was charged for her role in defrauding Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention benefit for autistic children. According to the Justice Department, between 2019 and 2024 Ms. Hassan’s company, Smart Therapy, took more than $14 million in reimbursements by falsely qualifying Somali-American children who didn’t have autism. Then she kicked back some of the proceeds to the children’s parents. Ms. Hassan sent money abroad and bought property in Kenya. Her attorney says she plans to plead guilty.

The timing and location of such wrongdoing matter. The flood of federal assistance that washed over the country beginning in 2020—some $4.6 trillion in additional spending over two years—created numerous opportunities for corruption. Minnesota’s full-bore progressivism created interlocking structures of taxpayer support that are lax, openhanded and easy to exploit.

Government provision is no longer targeted to the poor. It is a way of life. The debate over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and recent government shutdown unearthed the nation’s welfare archipelago, a nationwide system of transfers and subsidies on which a growing population is increasingly dependent. The federal government has more than 80 welfare programs, which collectively cost more than $1 trillion. Seventy million Americans are on Medicaid. Twenty-four million buy insurance on the heavily subsidized ObamaCare exchanges. Forty-one million get food stamps.

The expense isn’t only financial. It can’t be counted in the number of crooks brought to justice. The real price is measured in the subtle corrosion of personal agency—the men and women who drop out of the workforce, a dependence on government largess that runs against the American grain. Republicans searching for an agenda might build on their recent reforms to Medicaid and SNAP by emphasizing work requirements, job skills and spending reductions to limit fraud and restore individual initiative.

Start in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. “Minnesota is a generous state, Minnesota is a prosperous state, a well-run state, we are AAA bond-rated, but that attracts criminals,” Mr. Walz told “Meet the Press.”

No it doesn’t. What attracts criminals is the chance that they will get away with the crime. The possibility of an easy getaway to Kenya spikes when welfare isn’t limited, temporary and conditional, but omnipresent and unreserved. When government aid isn’t considered a sign of systemic failure but a positive good. And when political correctness demands willful blindness to wrongdoing.

Mr. Continetti is a Journal opinion columnist.