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Minnesota assisted living fraud scheme includes indicted figure still getting state pay

December 18, 2025 | | Print Article

An investigation by Minnesota state Rep. Kristin Robbins has uncovered yet another fraud scheme that appears to be being committed by Somalis.

This particular scheme is tied to the state’s assisted living program, according to Fox News.

The fraudsters have reportedly been receiving millions in taxpayer dollars for alleged assisted living. Moreover, one of the fraudsters is already facing indictment charges over his involvement in the separate Feeding Out Future scandal.

Speaking to Fox News, Robbins expressed amazement over the fraudster collecting money from the Minnesota Department of Human Services despite facing an indictment for similar fraud elsewhere.

“I just find it unconscionable that they, the department, didn’t run a basic check of all these Feeding Our Future people who’ve been indicted or convicted, and make sure that they weren’t getting state money in other programs,” she said.

“I expect there will be more fraud uncovered in those sectors. And I’m assuming it’s happening in other states, as we’ve seen, there is a similar fraud going on in Maine, and I’m sure many other states. And so I think all agencies around the country need to be attuned to this and need to look at the programs,” she added.

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Writing for City Journal, journalists Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo recently uncovered the Feeding Our Future fraud.

“Using fake meal counts, doctored attendance records, and fabricated invoices, the perpetrators of the fraud ring [tied to Feeding Our Future] claimed to be serving thousands of meals a day, seven days a week, to underprivileged children,” Thorpe and Rufo reported. “In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding.”

The pair also uncovered plenty of other fraud — all of it being committed by Somalis in Minnesota. For instance, the fraud also included Minnesota’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program for children with autism.

The chief suspect, Somali woman Asha Farhan Hassan, “approached parents in the Somali community” and recruited their kids into autism therapy services regardless of whether the kids actually had the disorder.

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In a press release announcing Hassan’s indictment months earlier, then-acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Joe Thompson wrote that she and her partners had “paid monthly cash kickback payments to the parents of children who enrolled.”

“These kickback payments ranged from approximately $300 to $1500 per month, per child,” the press release continued. “The amount of these payments was contingent on the services DHS authorized a child to receive—the higher the authorization amount, the higher the kickback. Often, parents threatened to leave… and take their children to other autism centers if they did not get paid higher kickbacks.”

Thompson noted in another press release that all these schemes — which, by the way, occurred under Democrat Gov. Tim Walz — weren’t isolated.

“From Feeding Our Future to Housing Stabilization Services and now Autism Services, these massive fraud schemes form a web that has stolen billions of dollars in taxpayer money,” he said.

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Indeed, and the most surprising aspect of this story was what eventually happened to all the stolen taxpayer money.

“The Somali fraud rings have sent huge sums in remittances, or money transfers, from Minnesota to Somalia,” Thorpe and Rufo reported. “According to reports, an estimated 40 percent of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. In 2023 alone, the Somali diaspora sent back $1.7 billion—more than the Somali government’s budget for that year.”

The even more troubling revelation was that “this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab.”

Vivek Saxena
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