A Billion Dollar Somali Autism Fraud in Minnesota

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog 

The $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ free food fraud in which Somali groups stole a quarter of a billion dollars while claiming to feed hundreds of thousands of children who never existed seemed like the biggest case of welfare fraud in Minnesota, but it may be just the beginning.

Somali autism fraud, partly linked to the ‘Feeding Our Future’ scam, may be even bigger and after the FBI raids of autism clinics last December, the scale of it is still being put together.

The pattern in both Somali meals for children and autism treatment for children is similar.

In 2019, Feeding Our Future distributed $3.4 million in taxpayer food aid funds to the non-profits it was sponsoring, In 2020, that shot up to $42 million and then up to $197 million in 2021.

EIDBI autism claims to Medicaid in Minnesota similarly shot up from $3 million in 2018 to $54 million in 2019, $77 million in 2020, $183 million in 2021, $279 million in 2022, $399 million in 2023, and nearing $400 million most of the way through 2024 for a total of over $1.4 billion.

How did autism claims rise from $3 million to $400 million a year in just 4 years?

The number of autism providers shot up 700% from 41 to 328 over 5 years. 1 in 16 Somali four-year-olds (6%) were supposedly suffering from autism leading to a mass demand for services. Somalis had accused the Minnesota Department of Human Services of racism, and protested outside its offices to pressure it into providing funding for the $250 million ‘Feeding Our Future’ and similarly launched a pressure campaign to sign off on the autism fraud.

Somali community groups set up their own autism treatment centers to provide diverse “culturally appropriate programming” and Somali kids were seven times more likely to receive autism treatment than other children. Whistleblowers at the Minnesota Department of Human Services report that 1 in 5 autism centers in the state are now under investigation.

In the 85 investigations, of the 5 closed cases last year, all of them involved Somalis including apparently Sharmarke Issa, the former chair of the Minneapolis Public Housing Authority who pleaded guilty over his involvement in the Feeding Our Future fraud.

Some of the autism clinics double dipped by also signing up to hand out meals to children. Smart Therapy, one of the autism clinics raided by the FBI, received $13 million from Medicaid and also signed up with Feeding Our Future to get ‘reimbursements’ from the government for allegedly feeding 300 kids a day for seven days a week which by 2021 was up to 500 kids.

The emails listed in the federal complaint appeared to be signed by Aisha Hassan, the CEO and President of Smart Therapy. The autism center was allegedly working with S&S Catering, whose owner Qamar Ahmed Hassan, took in $13 million in government money and then wrote checks to a travel agency specializing in Islamic tours of Mecca as part of the Feeding Our Future fraud. It’s unknown if Qamar Hassan and Asha Hassan are related, but a whistleblower told investigators that another Smart Therapy owner was indeed related to Qamar Hassan.

A Smart Therapy whistleblower stated that the employees were teenage family members of the owners with no training, spent all day on their phones, that the children were not autistic, and that their parents were paid to sign them up for ‘treatment’ with envelopes full of cash.

Star Autism Center, also raided by the FBI, billed Medicaid for 21.5 hours of autism therapy from one therapist in one day. Another billed 23 hours of services in a single day. Star’s organizer, Abdinajib Hassan Yussuf, claimed to know nothing. Both centers billed for treatments being provided by its ‘therapists’ while they were in Kenya (which hosts a large Somali migrant population) and Turkey which serves as a center for Islamic terrorist migration. Including ISIS.

It is difficult to know the full scale of the Somali autism fraud, but troublingly DHS Assistant Commissioner Natasha Merz had claimed that the catastrophic growth of the state’s autism program has been “pretty consistent” with other DHS programs including housing and disability funding. That means that the fraud we know could be only the tip of a massive iceberg.

For example, Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) was budgeted at $2.6 million when it was launched in 2020 but by 2024, was expected to hit $120 million. The sheer scale of welfare fraud under the Walz administration is so severe that hundreds of millions of dollars can easily vanish across the board without anyone even noticing because it’s no longer an aberration.

Under Gov. Tim Walz, it’s become routine for welfare programs to shoot up from the millions to the hundreds of millions. “Well, I think you’re always accountable for when things happen, but I think the accountability piece that we’re going to have to try and understand,” Walz replied, when asked about Minnesota’s spiraling welfare fraud crisis. “The question is, in state government, our job is to carry out the programs to try and get the resources to the people who need them.”

While Gov. Walz may act baffled, he and his political allies in the DFL chose to roll money out the door to Somali groups, while eliminating accountability and avoiding any scrutiny out of fear of racism. Between Attorney General Keith X. Ellison and DHS Inspector General Kulani Moti, a former public defender and the daughter of the first ‘Oromo’ immigrant from East Africa to move to Minnesota, sensitivity has been a priority, rigorous enforcement has not.

Somalis were already caught stealing tens of millions of dollars in various unrelated Medicaid health care frauds including $20 million in fraud in 2023 alone. This year there’s already been a Somali $7 million fraud conviction. But without federal investigations, these are just a fraction of the abuses being caught at the state level, even as the massive systematic fraud goes on.

Somali fraud now appears to equal half the budgets for the Twin Cities. How big can the fraud get before Minnesota runs out of money?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.  Thank you for reading.

 

Vermont Resettled Somalis, Shootings Are Up 185%

By Daniel Greenfield  @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Shootings are up 185% in Vermont from 2021 to 2022.

“We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger complained after the city racked up 5 murders. That may not sound like much, but it gives the normally sleepy city, where Bernie Sanders got his start, a higher murder rate than Philly.

When James Eaton, a mentally unstable leftist who had praised Hamas, shot and wounded three Arab Muslim men outside his home, the media eagerly diverted attention from the crime wave to the shooter, who was conveniently white, while falsely blaming it on ‘Islamophobia’.

The discredited hoax was not only trying to rally support for terrorists, but also to distract attention from the real perpetrators of the violence that has overtaken Bernie’s old city.

The shooters in Burlington, VT are much more likely to be Muslim male teens.

Another recent shooting out of Burlington made the national news when Hussein Mohamed, the underage son of Somali immigrants who don’t speak English, shot and killed Madden: a local 14-year-old boy. It was reported that “state police were able to make an arrest despite at least two eyewitnesses from the car providing multiple false statements about the crime.”

The murder wave in Burlington was touched off in 2022 when Abdiaziz Abdhikadir, 19, shot and killed Hussein Mubarak, 21.

Abdiaziz Abdhikadir had been part of a Somali Muslim refugee family profiled by the New York Times under the headline “U.S. a Place of Miracles for Somali Refugees.” Of that family, one son was convicted of assault with a firearm, another of “aggravated assault for shooting a man in November 2020” and Abdiaziz Abdhikadir was the grandson of that same family.

Abdhikadir had allegedly become a member of a Somali gang that stole cars while “wearing surgical gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints behind” and two of them had attacked a man in broad daylight while wearing ski masks.

Mubarak had been born in a refugee camp before being his family was resettled in America where his “older and younger siblings” spent time in jail, while he turned to selling drugs.

The reporting on the incident and other violent encounters in Burlington are littered with mentions of drug dealing, stolen cars and guns, shootings in garages and names like Abdirahman Mohamed, Ahmed Mohamed, Badal Khadka and Abukar Hilowle.

Abukar Hilowle was accused of a few shootings, including one in which he allegedly shot the driver of the car he was in, resulting in a car crash, and another in which he shot two middle-aged American men on the street, one of whom had told him to “chill”, but the Muslim perpetrator claimed that he was responding to “racial slurs” by his two victims.

In 2022 it was reported that, “by mid-summer, about half of the city’s gunfire incidents were connected to a small group of new American young men.” The inaccurate euphemism “new Americans“ was being used to refer to Somali and other often Muslim African immigrants.

The perps are usually repeat offenders who wander in and out of the justice system.

In 2020, Bonide Badibanga was arrested for aggravated assault during a fight over drugs. By 2022, when he was accused of trying to shoot his brother, he had racked up 47 police contacts and 11 arrests. Despite being briefly charged with attempted murder, his family refused to testify and he received a plea deal last year for time served.

Mayor Miro Weinberger however has claimed that the role of migrant settler teens in the wave of violence is not “particularly relevant”.

When the three Arab Muslim men were shot, State’s Attorney Sarah George rushed to claim, without a shred of evidence, that, “there is no question this was a hateful act.” But the Soros DA has been accused of giving violent drug gang members a pass for the sake of social justice.

Burlington’s crime level rose sharply after the City Council had voted to defund 30% of the police department during the peak of the BLM race riots.

Burlington City Councilor Ali Dieng, an African Muslim immigrant who has run for mayor, has attacked the police while introducing resolutions to boycott Israel and has urged funding for social services to explore the “root causes” of the violence by members of his community.

Tens of thousands of dollars were allocated to the Vermont New American Advisory Council (VNAAC), a group in which Ali serves as a secretary, which were used to pay for 15 hours of group therapy with “a therapist of African descent” along with “listening sessions” in which it was determined that the foreign population in Burlington had a “deep distrust” of the police.

“We all know in the 21st century, black people in this country continue to live in fear of losing their lives at the hands of law enforcement, or members of the white supremacy groups,” Ali Dieng had claimed after a resolution ordering the flying of the BLM flag at City Hall in 2020.

The reality is that black people in Burlington are being killed by other black people.

Ali Dieng has spent his political career alternating between falsely accusing America, the country that took him and his people in, of racism and accusing Israel of violence. The actual violence and racism are coming from the Muslim immigrants hiding behind those accusations.

When Hussein Mohamed killed Madden Gouveia, a 14-year-old local boy, local eyewitnesses attempted to lie to the police about what happened. The NAACP and other local leftist groups rallied for Mohamed who was portrayed as the victim. Meanwhile Gouveia’s family lost their son.

“Thankfully, through God’s work, (Madden) came to my house a week ago,” Ricky Worthen, his brother, wrote. “He walked to Battery Park with me and my daughter and spent two hours with us. I know now that was God’s way of showing me, I should cherish every moment and from this day forward I will”

While Madden’s family were thinking of God, Allah was on trial in Vermont.

Allah had been caught with fentanyl: the drug at the heart of the overdose epidemic and also of much of the local Muslim drug dealing and violence in the city. The police had busted Zahir Allah, a black convert to Islam, just outside Burlington, and he was tried and sentenced to less than three years in prison for trafficking in the deadly drug.

Muslim drug gangs are killing each other while fighting over territory in Burlington VT and across much of New England. And increasingly spreading their wave of terror across America.

While certainly not all shootings or murders in Burlington, VT involve Somalis, it is startling to see how many do, especially since the city has a relatively small Somali settler population.

Only a few hundred Somali Muslims were resettled in Burlington with horrifying consequences.

The question in Burlington, VT and across a nation under siege by hate, extremism, violence, crime and terror spread by first, second and third generation ‘refugees’ is how much more can we take, how many more lives can we lose and how long can we go on living this way?

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

Somalis have Changed Minneapolis

June 3, 2019 By Sunny Lohman

Everyone not lying to themselves predicted when the federal government under Bill Clinton – aided and abetted by Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities and World Relief Minnesota -- plopped 30,000 Somalis down into the midst of the kind, virtue-signaling, eager-to-help Midwesterners of Minneapolis (of which I am one) that it would lead to some grave consequences for our community.

Now, due to continuing refugee placements as well as chain migration there are an estimated 80,000 Somalis living in the Twin Cities metro area, or more like 79,000 if you subtract those who’ve left the country to join terrorist organizations like ISIS.

Anyhoo, here’s a week Minneapolitans had with their Somali neighbors last month:........... Read more