MAGA's Somali Freakout: An Explainer
MAGA has discovered a new folk villain: the Somali immigrant in Minnesota, allegedly ferrying your tax dollars out of the country in a suitcase labeled “Fraud.” It’s a convenient character — exotic enough to frighten cable news viewers, pliable enough to fit any storyline, and distant enough that the people being stereotyped don’t get to rewrite the script.
But the actual Minnesota fraud saga — the one in court filings, verdicts, and agency statements — doesn’t cooperate with the morality play.
The Feeding Our Future controversy that MAGA has been ranting about for weeks refers to a massive fraud scheme involving federal COVID-19 child nutrition funds, in which a network of Minnesota nonprofits and vendors falsely claimed to serve millions of meals to children in order to siphon off hundreds of millions of dollars. The scheme exploited emergency pandemic programs with lax oversight, submitting fabricated meal counts, fake invoices, and shell-company contracts while little or no food was actually provided. The case, which prosecutors described as one of the largest pandemic-era frauds in the country, has led to dozens of charges and convictions, including against Feeding Our Future’s founder.
In 2022, the Biden Justice Department charged nearly fifty people with wrongdoing in the scheme, a number that has grown to nearly eighty since. So far, fifty-seven people have been convicted, most of whom are of Somali descent.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/magas-somali-freakout-an-explainer
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