Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Democrat Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is a Somalia-born refugee who was granted the privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen in 2000 when she was 17 years old. She became the first Somali American elected to the U.S. Congress in 2018. But in January 2024, Rep. Omar delivered a speech to Somali supporters in Minneapolis that demonstrated where her true loyalties lie. She said that:
“the U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do. We as Somalis should have that confidence in ourselves. We live in this country. We pay taxes in this country. It’s a country where one of your own sits in Congress.” (Emphasis added)
Rep. Omar trotted out her usual accusations of racism, xenophobia, and Islamophobia against those who criticized this speech. Now Omar is at it again. She is playing the same race card as she dances around the recent reports of massive fraud committed by Somali Americans living in Minnesota. When asked by a reporter about this linkage of widespread fraud to the Somali American community, Rep. Omar remarked how “xenophobic and racist your question sounds.” And reacting to President Trump’s harsh comments about the scandal, Omar wrote in her December 5th New York Times op ed article that President Trump “reaches for the same playbook of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and division.”
Rep. Omar tried vainly to explain away the criminal Somali American network accused of fraudulently exploiting a federal government-funded program to feed hungry children in Minnesota during the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview on CNN, she offered this rambling rationalization:
“I think what happened, um, is that, you know, when you have these, kind of new programs that are, um, designed to help people, you’re oftentimes relying on third parties to be able to facilitate. And I just think that a lot of the COVID programs that were set up— they were set up so quickly that a lot of the guardrails did not get created.”
No publicly available evidence has surfaced yet indicating that Rep. Omar personally engaged in or aided the fraud scheme and she has brought herself finally to condemn the fraud. Nevertheless, there is still good reason to ask what she knew and when she knew it. Rep. Omar failed to establish her own personal guardrails in deciding whom to associate with. As reported by the New York Post, she “held parties at one of the key restaurants named in the fraud, knew one of its now-convicted owners, and one of her own staffers has also been convicted — both for stealing millions.”
A now-defunct nonprofit organization, known as Feeding Our Future, was supposed to distribute taxpayers’ money for the purpose of feeding hungry children in Minnesota. Instead, many millions of dollars ended up being diverted to greedy Somali Americans in Rep. Omar’s district to pay for their lavish lifestyles.
“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,” journalists Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo reported in their scoop published by the Kansas City Journal. “In 2021, Feeding Our Future received nearly $200 million in funding. In reality, the money was being used to fund lavish lifestyles, purchase luxury vehicles, and buy real estate in the United States, Turkey, and Kenya.”
Mr. Thorpe and Mr. Rufo reported an even more shocking diversion of some of these funds. “Federal counterterrorism sources confirm,” they wrote, “that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab.”
Even the leftist New York Times could not ignore the real facts. “The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness,” it reported. The so-called “Paper of Record” for once did not twist the facts to match its own editorial narrative. And it relied on the expert opinion of a Somali American professor at a Minnesota college, not its editorial writers or leftwing activists, for an accurate perspective.
“Ahmed Samatar, a professor at Macalester College who is a leading expert in Somali studies, said a reckoning over the fraud and its consequences for Minnesota was overdue,” the New York Times reporter wrote. “Dr. Samatar said that Somali refugees who came to the United States after their country’s civil war were raised in a culture in which stealing from the country’s dysfunctional and corrupt government was widespread. Minnesota, he said, proved susceptible to rampant fraud because it is ‘so tolerant, so open and so geared toward keeping an eye on the weak.’”
When describing the Somali American community in Minnesota, Rep. Omar painted a much rosier picture. “We are doctors, teachers, police officers and elected leaders working to make our country better,” she wrote in her New York Times op ed article. She skipped over the dysfunctional side of the Somali American community.
During Rep. Omar’s “Face the Nation” interview on December 7th, this anti-Semite had the unmitigated gall to equate describing some ethnic Somalis as corrupt and terrorists, which is true, to “the way the Nazis described Jewish people in Germany.”
President Trump was right when he said that Somali immigrants living in the United States “have caused a lot of trouble.” Not all Somali immigrants fit that description. But there are plenty more Somali American troublemakers, who have not managed to assimilate seamlessly into American society, than Democrat politicians and their friends in the legacy media would like us to believe.
Approximately 80,000 Somalians live in Minnesota, most of whom have made the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul their home. About 42 percent of the Somalis in Minnesota are foreign born. Although most of them are American citizens, the vast majority of Somali Americans in Minnesota speak a language other than English. Many have attained less than a high school education. Crime is rampant in Somali immigrant-dense communities. So is the culture of corruption, which Somali immigrants to the United States have imported from Somalia.
Last month, President Trump said he was terminating Temporary Protected Status for Somali migrants in Minnesota. And now he is clamping down further on immigrants from Somalia and other dysfunctional high-risk countries that he had previously included on his travel ban list. The president is taking these actions in response to an Afghan immigrant’s alleged shooting of two National Guard members, one of whom lost her life, and in response to the Somali American fraud scandal in Minnesota.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) issued a Policy Memorandum on December 2nd. While directing USCIS personnel to place a hold on all applications for asylum irrespective of the country of origin “pending a comprehensive review,” the memorandum targeted “aliens from 19 high-risk countries” for an even more thorough examination. The purpose is to remedy the lack of proper vetting by the Biden administration. The USCIS memo directed USCIS personnel to pause the review of all pending applications for green cards, citizenship, or asylum from immigrants who had come from Somalia or any of the other listed high-risk countries. Previously, the USCIS announced that it would take another look at the status of immigrants whom the Biden administration had already admitted into the U.S. as refugees.
Meanwhile, federal immigration law enforcement agents are tracking down Somali immigrants who do not belong in this country, focusing on the Minneapolis–St. Paul vicinity. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has already arrested a Somali immigrant convicted of fraud, Abdul Dahir Ibrahim, who entered the U.S. illegally in 1995 after Canada kicked him out for asylum and welfare fraud.
Ibrahim should have been deported from the U.S. a decade ago pursuant to a deportation order that was issued against him. But he subsequently received Temporary Protected Status despite his crimes and falsehoods in his immigration paperwork.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar thought enough of Ibrahim to be photographed with him. Fortunately, the Trump administration thinks otherwise and is preparing to finally deport this fraudster after removing his Temporary Protected status.
ICE has also arrested Somalian criminal illegal immigrants convicted of fraud, criminal sexual conduct with a minor, assault, domestic violence, and robbery. “ICE law enforcement are risking their lives to protect Minnesotans while their own elected officials sit by and do nothing. No matter when and where, ICE will find, arrest, and deport ALL criminal illegal aliens,” said Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin.
Good riddance to them.
