In Somali fraud scandal, Republicans probe evidence of a blue state election scheme

As the magnitude and complexity of Minnesota’s Somali immigrant welfare fraud scandal come into clearer focus, Republicans in Congress are more boldly talking about it being part of a larger scheme by Democrats to use illegal immigrants and purported refugees to hijack federal elections and manipulate apportionment that determines Americans’ congressional representation and federal funding.

The Republicans' argument goes like this: Democrats reversed Donald Trump’s related first-term executive orders and ensured that noncitizens, including illegal immigrants, were counted into 2020 U.S. Census. Then-President Biden opened the southern border so that millions of illegals could flood the country in just a few years.

Next, liberal nonprofits helped move those migrants from the southern border red states, where they were not particularly welcome, to "sanctuary cities" in Democratic-run cities in the election battleground states and helped them enroll in welfare at the taxpayers' expense.

And finally, Democratic leaders, like failed vice-presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tom Walz, they say, failed to act — or even worse, looked the other way — when evidence emerged that non-citizens were defrauding those safety net programs by the tune of billions of dollars. And liberal judges blocked efforts to stop or punish the fraud.

Comer: "A coordinated effort"

But Republicans are now on the investigative prowl and sounding increasingly confident they can find and prove it was an intentional strategy.

“No question. One hundred percent, this was a coordinated effort to get more Democrat voters into these states,” House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., who is taking the lead in his panel investigating the fraud scheme, told the Just the News, No Noise television show this month.

Comer rattled off statistics his committee has already dug up to make the case in Minnesota, where Democrats have now won most of the statewide offices for more than a continuous decade. Prosecutors now estimate half of the $18 billion in federally funded welfare in that state was lost to fraud over the last few years. 

86% of Somali immigrants on Medicaid, food stamps and other entitlements, Comer says

“In Minnesota, 86% of the Somalis are on Medicaid,” he said. “That is free healthcare. You don't pay one penny into it like we pay into Medicare. All that Medicaid is free healthcare. So 86% of the Somali population of Minnesota gets full free healthcare, in addition to food stamps, housing and transportation and obviously daycare and things like that. So this is completely an effort to create a huge voting bloc. 

Democrats' success in the state is “because of this Somali population,” Comer added. “Not only do they vote, they now contribute a lot of money to Democratic candidates. And I think a source of this money is probably a lot of these fraudulent schemes taking place.”

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., the Senate Homeland Security Committee chairman, is taking the lead in the senior legislative chamber, investigating blue state fraud and its ties to Democratic political strategy. He too, sees strong early evidence of a concerted effort to use illegal immigrants and refugees to hijack elections and federal funding, and has just introduced legislation to outlaw welfare to refugees.

“It's not just welfare dependency. It's actually a scam, and they're stealing the money,” Paul told Just the News.

Public charities shirking responsibility part of the problem, Paul says

Paul is focused on the role that liberal-leaning nonprofits played in securing billions in taxpayer money from the Biden administration to help move illegals from the southern border to blue sanctuary cities in the battleground. Paul hopes his legislation will shift the burden of supporting those non-citizens back to the charities who helped create the crisis.

The Center for Renewing America, a 501(c)(3) organization focused on "America First" research and policy development, reports that some of those non-profits include the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Catholic Relief Services, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Central American Resource Center and the International Organization for Migration, a UN-backed NGO with the stated goal of “facilitating pathways for regular migration,” among others.

“People say, ‘Well, gosh, these poor people come from war-torn areas. How will they survive?’ Well, they will survive the way we traditionally did when we admitted people. If you sponsor them, they're your responsibility,” Paul said. “So you have many of these church charities involved with bringing people here, and then the church charity thinks that charity involves signing them up for welfare. If your charity brings them here, and they can't, they aren't working enough to have food you feed them. It's charitable to give your own money. It's not charitable to take someone else's money.”

“If you look at the overall scheme of things, we're $2 trillion in the hole. We can't take care of our own, much less admitting hundreds of thousands of new people,” he added.

A plan, not an accident, and casting critics as bigots

Conservatives are also taking the lead in narrative building, more aggressively educating voters that the open border policies and fraud schemes were not an accident but rather Democrat intentions that stretch far beyond Minnesota.

The widely-read conservative publication The Federalist recently ran a headline saying “It’s Not A Minnesota Problem, It’s A Blue State Problem” that laid out some of the arguments and declared there was a “deeper, darker truth lurking beneath” the scandal that has dogged Walz’s state and abruptly ended his ambitions to run for re-election in 2026.

“Democrats and regime media have been gaslighting the country, casting critics as bigots, and shooting the messengers who sent the long-neglected story viral — and why, now, state and local leaders are trying to turn Minneapolis into a powder keg,” the publication wrote.

“These dodges and diversions distract from the fact that the fraud is a feature of what we might call The Blue Model of government. Fueled by the welfare state and increasingly open borders, it is at core about political patronage, profiteering, and plunder,” it added.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, R-Minn., agrees with that assessment,

“You know, Minnesota is an interesting place. It's a microcosm of the Biden administration that turned itself into a weapon against Donald J. Trump, that Minnesota thuggery from Tim Walz and (Minnesota Attorney General) Keith Ellison. These guys are crooks,” he told the John Solomon Reports podcast.

State workers prepared to testify that Walz and Ellison ignored warnings

Emmer dropped a bombshell last week that is poised to advance the GOP investigations in Congress. He confirmed to Just the News that investigators have secured affidavits from Minnesota state workers alleging they told Walz and Ellison about the fraud and nothing happened.

“The whole thing is a powder keg that has been allowed to exist for years by Democrats, who benefit off of corruption,” Emmer said.

Walz and Ellison deny wrongdoing and insist they did not turn a blind eye to the fraud. Hundreds of FBI and Homeland Security Investigation agents are scouring Minnesota for evidence right now to see whether the whistleblowers or Walz's defenses turn out to be more accurate.

Probes into "high risk" for fraud expanding beyond Minnesota

Meanwhile, the investigations in Congress and the FBI are poised to expand to bigger states. President Trump just ordered his agencies to open a probe in California and congressional committees are also eyeing New York and Illinois, all states with much larger taxpayer subsidies, illegal immigrant populations and often, red flags of fraud.

“California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account earlier this month,

The California state auditor last month issued a report  that lends credence to Trump’s concerns, flagging eight major agencies as “high risk” for fraud and risk. The report specifically flagged a food welfare program called CalFresh that may soon need $2.5 billion a year in state funds to replace federal funds because it has such a high fraud errant payment rate.

“We conclude that the California Department of Social Services met our criteria to be designated as a high-risk agency, and we are adding it to the high-risk list,” the report warned in December. “Because of recent changes to federal law, the State will soon be required to pay a portion of its CalFresh benefits. This cost, which could be as much as $2.5 billion in federal fiscal year 2028, is based on California’s payment error rate, which measures the accuracy of the State’s eligibility and benefit determinations.”

You can read the full report here.

As Congress and the FBI probe, some blue states are about to see a major reduction in federal welfare funds.

Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, for instance, is freezing $10 billion in federal funds over concerns about child care programming. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is considering a similar cutoff over food stamp fraud, though a Democrat-appointed lower court judge blocked an effort to cut off funding to Minnesota’s food stamp program, eliciting an angry response from Secretary Brooke Rollins.

“This isn't about helping those in need. It's about liberal judges protecting fraud and refusing transparency,” she wrote on Thursday.