Minnesota Judges Enabling Somali Fraud Epidemic With Slaps On Wrist

The Feeding Our Future fraud is the largest pandemic-relief theft in American history - $250 million stolen, mostly by Somali immigrants who fabricated meal counts and pocketed federal child nutrition funds.

The prosecutions have dragged on for years.

Now that sentences are finally coming down, a troubling pattern is emerging: the punishments don’t seem to fit the crime.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel — nominated to the bench in 2018 through a package deal between the first Trump administration and Minnesota’s Senate Democrats — has been at the center of two recent sentencing decisions that have taxpayers seething. 

On March 29, she sentenced Abdul Abubakar Ali to one year and one day in prison. Ali ran a shell company called Youth Inventors Lab under Feeding Our Future’s sponsorship, orchestrated $3 million in fraud, submitted fake invoices claiming more than one million meals served, and served none. Federal sentencing guidelines recommended 30 to 37 months. Prosecutors asked for two and a half years. Brasel gave him a sentence of just one year and a day. That extra day is not accidental — it’s the legal threshold that makes Ali eligible for transition to a halfway house on good behavior.

One day later, Brasel sentenced Zamzam Jama to six months. Jama stole $5.6 million — nearly twice what Ali took — and was the first of six Jama family defendants associated with a Rochester restaurant to face sentencing; all were linked to the same fraud network. Prosecutors requested 16 months. Sentencing guidelines called for 10 to 16 months. Brasel issued a downward departure and handed Jama a sentence of just half a year. Jama must also pay $491,000 in restitution — a mere fraction of the $5.6 million she stole — and serve one year of probation.

When reports of widespread abuse went viral last year due to the investigations by independent journalist Nick Shirley, Gov. Tim Walz insisted on maintaining control of the investigation.

“This [was] on my watch,” the governor said at the time. “I am accountable for this, and more importantly, I am the one that will fix it.”

Unfortunately, federal judges in Minnesota are failing to give the fraudsters the sentences they deserve, and this will hardly serve as a deterrent to stop the fraud.

The contrast with how other jurisdictions handle similar fraud is actually quite jarring. Earlier this month, a North Carolina federal court sentenced four people in a $12.7 million Medicaid kickback scheme that exploited substance abuse patients. The ringleaders — who falsified records to deceive auditors — each received six years. Another defendant got two years, and another two and a half years. U.S. Attorney Ellis Boyle even mentioned the Minnesota fraud in response to these sentences.

“This is shocking Minnesota-Somali-style fraud right here in North Carolina. For too long, government has allowed grifters to steal taxpayer dollars with impunity. Here, these vultures exploited particularly susceptible drug abusers trying to recover their lives and dignity. Shameful abuse, no remorse. They better learn, and everyone should get the message. Cheaters. Never. Win.” 

The math is simple and damning.

In North Carolina, fraud leaders who stole $12.7 million each were sentenced to six years.

In Minnesota, a fraudster who stole $5.6 million got six months, and another who ran a $3 million scheme got just over a year.

The deterrent value of the Minnesota sentences is approximately zero.

The question that hangs over all of this is whether the judiciary in Minnesota has become the final link in a chain of institutional permissiveness. Walz’s administration looked the other way while $250 million vanished. Minnesota Democrats who depend on Somali-American voter turnout had every political incentive to keep the issue quiet. And now a federal judge is handing out sentences so light they barely register as consequences. The message sent to anyone considering the next fraud scheme is that Minnesota is still open for business.