Watch: Just As Ilhan Omar Says Somalis Help America ‘Thrive,’ DOJ Adds 78th Suspect to $250 Million Tax Dollar Somali Money Laundering Investigation
Story by C. Douglas Golden
It was supposed to be a brave stand against common-sense immigration regulations. It ended up being yet another example of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar highlighting why she’s a leftist leper. Nice work, I guess.
On the same day that the Minnesota firebrand appeared at the state Capitol to protest against Somali individuals being stripped of Temporary Protected Status and said that migrants from the country help America “thrive,” a 78th Somali migrant living in the state was charged as part of a massive $250 million welfare scam.
Abdirashid Bixi Dool, 36, was hit with a seven-count indictment for wire fraud and money laundering, a Department of Justice media release Monday said. The indictment alleged that he stole more than $1 million via his participation in the Feeding Our Future fraud.
From the media release:
Dool co-operated and served on the boards of two Minnesota non-profits, Bilaal Mosque Inc. and Multicultural Resource Center Inc (MRC). Dool also served as the President of MRC. Through those companies, Dool and a second person identified in the indictment as “Conspirator A” participated in the Federal Child Nutrition Program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future. Dool and Conspirator A purported to operate two food sites—the Bilaal food site in Pelican Rapids, Minnesota, and the MRC food site in Moorhead, Minnesota.
As set forth in the indictment, at those sites, Dool falsely claimed to be serving over 40,000 meals to children every week. Through the Bilaal site alone, Dool claimed to serve 6,000 meals to children every day, seven days a week. That daily figure is more than double the entire population—children and adults—of the outstate town that is home is Bilaal. In support of his false claims, Dool submitted fraudulent invoices, purporting to detail the food purchased by Bilaal and MRC to feed hungry children. In reality, Dool purchased very little food. Dool also submitted phony rosters purporting to list the names of the hungry children who he fed at his meal sites. These rosters were also fake.
Between March 2021 and February 2022, Bilaal and MRC received about $1.1 million in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds from Feeding Our Future. However, little of this money was used by Dool to purchase food. Instead, Dool and Conspirator A laundered most of the taxpayer dollars to their families and to themselves. Dool used his cut of the fraud proceeds to travel and to buy real estate in Minnesota.
The case, which is billed as the largest COVID-era fraud scheme uncovered thus far by the DOJ, involves a charity that is almost exclusively Somali-run and serves the large Somalian immigrant community in Minnesota — or at least was supposed to.
As KMSP-TV noted, they didn’t actually do so, and their self-reported meals-served total — up to 60,000 a day, at one point — quickly fell apart after a 2022 whistleblower report.
This led President Donald Trump to declare on Friday that he was ending TPS protections for Somali migrants, something they’ve enjoyed since 1991. (Not quite “temporary” when your country is apparently such a mess that it can’t sufficiently improve to end the protected status for over 34 years, but I digress.)
“Minnesota, under Governor [Tim Walz], is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity,” Trump said in a Truth Social post Friday, announcing he was “hereby terminating” the Somalis’ TPS protections, “effective immediately.”
“Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!”
Omar and other Democrats rallied at the Capitol in St. Paul to defend the TPS protections, which allow individuals to live and work in the United States in the event of a temporary catastrophe of a political or natural sort.
Roughly 700 migrants from Somalia have Temporary Protected Status as of March 2025, according to CBS News.
“Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the U.S. with roughly 80,000 Somali Minnesotans living in the state, according to Minnesota Compass, a project of Wilder Research,” the network reported.
“Somalis are not terrorizing this nation,” said Omar, a naturalized Somali migrant, during her speech Monday. “We are helping it thrive. Somalis have always … seen themselves as a fabric of this nation.”
“So not only are we not going anywhere,” Omar said, with her usual contemptuous smile, “not only are we not going anywhere, we are not going to allow anybody to make us feel less Minnesotan or less American.”
That’s a word salad that collapses under the slightest scrutiny.
First off, the very phrase “temporary” in Temporary Protected Status indicates that they are, in a manner of speaking, “less Minnesotan or less American.” They are temporary American residents in Minnesota, there because the government has allowed them to stay on and has (somewhat regrettably, I will add) extended these “temporary” measures well past when they should have been revoked.
While Somalia has never been a particularly stable corner of the world, it is not in the most acute throes of its civil unrest, that which prompted the TPS protections to be granted in 1991. Even if the Somalis were a particularly model minority, that still isn’t an excuse to keep a people who do not otherwise qualify for residency in the country for three decades under a “temporary” program.
Second, they aren’t a model minority. Even if you want to concede that Somali gangs in Minnesota don’t count as “terrorizing this nation” (although the people of Minnesota certainly find them to be problematic), “charities” linked to the Somali community are at the epicenter of the biggest COVID-19 fraud allegedly perpetrated against the federal taxpayer. That isn’t “thriving” — and ought to be enough on its own for the Somali community in Minnesota to draw scrutiny. Terminating TPS is a reasonable first step, and Abdirashid Bixi Dool is the 78th alleged proof of that.
No Muslim should be in the US. They are not coming here to assimilate into our culture. They don’t want to follow our laws. We need to classify them as domestic terrorists and deport them all.