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city-journal.org
Ryan Thorpe, Christopher F. Rufo
“The Largest Funder of Al-Shabaab Is the Minnesota Taxpayer”
How some of the state’s welfare funds ended up in the hands of a terror group
Our investigation reveals, for the first time, that some of this money has been directed to an even more troubling destination: the al-Qaida-linked Islamic terror group Al-Shabaab. According to multiple law-enforcement sources, Minnesota’s Somali community has sent untold millions through a network of “hawalas,” informal clan-based money-traders, that have wound up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.
According to Glenn Kerns, a retired Seattle Police Department detective who spent 14 years on a federal Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), the Somalis ran a sophisticated money network, spanning from Seattle to Minneapolis, and were routing significant amounts of cash on commercial flights from the Seattle airport to the hawala networks in Somalia. One of these networks, Kerns discovered, sent $20 million abroad in a single year. “The amount of money was staggering,” Kerns said.
Kerns’s investigation eventually expanded to Minnesota, where he realized the same thing was happening. “I worked on it for five years,” Kerns said. “We had sources going into the hawalas to send money. I went down to [Minnesota] and pulled all of their records and, well shit, all these Somalis sending out money are on DHS benefits. How does that make sense? We had good sources tell us: this is welfare fraud.”
Kerns then investigated the hawalas in Somalia that were receiving the money transfers. He determined, primarily through human sources, that significant funds were being sent from America to Al-Shabaab networks in Somalia. Whether the money was intended for Al-Shabaab or not, Kerns said, they were taking a cut.
A second former official, who worked on the Minneapolis JTTF, confirms the story’s general structure. This former official, who requested to remain anonymous, worked on two terrorism cases that intersected with Minnesota’s Somali community and has studied the flow of funds from Minnesota to Somalia.
“Every scrap of economic activity, in the Twin Cities, in America, throughout Western Europe, anywhere Somalis are concentrated, every cent that is sent back to Somalia benefits Al-Shabaab in some way,” the former official said. “For every dollar that is transferred from the Twin Cities back to Somalia, Al-Shabaab is . . . taking a cut of it.”
A third source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the close links between the Somali-American community in Minnesota and Islamic terror groups abroad. Ten years ago, the source was recruited as an “independent contractor” for a three-letter agency investigation into the “Minnesota men” who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. That year, a Homeland Security task force report found that Minnesota led the nation in the number of Americans who had joined, or attempted to join, ISIS. Of the 58 Americans who had done so, nearly half came from Minnesota.
Scott Johnson, who has covered these and related stories for years, attended several of those men’s trials, reporting on them for City Journal. He noted that the Minnesota men “gave the outward appearance of American assimilation”—including being “sophisticated users of social-welfare benefits.”
The relationship is ongoing. “This is a third-rail conversation, but the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer,” the third source said. “There is an issue here that is real, and if there is ever an event that is traceable back to these funds, or to people from this area, then this situation will take on a whole new set of optics.”
Welfare fraud is likely to become a major issue in Minnesota’s 2026 elections. Governor Tim Walz, now seeking a third term, has presided over a litany of scandals and faces Republican Kristin Robbins, who has made fraud prevention central to her campaign.
Gaither, the former state senator, said “political blowback is brewing” in the state and that, as more information emerges from ongoing investigations, “it’s a real rough place to be if you’re the current administration.” He added that if you talk to law-enforcement officials and others close to the probes, “they will tell you off the record that we aren’t even close to being halfway there” in understanding the true scale of the fraud.
The first step to solving a problem is acknowledging it. By extension, that means recognizing the problem’s true source. So far, Minnesota’s governing class and its media establishment have failed to take that basic step. Minnesotans will have to confront the uncomfortable but unavoidable reality: members of the Somali community have played a central role in the massive fraud now engulfing the North Star State.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/minnesota-welfare-fraud-somalia-al-shabaab