President Donald Trump announced that he is terminating the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) amnesty for Somali migrants in Minnesota, stating that “BILLIONS of Dollars are missing.”
“Minnesota, under Governor Waltz, is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. “I am, as President of the United States, hereby terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota. Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing.”
TPS is described as “a government protection” that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grants “to eligible foreign-born individuals who are unable to return home safely due to conditions or circumstances preventing their country from adequately handling the return,” according to the National Immigration Forum’s website.
Trump’s post comes after a report from the City Journal found that “federal counterterrorism sources confirm 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”:
In many cases, the fraud has allegedly been perpetrated by members of Minnesota’s sizeable Somali community. Federal counterterrorism sources confirm 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. As one confidential source put it: “The largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer.”
Breitbart News’s Warner Todd Huston reported that in the City Journal article, it was revealed that the state’s Housing Stabilization Services (HSS) program “paid out $21 million its first year,” and that in each subsequent year “the program ballooned to $42 million”:
The money paid out by Minnesota’s scandal-plagued welfare schemes is monumental. The state’s failed Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, for instance, was kicked off in 2021 with expenses expected to ring in at $2.6 million. But instead, the program paid out $21 million its first year. In each subsequent year the program ballooned to $42 million, then $74, and then $104 million, respectively. During the first half of 2025, costs had already reached $61 million, according to City Journal.
Fraud is also endemic in many of Minnesota’s other welfare programs. City Journal noted that a Somali woman named Asha Farhan Hassan has been charged with defrauding the state’s Early Intensive Developmental and Behavioral Intervention program of $14 million over fake diagnoses of autism in children of Somali migrants.
City Journal also reported that their investigation found that money was being “directed” to Al-Shabaab. Minnesota’s Somalian community has allegedly “sent untold millions through a network of ‘hawalas’”:
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 wounds up in the coffers of Al-Shabaab.
In a September 18 press release from the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota, eight people were “federally charged with wire fraud” for their involvement in an HSS fraud scheme.
Out of the eight people, six of them were reportedly “members of Minnesota’s Somali community,” according to City Journal.
House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN) has called for an investigation into millions of dollars of Minnesota taxpayer funds ending up in the hands of the Al-Qaida-linked Al-Shabaab terrorist group.
In a letter addressed to U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota Daniel Rosen, Emmer said he was “deeply concerned” about the reports that millions of dollars in stolen taxpayer funds in Minnesota were ending up in the hands of terrorists.
