(The Epoch Times)—Two federal agencies are “absolutely” taking steps toward revoking the citizenship of Somalis who have been convicted of fraud, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Dec. 31.
The Homeland Security and Justice departments are pursuing that type of action, Leavitt told “Fox and Friends.”
She was reacting to Rep. Tom Emmer’s (R-Minn.) Dec. 29 call for “denaturalization and deportation of every Somali engaged in fraud in Minnesota.”
Emmer, the GOP Majority Whip, hails from the state, which has gained national attention for its fraud crisis.
Since 2022, nearly 100 people, mostly of Somali descent, have been charged in various Minnesota fraud schemes.
Programs intended to provide meals, autism therapy, and housing assistance have been defrauded, authorities have said, leading to charges.
An additional major scandal is emerging over home health care, prosecutors announced after evidence was seized in mid-December. No charges have yet been filed.
Emmer’s call for deporting and denaturalizing Somali fraudsters followed FBI Director Kash Patel’s Dec. 28 statement that Somali fraud cases were “being referred to [immigration] officials for possible further denaturalization and deportation proceedings where eligible.”
Minnesota is home to almost 77,000 Somalians, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Many of them are refugees who came to the United States legally.
However, concerns about widespread immigration fraud among Somalis have also sparked investigations.
Other state and federal leaders said they support action against Somalis linked to fraud.
Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.), a former attorney general in his home state, said laws allow for arrests and immigration enforcement actions.
“Enough talk about Somali fraud. We need immediate action,” he wrote on X on Dec. 30.
“One, arrest all Somali fraudsters under 18 U.S.C. § 1343 (wire fraud). Two, immediately revoke all Somali fraudsters’ visas. Denaturalize where possible. Three, deport all eligible for deportation.”
In recent weeks, publicity has surged over Minnesota’s fraud cases. Federal prosecutors estimate the state’s total fraud for just 14 scrutinized Medicaid programs could exceed $9 billion. That’s a fraction of the total 87 Medicaid programs that the state runs.
Leavitt said she expects legal challenges to the administration’s efforts to further penalize Somali offenders.
“There are liberal activist judges across the country who will try to block and tackle this administration from pursuing justice at every turn,” she said.
“But that’s not going to stop the president and his entire Cabinet from acting on behalf of law-abiding, taxpaying citizens in the state of Minnesota and in states across the country.”
She said the Trump administration will not tolerate “people who abused our immigration system, came to our country, do not love our country or respect our values, and now have been ripping off and stealing money from law-abiding Americans.”
Multiple federal investigations into Somali-led fraud networks were already underway, Leavitt said, well before YouTuber Nick Shirley released a viral video raising concerns about fraud in Minnesota’s day care centers.
Since Shirley’s video was posted on Dec. 26, it has drawn more than 132 million views on X alone.
In the video, Shirley visits Minnesota day care centers that are devoid of children, cites figures showing that the sites raked in large chunks of government-program money, and raises questions about the legitimacy of the businesses.
Shirley’s report sparked outrage and inspired citizens nationwide to do their own investigations of day care centers and other government-reimbursed programs.
Federal agencies ramped up investigative and enforcement actions, and the federal government cut off child-care funding to Minnesota while also insisting on better verification from states before payments are issued.
“Starting today, all [Administration for Children and Families] payments across America will require a justification and a receipt or photo evidence before we send money to a state,” Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary Jim O’Neill wrote on X.
And on Dec. 30, dozens of lawmakers in Ohio, home of the nation’s second-largest Somali population behind Minnesota, asked for intensified scrutiny of home health care and day care services.
Measures sought include audits and possible prosecutions, along with unannounced site visits.
National publicity about Minnesota’s fraud cases began rising after City Journal published a Nov. 19 report alleging that Somali fraudsters’ ill-gotten gains had been funneled, perhaps indirectly, to terrorists overseas.
Shortly thereafter, the Treasury Department began probing the fraud-for-terror claims.
Faisa Ahmed, who describes herself as a second-generation Somali Minnesotan, accused “right-wing influencers” of unfairly characterizing Somalis and calling for deportations earlier this year, well before publicity rose to its current levels.
In a Dec. 10 column in the Minnesota Reformer, Ahmed denounced people who “questioned U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s loyalty to America and called for her to be denaturalized and deported.”
Omar, a Somali-born Democrat, represents Minnesota in Congress.
“The Somali community I know is everything that conservatives and Republicans claim to want in America,” Ahmed wrote.
“We are people of deep and unwavering faith. We pray five times a day, no matter where we are, no matter who’s looking. We are generous people who give freely and without hesitation to our neighbors, regardless of where they’re from or who they vote for.”
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
