Minnesota has been rocked by a series of massive fraud scandals targeting taxpayer-funded social services programs, with losses potentially exceeding $9 billion since 2018, according to federal prosecutors. That appears to be just the tip of the iceberg as independent journalist Nick Shirley recently exposed further scams involving daycare and healthcare businesses that appear to be fraudulent fronts.
The original schemes—primarily involving child nutrition programs during the COVID-19 era, autism therapy services, housing stabilization aid, and other Medicaid benefits—have largely implicated individuals from the state’s Somali-American community. Dozens of defendants, nearly all of Somali descent, have been charged in connection with these cases, including the infamous Feeding Our Future scandal that alone defrauded at least $250 million intended for feeding hungry children.
The fraud that Shirley and others have uncovered will likely end up being just as big if not bigger.
As details emerge, many Americans understandably demand action. Calls for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to intervene and deport those responsible have grown louder, especially amid recent enforcement operations in the Twin Cities area. However, this approach misses the mark on a critical fact: the vast majority of Minnesota’s Somali population consists of U.S. citizens who cannot be deported.
Estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey place Minnesota’s Somali-descended population at around 108,000 in 2024. Of these, nearly 58% were born in the United States, making them natural-born citizens. Among the foreign-born, an overwhelming 87% are naturalized U.S. citizens. Only about 5,000 to 5,800 individuals of Somali descent in the state are non-citizens, including those with permanent residency, visas, or limited protections like Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a number recently targeted for revocation but affecting far fewer people than the broader community.
The perpetrators in these fraud cases are predominantly U.S. citizens or long-term residents, not recent immigrants subject to straightforward deportation. ICE’s role in immigration enforcement simply does not apply here. Deportation is not a viable remedy for American citizens committing crimes on U.S. soil.
Instead, the solution lies with the FBI and local law enforcement. As FBI Director Kash Patel announced this weekend, the bureau has already “surged” personnel and resources into Minnesota to dismantle these large-scale fraud networks exploiting federal programs. Federal prosecutors, led by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, have secured over 90 indictments across related schemes, with more than 50 guilty pleas and convictions in the Feeding Our Future case alone by late 2025. Ongoing investigations into autism services fraud, where providers allegedly recruited Somali families and billed for nonexistent therapy, and other programs underscore the need for rigorous criminal probes.
Thorough investigations, indictments, arrests, prosecutions, and lengthy prison sentences are the appropriate path. These are crimes of greed—defendants have been documented spending stolen funds on luxury cars, overseas properties, and lavish lifestyles. Holding them accountable through the justice system sends a clear message: fraud will not be tolerated, regardless of community ties.
Crucially, aggressive enforcement could have a profound positive impact on the Somali-American community as a whole. Sources within the community, including former investigators like Kayseh Magan, have noted that fraud proceeds often circulate through tight-knit networks, funding businesses, remittances, and local economies. A significant portion of the illicit gains supports extended families and community enterprises. Cracking down on these schemes would disrupt the flow of dirty money, forcing legitimate economic activity and deterring future criminal enterprises.
This is not about scapegoating an entire community. But ignoring the concentration of defendants in these scandals does no favors. Proper FBI-led enforcement protects taxpayers, restores integrity to vital programs for truly needy families (including many in the Somali community), and ultimately strengthens the community by rooting out corruption.
President Trump’s administration is right to spotlight this crisis and deploy federal resources. But the fix is criminal justice, not immigration raids. Let the FBI finish the job: investigate relentlessly, prosecute vigorously, and jail the guilty. Minnesota—and America—deserves nothing less.
JD talked about this on his latest episode of The JD Rucker Show.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.
