OAN Staff Blake Wolf
10:52 AM – Thursday, December 4, 2025
During an appearance on CNN‘s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota’s 5th District faced a slew of questions about widespread fraud within her state’s Somali community. The interview aired one day after the Small Business Administration launched an investigation into a “network of Somali organizations” linked to the schemes.
In the Wednesday interview, Omar struggled to account for the fraud’s prevalence, deflecting blame from the many Somali residents who have been accused and pleaded guilty.
Instead, she cited Minnesota’s insufficient “guardrails,” pinning the problem on rushed program launches that depended on unvetted third parties — without directly confronting the allegations specific to the Somali community.
Minnesota has been “ground zero” for one of the largest COVID-19 fraud schemes in U.S. history, with estimates of $250 million to over $1 billion stolen from federal and state programs. At least one major scheme revolved around the “Feeding Our Future” program, which billed for millions of “phantom” meals, claiming to serve 2.3 million meals that never happened, for low-income kids during the pandemic.
Nonetheless, Tapper further pressed Omar (D-Minn.) on the recent, ongoing reports alleging that the Somali community in Minnesota is connected to a series of multimillion-dollar COVID-19 fraud schemes.
“Numerous individuals and nonprofits indicted in the $1 billion Minnesota COVID fraud scandal, including Feeding our Future, received SBA PPP loans in addition to other state and federal funding,” stated Small Business Administration Kelly Loeffler. “I have ordered an investigation into the network of Somali organizations and executives implicated in these schemes.”
Omar, struggling to explain the reasoning for the widespread fraud within the Somali community, chimed in to argue that there were no “guardrails” in place to prevent hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars from being stolen.
“I think what happened, um, is that, you know, when you have these, kind of new programs that are, um, designed to help people, you’re oftentimes relying on third parties to be able to facilitate. And I just think that a lot of the COVID programs that were set up – they were set up so quickly that a lot of the guardrails did not get created,” Omar explained.
Omar also addressed recent remarks from President Donald Trump, who, during a White House Cabinet meeting, declared that he doesn’t want any more Somali immigrants in the United States, maintaining that they have “taken billions and billions of dollars” from the country, “contribute nothing,” and have essentially “destroyed Minnesota.”
She went on to argue that President Trump was attempting to “scapegoat and deflect” from his own “policy failures,” while emphasizing that Somali Americans “are Americans.” Omar also asserted that the Somali community was not “going anywhere” and “will continue to thrive.”
“I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you,” Trump stated during a Tuesday cabinet meeting, proclaiming that they should “go back to where they came from.”
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” the president continued, criticizing the community following the recent allegations linking the Minnesota Somali community to massive fraud. “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.”
“With Somalia, which is barely a country, you know, they have no, they have no anything. They just run around killing each other.”
President Trump also alleged that she previously “married her brother” to attain U.S. citizenship.
In the CNN interview, Omar continued to respond to the president’s criticisms, labeling him “very bigoted.”
“We know that the president oftentimes resorts to very bigoted, xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist rhetoric when he is trying to scapegoat and deflect from the actual failures that he has himself,” she added.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is reportedly set to introduce major immigration operations targeting Minnesota’s Somali community, according to a New York Times report, prompting Mayor Jacob Frey (D-Minn.) to issue a statement condemning the operation, arguing it “means due process will be violated.”
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin has since declined to comment on upcoming immigrant operations, though she did emphasize that individuals are targeted based on their legal status, rather than their race.
“Every day, ICE enforces the laws of the nation across the country,” McLaughlin stated. “What makes someone a target of ICE is not their race or ethnicity, but the fact that they are in the country illegally.”
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