Feds Spent $27 Million on Minnesota Somali Community Since FY2021

The Somali community of Minnesota has drawn attention in recent weeks as dozens of Somali immigrants have been arrested in relation to welfare-rip off scams worth upwards of a billion dollars. The funding so far is related to federally subsidized state spending through COVID-19 emergency funds intended to help hungry children during the government shut down, and through Medicaid fraud.

As it turns out, immigrants from Somalia are a major constituency to serve and keep happy in Minnesota, but they’re not only drawing federal dollars through state programs that bill CMS. They’re also named beneficiaries in millions of dollars’ worth of federal grants, and those dollars are aimed in part at helping them preserve a distinct culture through “culturally relevant” programming and services.

So how many federal grants directly fund the Somali community in Minnesota? Open the Books research shows there were $27 million worth since FY 2021.

Grants either directly address the Somali community in Minnesota or include the Somali community in other minority outreach or research efforts.

Most funding ($14.3 million) was spent on various projects with the University of Minnesota. The university seems to have profited handsomely from initiatives addressing assimilation issues within the Somali community. Those projects include:

• $416,664 to get 30 “Somali American teenagers” involved in an after school art and science program. The grant states “the arts empowers youth to preserve Somali culture through performing arts, cultural arts and spoken word.” Several field trips throughout the year will also “infuse in youth a sense of hope and expectation for their futures.”

• $467,000 for a project stating that “structural barriers, like anti-Muslim racism, rural social isolation, and deficit-based interventions negatively impact Somali youths’ educational outcomes.” The solution is a program that will “not solely focus on building skills and changing behavior of youth, but [cultivate] positive environmental contexts within youths’ families, schools, and potential places of work.”

• $773,154 for a project called “Training Research Educators in Minnesota Whilst Increasing Diversity” which has an immediate goal to “tap into the diversity currently in our community colleges, whilst preparing superlative future faculty.”

An additional $2.6 million was spent on Autism Spectrum Disorder research which claims “support needs of children with ASD range considerably, and disparities in identification and service receipt persist.” The researchers are particularly concerned with Somali children, who “ have a higher prevalence and severity of ASD than other groups.”

Recent reporting claims that members of the Minnesota Somali community were getting their healthy children diagnosed with ASD to defraud Medicaid benefits, to the tune of $14 million. Scam Autism support centers provided hundreds to thousands of dollars in monthly kickbacks to parents who enrolled their children under false pretenses. The federal investigation is still ongoing.

Open the Books asked the principal investigator, Jennifer Hall-Lande, for the federally funded University of Minnesota Autism research project how these findings could affect her research, and if she had any suspicions that this could have been a problem before national news broke.

In response, Hall-Lande stated her office relies on data provided by Autism service providers, noting “As with all surveillance systems, our estimates reflect the information available in the records we are authorized to review.”

She affirmed that her data does suggest an elevated diagnoses level for Somali children in Minnesota, but stated Somali children are not the primary focus on her research. Read Hall-Lande’s full response at the end of this report.

The project is still ongoing and will receive over a million more dollars before it is complete.

Several nonprofits have also received federal funds over the years.

The Food Group of Minnesota, “a nonprofit working towards food justice and equity,” according to its website, received $2.2 million. The funds will be used to offer “organic and sustainable agriculture education for underserved farmers” in the state.

The project will help connect the “underserved farmers” to even more federal assistance through U.S. Department of Agriculture programs and services. The grant states that “funding through this grant will help ensure that underserved Minnesota farmers access the culturally appropriate resources they need to build thriving farm businesses.”

A nonprofit called Isuroon, which is almost entirely funded by government entities according to its most recent tax filing, helps its constituents “overcome challenges like language barriers, racism, and religious intolerance.” Two federally funded projects since FY 2022 include:

• $428,570 for “Somali family violence prevention and services culturally specific domestic violence and sexual assault.”

• $598,650 for a project called “Somali women support Afghan women.”

The Minnesota State Horticultural Society was granted $339,902 to use “its gardening expertise and cross-sector partnerships to respond to the increased need and interest in growing food amongst low-income community members by providing gardening materials, education, and resources to remove barriers for new gardeners; connecting gardeners with excess produce to food distribution programs; and offering coordination, training, and an online resource hub to strengthen the infrastructure needed to make community gardening sustainable over the long term.”

A Minnesota charter school, called Skyline Math and Science Academy, received $125,000 in 2024 to help reduce drug use in the Somali community. In 2025 Skyline was closed due to “low test scores and poor financial management” according to local reporting.

From help gardening, to art and science programs, to projects intended to reduce criminality among this relatively small group of about 100,000 people in Minnesota, these findings highlight the ever-expanding nature of federal support for immigrant needs.

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Full response from Jennifer Hall-Lande about how Autism fraud in the Somali community could impact her research, which has received millions of dollars in federal funding:

Thank you for reaching out about our MN Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) project. To share a bit about our work, MN-ADDM is part of the CDC’s Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring Network. We estimate autism prevalence among 4- and 8-year-old children in Minnesota communities by reviewing existing health and educational records. We do not diagnose children, independently confirm diagnoses, or investigate fraud. Issues related to fraud or program integrity are outside the scope of our work.

A point of clarification: our project is funded to examine autism prevalence broadly across the population of children in Minnesota communities. Somali children are one of many groups included in these population-based analyses; our work is not focused exclusively on the Somali community. Our most recent (Study Year 2022) reported autism rate for Somali 8-year-olds in Minnesota was 1 in 12 (82.6 per 1,000 children, 95% CI 63.2–105.7). For Somali 4-year-olds, it was 1 in 18 (54.5 per 1,000, 95% CI 40.9–70.8). Our overall autism prevalence rate for 8-year-olds in Minnesota communities was 1 in 28 (35.5 per 1,000 children, 95% CI 32.9–38.4).

Our prevalence data are population-based and reflect diagnoses and educational eligibility documented across large health systems and school districts that serve children in our surveillance area. As with all surveillance systems, our estimates reflect the information available in the records we are authorized to review. In our surveillance system, an autism diagnosis or autism eligibility typically appears in a health or educational record because a child is receiving autism-related services in that setting. In practice, that means another provider or a school team has documented a medical or educational need for autism-related supports. Put simply, for an autism diagnosis or eligibility to appear in the records we review, a child would generally need to demonstrate autism-related needs in that setting. Schools and clinics typically conduct their own evaluations to determine eligibility for services within their systems.

In our most recent data cycle (Study Year 2022), we reviewed records from major health systems, long-established autism service providers, and participating school districts. The organization currently facing fraud allegations was not one of our data sources.

Because we do not investigate fraud, we cannot determine whether the current allegations had any broad impact on Minnesota prevalence estimates. For our prevalence numbers to be affected, a diagnosis would need to have been documented within one of the health or education sources we reviewed, and the children would have needed to be in our age groups (4 or 8 years old) during the surveillance year. While documentation in these records typically reflects that a child is receiving autism-related services in that setting, we do not have enough information about the extent of the allegations, or which children may have been involved to determine whether our Minnesota prevalence numbers were meaningfully impacted.

Thank you for reaching out about MN-ADDM.