Donald Trump took further aim at Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz and the Somali American representative Ilhan Omar on Wednesday in the wake of his administration’s decision to freeze federal childcare funding to their state.
“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90%, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” Trump alleged in a post on Truth Social, calling Omar “an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers”.
Trump continued his tirade against the representative, repeating a smear that Omar had married her brother: “Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth.”
The president continued: “Tim Waltz of Minnesota is a Crooked Governor!!!” and sought to tie California in with his criticism of Minnesota.
“There is more FRAUD in California than there is in Minnesota, if that is even possible,” he wrote. “When you add in Election Fraud, then they are tied for first. Two Crooked Governors, two Crooked States!”
Trump’s inflammatory missives came hours after Walz slammed the administration’s decision to freeze childcare payments to the state, saying on X that Trump is “using an issue he doesn’t give a damn about as an excuse to hurt working Minnesotans”.
Walz said that the decision announced late Tuesday by Jim O’Neill, deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to stall childcare payments to the state amid increased allegations of fraud within its social services programs, was a political ruse.
“This is Trump’s long game,” Walz wrote Tuesday in a post on the social platform X. “We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue – but this has been his plan all along. He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans.”
The dispute centers in part on alleged fraud at Minneapolis’s Somali American childcare centers exposed by YouTuber Nick Shirley over the Christmas break. Shirley posted video of himself confronting workers at state-supported daycare centers over an apparent lack of enrolled children.
But the video, which has been viewed more than 100m times, has been criticized for falsely presenting as new allegations of fraud schemes that were already known to exist during the Biden administration.
The issue has provided a potent political cudgel for Trump and senior figures in the administration. On Tuesday, JD Vance wrote on X that the move to suspend childcare payments are some of the “most important steps we can take to end the fraud in Minnesota”.
The justice department claims to have charged 98 people in connection with the sweeping fraud case, which concerns businesses that falsely billed programs under the Minnesota department of human services (MDHS), since 2022. Most of the defendants are Somali Americans, prosecutors have said.
Justice department officials have said that “half or more” of the $18bn billed to 14 services under the MDHS since 2018 is fraudulent, but court records reviewed by the Minnesota Star Tribune indicate that the alleged fraud is closer to $218m.
O’Neill said in a video statement that the funding freeze was in response to what he called “blatant fraud that appears to be rampant in Minnesota and across the country … We have turned off the money spigot and we are finding the fraud.”
The alleged fraud in Minnesota, put at $9bn by some estimates, is a small fraction of the total estimates of Covid relief money that went missing or was misspent, estimated at around $400bn by the Associated Press in 2023.
Still, it has provided an opportunity for Trump, as part of a larger administration push against immigrant entitlements, to ramp up his feud against Walz and Omar. Omar has urged people not to blame an entire community for the actions of a relative few and spoken out against ICE raids in Minneapolis.
Earlier this month, Omar called Operation Metro Surge “state-sanctioned racial profiling used as a tool of political intimidation. But Somali Minnesotans aren’t intimidated. We’re brave and resilient, and our neighbors have our back. We don’t cower to bullies.”
