Minnesota Dems Allegedly Fund Islamic Terror Groups as State Faces Law Enforcement Exodus

In March 2019, the Minneapolis Police Department employed 920 officers. After George Floyd’s unlawful death at the hands of Derek Chauvin two months later—an incident which made the front page of every national news publication and elevated the Black Lives Matter movement into the stratosphere—the number of enlisted officers underwent a dramatic freefall which would stretch over the course of the next half decade and beyond.

Exactly six years later, the department only had 560 officers. The city’s charter mandates a minimum of 713. That standard hasn’t been met since 2021.

Sadly, that trend isn’t isolated to just Minneapolis. It continues across the entire state of Minnesota. Earlier this week, St. Paul Police Federation President Mark Ross told Fox News Digital that the state is about “one thousand police officers short” and, worse yet, “we’re on pace to lose another 2,000 to 2,500 over the next few years." 

Since then, Minneapolis PD has seen a very modest rebound to around 588-600 officers—the first increase since 2019. Even so, the department remains deeply shorthanded, and overtime spending has surged. MPD recently blew its budget by nearly $20 million this year, driven largely by record overtime and staffing gaps. Members of the City Council alleged this was "mismanagement." The Police Chief doesn’t agree. 

This problem is only exacerbated by recent allegations concerning welfare fraud and the Somali jihadi insurgent group Al-Shabaab. The al-Qaeda-affiliated group conducts guerrilla attacks, suicide bombings, targeted assassinations, and large-scale assaults on civilian sites—with Christians being a favored target—and government positions to destabilize the Somali state and impose its interpretation of Islamic law.

Their biggest funder is the Minnesota taxpayer. 

That’s the claim now being investigated by the Trump administration and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who recently tweeted that the reason for the suspected fraud is the “feckless mismanagement of the Biden Administration and Governor Tim Walz." These allegations stem from large-scale fraud involving multiple state programs which includes pandemic-era food aid via the nonprofit Feeding Our Future, Medicaid housing-stabilization services, and purported autism-treatment clinics. 

Conservative estimates by prosecutors estimate the total theft at hundreds of millions, but it’s quite possibly much more. 

Similarly, the House Oversight Committee recently shared a letter that it "has serious concerns about how [Walz] as the Governor, and the Democrat-controlled administration, allowed millions of dollars to be stolen," and is now requesting "documents and communications showing what [Walz’s] administration knew about this fraud and whether [he] took action to limit or halt the investigation."

In late November, President Trump ended deportation protections for Somalis and stated that “hundreds of thousands of Somalians are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state." Walz immediately fired back by saying “there is no proof of that.” Mere days later, the proof—or at least the information that served as the impetus for the President’s accusation—emerged.

What does this have to do with the Minnesotan police exodus? It all comes back to the erosion of public trust. Those massive fraud losses have, in Ross’ opinion, “worsened long-term pressures on public-safety agencies.”

"Political leadership is destroying public safety through their ideology," said Randy Sutton, a police veteran and founder of The Wounded Blue. "The public safety is at risk… we are in a criminal justice crisis in America."

The pattern emerging out of Minnesota is particularly familiar in blue states across the nation. Cities that swung hard left after high-profile police incidents have struggled to keep officers on the job, and the fallout shows up in staffing, morale and public-safety metrics. Los Angeles is a good example: between hiring shortfalls and attrition to other states and departments, the LAPD today is over a thousand officers smaller than it was in 2022 and has repeatedly juggled patrol minimums, overtime and long-term vacancies even after pay deals and recruitment pushes. It’s expected to go into 2026 with the lowest deployment in 30 years.

Atlanta is another example. Officers say they’re worried about being second-guessed, disciplined, or criminally charged for split-second decisions; surveys going back to the Ferguson era found large shares of officers saying they’re now more reluctant to use force even when trained to do so. 

"The first thing cops think during a use-of-force incident is: ‘Am I going to jail for this?’" said Sutton. "Officers are more afraid of their own leadership than of the criminal element and that is the saddest part of this whole story."

That reluctance coexists with hard numbers showing the job has grown more dangerous in recent years: the FBI reported roughly 79,000 assaults on officers in 2023—the highest in a decade—and the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund documented 147 line-of-duty deaths in 2024, 52 of them firearms-related. In 2025, that number of assaults has risen even higher.

"Last year, more than 85,000 American officers were assaulted… Every single day an officer is being shot," Sutton said. "We’ve never seen volume like this."

Put those factors together—declining morale, higher risk of violence, heavy public scrutiny, and the lure of better pay or working conditions elsewhere—and it’s no mystery why departments find it hard to recruit and retain talent. Some officers even live out of state, and whole cohorts are choosing lateral moves to agencies that offer better compensation or a different political climate, which only deepens the staffing crisis—whether it’s Minneapolis, California, or Georgia.

But if Minnesota in particular had hoped to reverse its fortunes, then a national story about a sprawling $1 billion social services fraud scandal and American taxpayer money going to Islamic terrorists in Africa was quite possibly the absolute last thing law enforcement had hoped to see.