When unverified rumors first circulated that Rep. Ilhan Omar had once been married to her own brother, some liberals were scandalized that Republicans had the nerve to mention the rumor at all. You don’t accuse someone of something like that without solid proof, as one friend said to me.
But it was all a matter of context. The same sentence that sounded bizarre and depraved to American ears—she married her own brother?—sounded banal to anyone familiar with the Somali diaspora, where pretending to be someone’s mother, wife, or sister is a common way of obtaining legal residency for them. A 2008 State Department study of African refugees (many of them Somali) seeking family reunification in the United States found that 80 percent of applications included at least one fraudulent family member. The program was then suspended for four years until a DNA testing requirement could be added.
Recent allegations of fraud at daycare centers in Minnesota are also a matter of context. On December 26, 2025, independent journalist Nick Shirley released a 43-minute video claiming that Somali-owned daycares were receiving taxpayer funding for non-existent children through the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP). When Shirley visited the shabby buildings, he saw no children present, and some of the buildings had no visible outdoor play areas. Shirley claimed to have uncovered $110 million in fraud in one day. However, the video itself was not conclusive. Shirley could have been visiting outside regular operating hours, as one daycare owner has claimed, or the children could have been inside where Shirley could not see or hear them.
The type of fraud alleged in the video matched the fraud described in an August 2018 memo by a Minnesota Department of Human Services investigator, which claimed that “the overall fraud rate in this program [CCAP] is at least 50 percent.” DHS stopped payments to fifteen daycares for “demonstrated intentional overbilling” on the scale of “an average of 23.9 children per day, per center.” These centers did serve children, just not as many as they claimed. “It is not unusual to see attendance records claim X number of children arrived at the center between 8:00 am and 11:00 am when the video surveillance shows only a fraction of that number,” the memo states.
In response to Shirley’s video, state officials at the Minnesota Department of Children, Youth, and Families said that investigators had visited all nine daycares and found them “operating as expected.” Democrats accused Shirley of racially targeting the Somali community and scapegoating immigrants. “When a few child care centers that serve white children commit fraud, do we decide that every child care center that serves white children is committing fraud? No,” local daycare provider Mary Solheim told Minnesota Public Radio. “The Somali child care community deserves that same respect.”
“This story cannot be understood apart from the particular dynamics of the Somali community.”
But this story cannot be understood apart from the particular dynamics of the Somali community. If an investigative reporter alleged that hundreds of random Minnesotans had committed a multimillion-dollar fraud and all kept their mouths shut about it for years, that would strain belief. Surely someone would have talked. But with a group as insular as Somalis, the idea that hundreds of people could have conspired without anyone leaking is easier to believe.
Readers decide whether news stories are credible based on their sense of what normal people do. But what is “normal” varies from culture to culture. In this case, evaluating the allegations of fraud requires understanding two things: how unique Somalia is even among the diverse cultures of Africa, and how unique Minnesota is in its adherence to the race-based politics of the civil rights regime.