CHICAGO: Aimee Bock, the founder of a Minnesota nonprofit convicted in a multimillion-dollar fraud involving dozens of Somali suspects, has told Arab News that federal investigators should investigate Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s role.
The Minnesota Democrat’s 5th District has the largest concentration of Somali Americans and much of the fraud convictions.
Evidence shows that fraudsters, mostly of Somali heritage, created shell companies and fake sites, and forged delivery counts of food provided to hundreds of thousands of children and families in order to boost reimbursements they received from the Minnesota Department of Education.
Bock, executive director of Feeding Our Future, which processed the payments, said she warned and provided evidence of the fraud to the MDE and state officials, but was ignored and later prosecuted as a “scapegoat.”
She told Arab News: “The fact remains that there were a lot of politicians who were alerted and should’ve been aware. I reported it to two state agencies. They should’ve escalated it to others. If they didn’t, why?
“As it stands, I’m the only individual in the state of Minnesota who, prior to the federal investigation, caught the fraud, identified it, stopped it, and reported it not only to the MDE but also to the attorney general’s office.
“Despite those reports, those individuals (I identified) were moved to another organizations and allowed to continue their fraudulent activities.”
According to the Justice Department, the case involved roughly $250 million in federal child nutrition funds that were supposed to feed low-income children during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Prosecutors said Bock and others created fake meal sites, submitted fraudulent attendance records and meal counts, and funneled money to co-conspirators and personal luxuries instead of food programs.
Interviewed remotely at Sherburne County Jail in Minnesota, where she is awaiting sentencing, Bock denied the accusations and said Minnesota government officials such as Omar are being protected.
“We’d informed the MDE that we intended to file a motion seeking to hold them in contempt of court and asked that they be sanctioned. The records show that within three hours of us notifying them, they contacted the FBI and alerted them to fraud at Feeding Our Future,” Bock said.
“We need accountability within our state government. Our state employees are too protected. They knew there was fraud happening.
“I admit I missed fraud. They admit they missed fraud, but there was also fraud that I presented to them essentially on a silver platter, that these invoices are fake, these companies are fake, there’s no food, and they allowed them to continue. Why has there been no accountability?”
She added: “None of these (government agencies), no one from the state agency, none of the politicians, no one who was alerted (to the fraud) has been included in any of the investigations, to my knowledge.”
Bock was convicted in March 2025 of “conspiracy, bribery and wire fraud” for the fraud claims that resulted in the theft of millions in child nutrition funds from the government.
She said she had no personal ties to the Somali community or any Somali businesspeople. “Most communities are very difficult to build trusting relationships with, especially our immigrant refugee communities, so this notion that a white woman would enter and be like ‘hey, I have an idea’ is absurd,” she added.
“In large part, it has been a convenient narrative. The government needed somebody to blame to shift it off of themselves. I was there. They needed the lawsuits to end. They needed to be able to not be accused of discrimination or racism. If you watch most of our local media to date, almost any time they talk about the case, it’s my photo that goes up.”
US President Donald Trump and federal prosecutors allege that more than $9 billion have been stolen in widespread, Minnesota-based social service fraud schemes that appear dominated by members of the Somali community, potentially tied to nearly half of all federal funds, $18 billion, provided to 14 state welfare programs since 2018. Hundreds of millions were distributed through Minnesota food providers.
Bock said she takes some of the blame for not immediately recognizing the fraud and not doing enough to stop it.
“I feel horrible that this happened on my watch. People are saying I’m shifting responsibility. I’m not,” she added.
“I acknowledge I was part of the problem, but I wasn’t the whole problem. I wasn’t intentionally, knowingly allowing the fraud. I made the mistake of trusting the wrong people.”
Bock said her responsibility was to review and process reimbursement paperwork submitted by the individuals who were supposed to provide meals and supervise food distribution programs before being paid. She will face sentencing for the conviction sometime this week.
A second individual, Salim Said, was also convicted in the same trial. He owned the Safari Restaurant, which enrolled in the Federal Child Nutrition Program under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future in April 2020.
By July that year, Said claimed to be serving meals to 5,000 children per day every day. In total, he claimed to have served more than 3.9 million meals to children from Safari’s food site between April 2020 and November 2021.
Said also claimed that the restaurant provided more than 2.2 million meals to other food sites involved in Feeding Our Future’s fraud scheme.
Omar’s office did not respond to an Arab News request for comment.
