President Donald Trump used a Wednesday Cabinet meeting to again target Somali immigrants in Minnesota, calling them "crooked as h***" and declaring "they're all crooks" while referencing ongoing federal fraud prosecutions and the work of Vice President JD Vance's fraud task force.
The remarks, reported by NBC News, represent the latest in a months-long pattern of public statements by the president singling out the Somali-American community in Minnesota and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar. Trump offered no new evidence to support his broadest claim, that an entire immigrant community is criminal, but the fraud cases he referenced are real, large-scale, and well-documented.
That tension, between verified, billion-dollar fraud and the president's habit of painting an entire ethnic community with a single brush, is the core of the story. And it is a story the media class would rather reduce to a racism charge than examine on the merits.
Trump's comments came while discussing the fraud task force's work in Minnesota. He did not limit himself to the defendants.
"The Somalians, what they've done to Minnesota, the Somalians, crooked as h***. Ilhan Omar, crooked as h***."
He went further, broadening the accusation beyond those charged.
"They're all crooks, and we got them, we got them. Now we're putting the clamps on."
Trump also took aim at Omar directly, though NBC News noted it remains unclear what specific conduct he was accusing her of. He said she "shouldn't be allowed to be a congresswoman" and that she "should be thrown the h*** out of our country."
Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who came to the United States as a refugee from Somalia, has faced ongoing scrutiny from the House Oversight Committee, which referred her financial concerns to an ethics panel. Her spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the president's latest remarks.
Whatever one thinks of the president's rhetoric, the underlying fraud cases are not in dispute. The Minnesota U.S. attorney's office data, cited by the Associated Press in December 2025, showed that 82 of 92 defendants arrested in Covid relief fraud schemes were Somali Americans. The schemes netted over $1 billion.
The most prominent case involved Aimee Bock, a nonprofit leader, notably not Somali herself, who was sentenced to nearly 42 years in prison for running an organization at the center of a massive false billing scheme. Trump referenced her sentencing as having occurred "last week," along with additional fraud arrests in Minnesota during the same period.
Omar's name has surfaced repeatedly in connection with the broader scandal. She was named six times in $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud exhibits, and has declined to answer questions about those references.
The scale of the fraud is staggering by any measure. Breitbart reported that Somali leaders allegedly embezzled over $1 billion from aid and welfare programs, including funds earmarked for autistic children, coronavirus relief, and homebuyers. Those are not abstract budget line items. They are programs meant to help vulnerable Americans, and they were looted.
Minnesota's own former governor, Tim Walz, acknowledged the problem in limited terms. Fox News reported Walz saying, "The programs are set up to improve people's lives, and in many cases, the criminals find the loopholes." That framing, treating billion-dollar fraud as a loophole problem, tells you something about how Minnesota's political class has handled accountability.
Trump's Wednesday remarks did not come out of nowhere. They fit a clear trajectory stretching back at least six months.
In December 2025, as news broke about the fraud convictions, Trump declared: "The Somalians should be out of here. They've destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain." A day earlier, he had called Omar "garbage" and said he did not want Somalis in the United States.
The Associated Press reported that Trump also pledged to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Somalis living in Minnesota, though the AP noted only 705 Somalis nationwide hold TPS, a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands in the state.
Earlier in May 2026, Trump spoke at an event at The Villages in Florida and offered a blunt description of Somalia itself: "It's got no government, it's got no military, it's got no anything. It's got one thing that's really strong, crime." He called the country "filthy, dirty, disgusting" and added, "All they do is run around shooting each other." That rally also featured Trump targeting Omar and the Minnesota fraud cases, claiming his administration was "taking down thousands."
At the Cabinet meeting, he returned to the theme with familiar bluntness: "Somebody will say, 'Oh, that's not politically correct.' I don't care. I don't want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason."
Omar responded to Trump's December attacks on social media, writing: "Your message of bigotry won't work. Somali Americans are here to stay." She has not yet commented publicly on the May 27 remarks.
Newsmax reported that Minneapolis and St. Paul city leaders defended the Somali-American community in December and criticized Trump's remarks as racist and dangerous. That defensive posture is predictable, and it sidesteps the billion-dollar question. When 82 of 92 fraud defendants in a single jurisdiction share the same community background, elected leaders owe their constituents more than accusations of bigotry aimed at the people asking questions.
The political pressure on Omar extends well beyond the president's rhetoric. Rep. Tom Emmer has called Omar a "complete fraud" as financial disclosure gaps draw ethics scrutiny. And Vice President Vance has confirmed that the Department of Justice is actively probing Omar's finances and marriage history.
Wilder Research, an independent firm based in St. Paul, estimates roughly 80,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota. The overwhelming majority are not defendants in any fraud case. That is worth stating plainly, and it is also worth stating plainly that the fraud that did occur was organized, systematic, and breathtaking in scale.
The press corps will spend the next news cycle debating whether Trump's language was racist. That debate is easy and familiar. It requires no reporting, no document review, and no follow-up with the Minnesota U.S. attorney's office.
The harder questions are the ones that matter. How did over a billion dollars in federal relief funds get siphoned through fraudulent nonprofits in a single state? Who in state government failed to catch it? Which elected officials had relationships with the organizations involved? And why has accountability been so slow?
Trump's language is broad. His impulse to condemn an entire community for the crimes of its worst actors is a rhetorical habit that weakens his own case. But the underlying facts, the arrests, the convictions, the sentencing, the sheer volume of stolen taxpayer money, are not rhetoric. They are a record of institutional failure that Minnesota's leaders have never adequately explained.
When the president says "they're all crooks," he hands his critics an easy out. They get to talk about his words instead of the billion dollars.
Taxpayers deserve better than that, from both sides.