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Former Minnesota Vikings and University of Minnesota football player Jack Brewer said he has seen high-end cases involving Minnesota’s “elite” Somali population up close. In doing so, he witnessed a demographic and class transformation in his home state.
“You go to one of them, and they have Bentley and Maserati dealerships in Minnesota. I know that because I’ve done business with them and been supported by them as an athlete,” Brewer told PK Press Club Digital.
“Now you go there, and some of their main customers are these Somali fraudsters who buy high-end cars in a state that has four months of sunshine and decent weather. They drive sports cars like you see in Beverly Hills or South Beach Miami, all on the backs of the American taxpayer.”
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Images of empty daycares have become a sudden cultural flashpoint across the country. Minnesota is mired in a growing scandal after revelations that billions of taxpayer dollars were fraudulently distributed through members of the state’s Somali population.
Brewer remembers the moment he began to see this reality take shape, when the Somali population suddenly began exploding in his state 28 years ago. He witnessed this firsthand as the husband of a Muslim American legal immigrant.
“I’ve lived in Minnesota for a long time. My wife was born and raised there, from a family of immigrants who came from the Middle East, came to America, assimilated and not just assimilated, but actually made me more patriotic,” Brewer said.
INSIDE ‘LITTLE MOGADISHU’: MINNESOTA’S ASSOCIATED SOMALIAN COMMUNITY UNDER A CLOUD OF FRAUD
“I saw Somalis arriving in droves. They had their own neighborhood and slowly began to take over the city of Minneapolis.”
The Somali population of Minneapolis and St. Paul increased significantly in the early to mid-1990s, driven by refugees fleeing Somalia’s civil war. A significant number of them arrived after 1991 and continued throughout the 2000s.
The collapse of the Somali government in 1991 led to widespread conflict, forcing millions of people to flee the country. At the time, Brewer was just a kid in Grapevine, Texas. At the time he transferred from SMU to the University of Minnesota, the Somali population was estimated at about 15,000 people, according to the Minnesota State Population Center.
By the time Brewer joined the Minnesota Vikings in 2002, at least 5,123 Minnesota students reported speaking Somali as their primary language at home, according to the National Institutes of Health.
Over the years, Brewer, as a sustained professional athlete, says he did business with many local Somali immigrants who were becoming wealthy. He began to see their growing influence on local culture and religion.
“You turn on your TV. Have you ever seen a mayor on TV waving a foreign country’s flag and dancing and trying to rally people to support Somalia instead of supporting America? … When you drive through Minneapolis, you hear the Islamic sirens going off because they came here with this culture, trying to bring in Islamic culture,” Brewer said.
“This is a spiritual battle like we haven’t seen in a long time.”
A recent investigation by activists Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo found that federal counterterrorism sources confirmed that millions in funds intended for Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, Feeding Our Future and other state-sponsored organizations were sent to Somalia and that the terrorist group Al-Shabab may have obtained the money.
Around 40% of Somali households receive remittances from abroad. Thorpe and Rufo reported that in 2023, the Somali diaspora sent $1.7 billion to the country, which was higher than the Somali government’s budget in the same year.
In the Land of a Thousand Lakes, political power and social funds have found their way to the Somali population.
The state has seen the rise of several prominent Somali politicians, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, state Senators Omar Fateh and Zaynab Mohamed, and St. Louis Park Mayor Nadia Mohamed, all Democrats.
“These people have integrated themselves into the political world, where they now rely on the federal government to finance their campaigns, send money overseas to Somalia, build luxury apartments and create a lifestyle for Somalis on the backs of the American taxpayer,” Brewer said.
“For me, as a former Minnesota Viking, as a former Gopher, I got my undergrad and my master’s degree at the University of Minnesota. I was a captain on both of those teams. It’s one of the most embarrassing times I’ve ever been through for a state that, I’ve said proudly, helped me grow from a boy to a man.”
Brewer, a business owner, added that he has moved many of his assets out of state in recent years.
“I withdrew many of my investments in the state and moved my business interests elsewhere because of what we saw after George Floyd,” he said.
Somali residents previously told PK Press Club Digital that they are angry that the entire community is saddled with what they see as an unfair reputation, blaming a small minority of fraudsters and criminals for the negative attention brought to the entire group.
“Somalis in Minnesota are hard-working people. Many of them work two jobs, and yet about 75 percent are still poor,” Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) of Minnesota, told PK Press Club Digital.
“There are entrepreneurs, successful restaurants – people in trucking, IT and even corporate America – who are making meaningful change. But these positive stories don’t get a lot of attention.”
About 36% of Somalis in Minnesota lived below the poverty line between 2019 and 2023, more than triple the U.S. poverty rate of 11.1%, according to Minnesota Compassa statewide data project. Somali-headed households reported a median income of around $43,600 during this period, well below the national median of $78,538.
Najma Mohammad, a hairdresser who came to the United States as a child, previously told PK Press Club Digital: “Most people think, just because some people are bad and Somali, that all Somalis are bad, which is just a stereotype. »
Brewer supports the state’s patriotic Muslim legal immigrant population, to which he is personally connected through his wife’s family.
“Witnessing their family – the way they do business, the way they love this country, what they stand for, their patriotism – I learned from it. I became better because of it. I loved my country more from witnessing my in-laws. So I know what’s possible,” Brewer said.
“They did it by moving to Minneapolis and starting their businesses. It can happen, and it does happen. That’s what this country was built on.”
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But he also wants President Trump to take drastic action in response to recent developments.
“I would freeze all immigration until we have a sense of the scale of this fraud and the extent of the corruption that has taken place.” » Brewer said. “We must remove all of these foreign terrorists from our country. It should be a collective effort between our armed forces, our local law enforcement, our communities, our leaders, our churches – everyone – to protect our land.”
