There’s multiple parts.

First there was a massive pandemic relief fraud. A bunch of people exploited programs meant to feed kids, because those programs had relaxed checks during the pandemic. The main organization here is “Feeding our Future” who helped various individuals fraud the government.

Basically they claimed to be serving millions of meals to kids, with fabricated invoices/etc.

In exchange for Feeding our Future helping individuals with the fraud, they required kickbacks from the individuals. A lot of this money was used to buy real estate, especially in Kenya and Turkey (which makes it very difficult to recover the money).

Not everyone involved was Somali, be the majority of the people charged were part of the same Somali-american community.

Recently it was found out that some similar fraud was happening with Somali run daycares. They were getting millions in subsides, while having few to no children present at the daycares.

Tim Walz and the Department of Education are being criticized over various parts of how they handled it. The Minnesota Department of Education had warnings about the fraud as early as 2018, but ignored them. Later on they asked the Feeding Our Future to investigate themselves for fraud (which obviously didn’t work).

When the pandemic meal fraud was discovered in 2021, the MDE decided to continue payments to the fraudsters because they claimed they didn’t have enough evidence to win in court. Tim Walz later claimed a judge forced them to continue payments, but the Judge released a statement saying that was a lie. There’s some speculation that Walz was originally trying to avoid it going to court to avoid it being a big scandal.

Finally when Walz did announce the fraud, he framed it as a success that they caught these people, even though it had gone on for years and huge amounts of money had already been stolen.

A journalist uncovered massive contracts for daycare facilities going to somalis that ended up being fraudulent. Some of them were worth billions of dollars.