Ryan Thorpe

In regards to Feeding Our Future, one of the findings was that concerns over how this would play in the press, concerns over being accused of racism absolutely impacted how they responded to

these trends, these situations where they knew something wasn't on the up and up.

Well, what we can say for sure is that on a number of the major fraud rings that have been exposed to date, it wasn't just a couple of bad actors.

There's evidence to believe that this extended out wider into the Somali community.

So when it came to the feeding our future scandal, you know, various organizations were all tied up in this.

There's also an ongoing autism fraud case.

There's only been one indictment today, but the U.S.

Attorney's Office indicates that more indictments are coming.

And it makes clear that the accused in this case recruited.

smally parents in the community to sign their children up to get fraudulent autism diagnosis and then get fake autism services.

These aren't isolated schemes.

This is like a network of fraud rings.

Now, in terms of just how many organizations, no one really knows at this point because the true scope of the fraud remains unclear.

But what officials...

Yeah, I mean, of course, it's not, you know, every Somali in Minnesota, you know, many people in that community would be law abiding citizens.

And I know that there are elements of that community that are somewhat outraged because they feel like,

hey, we have these bad actors in our community who are now making the rest of us look bad.

So, I mean, I take that point well.

There's also a concern on the other side where I think we're through this now, but for a long time, there was kind of a hesitancy to confront the facts that, hey, there's a pattern here when it comes to these cases.

And if we're going to collectively going to try to address this, then we have to take the facts for what they are and start there.