On June 3, 2026, a congressman from Texas gaveled in a hearing about Ohio.

Brandon Gill represents Texas's 26th District — Denton County, north of Dallas, about a thousand miles from Columbus. He has been in Congress since 2025. But he chairs a House Oversight panel with a very long name, the Task Force on Defending Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses, and he decided its very first hearing would be about Ohio's Medicaid program.

Three Ohio members of Congress asked to take part. Gill told them no.

What actually happened in that room

Reps. Shontel Brown, Emilia Sykes and Greg Landsman all asked to question the witnesses. All three represent Ohio. All three were denied.

Brown is the one whose exclusion is hardest to explain. She sits on the full House Oversight Committee — she's the only Ohio Democrat on it — and she says she represents over 300,000 constituents who rely on Medicaid. A hearing was being held about the health program her constituents depend on, by a committee she serves on, and the chairman would not let her ask a question.

She had written out remarks she never got to give:

"This is a political hearing built on allegations that remain unproven, amplified by partisan actors, and aimed at justifying a broader political goal: cutting Medicaid and shifting blame away from those who have actually been in charge."

Her point about who's been in charge is the one Gill's hearing never got around to. Republicans have run Ohio's state government — the agencies that enroll Medicaid providers, process claims, and catch fraud — for more than fifteen years.

Tempers flared right at the start. Brown interrupted the opening statement of the hearing's lead witness. That witness was Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter at the Daily Wire, a conservative news and opinion site — the man who wrote the story the hearing was built on.

The $1.2 billion number came from a blog post

The hearing's headline figure was $1.2 billion in Ohio Medicaid home healthcare fraud. Where does that number come from? The Daily Wire story. Spectrum News, reporting from the hearing room, put it plainly: the $1.2 billion amount in alleged home healthcare fraud is not verified.

For comparison, Ohio Auditor of State Keith Faber — a Republican, who testified at the hearing — released a report in 2024 that found $209 million in Medicaid spending for patients enrolled in both Ohio and another state.

Ohio's Republican governor, Mike DeWine, did announce a six-month moratorium in May on new home healthcare providers receiving Medicaid funds. He talked about it the way you'd expect a person actually responsible for a state to talk about it:

"We do have a long history in Ohio of being very successful in prosecutions. But we always can do better, and we're going to continue to work and try to stop any kind of fraud that we're seeing."

Notice what's missing from DeWine's answer. He didn't name an ethnic group.

Gill did

Here is what Gill said in his opening statement, published by his own committee:

"So who are these fraudsters? Well, just like in Minnesota, many of them are Somali."

He went on to say Ohio is also home to the largest Bhutanese population in America, and that "the Somali and Bhutanese communities commit a large portion — if not the vast majority — of home health Medicaid fraud in Ohio."

Then he said the quiet part out loud:

"The reality is that America wouldn't have a problem with Somalis and Bhutanese populations defrauding us if we didn't import large numbers of Somalis and Bhutanese to begin with."

He described those communities as "foreigners from low trust societies." He pre-emptively dismissed anyone who objected: "we cannot back down to fraud simply because of spurious slanders of racism." And before any of it, he added the line people use when they know exactly how something sounds — "It may not be politically correct to say, but it's true."

Ohio State Senate Minority Leader Nickie Antonio was in that hearing. Gill asked her whether Somali immigration had been good for the state. She said she was almost brought to tears.

"Because the rate of the level of hateful rhetoric based on false information is shocking to me, the lack of humanity."

Who he was actually talking about

The Bhutanese community Gill described as having been "imported" is largely made up of Lhotshampa — Nepali-speaking people expelled from Bhutan, who then spent years, in many cases decades, in United Nations refugee camps in eastern Nepal. They came to the United States through the federal refugee resettlement program. Around 20,000 of them live in the Columbus area, making it home to the largest Bhutanese-Nepali population in the country. Many are now U.S. citizens.

These are people the United States government invited, vetted, and resettled. Gill described their presence here as the reason for a fraud problem.

He inflated his own committee's number

Gill's opening statement leaned on Minnesota as the template — "just a couple months ago, the House Oversight Committee examined a similar problem in Minnesota, where Somali fraudsters stole over $16 billion from American taxpayers."

That's his own committee's investigation he's describing. And his own committee doesn't use that number. The House Oversight Committee's official wrap-up of the Minnesota hearing says fraudsters stole "an estimated $9 billion," and quotes federal prosecutors putting the figure at "at least $9 billion."

Gill nearly doubled it. Not a rival party's number he was disputing — the number his own committee published.

This is what he does with the job

Gill got the gavel to this task force in 2026, and the pattern of what he uses it for is by now easy to trace. He has run it as a standing hearing series against "DEI", summoning the president of the American Bar Association to answer for what law schools teach. He has used it to subpoena maternity clinics and float "criminal conspiracy" charges against doctors over birthright citizenship — a right written into the 14th Amendment.

And when the subject was finally something that touches people's health care, he pointed at two immigrant communities and told the room it wasn't politically correct to say so.

He didn't invent this playbook. He's one of the members who joined the "Sharia Free America Caucus," and he's quoted in our reporting on the ten-million-dollar Republican effort to make "Sharia" a campaign word saying "No more Muslims immigrating to America." He told Newsmax in November 2025 that "Islam is a political ideology that is incompatible with the United States", and he has introduced a bill, the Somalia Immigration Moratorium Act, to ban nearly all immigration from Somalia — and only Somalia — for 25 years.

What Ohio actually needed from that hearing

Medicaid fraud is real, and prosecuting it is legitimate work. Nobody — not Shontel Brown, not Nickie Antonio, not Mike DeWine — argued otherwise. Brown's prepared remarks said flatly: "if providers committed fraud, they should be prosecuted. If taxpayer dollars were stolen, they should be recovered."

But a serious hearing about Ohio's Medicaid program would have started with the people who run Ohio's Medicaid program, and it would have let Ohio's own representatives ask questions. Gill's hearing did neither. It built its central number on a partisan website's estimate, seated that website's reporter as its star witness, named two ethnic groups as the cause, and locked out the three members of Congress who could have pushed back.

That's not oversight. That's a press release with a witness table.

Gill's constituents in Denton County are dealing with grocery bills, rent, health insurance premiums, and child care costs. He spent the first hearing of his own task force a thousand miles away from them, explaining who he thinks doesn't belong in this country.

We deserve better.

Source

Reporting from the hearing by Harri Leigh, "Ohio Medicaid fraud discussed in House hearing," Spectrum News 1 (June 3, 2026). Photo: House Oversight Committee, via Spectrum News.