On March 12, 2026, Pete Stauber introduced a bill in the U.S. House and gave it a name: the Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act.

The acronym is a stretch, and everybody could see it. In the official text, SOMALIA stands for "Strengthening Oversight and More Accountability for Lying and Illegal Activity." Nobody was fooled. Stauber's own press statement said the quiet part plainly:

"Taxpayers in Minnesota and across the country deserve to know their hard-earned dollars are supporting legitimate services and not lining the pockets of Somali fraudsters."

That's the congressman for Minnesota's 8th District, quoted by KAXE, describing a whole nationality as the problem his bill exists to solve.

Minnesota's largest Muslim civil rights group called it what it is. "You cannot name a federal bill after a nationality or ethnic group and claim it is about accountability," said Suleiman Adan, deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota. "Fraud is a crime committed by individuals, not by entire communities."

The group's executive director, Jaylani Hussein, put the test in one sentence: "No member of Congress would introduce legislation titled the 'Stop Fraud by Norwegians Act' or the 'Stop Fraud by Germans Act.'"

Read the actual bill

This is where it stops being about a name.

H.R. 7923 is nominally a child care bill. Section 2 amends the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act to permanently bar providers found to have committed fraud. Fine — nobody defends stealing from a program for poor working parents.

Then keep reading.

• Section 4 amends the terrorism section of immigration law. It writes into federal statute that a debarred child care provider who is found to have sent money to "any terrorist organization, including Al-Shabaab" is inadmissible. The same section adds a blanket bar for anyone "in any way associated with" the Palestine Liberation Organization or al-Shabaab.
• Section 5 makes a debarred provider deportable, ineligible for asylum, ineligible to adjust status, and legally incapable of showing "good moral character."
• Section 6 is the one to sit with. If an immigration officer or judge merely "suspects" an arriving person may be inadmissible under the new fraud provision, the officer "shall order the alien removed" — and must "refrain from conducting any further inquiry or hearing" unless a senior official says otherwise.

Suspicion. Not a conviction, not a hearing — suspicion, and you're on a plane.

A day care billing dispute is now a terrorism screening and an expedited removal. That is not an oversight bill. That is a bill built to tell one community that its members are presumed criminals, presumed foreigners, and presumed one step from a terrorist group.

Stauber introduced it alone. Five months later it still has zero cosponsors and has never moved past a committee referral. It was never going to become law. It was written to be said.

The scandal it's built on never checked out

Here's the part Stauber has never gone back and corrected.

The whole thing started the day after Christmas 2025, when a conservative YouTuber named Nick Shirley posted a 43-minute video in which he knocked on the doors of ten Somali-run day cares in Minneapolis, and declared — when nobody answered, or when staff wouldn't let a group of strangers in — that there were no children inside. He claimed $111 million in fraud.

Then people actually went and looked.

• On January 2, 2026, Minnesota's Department of Children, Youth and Families said inspectors had visited nine of the ten sites and found them "operating as expected". Children were present at eight of the nine. The ninth simply hadn't opened for the day yet.
• The Minnesota Star Tribune visited all ten and found children inside four of them — the four that invited reporters in. Its review of state enforcement records and court filings found that none of the people publicly identified as owners or operators of the ten businesses "have ever been charged with fraud or any other felonies."
• Three months later, on March 16 — four days after Stauber introduced his bill — MPR News summed up the state of play in one line: "No evidence of fraud has yet been confirmed at any of those sites."

We've written before about how this video was assembled and who fed it — the Minnesota House Republican caucus claimed a hand in it, then backed away when the YouTuber publicly called that a lie.

Real fraud in Minnesota's social service programs is real. More than 50 people have been convicted in the Feeding Our Future scheme. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But Stauber didn't build a bill around the convictions. He built it around a video that fell apart.

He gave a State of the Union seat to the man who said "EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud"

Three weeks before he introduced the bill, Stauber announced his two guests for Trump's State of the Union: Nick Shirley, and the man who appears in the video as "David."

"David" is David Hoch, a Minnesota lobbyist and former right-wing candidate for state attorney general. The Intercept identified him on January 3 and pulled his now-deleted Instagram posts. Two of them:

"EVERY Somali in MN is engaged in fraud. ALL of them."

"Even the Blacks have had enough of the demon Muslims."

That was public, in a national outlet, seven weeks before Stauber handed him a ticket to the House chamber. Stauber's statement announcing the guests:

"By revealing stunning levels of obvious fraud to the American people, Nick and David did more work and showed more transparency than the Minnesota Department of Human Services."

He called them "citizen-driven oversight."

What it cost people who live here

None of this stayed on the internet.

A lawyer for one of the day cares told the Star Tribune his Somali clients had received hundreds of death threats. "Everybody is very scared right now of being targeted," attorney Jason Steck said. "Nobody wants to stick their head up. Nobody wants to get shot."

One director played reporters the voicemails his center was getting at 5 a.m. and at midnight — "We're coming," "ICE, ICE baby." A part-owner, Umi Hassan, said she'd lived in Minnesota since right after 9/11 and had never felt this marginalized. Crying, she asked the reporters: "What else can I do to be an American?"

Meanwhile the Trump administration froze federal child care money to Minnesota — the money that helps poor parents pay for care while they work — and around 3,000 federal immigration officers surged into the Twin Cities in Operation Metro Surge. Two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were shot and killed by federal officers in January.

Stauber's answer to all of it was a bill with a nationality in the title.

This is a pattern, not a slip

Stauber's response to the ICE killing in Minneapolis wasn't to ask questions about the shooting. It was to blame local politicians for it: "When Twin Cities politicians spew hateful rhetoric about our law enforcement for months, it gives their constituencies permission to violently attack my brothers and sisters in uniform. The events of today are the result."

In February 2026, union workers stood outside his Hermantown office asking him to address what ICE operations were doing to the region.

He has not held an open, in-person town hall where any of them could ask him about it. When the mayor of Cloquet invited him to hold one, his office offered a virtual meeting with no date attached.

The ten day cares in that video are in Minneapolis. Stauber doesn't represent Minneapolis — his district runs from Duluth to the Iron Range to the Canadian border. He went looking for this fight. He named a bill after the people on the other side of it. And when the underlying story collapsed, he didn't withdraw the bill, revise the title, or say a word.

We deserve better.

Sources

• MPR News, Muslim civil rights group: Congressman's fraud bill 'discriminatory and deeply irresponsible' (March 16, 2026)
• KAXE, Stauber introduces Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act (March 13, 2026)
• The Minnesota Star Tribune, We went to the day cares Nick Shirley did. Here's what we found. (Dec. 31, 2025)

Photo: Rep. Pete Stauber speaks on the House floor, January 2026 / U.S. House Clerk, via KAXE.