ST. CLOUD, Minn. A Somali daycare owner whose business has drawn scrutiny over government funding and is connected to a major fraud settlement secured a seat in the Minnesota legislature on Tuesday night.
Abdi Daisane, a Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party candidate, defeated a Republican incumbent to capture the House District 14A seat in St. Cloud. According to MPR News, he is the first Somali-born lawmaker from St. Cloud to serve in the statehouse. Daisane delivered a portion of his victory speech in Somali.
Daisane serves as CEO of Blooming Kids Child Care Center in St. Cloud, which has collected $7.29 million through the state-run Child Care Assistance Program since 2018. The center has also received $598,251.62 since 2020 from the federally funded Child and Adult Care Food Program, known as CACFP.
The center's sponsor for those CACFP funds was a nonprofit called Partners in Nutrition, which recently paid an $18.5 million civil settlement over fraud. A press release announcing the settlement states that Partners in Nutrition "knowingly defrauded the State of Minnesota out of millions of dollars in federal child nutrition funds during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, in violation of the Minnesota False Claims Act."
A visit to Blooming Kids Child Care Center by Fox News Digital on Thursday found a quiet scene. The facility sits along a main road in St. Cloud's small downtown, with a paper sign on its wooden front door directing visitors to another entrance. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows beside the door are covered with tinted, mirrored film, and the parking lot next to the building was mostly empty in the afternoon. A small fenced playground behind the building holds two children's jungle gyms that appear to fill most of the space.
Alpha News reported on the center's funding in late October, quoting a worker nearby who said they never saw children entering or leaving the facility. The outlet also reported that Blooming Kids has been cited for more than a dozen violations.
Separately, questions about the immigration status of Daisane's wife, Ayaan Aydid, have circulated online following the emergence of a video in which she described to the BBC how she crossed into the United States at the southern border. Daisane did not respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.
Word of Daisane's victory prompted swift criticism on social media. "We are a lost state," Red Ax Strategies President Matt Brodsky wrote on X, adding, "We should cede it to Canada." Conservative commentator Eric Daugherty posted, "MINNESOTA IS SO FREAKING COOKED," while conservative personality Gunther Eagleman wrote, "Minnesota is done."
Bridgette Gabriel, founder of ACT for America, flagged a post about Daisane's election, and his purported illegal immigrant wife, to the Department of Homeland Security and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin on X, calling it a "[G]reat opportunity to do something about this."
