By Ernesto Londoño and Matthew Mpoke BiggSaturday July 18, 2026
After nearly four years on the run, Abdikerm Eidleh, a man prosecutors call a key player in Minnesota’s vast social services fraud scandal, has been returned to the state to face federal charges.
Mr. Eidleh was brought back to Minnesota this week after being captured overseas, making him the first of several people sought abroad in connection with federal fraud indictments that have become a prominent focus for the Trump administration, officials said.
Mr. Eidleh, 42, a naturalized American citizen, was outside the United States in September 2022 when he and dozens of others were charged with taking hundreds of millions of dollars from a pandemic-era program intended to provide meals to low-income children.
Authorities in Somalia arrested him late last month in Mogadishu, the capital, following an F.B.I. request. His return to the United States had appeared uncertain because Somalia and the United States do not have an extradition treaty. In Somalia, supporters of Mr. Eidleh staged street protests over his arrest.
Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, called the development “historic” in a statement describing the agency’s “war on fraud.”
Mr. Eidleh, who has no lawyer listed in court records, was due to appear Friday afternoon in federal court in St. Paul, Minn. He faces charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud federal programs and money laundering. As of Friday, no plea had been entered for him.
Federal prosecutors have portrayed him as a leading associate of Aimee Bock, who headed Feeding our Future, a Minnesota nonprofit accused of orchestrating a scheme that billed the government for hundreds of millions of dollars in meals that were never provided. The Justice Department has described the matter as the largest Covid-era fraud case of its kind.
Ms. Bock received a prison sentence of more than 41 years in May. Of the 79 people charged in the case to date, 68 have been convicted. Most are of Somali origin, a detail repeatedly cited by the Trump administration as it pushes for tighter immigration policies.
The case put Somalia’s president, Hassan Sheikh Mohamud, in a difficult position. He has generally avoided responding to disparaging comments President Trump has made about Somalia and its government. A spokesman for the Somali government declined to comment on Mr. Eidleh’s case.
Mr. Eidleh, who also has Ethiopian citizenship, is a member of a powerful Somali clan that urged the government to free him.
Somali authorities this week effectively expelled Mr. Eidleh to a neighboring country, where F.B.I. agents detained him and accompanied him back to Minnesota, according to Joseph H. Thompson, a former federal prosecutor who led the investigation. The F.B.I. and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to name the neighboring country or discuss details of the extradition.
Hussein Mohamed contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia.
