WATCH: Tim Walz Blames Somali Fraud Scheme That Occurred Under His Watch on Trump

Democrat Tim Walz may have been Minnesota's governor when a group of mostly Somali migrants in the state stole more than $1 billion in taxpayer funds, but he's blaming President Donald Trump for failing to stop the scheme.

"Dozens of people of East African descent have been charged, convicted, and sentenced for stealing more than $1 billion in taxpayer money from government programs during COVID," NBC News’s Kristen Welker told Walz on Meet the Press on Sunday. "Do you take responsibility for failing to stop this fraud in your state?"

"Well, certainly I take responsibility for putting people in jail," Walz said before pointing to Trump.

"This president has cut a lot of inspector generals [sic]," he added. "He’s cut programs that could help us tackle this on [sic]. That’s Donald Trump: deflect, demonize, come up with no solutions. He’s not going to help fix anything on fraud."

Walz was responding to Trump ordering a reexamination of green card holders from Somalia on Thursday—he also said earlier this month he would terminate Temporary Protected Status for Somalis living in Minnesota. The president's announcements followed a City Journal report detailing how Somali-American networks help redirect money to Somalia, with millions of taxpayer dollars landing in the hands of Al-Shabaab, an al Qaeda affiliate.

"Hundreds of thousands of Somalians are ripping off our country and ripping apart that once great state," Trump said Thursday.

Feeding Our Future, a nonprofit that received federal child nutrition funding through the Minnesota Department of Education, was a centerpiece of the fraud scheme. Between April 2020 and January 2022, Feeding Our Future, sites that it sponsored—such as day cares—and its site vendors bilked the program of millions of dollars each month by filing false claims for reimbursement supported by false meal counts, fake rosters, and bogus invoices, the Washington Free Beacon reported. As of March, 70 defendants—mostly Somalis—have been charged, 37 have pleaded guilty, and 7 have been convicted, while the others have not been tried.

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