The pipeline: Immigration NGOs and Medicaid fraud

Between the Feeding Our Future scandal, the Romanian SNAP fraud rings, the Nigerian Medicaid chieftain, the Somali homecare ghost towns, the Bhutanese homecare kingpins, the Somali “Learing” Center, and the alleged Hamas-funding Palestinian Medicaid fraud operation, there have recently been a lot of stories about immigrants defrauding government programs. Why?

Social media sensationalism is partly to blame. Stories about unassimilated immigrants looting American coffers create anger, and anger drives the clicks that incentivize more stories. Homegrown Americans have a long and storied tradition of defrauding welfare programs as well, because fraud prevention policies have been so weak for so long; but news about those convictions doesn’t usually draw the same headlines.

At the same time, the unprecedented scale of fraud being uncovered today and the high concentration of immigrant involvement suggests several insular immigrant groups are disproportionately represented in these scams. There could be many reasons for this, from poor policy to cultural and religious differences. But there is also a clear practical reason: American NGOs, many government-funded, have spent years specifically training immigrants to work in, receive benefits from, and create businesses servicing the same welfare programs that are now dominating fraud headlines.

This uniquely American fraud monster is at least partially the creation of our own government.

Welfare training from American NGOs

Dozens of nonprofits funded by federal and state governments offer specialized curriculums, training, benefits coordination, and certification classes specifically to immigrant and refugee communities. This instruction enables them to work as home health aides, open their own daycares and learning centers, collect and use SNAP benefits, run addiction treatment facilities and generally work in any field attached to the American welfare system.

One big NGO doing this is the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which has been awarded federal obligations totaling nearly $300 million for their work transporting, feeding, resettling, educating, and housing refugees and immigrants. The group is no stranger to financial irregularities. In 2021, IRC agreed to pay $6.9 million to settle allegations of procurement fraud related to USAID contracts it received for work abroad.

One of the many things the IRC has received federal funds for—at least $6 million worth—is providing training and “microenterprise” loans to refugees and immigrants to help them set up lucrative government-funded childcare organizations servicing their own communities. These loans range from $5,000 to $50,000 and “are offered in tandem with related training and services.” The loans are currently offered in San Diego, Atlanta, Des Moines, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Wichita.

The IRC does not publicly disclose records of who receives microenterprise loans, so there is no way to prove that IRC loans funded aspiring fraudsters. But there have been several major daycare fraud busts and reports of suspicious daycare activity involving immigrants in several of the cities where the IRC microenterprise loans are available.

For example, the IRC received two grants in 2018 and 2022 totaling more than $1.1 million for refugee childcare microenterprise loans in San Diego. In September 2026, the Department of Justice (DOJ) charged 12 people originating from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria with stealing a combined total of $10 million by allegedly running bogus daycares out of their homes in San Diego County.

The IRC also received $562,000 in grants for refugee childcare microenterprise development in Seattle in 2022. Since then, multiple journalists have reported a surge in suspicious daycare operations affiliated with Somali immigrants that display little to no evidence of caring for as many children as the bills submitted to the state government suggest.

The IRC also trains refugees to work as home health aides. This part of the Medicaid homecare program which, as Capital Research Center has documented, has long been a magnet for fraud. In 2024, the IRC partnered with two New Jersey firms named Alpha Care and BAYADA to provide “Home Health Aide (HHA) training” in Farsi, rather than English. In June 2026, Alpha Care, owner Nihar Gala, and lab director Bo Wang were named as defendants in a civil complaint by the DOJ alleging Alpha Care submitted thousands of claims for lab tests that “lacked a valid medical purpose” or were never performed at all. In September 2021, BAYADA agreed to pay $17 million to resolve allegations of violating the False Claims Act’s Anti-Kickback Statute by purchasing two home health companies in Arizona from a retirement home.

Hardly a stellar pair of partners.

The IRC isn’t the only organization training immigrants to join the homecare workforce.

The Uloma House in Flint, Michigan offers an Integrated Education & Training (IET) Program for immigrants and refugees that includes English and AI literacy classes, but the only actual job specifically mentioned is “home health aide.” Building One Community and Norwalk Community College in Connecticut have run several 6-month classes training immigrants in English and home health care skills. A group called Encuentro in New Mexico has a dedicated home health aide training program for immigrants which includes an 8-week course on opening and running your own home health company. The Refugee Women’s Alliance, which has received more than $3 million in federal grants, offers a 75-hour home care aide training for refugees and immigrants only, and home health is the only job specifically mentioned on the job training program webpage. Jewish Family Services of Metrowest, which has received more than $1 million in federal grants, just launched a program providing immigrants with “Personal and Home Care Aide State Training (PHCAST).”

This is far from a comprehensive list of organizations training immigrants to work in homecare. But it gives a good sense of the scale of NGO involvement in pushing immigrants into the fraud-riddled program.

The results of the NGOs pushing immigrants to work in homecare are easy to see. Thirty percent of homecare workers nationwide are immigrants. In New York, the homecare capital of America, more than sixty percent of homecare workers are immigrants. Immigrants are so over-represented in the homecare program that multiple public policy think tanks have published reports examining how immigration policy will affect the industry, and the Brookings Institute recently proposed creating an “H-1D visa” allowing for the issuing of 65,000 additional work visas per year specifically for “home health aides, personal care aides, and nursing assistants.”

Back to the daycares

A similar number of NGOs are strongly pushing refugees toward running or working in daycares. And the International Rescue Committee is far from the only group distributing “microenterprise” loans to refugees so they can set up daycares with taxpayer dollars. Since 2011, the Department of Health and Human Services has distributed more than $30 million in grants to 50 recipient organizations for microenterprise loans or other support for childcare through the “Refugee and Entrant Assistance Discretionary Grants” program.

As with the IRC, these NGOs do not publicly disclose the final recipients of the microenterprise loans. This makes it very difficult and perhaps impossible for anyone not in law enforcement to track whether childcare providers embroiled in allegations of financial irregularities are loan recipients. But there have been some potentially suspicious coincidences.

In 2026, Idaho initiated a full review of daycare providers receiving state funds and sixteen providers, mostly run out of homes in Boise, were terminated “for fraud.” The terminated daycares included Sapro Child Care, in Boise, where owner Richard Mwemba “grew agitated, refused to provide documents, disappeared into a back room, and spoke at length in a language investigators could not understand.” Another alleged Boise daycare provider, simply named “Maria Hernandez,” was terminated after investigators failed five times to find any children or adults on-site.

Five years earlier in 2021, Jannus, Inc. in Boise received a $562,500 federal grant to provide “refugee childcare business development program.”

As previously mentioned, twelve individuals from Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and Syria have been arrested and charged with running daycare frauds in the San Diego metro region. Somali Family Services of San Diego apparently worked alongside the International Rescue Committee in building the San Diego immigrant day care industry, receiving a $397,292 federal grant in 2022 for the “SFS Afghan family childcare program.”

The Alliance for Multicultural Services (AMCS) in Houston, Texas closed in 2024 after racking up $1.4 million in debt, but not before receiving a $568,687 federal grant in 2015 for the “refugee family childcare microenterprise TX-007 development program.” Immigrant daycare in Texas took another black eye in May 2026 when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Golden Qi Holdings, owned by a Chinese national, alleging fake daycare companies were created to defraud the H-1B visa program.

Coincidentally, Somali Bantu Community of Greater Houston has been pushing daycare programs in the region since at least 2014 when they received a $370,000 grant for “refugee home-based childcare microenterprise development.”

In 2015, a Liberian immigrant named Jeremiah Tikonblah Nimely in Sioux Falls, South Dakota was forced to repay $60,000 for overbilling the state by “claiming four children who were not actually present.” Four years earlier in 2011, Lutheran Social Services of South Dakota got $350,000 from the federal government to provide “refugee childcare microenterprise development in Sioux Falls.”

In 2023, a Harford, Connecticut woman named Xiomy Auqui De La Cruz, who was a resident of Peru as recently as July 2019, was charged with allegedly stealing more than $127,000 from the Connecticut Department of Social Services using her daycare business, Care4Kids. Xiomy has pleaded not guilty, and should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty.

A dozen years earlier in 2011, Catholic Charities – Archdiocese of Hartford received a $350,000 federal grant described only as “microenterprises: refugee childcare.” The charity has also received more than $10 million from the federal government for various other refugee related projects.

This isn’t working (for anybody)

Again, the coincidences listed above do not mean the immigrants alleged to have committed the financial misdeeds were also recipients of federally funded microloans given out by NGOs in those same towns. An investigation into such a suspicion is not possible until the NGOs disbursing the taxpayer-supported loans provide public transparency regarding who is receiving them.

Alongside the American taxpayer, additional victims of this lack of transparency are the immigrant service providers who received these loans and then used them honestly, perhaps even exceptionally. They are part of the melting pot success stories that built America and deserve to be differentiated both from those who have committed fraud and those alleged to have done so.

But look at the big picture. The federal government, through NGOs of all shapes and sizes, has spent tens of millions of dollars on training immigrants to work in and own their own learning centers, daycares, and homecare companies. This seems to have led, directly or indirectly, to a nation-wide epidemic of welfare fraud. The individual fraudsters are the only ones ultimately responsible for their actions, but the federal government and the NGOs it funds are also partially to blame for pushing wave after wave of immigrants into programs that are exceptionally easy to defraud.

It’s time for this to stop. U.S. immigration policies should benefit Americans above all else. And while there is room for debate on how much and what kind of immigration should be allowed in order to best serve Americans, there’s no world in which huge numbers of immigrants being funneled into daycares, homecare, and other murky welfare-adjacent industries by immigration NGOs is the best way to advance anybody’s interests. Immigrants should be directed towards private industry, not government programs. Towards innovation, not benefits manipulation. Towards self-sufficiency and assimilation, not tribal reliance on just a handful of taxpayer-funded programs.

The NGO to Medicaid fraud pipeline is a disservice to immigrants and Americans alike, and it should be closed in favor of good-old-fashioned “nothing,” the starting point of all the best success stories. It’s the only way to protect American tax dollars and bring out the best in immigrants.

Source: https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-pipeline-immigration-ngos-and-medicaid-fraud/