Bessent delivers bad news to Somalis on welfare: No more wire transfers to the homeland

U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent revealed on Thursday that the Trump administration is clamping down on extra-national remittances by individuals exploiting public assistance.

The announcement, which comes on the heels of a series of damning revelations about fraud committed by Somalis in Minnesota, could prove impactful for the crime-ridden Islamic nation of Somalia.

After all, members of the Somali diaspora sent $2.12 billion in remittances home in 2024 alone. The loss of the American portion of this funding stream would not go unnoticed for a failed nation with a GDP in the neighborhood of $12 billion.

'Our generosity has been taken advantage of.'

Bessent, who is also the acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, told Fox News' Laura Ingraham, "We are here to follow the money because that's what Treasury does."

"We did it with the mafia, we have done it with the cartels, and now we are going to do it with these Somali fraudsters," continued Bessent. "Treasury has something called FinCEN, Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, and we are coming in."

Bessent indicated that the agency is launching four investigations into money-service businesses "that we believe may have wired money out of the country — a lot of the ill-gotten, stolen money — over to the Middle East, over to Somalia. We'll see where that's going."

RELATED: Somali terror group cashing in on your tax dollars? Minnesota's child-care fraud whistleblowers warned about a decade ago.

Photographer: Ben Brewer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

As part of the crackdown, Bessent indicated that FinCEN will be issuing a Geographic Targeting Order, an order that imposes new identification and record-keeping requirements pertaining to transactions within a certain region, and engaging in "enhanced surveillance."

"There's something called a Suspicious Activity Report if a certain amount of money gets wired," added Bessent.

According to guidance released in October by FinCEN, financial institutions are required to "file a SAR if the institution knows, suspects, or has reason to suspect that the transaction or series of transactions are designed to evade [currency transaction reporting] requirements."

After Ingraham suggested the threshold was $10,000, Bessent said, "We're lowering that to $3,000."

In addition to significantly lowering the threshold for a SAR, Bessent said that "from now on, anyone who wires money out from one of these money-service businesses has to check a box saying whether they are on public assistance."

"If you are on public assistance, we are going to start pushing that you cannot wire money out of the country," added Bessent.

"Our generosity has been taken advantage of."

The treasury secretary further suggested that if a so-called asylum seeker is wiring money out of the country, "one of two things must be true: You are getting too much money and your benefits should be cut, or you are part of this conspiracy."

Days before President Donald Trump announced the termination of the Temporary Protected Status designation for Somalia, BlazeTV host Christopher Rufo and investigative reporter Ryan Thorpe detailed the alleged direction of stolen taxpayer funds by Somalis in America to terrorists abroad.

According to the duo's City Journal report, federal counterterrorism sources confirmed "that millions of dollars in stolen funds have been sent back to Somalia, where they ultimately landed in the hands of the terror group Al-Shabaab."

Al-Shabaab is a Somalia-based, Al-Qaeda-linked terrorist organization committed to waging a global jihad.

One confidential source told Rufo and Thorpe that "the largest funder of Al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer."

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