A former Somali-born aide to Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey was ordered to federal prison for stealing $1.6 million in child nutrition funds tied to COVID relief fraud.
Abdi Nur Salah was ordered Thursday to spend 33 months behind bars for his role in the Feeding Our Future case, the Washington Examiner reported.
The same account also described the term as three years in federal prison. Prosecutors tied him to the theft of $1.6 million meant for child nutrition, carried out as the operator of a fake food distributor inside the fraud ring.
Salah had worked as an aide to Frey, the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis. The sentence lands in a case that drained federal dollars sold to the public as pandemic aid for children.
Federal authorities treated Salah as more than a bit player. He ran a sham food distributor used to pull child nutrition funds out of a program built for kids during the COVID-19 emergency.
The money was supposed to feed children. Instead, the case describes a pipeline of bogus claims and paper entities that converted relief dollars into personal take.
A U.S. Department of Justice release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Minnesota, linked in that reporting, framed the action as a St. Paul man sentenced to 33 months for defrauding $1.6 million in federal child nutrition funds.
Feeding Our Future became the banner name on a sprawling Minnesota fraud probe. The Washington Examiner described the ring as the largest-known racket to exploit COVID-19 relief programming during the pandemic, a label that belongs to the coverage, not an independent scorecard.
Whatever the final ranking, the mechanics were simple and ugly. Operators invented or inflated food sites, billed the government, and kept cash that never bought meals at the scale claimed.
Salah’s past job under Frey gives the sentence a sharper political edge than a routine white-collar plea.
Minneapolis taxpayers and federal taxpayers already paid once for the stolen nutrition funds. Now they watch a former City Hall aide leave for federal custody after helping empty a program sold as compassion for kids.
The reporting does not spell out Salah’s exact title, start date, or end date in the mayor’s orbit. It does state the core fact: he was a former Somali-born aide to Frey before the fraud case caught up with him.
Frey is not accused in the materials at hand of joining the scheme. The accountability point is narrower and harder to dodge. City hall credentials and community-network trust are exactly the kind of cover fraud rings hunt for when federal spigots open wide and oversight runs thin.
COVID relief poured out under emergency rules. Child nutrition dollars moved on claims that were supposed to be checked. In this ring, those checks failed long enough for millions to walk out the door.
The prison term is 33 months, also rendered as three years in the same account. Either way, it is real time for a real theft from a program with “child” in the name.
No verbatim quotes from the judge, prosecutors, or Salah appear in the available report. No docket number, courtroom, or full charge list is laid out there either. The operative public facts are the sentence length, the $1.6 million figure, the fake-distributor role, and the Feeding Our Future case caption.
Restitution, supervised release, and other conditions are not detailed in that account. The headline result is custody for a man who once worked beside the mayor of a major American city.
Feeding Our Future was not a paperwork glitch. It was organized conversion of pandemic charity into private gain, built on entities that pretended to feed children while billing the United States.
When emergency spending meets weak verification, the bill does not vanish. It lands on taxpayers, and the kids used as the marketing hook get the leftovers.
A former mayoral aide walking into federal prison for looting child nutrition funds is not a paperwork error, it is what happens when oversight fails and political proximity is treated as a substitute for proof.
