Zamzam Jama and her family stole $5.6 million from a federal child nutrition program that was supposed to feed hungry kids during the pandemic. She didn’t feed a single child. She submitted fake invoices, pocketed millions, and got caught. Federal prosecutors asked for 16 months. Sentencing guidelines called for 10 to 16 months.
Judge Nancy Brasel gave her six months.
Six months. For $5.6 million. That’s roughly $31,000 per day of her sentence. Crime doesn’t pay — unless you’re committing it in Minnesota, in which case it pays spectacularly well.
Jama wasn’t a lone wolf. She was part of Feeding Our Future, the largest pandemic relief fraud in American history. Two hundred and fifty million dollars stolen — a quarter of a billion — mostly by Somali organizations in Minnesota that fabricated meal counts, created fake invoices, and pocketed federal child nutrition funds meant for kids who weren’t eating. They claimed to have served over a million meals. They served zero.
Another defendant, Abdul Abubakar Ali, ran a shell company called “Youth Inventors Lab.” Inspiring name. The youth didn’t invent anything, and the lab didn’t exist. Ali submitted invoices claiming over a million meals served. Actual meals served: none. He personally pocketed over $100,000 of the $3 million his fake company billed. His sentence from Judge Brasel? One year and one day.
Six of the Jama family members were indicted in September 2022. One died of natural causes in 2023. The rest pleaded guilty. And then Judge Nancy Brasel — nominated to the bench by Senator Amy Klobuchar, for those keeping score at home — decided that stealing millions from starving children during a pandemic warranted less time than some people get for a DUI.
Here’s where it stops being just a sentencing story and starts being something uglier. The Feeding Our Future fraud didn’t happen in a vacuum. It happened in Minnesota. Under Governor Tim Walz. Whose administration approved the funding, failed to audit it, and looked the other way while $250 million vanished into a network of shell companies and fraudulent nonprofits run primarily by Somali immigrants.
Nobody wants to say that part out loud. It’s the part that makes editorial boards nervous and cable news anchors change the subject. But the facts don’t care about your comfort level. The fraud was concentrated in Somali-run organizations. The defendants are overwhelmingly Somali. And the sentences are so light that you have to wonder whether the judges are more afraid of being called racist than of letting criminals walk.
If a white-collar executive stole $5.6 million from a children’s charity, he’d get ten years and a perp walk on the evening news. Zamzam Jama stole $5.6 million from a children’s nutrition program and will be home before the Super Bowl.
Follow this forward. What does a six-month sentence for $5.6 million in fraud tell the next person thinking about stealing from a federal program? It tells them the risk-reward ratio is the best deal in America. Six months for $5.6 million works out to about $11.2 million per year — tax-free, no commute, and the only downside is a brief vacation at a minimum-security facility. Wall Street guys go to prison for insider trading profits smaller than that.
The sentencing guidelines existed for a reason. The prosecutors made their recommendation for a reason. Judge Brasel ignored both. And when this happens — when a judge departs downward from both the guidelines and the prosecution’s request in the largest pandemic fraud case in American history — you’re not watching mercy. You’re watching a system that has decided certain defendants deserve different rules.
That’s not justice. That’s surrender with a gavel.