Two more sentences in the sprawling Feeding Our Future fraud scandal are scheduled to be handed down on Tuesday, September 8. Mekfira Hussein and her husband Abduljabar were jointly indicted in the case in October 2022. Mekfira had been separately charged the previous month in the case, after her unsuccessful effort to flee to Ethiopia on a one-way ticket. She was accused of stealing almost $7 million from the free-food program.
Mekfira pled guilty in January 2025, with the dollar amount now calculated at just under $9 million. Abduljabar followed with a guilty plea in February 2025.
Prosecutors are requesting prison sentences of just under 5 years and just under 4 years, respectively. In a joint filing, lawyers for the defendants are asking for zero jail time. They point out that, unlike some other defendants, the Husseins did operate, to some extent, a legitimate food distribution operation under her nonprofit company, Shamsia Hopes.
They argue (p. 14),
None of these facts excuse Defendants’ admitted fraudulent conduct. They do, however, mean that this is not a case of a wholly fictitious meal program, and the Court should weigh that difference in calibrating appropriate sentences.
I would argue for just the opposite. At the height of the fraud, Mekfira put herself forward to the media as the legitimate face of the fraudulent Feeding Our Future operation. The Sahan Journal reported in May 2021,
Mekfira Hussein’s meal programs have been feeding 5,000 children a day in the Twin Cities. A state effort to discipline an intermediary nonprofit forced her to suspend operations. While the Minnesota Department of Education and the nonprofit Feeding Our Future battle in court over allegations of poor management, Mekfira ran out of money and laid off staff.
As we now know, she was never feeding 5,000 children per day. In a rare instance of trying to stop the fraud while it was still raging, in the spring of 2021, the Dept. of Education briefly cut off payments to Feeding Our Future. Mekfira ran to the media crying racism.
Sahan Journal wrote in May 2021,
Mekfira Hussein knows what it’s like to be hungry.
As a young girl, she and her Oromo family fled Ethiopia as refugees to neighboring Kenya. During that hectic time, she remembers sometimes going a full day without food.
Other than Mekfira’s account, there were no contemporaneous reports of child hunger resulting from the collapse of Feeding Our Future, because it was nearly all a fraud.
Mekfira doesn’t want children in Minnesota to experience what she went through. That’s why she runs Shamsia Hopes, which she said has been providing free meals to 5,000 children—mostly Oromo, Somali, and Hmong—every day since last fall.
The Husseins will receive the 28th and 29th sentences handed down in the food fraud. The totals so far:
The nonprofit company, Shamsia Hopes, was dissolved by court order in September 2024.