Ramsey County Sheriff Says Minnesota Has One Shot Before It Looks Like Europe

FBI Director Kash Patel said Minnesota fraudsters stole food money for hungry kids to buy mansions.

Now the sheriff next door says a different crisis never got fixed and it is getting worse.

Fletcher says Minnesota has one shot to stop it before the state ends up looking like parts of Europe.

The Three Hundred Men Fletcher Says Are Driving the Crisis

Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher sat down with NewsNation's Elizabeth Vargas this week and did not soften anything.

He said the vast majority of the roughly 100,000 Somali residents in his area have nothing to do with the violence.

"We really have 300 troublemakers out of 100,000 Somali people here," Fletcher said.

That is a small percentage, and Fletcher made sure to say so on camera.

But he said those 300 people are enough to drag the entire state into a crisis it may not recover from for generations.

"We better work our butts off right now to fix this problem," Fletcher said.

Skip a beat, and the warning gets darker: a "200-year legacy like parts of Europe."

The RICO Plan Aimed At Fifty Gang Leaders

Fletcher is not just diagnosing the problem.

He has a plan to end it.

He identified roughly 50 individuals as the actual leadership running the gangs causing the damage.

Half of them would face federal RICO racketeering charges, and county prosecutors would take the rest.

He is pushing for a new regional task force that pairs his department directly with federal authorities.

This is not the first time Fletcher has raised the alarm.

He told investigators in July that his office is actively tracking 12 separate Somali gangs across the Twin Cities metro.

Minnesota Already Learned This Lesson Once

Minnesota has watched a Somali-linked network drain the state while officials looked away before.

Prosecutors say the Feeding Our Future scheme stole as much as a billion dollars meant to feed hungry kids during the pandemic.

Investigators later traced some of that stolen money overseas, with researchers flagging ties running all the way to the terror group al-Shabaab.

Patel said the scheme funded "mansions and luxury cars" instead of feeding children.

Governor Tim Walz admitted the fraud happened but tried to wave off the worst estimates as "sensationalized."

That is the same pattern Fletcher is describing now, a small number of bad actors doing enormous damage while the people in charge downplay the scale of it.

CAIR-MN and a Minneapolis City Council member have already attacked Fletcher's comments as dangerous and stereotyping.

Fletcher is not backing off, because the last time Minnesota brushed off a warning like this one, it cost taxpayers a fortune and ended up funding a terror group overseas.

The Warning Already Written in Rotherham

Fletcher did not pick "Europe" by accident.

Britain's Jay Report found that officials in Rotherham let at least 1,400 children get abused over sixteen years, in part because police and council staff were afraid of being called racist for naming the gangs responsible.

Investigator Alexis Jay said police "regarded many child victims with contempt" and buried an early warning report instead of acting on it.

By the time Britain admitted what had actually happened, the abuse had gone on long enough to scar an entire generation.

Fletcher is trying to get ahead of that exact outcome while Minnesota still has 300 names instead of 1,400 victims.

Sources:

• Breitbart News, "MN Sheriff If We Don't Fix Somali Gang Issue We'll Have 200-Year Legacy Like Parts of Europe," Breitbart News, October 7, 2026.
• Breitbart News, "CAIR-MN Calls Sheriff's Somali Gang Warning Dangerous as Law Enforcement Tracks 12 Somali Gangs in Twin Cities Metro," Breitbart News, July 9, 2026.
• Fox News, "Minnesota Fraud Cases Explained: How Hundreds of Millions Allegedly Slipped Through State Programs," Fox News, 2026.
• Fox News, "Report Finds 1,400 Children Exploited in UK Town," Fox News, August 26, 2014.