Millions of dollars in cash, including large sums believed to be funding foreign terrorists, continue to fly out of the Minneapolis airport annually, according to lawmakers investigating the money funneling schemes.
Republican Minnesota state Rep. Kristin Robbins, chairwoman of the House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Committee, told the Washington Examiner that these cash-smuggling operations have been moving massive volumes of money via the state’s busiest airport for years.
But the $350 million flown out of Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in 2025 marked a record-high haul, a steady rise from the $343 million in 2024 and more than triple the $75 million identified back in 2000.
Robbins said the amount of money exiting through MSP, although only the country’s 16th largest airport, is far higher than the cash totals leaving other major U.S. travel hubs, including Los Angeles International Airport, New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, Chicago O’Hare International Airport, and the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
“We’re not that big of a city compared to these other international airports, but we have 90% more cash leaving ours,” Robbins said. “We’ve got to figure out what’s going on here.”
Where is the money going?
Over the years, criminal investigators have tied the cash flow to child care fraud within Minnesota’s social services. Fraudsters, many from the state’s Somali community, are suspected of transporting cash to terrorist networks abroad.
Much of the cash, stuffed inside suitcases and shipped out on international flights, makes its way to countries scattered across East Africa, where many Somalis fanned out following their nation’s civil war.
Somali refugees who resettled in Minnesota have been pressured to pay remittances to their war-torn home country through organized collection systems, known as hawalas.
The Minnesota Star Tribune and the Sahan Journal, a St. Paul newspaper, have interviewed operators of hawalas in Minneapolis, called collectors, who go around extracting money from members of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora.
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Of those interviewed, some Somali immigrants said the contributions went toward funding clan-based warfare back home, buying guns, ammunition, and general military supplies for the warring militias.
U.S. officials found that significant portions of the money funneled out of Minneapolis wound up in the pockets of terrorists who demanded a cut of the remittances.
Some hawala systems have been controlled directly by al Shabab, a designated terrorist group and paramilitary organization based in Somalia. In 2011, two Somali immigrants in Minnesota were convicted of raising money on behalf of al Shabab by soliciting funds door-to-door in Somali communities in Minneapolis.
Federal counterterrorism sources told City Journal that millions of dollars sent to Somalia by way of hawalas based out of Minnesota landed in the coffers of al Shabab.
This legislative session, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration, has introduced the Stop Somali Currency Airport Smuggling Through Hawalas Fraud Act.
The bill would require couriers in charge of the cash exports to disclose additional information about the beneficiaries of the outbound cash, reporting any money heading to countries of concern, including state sponsors of terrorism and destinations identified as high-risk by the State Department.
Where is the cash coming from?
Scott Stillman, formerly the head of digital forensics at the Minnesota Department of Human Services, testified in front of Robbins’s legislative committee this week on the financial ties investigators found directly linking proceeds from the child care fraud schemes to foreign benefactors.
At the time, Somali-owned day care centers were stealing millions of dollars in government subsidies from state programming meant to help low-income families with child care expenses.
Stillman said the criminal investigations division of the Minnesota DHS, which had access to bank records and cellular data, discovered that the department’s payments to child care providers would ping around the world to multiple banks in different countries and end up in East Africa.
“That’s how they knew that Minnesota money, taxpayer dollars, was being defrauded from these programs and sent overseas,” Robbins told the Washington Examiner.
Stillman, while working at the state DHS, also sounded the alarm about the stolen state funds being skimmed by terrorist organizations.
In 2017, Stillman sent a series of whistleblower reports to his department supervisors, alerting them to “significant amounts of these defrauded dollars being sent overseas to countries and organizations connected to entities known to fund terrorists and terrorism.”
A matter of federal regulation
There is no legal limit on how much cash can travel through customs per passenger, as long as travelers carrying $10,000 or more report the money to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, a bureau within the Treasury Department.
A retired agent of the Transportation Security Administration informed Robbins’s committee on Monday that the agency often did not physically check that the amount of money declared on the FinCEN form, which is typically submitted online before a courier arrives at the airport, matched what was actually in that courier’s carry-on or checked suitcase.
The agent, who previously worked at MSP, testified that when the X-ray machines flag luggage containing cash during the screening process, TSA takes the bag into a private room and inspects it, mainly to ensure that it does not conceal weapons or drugs.
“We never actually counted the money,” the TSA agent told committee members.
She recalled how her supervisor would eyeball a stack of cash based on the currency bands bundling the money, usually with $100 bills neatly laid on top.
Robbins questioned whether the TSA’s outbound cash statistics are an undercount of the amount of money truly flowing through the Minneapolis airport.
“As the testifier said,” Robbins told the Washington Examiner, “they see the top stack of hundreds, but there could be something else hidden underneath. So the concern is that maybe more money is leaving than we realize, because they haven’t actually been counting it.”
Robbins said she has been working closely behind the scenes with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to combat transnational financial crimes in Minnesota.
Bessent, after visiting the Twin Cities in January, lowered the reporting threshold of cross-border transactions out of the Minneapolis metropolitan area.
FinCEN, at Bessent’s behest, issued a geographic targeting order requiring payment processors operating in Hennepin and Ramsey counties, which cover Minneapolis and St. Paul, to file reports documenting transactions of $3,000 and above when the beneficiary is located outside the United States.
The enhanced compliance efforts and tightened reporting requirements are designed to help investigators quickly identify patterns of money laundering and stop suspicious payments sooner.
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Bessent also announced four active investigations into hawala money-transfer stations in Minnesota.
“They’re good federal partners,” Robbins said. “They’re helping us here, trying to trace the money. As legislators, we can shine a spotlight on it, but we don’t have access to bank records or any international jurisdiction. That’s why the Treasury has to run the show.”