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U.S. District Judge Nancy Brasel on Monday imposed a 10-year prison term on the latest defendant to be sentenced in the Feeding Our Future case. Abdimajid M. Nur was one of five people connected to a small Shakopee restaurant convicted at a 2024 trial of stealing $47 million from government child nutrition programs during the pandemic.
The Minnesota U.S. attorney’s office says the scheme, centered around the now-defunct nonprofit Feeding Our Future, was the nation’s largest COVID-19-related fraud and ultimately cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Nur, 24, is the youngest of the 78 defendants charged in the case since September 2022. Soon after the jury convicted him of wire fraud and money laundering, Nur pleaded guilty in a related scheme to bribe one of the jurors. Nur faces a separate sentencing hearing for that crime.
The sentence is four years shy of the prison term that lead prosecutor Joe Thompson asked for and about three years longer than the sentence defense attorney Edward Sapone requested.
Thompson said that Nur was “not just a cog in the machine,” but played a key role in the scheme by creating and submitting the bulk of the bogus invoices and other paperwork used to request reimbursement from the Summer Food Service and Child and Adult Care Food Programs.
Nur “participated in this fraud scheme literally every single day,” Thompson said. “This wasn’t a momentary lapse in judgment.”
The prosecutor also noted that Nur recruited his sister, Hayat M. Nur, to help him create the phony documents. In August, Brasel sentenced Hayat Nur, 28, to nearly four years in prison.
In arguing for a shorter prison term, Sapone said that his client has no plans to appeal his conviction and is taking responsibility for his role in the fraud. Nur has enrolled in classes and has taken part in other programming over the last 18 months that he’s been detained in the Sherburne County Jail and plans to continue on his path to self-improvement when he’s transferred to federal prison.
“Abdimajid Nur has done everything right to turn his back on criminality and send a message that he is going to continue to do everything right,” Sapone said.
The defense attorney said that his client fled civil war in Somalia at age four, grew up in poverty with his mother and seven siblings, and wasn’t reunited with his father until he was 14. Sapone also noted that Nur joined the U.S. Army at age 17 and was part of a unit that mobilized to help with COVID-19 relief in the early days of the pandemic.
Sapone also said that Nur had originally planned to plead guilty in the fraud case, but decided to go to trial because “he was still under the grip of [Abdiaziz] Farah,” the Shakopee group’s ringleader who’s serving a 28-year prison term, the longest of those sentenced so far.
“I stand before you as a man whose heart is filled to the brim with regret,” Nur told Judge Brasel. “I can’t change the past and undo what I’ve done and the harm that I’ve caused but I can make better choices now. I choose to take full responsibility for my actions.”
“Where others saw a crisis and rushed to help, you saw money and rushed to steal,” Brasel said. “And given where we were in the pandemic, that’s mind boggling.”
In imposing a sentence that’s below the federal guideline recommendations, Brasel noted that Nur “did worthy things” prior to participating in the scheme, particularly his military service. She also said Nur’s youth — he was 19 when he joined the conspiracy — was the most overarching mitigating factor in favor of a shorter prison term.
Brasel also ordered that Nur pay restitution of $47,920,514.
78th defendant charged
Hours before Nur's sentencing, the latest defendant to be indicted in the Feeding Our Future case made his initial court appearance before a magistrate judge in St. Paul.
Abdirashid Bixi Dool of Pelican Rapids, Minn., is the 78th person charged in the sprawling case. Dool, 36, is accused of operating fake meal distribution sites in Moorhead and Pelican Rapids under the sponsorship of Feeding Our Future.
According to the indictment, Dool and an unnamed co-conspirator siphoned about $1.1 million between March 2021 and early 2022, when the scheme ended with a series of FBI raids across the Twin Cities.
Like others charged in the case, “Dool used his cut of the fraud proceeds to travel, enrich himself, and buy real estate,” prosecutors allege.
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