The Trump administration has moved to seize three Minneapolis properties allegedly bought with money stolen in the Feeding Our Future fraud — the $250 million child-nutrition scheme that prosecutors describe as the largest pandemic-era fraud in the country. The administration says it has filed a civil forfeiture complaint to take back the properties for the American people, a step spotlighted at Tuesday's White House fraud event, where independent journalist Nick Shirley was on the ground covering the announcement.
The complaint (File No. 26-cv-4533) targets three adjacent properties on Pillsbury Avenue in south Minneapolis — two residential units and two adjacent vacant lots — which county property records value collectively at $422,000. According to the complaint, the target is the Addis Foundation, a nonprofit that reportedly took some $13 million out of the federal child nutrition program through Partners in Nutrition, a sponsor in the same federal meal program as Feeding Our Future.
Of the roughly $250 million prosecutors say was diverted in the scheme, only about $60 million has been recovered so far — the forfeiture push is about clawing back the rest, property by property.
Feeding Our Future was supposed to feed children. Instead, prosecutors say, the money flowed through a network of sponsors and sites that claimed to serve meals that never existed — false forms, kickbacks and cover-ups laid out by the Justice Department as the prosecutions rolled on, with defendant after defendant charged — the count has now passed 80 — and the fraud's political protection becoming a scandal of its own in Minnesota.
Civil forfeiture is the recovery tool built for exactly this: the government does not have to wait for every criminal case to end before going after the houses, lots and accounts the money bought. Tuesday's filing says the Pillsbury Avenue properties were purchased with the proceeds — and if the court agrees, they stop belonging to the people who allegedly stole from hungry children's program and go back to the American people.