Dozens of federal agents working with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security probed multiple locations in Lewiston on Tuesday that have been associated with Somali fraud allegations and gun theft charges.
Those locations included sites linked to Gateway Community Services CEO Abdullahi Ali and his former deputies State Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland) and Rep. Yusuf Yusuf (D-Portland), as well as a 210 Blake St. property owned by Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services (MEIRS) founder Rilwan Osman.
News of the federal investigation emerged subtly on an X account associated with Homeland Security Investigations New England, @HSINewEngland.
“HSI is actively conducting audits of businesses in Maine to protect America from fraud & ensure businesses only employ legal workers,” the agency said in a post.
“Hiring unauthorized workers risks severe penalties & undermines national security,” it said. “The best way to protect your business is by following the law.”
A spokesperson from HSI in Portland declined to elaborate on why the agency had selected those addresses for aggressive audit visits.
The intense federal investigation targeted the Gateway Community Services’ office at 124 Canal St. — a hub of Somali-linked nonprofits and Medicaid agencies, including the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition.
The presence of HSI agents at Gateway’s Lewiston office is yet another sign that scrutiny of the organization is intensifying.
Last week, U.S. Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the chairman of the powerful House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the U.S. Treasury Department requesting financial records for Gateway CEO Abdullahi Ali, former Assistant Executive Director Deqa Dhalac, and a host of other individuals associated with Gateway’s 501(c)3 arm.
[RELATED: House Oversight Requests Bank Records Linked to Maine Medicaid Agency, Somali Rep Dhalac…]
The HSI photographs also appear to show agents inspecting the 210 Blake St. address that Iman Osman has falsely listed as his residence in order to secure a mayoral appointment to the Lewiston School Committee and, later, an illegitimate spot on the Lewiston City Council representing a ward in which he does not live.
Despite his ineligibility for the Ward 5 city council seat and condemnations by prominent Lewiston leaders, Osman appears set for his swearing-in ceremony on Monday at 6:00 PM EST at Lewiston City Hall, according to Lewiston officials who spoke with the Maine Wire.
City records show that the 210 Blake Street building where Osman claims to live was condemned as unfit for human habitation, and the building appeared vacant on Tuesday. That building happens to be owned by Rilwan Osman, Iman’s brother, who is also the founder of the Maine Immigrant and Refugee Services (MEIRS).
At the same time HSI agents were investigating Somali-controlled nexuses in Lewiston and potentially other Maine cities, Maine Republicans held a press conference at the State House demanding that Gov. Janet Mills (D) and Attorney General Aaron Frey (D) cooperate with the Department of Justice’s investigation into criminal activities carried out by noncitizens in Maine.
Nearly all of the organizations federal law enforcement appears to be probing are entirely funded with taxpayer money, including MaineCare dollars and federally funded no-bid contracts issued by the Mills Administration in violation of the safeguards around the no-bid contract process.
[RELATED: Maine Audit Reveals Systemic $2.1 Billion Financial Mismanagement and Corruption Risk…]
Gateway Community Services, founded by Somali refugee Abdullahi Ali, received approximately $28.8 million in MaineCare payments between 2019 and 2024, including: $4,380,787.27 in 2019, $5,343,145.12 in 2020, $5,536,030.98 in 2021, $4,878,840.07 in 2022, $4,485,309.85 in 2023, and $4,145,080.51 in 2024.
Much of that money now appears suspect. in light of allegations leveled by a former employee.
In May, the former Gateway billing specialist, Christopher Bernardini, came forward to the Maine Wire to allege that the government-funded migrant services agency systematically defrauded the MaineCare program for at least five years. According to Bernardini, Gateway supervisors would regularly use back-end access to the Electronic Visit Verification program to create fake service hours, which were them submitted to the state for payment.
Those allegations tracked perfectly with public records obtained by the Maine Wire, which showed that the company has been under audit by the Department of Health and Human Services for most of its existence and has been found to have significantly over-billed MaineCare in each audit. Details from the “Notices of Violation” received by Gateway showed that the company often couldn’t produce documentary support for significant services the company claimed to have provided.
The first audit, covering the period from November 1, 2015, to October 14, 2016, caused Gateway to repay a significantly reduced penalty of $125,058. The second audit, spanning January 1, 2017, to December 31, 2018, was lowered from $776,022 to $537,550 after an administrative review, but the case remains in appeal with the Division of Administrative Hearings at the DHHS.
Last week, amid national bipartisan scrutiny of Medicaid fraud operations led primarily by individuals of Somali descent, the Mills Administration finally relented and shut off the cash flow to Gateway. Although the company’s Medicaid income has been suspended, the administration has not commented on whether they will continue to receive payments under the no-bid contracts they’ve received from the Mills Administration or the $400,000 grant they were awarded by Attorney General Aaron Frey (D).
To date, both Mills and Frey have obstructed Justice Department inquiries and activities.
On Jan. 10, just ten days before President Donald Trump took office, Frey sent a secret directive to Department of Health and Human Services employees advising them not to talk to Justice Department lawyers or lawyers working for the then-unnamed U.S. Attorney.
Frey has never commented publicly on what DHHS employees might need to conceal from the Justice Department, and no other outlet in Maine has reported on the directive or asked Frey why he would attempt to gag state employees.
In December, the Maine Wire reported — once again, exclusively — that emails obtained under the Freedom of Access Act showed DHHS Commissioner Sarah Gagne-Holmes expressing fear over a potential subpoena from the House Oversight Committee, which has also been investigating irregularities in Maine’s Medicaid program.
“[T]he goal here is to avoid a congressional subpoena,” Gagne-Holmes wrote in an email to Ian Yaffe, Bethany Hamm, and Emily Cathcart.
Mills, despite facing a tense Democratic U.S. Senate primary contest against political neophyte Graham Platner, has yet to face scrutiny or questioning over her close relationship with Gateway’s most public faces. Platner’s silence on the matter could be due in part to the fact that earlier this month he joined former Gateway Community Services employee Safiya Khalid at a pro-Somali event in Lewiston, which was attended almost exclusively by elderly white people.
Tuesday night, the only Democratic leader to comment on the allegations facing Gateway Community Services was House Speaker Ryan Fecteau (D-Biddeford), who told his followers “we must avoid generalizations against entire groups of people, in this case, Mainers who have emigrated from Somali.”
The investigation into Gateway could become particularly problematic for Maine Democrats — and not just because several Democratic officials and appointees have direct ties to the embattled organizations.
Gateway has also come to play an influential role in turning out migrant voters for Democrats with the Community Organizing Alliance (COA), an organization Gateway’s CEO and several top employees created prior to Gov. Mills’ 2022 re-election fight with former Republican Gov. Paul LePage, and shortly after receiving six-figures of federally funded cash via a no-bid contract from the Mills Administration.
[RELATED: Migrant Agency Accused of MaineCare Fraud Boasts Extensive Ties to Maine Democrats…]
COA, an explicitly political organization headed up by Ali’s former special assistant Safiya Khalid, boasted a board of Democratic big wigs.
Although Gateway’s political activism arm has recently attempted to scrub their board members from their website, the Maine Wire archived a copy for posterity. It’s not clear why top Democratic fundraisers and lobbyists would be attempting to remove their connections to an organization that is now facing multiple federal investigations.
As previously reported, COA’s advisory board includes:
Fatuma Hussein, Maureen Drouin, Chloe Maxmin, Joanne D’Arcangelo, and B.J. McCollister. Hussein and Drouin are, respectively, the heads of the Immigrant Resource Center of Maine and Maine Conservation Voters. McCollister is Troy Jackson’s former chief of staff. Maxmin is a former Democratic state senator, while D’Arcangelo is a Planned Parenthood board member. COA held multiple events with Secretary of State Shenna Bellows prior to both the 2022 election and the 2024 election, and the group is fiscally sponsored by Orono Sen. Mike Tipping’s Maine People’s Resource Center, the 501(c)3 arm of the Maine People’s Alliance — a key dark money group for Maine’s far left and part of the Arabella Advisors’ network of influence groups.
Read more on Gateway Community Services extensive, lucrative, and mutually beneficial relationship…
TL;DR – The Mills Administration awarded federal COVID-19 money through no-bid contracts to Gateway Community Services. Then Gateway organized and facilitated a Get Out the Vote operation targeting “New Mainer” neighborhoods in Portland and Lewiston-Auburn. While the pretext for handing no-bid contracts to Gateway and other left-wing NGOs was the pandemic emergency, those same contracts were expanded prior to the 2024 election and continue to provide funding. The effect was that taxpayer dollars were used to finance what was, in practice, an arm of the Democratic Party. (Source)
The Gateway to Jubbland
In March, the Maine Wire revealed that previously secret DHHS audit documents showed Gateway Community Services has been the subject of two audits that showed the organization has consistently over-billed Medicaid, a welfare program known in Maine as MaineCare. While Gateway eventually paid back the wrongful welfare payments from the first audit, the organization continues to fight repayment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in welfare spending that DHHS says was wrongfully charged to the taxpayers.
The Maine Wire’s March report also revealed that Gateway CEO Abdullahi Ali, after securing a nearly $700,000 PPP loan, began making frequent trips to Eastern Africa and eventually launched a failed bid to become president of Jubaland, semi-autonomous region of southern Somalia. As part of his candidacy, Ali bragged in at least two Somali-language interviews that he was bankrolling armed militia groups to help him seize power amid an acrimonious and contested election. In one of those videos, Ali stated explicitly that his goal was to use armed paramilitary forces to depose the incumbent President Madobe.
Ali’s boasts about funding a political army to back his attempt at seizing power in Jubbaland, combined with the multi-million dollar flows of taxpayer funds into his company and personal bank accounts, raised the obvious possibility that U.S. taxpayer dollars were being used to finance armed tribal clan disputes among competing warlords and wannabe warlords in an East African region that has been engrossed in a bitter multi-polar civil war ever since Mohammed Siad Barre launched a military junta in the 1980s.
Adding yet another layer of intrigue to the Gateway CEO’s alleged international arms deals is a July 2024 junket Ali enjoyed alongside several other Somali politicians and political operatives, including some with additional ties to Gateway Community Services.
The existence of the luxurious all-expenses-paid junket to Turkey and Azerbaijan was first disclosed on the financial disclosure forms of certain Maine officials. Among them was Somali State Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D-South Portland), a former assistant executive director at Gateway who has drawn intense criticism for consistently declaring that her first priority as an American political official is helping the war-torn country she first fled more than 35 years ago.
Also on the junket was Rep. Mana Abdi (D-Lewiston), another Somali refugee turned State Rep who has often commented negatively on the warm reception she received in the U.S. as a penniless and homeless migrant. Additionally, Ekhlas Ahmed, a former Gateway worker, was photographed on the trip just months before she would be named as the policy adviser to Maine’s latest government bureaucracy, the Office of New Americans (ONA).
The ONA migrant resettlement agency itself emerged from a bill introduced by Rep. Dhalac, which Gov. Mills later passed using the stealthy technique of tucking an unrelated bill into a broader spending package.
[RELATED: Janet Mills Names Director of Taxpayer-Funded State Migrant Resettlement Office…]
The junket — like virtually every story that touches on the less glamorous side of Maine’s migrant-industrial complex — was vigorously ignored by Maine’s newspapers until the left-wing monthly paper The Bollard finally summoned the courage to ask why top Democrats were ignoring both the junket and the junket’s organizer, Tarlan Ahmadov. Ahmadov, the erstwhile head of ONA, was specifically tapped by Mills and later ousted after a series of Maine Wire reports revealed his long and sordid history of anti-Armenian bigotry. Although Ahmadov no longer heads the migrant re-settlement agency, he remains employed in a cushy six-figure job at the Maine Department of Labor.
[RELATED: The Sinister Side of Tarlan Ahmadov’s Shusha Junket…]
The Somali-studded junket raised a number of questions. Chief among them: Why did Abdullahi Ali and Deqa Dhalac stage a photo op in the Nagorno-Kahrbak region, an area where Armenian Christians were forcefully displaced from their homes and churches by the Muslim Azeri military. The garish photos, which still decorate the embattled Somali leaders’ social media accounts, would be akin to white Maine pols posing for smiling photographs at the site of a bombed put Ukrainian village while posting positively about taking meetings with D-list Kremlin officials.
But the other question the junket raises — a question that Homeland Security Investigators may been more keen to explore than whether Gateway was hiring illegal aliens — is whether the Azeri junket was part of an international overture by Ali to secure weaponry for his nascent political bid.
Apart from Gateway’s well documented travails, the HSI post also hints at looming trouble for Iman Osman and his more powerful brother Rilwan Osman.
The lesser brother, Iman, has made headlines recently when Maine Wire journalist Jon Fetherston uncovered that the Somali refugee did not live at 210 Blake St., a condemned mixed-use building owned by his brother. Iman Osman’s residency is significant because his false claim to be a resident of Ward 5 is what allowed Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline to appoint him to the Lewiston School Committee — an appointment that now, in retrospect, was totally illegitimate under the Lewiston Public School rules and the city charter. But Osman’s false residency claims continue to cause controversy in Lewiston because Osman was elected in November to serve on the Lewiston City Council, once again serving on the basis of the false claim that he lives at an address that has been condemned by city officials as unfit for human habitation.
Further complicating Iman Osman’s bid to seize the small Ward 5 fiefdom where he doesn’t live is his indictment in early December on two sets of gun theft charges. According to court documents obtained by the Maine Wire, a grand jury has indicted Osman on charges of stealing two separate firearms arms.
According to the records, Osman has been indicted on two Class B felony charges related to the theft and possession of stolen firearms and explosive devices. The indictment, handed down by an Androscoggin County grand jury on December 1, 2025, accuses Osman of crimes allegedly committed over nearly a year, meaning he was under investigation for multiple gun crimes while Mayor Sheline had appointed him to the school board and while he was making an illegitimate run for a city council seat for which he’s not eligible to hold.
The charges stem from incidents between November 15, 2023, and October 11, 2024, in Lewiston, according to the court document. Count 1 alleges receiving stolen property under 17-A M.R.S. §359(1)(B)(2), involving Osman knowingly receiving, retaining, or disposing of a firearm or explosive device belonging to the Estate of Leroy Scott, with the intent to deprive the estate of its property. The item is described as having probably been stolen. Count 2 charges theft by unauthorized taking under 17-A M.R.S. §353(1)(B)(2), accusing Osman of obtaining or exercising unauthorized control over an explosive device from the Estate of Mowld Gure, again with the intent to deprive the rightful owner. Both counts classify the offenses as Class B crimes, which in Maine can carry penalties of up to 10 years in prison and fines up to $20,000, though actual sentences often depend on factors like criminal history and plea agreements.
It’s not clear how Osman knew either Scott or Gure, or how he would have allegedly taken illegal possession of their firearms. But in a separate firearm-related issue, Osman himself reported to the Lewiston Police Department in November that he’d had a handgun stolen from an unlocked vehicle he’d parked on Bartlett St., one of the highest crime areas of Lewiston.
Bartlett St. also happens to be the location of Rilwan Osman’s MEIRS, another organization that has faced difficultly accounting for massive payments its received under MaineCare.
According to documents obtained by the Maine Wire, MEIRS, like Gateway, was subjected to DHHS audits that found the migrant-run organization over-billed MaineCare for a whopping $2.4 million. Like Gateway, MEIRS has continued to receive special no-bid contracts from the Mills Administration despite its difficulties in explaining lofty reimbursements from DHHS.
Gateway Community Services’ office at 124 Canal St. — a hub of Somali-linked nonprofits and Medicaid agencies. Secretary of State records show that the shabby office building — owned by Veridis LLC — is the registered address for ATQ LLC, Careway Express LLC, LA Home Care LLC, Noble Personal Care LLC, Optimus Residential Care LLC, and it has also been used as the mailing address for Quality Care LLC, which previously went by the names Adam Healthcare LLC and Quality Healthcare LLC.
Quality Care LLC is owned by Ferdus Awali, according to state records, and has billed MaineCare for nearly $1.3 million since 2019. Prior to changing its name to Quality Care LLC, the company went by Adam Healthcare Services LLC, which was dissolved in 2021 after a DHHS audit found the company over-billed MaineCare by $647,834.26.
It’s not clear why Quality Care LLC and multiple other Home and Community Based Care organizations would use Gateway’s Canal St. location as their mailing address.
Neither Ali, nor Dhalac, nor any employees of Gateway Community Services have ever responded to the Maine Wire’s requests for an interview or our questions about their business practices. But they have leveled baseless and defamatory allegations of racism during interviews with friendly media personalities. In response to these comically absurd aspersions, we’ve invited “Dr.” Ali to take part in an open forum in Maine should he dare to set foot again on American soil.
