AUGUSTA, Maine — Rep. Deqa Dhalac (D) is heading for the exits.
After months of mounting scrutiny tied to Gateway Community Services, including MaineCare fraud allegations, Lewiston shooting-related grant questions, and expanding federal interest, Dhalac announced on Jan. 29, 2026, that she will not seek reelection, blaming what she called an “increasingly hostile and unsafe” environment for Black and brown public servants.
Speaking to this reporter Tuesday at the State House, Dhalac leaned on the same core defense: she says she worked on the “non-profit” side of Gateway and had no knowledge of billing practices now at the center of the case.
But that explanation doesn’t land the way it used to, not after Gateway’s problems went beyond Augusta talking points and into federal territory. The Maine Wire was on the scene when Homeland Security agents went to Gateway’s Lewiston office, underscoring that this is no longer just a partisan back-and-forth.
At the same time, Gateway is now in the crosshairs of the U.S. House Oversight and Accountability Committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer, and Dhalac has been pulled into that oversight inquiry as a figure of interest because of her Gateway ties.
The Ali connection: not “distant,” not “incidental,” and not going away
Dhalac’s relationship with Gateway CEO Abdullahi Ali is not some vague, old résumé line that can be dismissed with a shrug. Maine Wire reporting shows Dhalac and Ali were colleagues at Gateway, with Dhalac serving as assistant executive director while Ali ran the operation — during the same period the state’s Program Integrity unit was attempting to claw back hundreds of thousands in improperly billed MaineCare claims from the organization.
Then there’s the political relationship, the kind that turns “I worked on the nonprofit side” into an excuse, not an answer.
In January, The Maine Wire reported that Dhalac actively promoted Ali’s overseas political campaign in Jubaland, Somalia, urging supporters to back “our brother Dr. Abdullahi Ali” and calling on the community to put “our time our money our skills,” into Somalia, repeatedly referring to Somalia as “our country.”
That matters because Ali isn’t a generic figure in the background. The Maine Wire has previously reported that Ali, while leading Gateway’s MaineCare-funded operation, boasted in an interview with Kenyan media that he helped raise money to support a paramilitary force in Somalia, including supplies and munitions, a claim that raised major questions about his activities while his organizations were receiving large flows of taxpayer dollars.
Dhalac has also surfaced alongside Ali in other politically sensitive contexts, including a controversial Azerbaijan-related junket organized by figures tied to the Mills administration’s “Office of New Americans” orbit, an example of the same interconnected network of activists, and political operatives that keeps popping up in Gateway-adjacent reporting.
Bobby Charles: Democrats scream “racism” but don’t answer the questions
Gateway has become campaign fuel in the governor’s race, with Republican candidate Bobby Charles hammering the Mills-era culture of impunity and pushing back on Democrats who attempt to smother scrutiny by calling critics racist.
Whether you like Charles or not, his argument sticks because the basic accountability questions remain unanswered, and the deeper this story goes, the more obvious it becomes that Dhalac’s political allies would rather attack the messengers than explain the mess.
Mills’ silence: the scandal is in her backyard and she’s still playing dumb
Gov. Janet Mills (D) has tried to treat this like a problem happening somewhere else, even as Gateway and Dhalac operate in the same political ecosystem and the same State House building.
The Maine Wire has reported extensively on how Mills stayed quiet as scrutiny built, only later shifting into damage-control mode after months of public pressure and reporting made continued silence untenable.
That’s what infuriates critics: the governor doesn’t need a briefing memo to understand the political implications when a fellow Democrat lawmaker, working down the hall, is tied to a nonprofit facing fraud allegations, federal attention, and congressional oversight.
The bottom line
Dhalac says she’s leaving because the environment is hostile. But the public sees something else: a lawmaker tied to a politically connected nonprofit under expanding scrutiny, walking away from reelection just as the consequences are getting real, while Gov. Mills avoids direct accountability for what’s happening in her own backyard.
If Dhalac’s story is as clean as she claims, then Democratic leadership should welcome sunlight, subpoenas, and hard questions. The fact that they haven’t tells Mainers everything they need to know.
