Former Minnesota Viking and University of Minnesota football player Jack Brewer said he’s seen high-end business involving the “elite” Somali population in Minnesota up close. In the process, he witnessed a demographic and class transformation in his home state.

“You go to one of them, and they have Bentley and Maserati dealerships in Minnesota. I know because I’ve done business with them, and I’ve been endorsed by them as an athlete,” Brewer told Fox News Digital. 

“Now, you go in there, and some of their main customers are these Somali fraudsters buying high-end cars in a state that gets four months of sunlight and decent weather. They’re driving around sports cars like you would see in Beverly Hills or South Beach Miami, all off the back of the American taxpayer.”

CLICK HERE FOR MORE SPORTS COVERAGE ON FOXNEWS.COM

Images of empty daycare centers have become a sudden cultural flashpoint across the nation. Minnesota is embroiled in a growing scandal after revelations that potentially billions in taxpayer dollars were distributed fraudulently through members of the state’s Somali population.

Brewer recalls the moment he began to see that reality take shape, when the Somali population began to suddenly boom across his state 28 years ago. He witnessed this as a husband to a Muslim American legal immigrant. 

“I have been in Minnesota a long time. My wife was born and raised there, from a family of immigrants that came from the Middle East, came to America, assimilated and not just assimilated but actually made me more patriotic,” Brewer said. 

INSIDE ‘LITTLE MOGADISHU’: MINNESOTA’S BELEAGUERED SOMALI COMMUNITY UNDER A CLOUD OF FRAUD

“I saw Somalians coming there in droves. They had their own section of town and slowly started taking over the city of Minneapolis.”

The Somali population in Minneapolis and St. Paul grew significantly starting in the early to mid-1990s, driven by refugees fleeing Somalia’s civil war, with substantial numbers arriving after 1991 and continuing through the 2000s. 

The collapse of Somalia’s government in 1991 led to widespread conflict, forcing millions to flee the country. At the time, Brewer was just a child in Grapevine, Texas. By the time he transferred from SMU to the University of Minnesota, the Somali population was estimated at approximately 15,000 people, according to the Minnesota State Demographic Center. 

By the time Brewer joined the Minnesota Vikings in 2002, at least 5,123 Minnesota students reported speaking Somali as their primary language at home, according to the National Institutes of Health. 

Over the years, Brewer, as a pro athlete with endorsements, witnessed the transactions involving local Somali immigrants who were attaining wealth. He began to witness their growing influence on local culture and religion. 

“You turn on your TV. Have you ever seen a mayor on television waving a foreign country’s flag and dancing and trying to rally people to support Somalia over supporting America? … When you walk through Minneapolis, you hear Islamic sirens going off because they’ve come in here with that culture, trying to bring in Islamic culture,” Brewer said. 

“This is a spiritual battle like we haven’t seen in a long time.” 

A recent investigation by activists Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo found that federal counterterrorism sources confirmed millions in funds for Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, Feeding Our Future and other state-sponsored organizations were sent to Somalia and that the terrorist group Al-Shabab may have obtained that cash.

Approximately 40% of households in Somalia get remittances from abroad. Thorpe and Rufo reported that, in 2023, the Somali diaspora sent $1.7 billion to the country, which was higher than the Somali government’s budget that same year.

In the Land of 1,000 Lakes, political power and welfare funds found their way to the Somali population.

The state saw the rise of several prominent Somali politicians, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, state senators Omar Fateh and Zaynab Mohamed and St. Louis Park Mayor Nadia Mohamed, all Democrats.

“These people have embedded themselves into the political world, where now they are leveraging the federal government to fund their campaigns, to send money overseas to Somalia and to build luxury condos and create a lifestyle for people in Somalia off the back of the American taxpayer,” Brewer said. 

“For me, as a former Minnesota Viking, as a former Gopher, I got my undergraduate and my master’s degrees from the University of Minnesota. I was a captain on both of those teams. It’s one of the most embarrassing times I’ve ever had for a state that I’ve proudly said helped turn me from a boy into a man.”

Brewer, a business owner, added that he’s moved many of his assets out of the state in recent years. 

“I’ve pulled back many of my investment interests in the state and moved business interests elsewhere because of what we’ve seen post-George Floyd,” he said. 

Somali residents previously told Fox News Digital they are angered the entire community has been saddled with what they say is an unfair reputation, blaming a small minority of fraudsters and criminals for the negative attention against the entire group.

“Somalis in Minnesota are hard-working folks.  Many of them work two jobs, and yet about 75% are still poor,” Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Minnesota Executive Director Jaylani Hussein previously told Fox News Digital. 

“There are entrepreneurs, successful restaurants — people in trucking, IT and even corporate America — making significant changes. But those positive stories don’t get much attention.”

About 36% of Somali Minnesotans lived below the poverty line from 2019 to 2023, more than triple the U.S. poverty rate of 11.1%, according to Minnesota Compass, a statewide data project. Somali-headed households reported a median income of around $43,600 during that period, far below the national median of $78,538.

Najma Mohammad, a hair stylist who came to the U.S. as a child, previously told Fox News Digital, “Most people think just because some people are bad and Somali, that every Somali is bad, which is just a stereotype.”

Brewer stands behind the state’s patriotic Muslim legal immigrant population, which he is connected to personally through his wife’s family. 

“Witnessing their family — the way they do business, the way they love this country, what they stand for, their patriotism — I’ve learned from it. I’ve become better from it. I’ve loved my country more from witnessing my in-laws. So, I know what’s possible,” Brewer said.

“They did that by moving to Minneapolis and building their businesses. It can happen, and it does happen. That’s what this country was built upon.”

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

But he also wants to see President Trump take drastic measures in response to the recent developments.

“I would put a freeze on all immigration until we get a handle on the depth of this fraud and the depth of the corruption that has taken place.” Brewer said. “We need to get all these foreign terrorists out of our country. That should be a collective effort between our armed forces, our local law enforcement, our communities, our leaders, our churches — everyone — to protect our land.”

Fox News Digital’s Michael Dorgan and Rachel Wolf contributed to this report. 

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X, and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.

WHEN THE MIAMI MARLINS made a bid to host the NHL’s annual Winter Classic at their stadium, LoanDepot Park, they knew they would have to overcome one major obstacle in pitching the idea: Florida’s warm and sunny weather. Rather than ignore the obvious hurdle of hosting the league’s signature outdoor winter hockey event in the tropics, the team decided to go all in on the theme and submitted a proposal entitled “Miami Ice,” a play on the hit 1980s TV show “Miami Vice.”

“We’re not shy of the fact that this is in South Florida. I think that’s what makes this unique and novel,” said Anthony Favata, vice president of operations and events for the Marlins. “The vibrancy of the colors of South Beach, of the palm trees, and this juxtaposition of warm weather versus winter. So, we’re very much leaning into that.”

The big question was whether South Florida’s balmy weather and professional-quality ice hockey could peacefully coexist.

After years of discussions and multiple visits to LoanDepot Park, the league awarded the 2026 Winter Classic to the Marlins, confident that engineers could build an outdoor hockey rink in sunny Miami where the average temperature in January hovers around 70 degrees Fahrenheit.

Miami will likely have the warmest temperature at the 8 p.m. ET puck drop in the history of the Winter Classic, where the average temperature for all previous sites at puck drop was 33 degrees, but the league and Marlins say they have a plan to ensure the ice will be ready to go on game day. The game will air on TNT.

To build the rink, NHL engineers planned to use multiple generators, two 18-wheeler coolant trucks, approximately 20,000 gallons of water and round-the-clock care starting in mid-December. Compared to other outdoor rinks they’ve built in much colder climates, they said, this Miami build was easier to plan and execute.

The idea to hold a Winter Classic in Florida started years ago, according to Steve Mayer, president of NHL events and content. League officials first considered hosting an all-Florida franchise matchup between the Tampa Bay Lightning and Florida Panthers. Ultimately, officials said they decided two games were better than one and awarded the Winter Classic to the Panthers, who will play the New York Rangers in Miami on Friday, and the Stadium Series to the Lightning, who will play the Boston Bruins at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa on Feb. 1.

Mayer described it with a “Field of Dreams” analogy. “This is an incredible sports story where you can go into a place that has never really participated [in hockey], never really been exposed to a sport, and then build it and they will come,” Mayer said, adding that filling a single arena would be an achievement. “And now we’re filling two stadiums that are huge, just full of Panther fans and Lightning fans.”

Mayer called Florida the new “hotbed of hockey.” A Florida team has played in the last six Stanley Cup Final series. The Panthers are the reigning back-to-back champions, having won in 2024 and 2025. The Lightning won back-to-back titles in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, league officials say youth hockey participation rates had increased by 212% since the NHL first expanded into Florida in the 1990s, and for the seventh straight season, there are at least eight Florida-born players playing in the league. Fifteen years ago, there had never been more than two players in the same season from the state.

LOANDEPOT PARK’S retractable roof, which will help control the conditions until game day, is a major reason why Florida’s heat isn’t such a big concern, event planners told ESPN.

“The greatest enemy of the ice is wind and sun,” said Jorge Pinoncély, of Industrial Frigo, a winter entertainment company that has built more than 500 outdoor ice rinks in the U.S. and is unaffiliated with the NHL.

The evening start time means direct sunlight won’t be a concern once the roof is retracted. But Pinoncély cautioned that wind could be an issue.

University of Miami atmospheric sciences professor Paquita Zuidema likened the effects of wind on an ice rink to a block of ice sitting in a backyard.

“The ice will be constantly cooling the air above it,” helping keep the surface temperature low, Zuidema said. But wind “will keep removing that cold pool of air. So the ice will need to work harder to cool off that air layer.”

The optimum temperature for ice level — the pocket of air above the ice and inside the glass — on game day is approximately 60 degrees, said Derek King, the NHL’s vice president of facilities and hockey operations.

“Inside the glass is really important. We know, though, that we don’t have a lot of control over that,” he said. “So we’ll make that [ice] sheet as cold as we can to kind of control that area, and then we’ll monitor our temperatures.”

The league refined the process of building a rink with each of the 43 outdoor games held since 2003. From start to finish, it takes two weeks and about 100 people to create the Winter Classic’s on-field build out of the hockey rink, but only 24 for the ice crew according to King.

Work began as soon as the NHL’s two 18-wheeler mobile refrigeration units arrived at LoanDepot Park from Canada, where they are stored. In cold-weather builds such as Chicago or Minneapolis, the NHL typically needs just one mobile refrigeration unit, but for Miami the league needed two.

Workers ran pipes that carried a mixture of 40% glycol and 60% water from the refrigeration trucks to the baseball field. At the same time, they prepped the field by covering approximately 80% of it with an armored subfloor before building a stage for the rink. Staff used the closed roof to help keep the indoor temperature controlled to 60 degrees.

With the foundation complete, workers laid down aluminum panels that connect to the pipes channeling the glycol mix. That mix has a freezing temperature lower than water and allows the metal plates to get colder than the 32 degrees needed to freeze water.

It typically takes four to five days to lay the pipes and build the foundation, rink and boards, according to King. Next comes a process where workers use ice and water to fill gaps — much like grouting between tiles — to create the smoothest-possible surface.

From there, teams finally begin to make the ice by slowly spraying the rink with water over the course of several days, gradually building the sheet of ice to get to an eventual game-time thickness of 2 to 2.5 inches and a surface temperature of 25 degrees.

During this process, they paint the rink white and add logos and lines before the top layer of ice is added.

Once completed in Miami, the Panthers and Rangers got practice time. The league planned to use any remaining time left to work out any kinks and make sure the ice was ready for Friday’s game day.

BY “TAKING MOTHER NATURE out of the equation,” King said, the build can be easier compared to colder venues such as Nashville in 2022, when rain created more than 4 inches of ice by game day, or during the 2025 Stadium Series in Columbus, where wind and snow interrupted the build.

But warmer venues aren’t hazard-free. Six days before the 2020 Winter Classic at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, heavy rain and warm weather melted the ice, forcing workers to restart the layering process.

When the league finally opens the roof in Miami, King said his team will be prepared to adapt to weather conditions.

“We just need to look at how we deal with the ice on game day. Are we going to limit the amount of time we’re going to flood? Are we going to shave off more ice and kind of deal with what we know we can deal with?” King said. “So control stuff we can control and really let Mother Nature set in.”

But King admits there was one unusual challenge for his team ahead of the warm weather build: what to wear.

“We’re not all bundled up in heavy coats and stuff like that, trying to stay warm,” said King, who is based in Canada and looked forward to the T-shirt weather of Florida. “We’ve all had to kind of rethink our outfitting for this build because we’re going to be in Miami.”

Conference play is finally here in college basketball.

After many long months apart, rival teams will visit each other to the sounds of rowdy student sections jumping on the bleachers. But it follows a nonconference schedule that treated fans to many defining and humorous takeaways.

As we shift our focus to conference play, let’s revisit some nontraditional superlatives — both on and off the court — that stood out from earlier this season.

Most likely to make an NBA court home

AJ Dybantsa

When BYU landed the No. 1 high school prospect in the Class of 2025, it had just completed its second season as a member of the Big 12 — a move that brought the program to a bigger stage. The addition of Dybantsa intensified the spotlight.

In July, when the Cougars released their nonconference schedule, it was revealed that they would play on three NBA courts — and Dybantsa rose to the occasion in all of those games.

Dybantsa and BYU first played No. 3 UConn at TD Garden in Boston, home of the Celtics, where the freshman erupted for 25 points and 6 rebounds in an 86-84 loss. BYU bounced back against No. 23 Wisconsin at the Delta Center, home of the Utah Jazz, with Dybantsa collecting 18 points, 6 rebounds and 3 assists in a 98-70 win.

He delivered another big performance on the Jazz floor against California Baptist, where he dropped 22 points in a 91-60 win before completing his NBA arena tour at the Jimmy V Classic against Clemson at Madison Square Garden, with 28 points, 9 rebounds and and 6 assists in a 67-64 victory.

Most valuable number

67

It got loud in arenas, and we mean loud because of one particular number: 67. The trend, which was popularized on TikTok, sent young students into a frenzy every time a team’s points landed on 67. Young audiences pierced the ears of players, coaches and other spectators at LSU, Oklahoma State, West Virginia and Auburn games, just to name a few.

play

Fans go wild after Oklahoma State scores 67 points

Lena Girardi gets a steal and makes the layup to increase Oklahoma State’s score to 67, and the fans celebrate in the crowd.

And the trend seems to be here to stay … at least for a while.

Most likely to make their parents’ commute easy

Cameron Boozer and Cayden Boozer

The Boozer brothers, sons of two-time NBA All-Star Carlos Boozer, have played together their entire lives. From teaming up on the AAU circuit with Nightrydas Elite to prep basketball at Christopher Columbus High in Miami, the twin brothers followed their father’s footsteps in taking their college talents to Duke.

In nonconference play for the Blue Devils, Cameron averaged 23.3 points, 10 rebounds, 4.0 assists and 1.7 steals, while Cayden averaged 7.3 points, 2.3 rebounds, 3.1 assists and 1 steal.

It’s safe to say that Carlos is happy to have his boys close to home.

Unmatched social media presence

Richard Pitino

One thing about the Xavier coach: He keeps it honest with his fans on social media. At the start of the season, Pitino lightheartedly trolled his father, St. John’s coach Rick Pitino.

Just spent 30 minutes trying to explain to @RealPitino how to download Amazon Prime on his iPad. Confidence is sky high that Xavier will get the sweep this year.

— Richard Pitino (@XUCoachPitino) October 31, 2025

As the season progressed, he would share a postgame report card with thoughts on the student section, uniforms, cheerleaders, his team’s performance and even the national anthem singer. For the most part, every category earned an A grade. But he kept it authentic at times with his true thoughts on Xavier’s performance, sometimes giving the team a C for rebounding, or an F for its defense.

Post Game Grades

Anthem Girl- A plus

Student Section- A plus

Grey Unis- A, Big fan!

Offense- B minus, 20 assists!

Defense- F minus

Rebounding- C, Filip 12 rebounds!

— Richard Pitino (@XUCoachPitino) November 7, 2025

When the Musketeers lost 87-68 to Santa Clara, Pitino took ownership of the loss on social media.

Monday night was on me. I will be better. We will be better. Tough one Friday night at Iowa!

— Richard Pitino (@XUCoachPitino) November 12, 2025

Most unconventional ‘transfer portal’ return

Amir Khan

During McNeese’s Cinderella run in last March, team manager Amir Khan went viral for his antics. He would lead the team out of the locker room with a huge boombox around his neck. It led to his nickname, “Aura,” and 20 NIL deals.

Read more: How a McNeese manager became a centerpiece in its March moment

But in the midst of McNeese’s run in the NCAA tournament, coach Will Wade came to an agreement to become the lead man at NC State. Into the “transfer portal” Khan went, following Wade to Raleigh.

However, Khan appeared back in blue and gold in early December after transferring back to McNeese in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is also his hometown.

“I just wanted to be back home,” he said. “I think NC State was amazing. I loved the city, loved the campus, loved the players on the team. There was no animosity whatsoever. I just wanted to be back with McNeese. It means a lot more to me to work for McNeese.”