A former Minnesota state trooper running against Rep. Ilhan Omar says soft-on-crime Democrats have emboldened Somali gangs in Twin Cities suburbs, and wants to know where she is.
John Nagel spent 30 years as a state trooper. Now he is the Republican challenger in Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District, and he is telling Fox News Digital that gang violence tied to Somali-American crews is escalating while local Democratic leaders hang back.
Nagel is pointing at a string of recent incidents across the Twin Cities area, including Eden Prairie and Bloomington. He is blaming soft enforcement, political restraint on police, and a refusal by Democrats, including Omar, to confront the problem by name.
Two teens were shot outside an Eden Prairie High School homecoming football game. More than 100 shell casings were recovered in a Bloomington neighborhood. Residents, Nagel says, are tired of living with the fallout.
Nagel’s sharpest question is simple. He wants the congresswoman who represents the area to show up.
“Where is Ilhan Omar in all of this?” Nagel said.
“I would think that, as a congressman that represents this particular area, that she'd be at these meetings, or she'd have a statement, or she’d be sitting down and saying, ‘Hey, how can we help this? How could we stop this?’ And I don't see her.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Omar’s office for comment. The same outreach went to Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison. No responses are included in the available account.
Nagel is not alone in treating Omar as a national accountability story. Separate coverage has examined Homan’s confirmation of an ongoing criminal investigation into immigration-fraud claims tied to the congresswoman.
On the street, Nagel frames the violence as a predictable result of Democratic governance in Minnesota. Soft-on-crime politics, he argues, have left crooks and gang members freer to act.
“Because of how the Democrats have run Minnesota over the years, these gang members and then just crooks in general, they’re emboldened by this.”
He says police are being held back by politicians who prefer “soft on crime” approaches and who send someone other than a sworn officer to handle problems that need real enforcement.
“They're being restrained by politicians, people that are trying soft on crime, people that are trying to send somebody other than a police officer to take care of issues, and it's not working.”
In Nagel’s telling, most Democrats “don’t want enforcement.” The public does. “The people do,” he said. “They're tired of it.”
The concrete cases give his critique weight. An 18-year-old, Adam Abdihakeem Adam, was charged Friday in the Eden Prairie homecoming shooting with two counts of second-degree assault with a deadly weapon and second-degree riot.
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty issued a press release the same day. She said Adam would face consequences and that community violence is “completely unacceptable.”
“Mr. Adam will be held accountable. Violence in our communities is completely unacceptable, and it requires a professional, coordinated response, which happened here.”
Nagel has accused Democrats, including Moriarty, of keeping their “heads in the sand.” Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, speaking at a news conference this week, also pressed for tougher follow-through.
Fletcher said a “big chunk of the problem” is the failure to hold gang members accountable. He argued Moriarty’s office needs to be more “aggressive” in prosecuting juveniles.
On the Bloomington incident, a spokesperson for Moriarty’s office, Daniel Borgertpoepping, told Fox News Digital that no related cases had been submitted for charging consideration. If they are, he said, “they’ll be thoroughly reviewed.”
That gap, shell casings on the ground, no charging packet yet, is exactly the kind of lag Nagel says emboldens the next shooter.
Fletcher also rejected fuzzy ethnic language that blurs who is driving the violence. He pushed back on “East African” as a catch-all.
He said “98% of these gang members are Somali,” and that a broader label is not “fair.” His point was blunt: name the problem.
“I think we just have to say what it is and not run away from the term.”
Nagel made the same case from a cop’s vantage point. He listed Latino gangs, Asian gangs, Black gangs, and Somali gangs and said identifying them is not prejudice. It is pattern recognition.
“I mean, we have Latino gangs and Asian gangs and Black gangs, and we have Somali gangs. This is not being prejudicial,” Nagel said. He called it a “Somali problem” because that is “who’s showing up.”
“It's ridiculous,” he added. “I'm a police officer. I don't care who you are. I don't care what color you are.”
Fear of being called racist, in his view, has become an excuse for silence. Silence does not stop bullets outside a high-school football game.
Omar’s record has drawn hard questions beyond Twin Cities crime as well, including reporting on her denial of federal contact after ICE-related scrutiny was confirmed.
Nagel’s prescription is not a new statute or another community grant. He says Minnesota already has the tools.
“We don't need to pass any more laws. We don't need any more people asking for money to help their group. We need to take the laws that we have and prosecute people.”
He wants arrests, incarceration, and a gang task force built around laws already on the books. Without that, he warns, the violence will not level off.
“We need enforcement, we need arrests and we need incarceration. Otherwise, this is going to continue to spiral.”
That message lands in a district where Omar remains the Democratic incumbent and will face Nagel and independent DeVelle Jackson in the coming midterm contest for the U.S. House seat.
Nagel is running as a Minnesota native and a career lawman who watched soft policy up close. His argument is that Democratic leaders chose restraint over results, then looked away when Somali gangs filled the space.
Readers tracking Omar’s wider legal exposure can also review analysis of the proof bar for stripping citizenship over marriage-fraud claims and related standards discussed in coverage of the steep proof needed in the DHS probe.
For Twin Cities families, the nearer issue is simpler. Teens got shot outside a football game. A neighborhood picked up more than 100 casings. A sheriff says the gangs are overwhelmingly Somali. A former trooper says Democrats will not enforce the law, and the congresswoman for the area is nowhere in the response.
Public safety does not improve when leaders fear the wrong words more than the next shooting. Minnesota will get safer when officials name the gangs, charge the shooters, and stop treating enforcement like a political liability.
