Twelve daycare operators in the San Diego area have been charged with stealing more than $10 million from government childcare assistance programs, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday.
The defendants are naturalized U.S. citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents originally from Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq, according to Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald. Investigators executed search warrants at multiple locations across the San Diego area as part of the probe.
“These charges underscore a simple truth: anyone who steals from programs meant to support children will face swift and uncompromising accountability,” McDonald said in a statement. “Fraud against these programs is an attack on vulnerable families, and law enforcement will continue to dismantle schemes that exploit them.”
U.S. Attorney Adam Gordon for the Southern District of California said the case marks the first charges of this kind since the formation of the National Fraud Enforcement Division. “Today is a bad day for home daycare fraud,” Gordon said. “These fraudsters may have criminally gamed the system before. But today, the game is over.”
Surveillance Contradicted Attendance Records
Court documents describe how surveillance footage of the defendants’ licensed facilities did not match the attendance records they submitted to collect payments. In one example cited in the complaints, Abdulrahman Ayman Alawad claimed to have provided childcare to 23 children in March 2026 and 25 children in April 2026, reporting care every single day of both months.
Surveillance recordings covering 57 days across those two months, however, showed children entering or exiting Alawad’s facility on only one occasion — the same day a state inspector arrived for an unannounced visit. According to the complaint, children and Alawad himself did not arrive at the facility until after the inspector had already gotten there.
Prosecutors also allege that Alawad and several other defendants submitted attendance records claiming they provided childcare at their homes on days when border crossing records show they were not in the United States at all.
The case is part of a broader federal effort to root out fraud in government assistance programs, tied to an executive order on immigration and public benefits that President Trump signed on his first day back in office in January 2025.
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