US Politics
Kristi Noem to deploy 2,000 agents to Minnesota amid hunt for more fraud
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The Trump administration is surging Homeland Security agents to the Minneapolis area, as the White House continues its immigration and anti-fraud crackdown aimed largely at the region’s substantial Somali community.
“While for the safety of our officers we do not get into law enforcement footprint, DHS has surged law enforcement and has already made more than 1,000 arrests of murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and gang members,” DHS told The Independent in an email.
The surge, which reportedly began on Sunday, and follows a similar operation last month, could involve as many as 2,000 agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations, law enforcement sources told CBS News.
It comes during a tense political time in the state, following the president’s numerous inflammatory attacks on the region’s Somali community and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz’s recent announcement that he won’t seek reelection.
The DHS mission, reportedly slated to last about a month, appears to be the first major crackdown of the new year, following similar deployments in Democrat-led cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., last year.
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The White House’s focus on the Twin Cities began late last year, when the administration said it would strip Temporary Protected Status from Somalis who came to the U.S. fleeing their home country’s ongoing humanitarian and security issues.
The president has long spoken derogatorily about Somalis in the U.S., comparing them to “garbage” in December, and DHS launched an operation that month to arrest “the worst of the worst” undocumented immigrants, though it largely targeted those without criminal convictions, data shows.
Trump’s Somali crackdown got new life later that month, when a viral video claimed widespread fraud at Somali-run child care centers in the Minneapolis area.
State officials disputed many of the claims in the video, but the Trump administration launched another round of actions, including Homeland Security and FBI investigations into the alleged fraud.
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The administration also said it would freeze large pockets of child care funding to all states until they provided additional records to the government.
Walz has accused the administration of ignoring his multi-year campaign to root out fraud and of wrongly “demonizing an entire community” for the actions of a handful of wrongdoers.
Though some of the viral video’s claims appear overblown and unfounded, the state has indeed struggled with vast fraud in social services.
Since 2021, more than 90 people in Minnesota have been hit with federal charges for social services fraud cases, including the pandemic-era $250m Feeding Our Future scandal. Most of the defendants in these cases are of Somali descent.
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Federal prosecutors say 14 different Medicaid-related services are under audit, and that the total amount of fraud in the state could top $9 billion, though state officials dispute that figure, and say evidence so far suggests fraud on the order of tens of millions of dollars.
The president has suggested that more fraud crackdowns could be coming to other Democrat-led states.
“We’re going to take back our country. Can you imagine, they stole $18 billion?” Trump said during a New Year’s Eve speech at his Mar-a-Lago club, though it was unclear exactly to what he was referring. “That’s just what we’re learning about. That’s peanuts. And California is worse. Illinois is worse, and sadly, New York is worse.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt sounded a similar note on Fox News earlier that day.
“Minnesota is at the top of the list but we know there has been massive fraud in blue states across this country,” she said. “Look at California, look at New York. These states will all be under investigation and consideration as far as this administration is concerned.”