By Janice Hisle
As additional investigators surge to fraud-plagued Minnesota, federal agents have already arrested 500 illegal immigrants and probed 1,000 immigration-fraud cases during the past two months, a Homeland Security official estimated.
Tricia McLaughlin, Homeland Security assistant secretary, gave those updated figures Dec. 30 during an interview with the Charlie Kirk Show.
Fraud was substantiated in about half of the immigration-fraud investigations, she said, and many of the arrested illegal immigrants were from Somalia. Somalis dominate the list of nearly 100 people federally charged in various schemes to defraud the government, authorities have said.
McLaughlin gave additional details in a Dec. 30 Fox News interview. She said “hundreds” of investigators were on the ground in Minnesota. They were knocking on doors of day care centers, health care centers, and “other organizations that take taxpayer dollars,” she said.
“These suspected perpetrators are really trying to cover their tracks,” McLaughlin said. She accused the suspects of “trying to whitewash” their operations to appear to be “legitimate” businesses, but they are shams, McLaughlin said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has ramped up its operations in Minnesota in recent months, well before a media firestorm erupted over widespread Somali childcare fraud.
YouTuber Nick Shirley gained nearly 132 million views after he posted a Dec. 26 video saying he uncovered over $110 million in alleged fraud in a single day. The video shows Shirley visiting day care centers that appeared to have no children present, yet these sites had received large payments from a federal childcare program run through the state of Minnesota. Federal officials have since cut off funding to that program in Minnesota, and are demanding more solid documentation from day care providers nationwide.
ICE has frequently encountered resistance and protesters in Minnesota, which is considered a “sanctuary” state that shields illegal immigrants. And Minneapolis, the state’s largest city, recently beefed up a local law forbidding any city employees from cooperating with ICE or other federal immigration agents.
In a Dec. 30 statement posted to X, ICE accused Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey of having “stoked nonstop riots and attacks against our officers.”
The Epoch Times sought comment from Walz and Frey on Dec. 31 and received no immediate reply.
Todd Lyons, ICE acting director, responding to criticism of recent ICE actions, told news reporters on Dec. 30, “If sanctuary cities would change their policies, and turn these violent criminal aliens over to us … instead of releasing them into the public, we would not have to go out to the communities and do this.”
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