A Minnesota county has quietly canceled a fund meant to help businesses that have been impacted by the actions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after the fund became inundated by fraudulent claims.
Officials of Hennepin County, home to the left-wing Mecca of Minneapolis, has ended its $2 million fund meant to help businesses that supposedly lost money due to ICE’s Operation Metro Surge after only being able to verify 82 out of 300 claims filed to the fund.
Operation Metro Surge was launched in December and ended with more than 4,000 illegal migrants arrested across Minnesota.
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The county entertained about 300 applications for the reimbursement funds, but while trying to verify the filings, officials found that most of the filings are blatantly fraudulent.
“The fact that people, after all this fraud, felt that they could apply and get away with it, I think it’s a problem because clearly there’s no fear out there,” Hennepin County Commissioner Jeffrey Lunde said, according to KARE-TV. “Until we get it where people fear things, then they’re gonna keep doing it.”
Officials found that many of the applications had false addresses or had information scripted by AI and then cut and pasted on other filings. Some supposed businesses did not even exist when county officials tried to track them down.
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“Then at a certain point we’re like, ‘OK, we’re getting declining results on that.’ And so we said it’s time to stop the program. So, we just stopped processing at that point,” Lunde said.
Minnesota has been at the center of a massive wave of fraud, much of it committed by the growing Somali community where the $250 million Feeding Our Future scandal has netted dozens of arrests and convictions.
But the Feeding Our Future scam is far from the only scandal of waste, abuse, and fraud seen in the North Star State. The Department of Justice has arrested and charged many others in a series of separate schemes and frauds that have wasted hundreds of millions of tax dollars.
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