Hennepin County set up a $2 million fund offering grants of $3,000 to $10,000 to small businesses affected by Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration's immigration enforcement crackdown in Minnesota. Three hundred applications poured in. Eighty-two got approved, totaling about $500,000 in taxpayer money distributed.
More than 200 of the remaining applications were flagged for fraud.
That's not a typo. Two-thirds of the applicants to an anti-ICE assistance fund appear to have been running a scam. Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Lunde told RedState the county eventually pulled the plug on the whole program after the fraud became impossible to ignore. "Then at a certain point we're like, 'OK, we're getting declining results on that,'" Lunde said of the decision to shut the fund down.
The fraud indicators weren't subtle. County reviewers found applications with false business information, businesses that couldn't be located at the addresses provided, and — the detail that really ties it together — AI-generated language appearing across multiple submissions. The same phrasing, the same patterns, copy-pasted across applications from supposedly independent small businesses who just happened to write identically.
Lunde didn't sugarcoat the implications. "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," he said. When a county commissioner is publicly admitting that fraudsters feel no fear of consequences, the program has moved past administrative hiccup into institutional confession.
Minnesota, of course, has some experience with this. The Feeding Our Future scandal — the federal child-nutrition fraud case — involved an alleged $250 million stolen from a program designed to feed kids. Governor Tim Walz acknowledged Minnesota's fraud problem and said it was his "responsibility to fix it." That was before his administration greenlit a fund structured so loosely that applicants used AI chatbots to mass-produce fake applications and nobody caught it until two-thirds of the pile was garbage.
The program's design practically invited what happened. Announce a pot of government money. Tie it to a politically sympathetic cause — helping businesses harmed by immigration enforcement. Set the verification bar somewhere between "low" and "decorative." Then act surprised when the same state that produced the largest pandemic-era fraud case in America attracts another round of grifters.
Some of the $500,000 already distributed may have gone to legitimate businesses. Some of it almost certainly didn't. The county hasn't disclosed how many of the 82 approved grants are now under review. What's clear is that a fund created to shield people from federal law enforcement was shut down not by ICE, not by the Trump administration, not by Republican legislators — but by the applicants themselves.
Two million dollars allocated. Five hundred thousand out the door. Two hundred applications flagged. Program terminated.
That's Minnesota's fraud problem taking responsibility for fixing itself.
