(Washington) The American right, led by the Trump administration, has seized upon a vast affair of public aid fraud which has been plaguing the Somali community of Minnesota for several months, to violently attack it and further toughen its migration policy.
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An influencer’s video on the subject ignited conservative circles this weekend and triggered a federal police control operation on site, with officials already talking about possible expulsions.
“What’s happening in Minnesota shows, on a miniature scale, what immigration fraud is in our system,” Vice President JD Vance said Saturday.
This case of embezzlement of public funds with multiple ramifications resulted in the indictment of 98 people, “including 85 of Somali origin,” Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted on Monday.
In the main case, more than $300 million was embezzled by suspects who obtained public subsidies to distribute free meals to children, meals never served in most cases.
Call for withdrawal of American citizenship
Republican elected officials and the federal prosecutor in charge of the case suspect Democratic local authorities of having, for years, turned a blind eye to numerous alerts, because the case concerned the Somali community of Minnesota, the largest in the country with around 80,000 members.
“People did not want to be called racist or Islamophobic, and they were also protecting one of their electorates,” said Kristin Robbins, a local Republican elected official, to AFP. It calls into question the responsibility of Democratic Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s unsuccessful running mate in 2024, who denies it.
If the affair was made public in 2022, it got excited this year with new revelations, taking a very political turn.
This issue “finally has all the attention it deserves,” Lisa Demuth, the Republican president of the Minnesota House of Representatives, told AFP.
Interest in the affair was revived in the middle of the end-of-year holidays by the video of a right-wing YouTuber, Nick Shirley, in which he claims to show crèches which he claims would embezzle public money.
The video, which exploded on
Donald Trump’s administration immediately stepped up to the plate, announcing on Tuesday the freeze on funding for child care in Minnesota.
The Department of Homeland Security said it conducted police operations Monday and Tuesday at “suspected fraud” sites in Minneapolis, the state’s largest city.
The secretary in charge of small and medium-sized businesses, Kelly Loeffler, froze funding to Minnesota, “while we investigate.” »
And Tom Emmer, elected from this northern state and tenor of the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, called for the “denaturalization and expulsion of all Somalis involved in fraud in Minnesota. »
Insults
The treatment given to the case by the Trump administration and conservative circles echoes a media sequence that occurred a month earlier.
At the end of November, a conservative media outlet claimed that the money embezzled in Minnesota financed the Shebab of Somalia, an armed Islamist group linked to Al-Qaeda – an accusation since denied by the prosecutor in charge of the case.
But, without delay, Donald Trump accused “Somali gangs of terrorizing the inhabitants” of Minnesota and put an end to a special status which protected Somalis from any expulsion to their country.
The Republican president increased his verbal violence on Wednesday, declaring that Somalia was “perhaps the worst and most corrupt country on earth” and calling Ilhan Omar, elected to Congress and a staunch Democrat of Somali origin, an “ungrateful failure.”
The raids carried out by immigration police have created, according to Minneapolis Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey, “a dangerous atmosphere of chaos and instability. »
“Trump is turning a tiny part of the population into scapegoats,” protested local Democratic representative of Somali origin Zaynab Mohamed. “It has nothing to do with security: they want to rid the country of people like me.”
