Don’t Lose Sight Of The ‘Unprecedented’ Reason Trump Is Coming For Minnesota

On the presidential campaign trail in 1976, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan (R) repeatedly told audiences about an Illinois woman who had used false identities to steal thousands of dollars from the government.

“She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 telephone numbers to collect food stamps, Social Security, veterans’ benefits for four non-existent deceased veteran husbands, as well as welfare,” Reagan told a lunch crowd in Asheville, North Carolina, adding that “her tax-free cash income alone has been running $150,000 a year.”

The shocking story — based on a real-life woman named Linda Taylor who had been the subject of extensive reporting in Illinois newspapers — helped fuel a furor over welfare fraud, both real and imagined. The uproar would lead to an increase in prosecutions and lay the groundwork for the eventual dismantling of the federal government’s main cash program for poor, single mothers.

The stories President when the officers deployed at the beginning of January.

Molly Michelmore, a historian at Washington and Lee University who has written a book on trends in welfare politics, said Trump’s militarized police response to welfare fraud was unprecedented in American history.

“I can’t think of anything similar to that,” Michelmore told HuffPost. “It hasn’t been armed police forces surging into communities.”

There has been extensive and well-documented welfare fraud in Minnesota, with some 98 criminal defendants accused of embezzling hundreds of millions in federal funds by billing the government for social services they did not actually provide to needy Minnesotans. While ICE agents had been deployed to the state since October, the Trump administration surged manpower to current levels after a viral video purported to show Somali-run day care centers containing no children.

Now the clampdown on Minnesota has seemingly taken on a life of its own, with immigration authorities responding violently to protesters, including by fatally shooting an American woman in her car. This incident has prompted even more protests — and threats from the president to send in the U.S. military. Several of the U.S. attorneys who led the federal government’s fraud prosecutions in Minnesota also resigned after the administration pushed them to investigate the spouse of the woman who was killed.

The Department of Homeland Security has highlighted its arrests of alleged criminal illegal immigrants in Minneapolis, but hasn’t disclosed any connections to the underlying fraud. In response a request for an update on its investigation into fraud, the department referred HuffPost to a Monday social media update from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that said agency investigators “are on the ground in Minneapolis conducting wide scale investigations to get justice for the American people who have been robbed blind.”

In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the administration’s response merely meets the scale of the crimes committed under the watch of Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey — both of whom now face criminal investigations from the Justice Department.

“The size and scale of the Trump administration’s response to Minnesota is directly correlated with the size and scale of the absolutely massive fraud scandal unfolding in state, enabled by Democrat politicians like Walz and Frey,” Jackson said. “Minnesota Democrats have allowed Somali fraudsters to rip off hardworking Americans, and it can’t continue. The Trump administration will enforce the law without apology.”

On Tuesday, Trump appeared at the White House press briefing and held up photos of some of the people ICE has arrested in Minnesota. While most of the suspects whose mugshots ICE highlighted weren’t from Somalia, Trump shared his thoughts about people from that war-torn country.

“They don’t have anything that resembles a country. And if it is a country, it’s considered just about the worst in the world,” Trump said. “They come here, and they become rich, and they don’t have a job.”

Despite the unprecedented nature of the situation, there are still parallels between what’s happening in Minnesota and past welfare scandals, Michelmore said.

“They’re telling a story about widespread criminal fraud in a particular racially identifiable group that then, because they’re defined as inherently criminal, justifies this kind of a crackdown,” Michelmore said. “They’re not actually interested in welfare fraud. … It’s a way of talking about racial politics without using words and phrases you’re no longer allowed to use in the post-1965 era.”

Following the passage of the Social Security laws in the 1930s, which created federal unemployment insurance, old-age benefits and welfare programs, reporters wrote stories about women cheating the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program, which was designed to provide cash assistance to single mothers.

In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, newspapers described women hiding their lovers, lying about their poverty and using their welfare benefits to buy steak. The scandals provoked FBI investigations, crackdowns by state governments and sustained grumbling about people mooching off the government.

Ronald Reagan then made Linda Taylor, already nicknamed “welfare queen” by the press, a key part of his stump speech during his unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign. Although Reagan got some details wrong, Taylor really was a shameless George Santos-style fabulist. Taylor was also worse than Reagan let on, since she was suspected of murder and kidnapping in addition to the various felony fraud charges that eventually put her in prison.

Yet the details were almost irrelevant. The purpose of Reagan’s anti-welfare rhetoric was to create an us-against-them mentality among white voters.

Josh Levin, a journalist whose book about Taylor tracked the rise of anti-welfare politics from the 1930s, said the attacks on Somali Americans in Minnesota are a continuation of the pattern.

“If there’s a group that is already villainized, or that is a convenient scapegoat, then if you find a real example of fraud or a crime that’s being committed, then it’s just naturally going to get elevated,” Levin told HuffPost.

The greater public focus on fraud has prompted more vigilance by states and the federal government. Between 1970 and 1979, the number of AFDC cases referred to law enforcement rose from 7,500 to more than 52,000, Levin reported in his book.

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton won the presidency partly on a promise to “end welfare as we know it” ― and he did so. Clinton signed a bill into law changing AFDC from an open-ended promise of cash benefits for low-income single mothers to a limited grant that states could use for benefits and services.

Ironically, the government’s decision to emphasize services over direct benefits created an opening for Minnesota’s fraudsters to serve as middlemen and bilk the government on a scale no individual welfare queen could have achieved.

“We’re in this era where Trump is really pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric. And so, in each era, we get a variety of welfare scandal that, I don’t want to say that we deserve, but we get the variety of welfare scandal that fits the times,” Levin said.