Minnesota may have once been the land of a thousand lakes. Now it's the land of a thousand fraud cases.
A $2 million "anti-ICE" fraud fund that was intended to help those who were "harmed" by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers enforcing the law was recently frozen because of — you guessed it — fraud.
The Hennepin County Small Business Recovery Fund was established to provide grants of between $3,000 and $10,000 to brick-and-mortar businesses suffering financial hardship because of Operation Metro Surge, according to the county's own guidelines.
The county received roughly 300 applications. Only 82 ultimately received grants totaling about $500,000, while more than 200 applications were flagged for potential fraud.
And we're not talking about somebody forgetting to attach the right paperwork. Officials reportedly encountered applications containing false information, businesses that couldn't be found during site visits, and suspiciously similar language that appeared to have been generated by artificial intelligence and copied across applications.
We wouldn't be surprised if a "Quality Learing Center" was trying to get paid.
At some point, county officials apparently decided they'd seen enough. "Then at a certain point we're like, 'OK, we're getting declining results on that,'" Hennepin County Commissioner Jeff Lunde said. "And so we said it's time to stop the program. So we just stopped processing at that point."
That's one way of putting it. Lunde was considerably more pointed when discussing what the attempted fraud said about the environment in Minnesota.
"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.
That's the part that should make Minnesota taxpayers' ears perk up. The state has spent years dealing with major fraud cases involving taxpayer-funded programs. The most notorious is Feeding Our Future, the sprawling federal child-nutrition fraud case in which prosecutors alleged approximately $250 million was stolen through bogus meal claims.
Gov. Tim Walz has acknowledged Minnesota's fraud problem and said it is his "responsibility to fix it," while arguing speciously that Republicans have exaggerated or politicized the scandals. He has also pushed back on President Trump targeting Minnesota's Somali community, saying an entire community shouldn't be blamed for crimes committed by individuals.
Fair enough. The entire state can be guilty. The point is to shut it down, not to encourage it further.
Hennepin County has supplied an almost painfully ironic addition to the story. This particular program was created because county officials said businesses were suffering under the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. The county's guidelines specifically cited declining customers, temporary closures and workforce disruptions caused by Operation Metro Surge.
Then people started trying to defraud the government assistance program. More than 200 applications were reportedly flagged out of roughly 300 received.
And perhaps the most Minnesota-in-2026 detail of all? Some of the questionable applications were apparently generated with AI.
Instead, it became another Minnesota program dealing with rampant fraud. At least this time, officials pulled the plug before the entire $2 million walked out the door.
But the political fallout isn't going away. As my colleague Teri Christoph recently noted, the Minnesota senate race is tightening. One of the reasons is the endless fraud. Somebody's got to put a stop to it.