A former Minneapolis sheriff says an excessive helping of “Minnesota nice” enabled the egregious spread of immigration fraud uncovered by federal officials in the Twin Cities last month.
“Minnesota has always been a very welcoming place,” said Rich Stanek, who spent 12 years overseeing Minneapolis law enforcement as Hennepin County Sheriff.
“But when people say ‘Minnesota nice,’ they simply didn’t ask. Or they ignored it.”
It’s those midwestern manners that Stanek believes led directly to the immigration crisis US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) discovered across Minneapolis and St. Paul in September: of 1,000 immigrant households visited during a two-week period, nearly half were engaged in some form of immigration fraud.
“Officers encountered blatant marriage fraud, visa overstay, people claiming to work at businesses that can’t be found, forged documents, abuse of the H1B visa system, abuse of the F1 visa, and many other discrepancies,” USCIS director Joseph B. Edlow told reporters after the operation concluded.
Stanek — who called USCIS’ findings “extremely high” — thinks local left-wing officials have been openly ignoring those abuses for decades, possibly with the long-term goal of building a voter base that would support their agendas.
“You’ve had several governors in a row — Mark Dayton and Tim Walz — who have ignored it. You had local officials in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Hennepin, Ramsey County, that have have ignored it,” he said. “It’s all about votes.”
USCIS did not say which immigrant communities were behind the fraud, but the local Somali population has boomed in recent decades to about 82,000 people — and Stanek said they have been particularly adept at working their way into local politics as they become naturalized.
“The community did what a lot of immigrant communities do — they became empowered. They elected themselves, they elected their kin to office, city councils, school boards, state legislature, Congress,” Stanek said.
“And people are ‘Minnesota nice,’ and they didn’t challenge it. Or they ignored it or they wanted that population and wanted their political agenda furthered, and so didn’t ask those tough questions,” he added. “Now it’s kind of all coming down at once.”
Minnesota’s Somali immigrant population has commanded headlines for years — particularly as after the liberal US Rep. Ilhan Omar was elected to congress in 2019, and more recently after Democratic Socialist state senator Omar Fateh nearly clinched the state’s leading Democratic party endorsement in his race for Minneapolis mayor.
Rumors of questionable immigration practices have even dogged Omar — a Somali born naturalized US citizen — including accusations she married her own brother to help him gain citizenship. She has vehemently denied those claims.
Exactly how many people were detained by the USCIS operation — dubbed “Twin Shield,” and carried out in coordination with ICE — remains unclear, but the agency recounted alarming schemes that included fake death certificates and even scam marriages taking advantage of elderly Americans.
Stanek said most immigrants coming to Minnesota — which also include large Mexican, Vietnamese and Indian populations — are made up of honest families seeking the American dream, but that widespread fraud ends up costing taxpayers “millions” and opens the door to dangerous criminals.
“If I was governor for a day, I would cooperate with the federal government on immigration fraud,” he said.
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