The Homeland Security Department announced on Friday that it was reviewing thousands of refugee cases in Minnesota, subjecting immigrants who had already been approved for status to new interviews and background checks amid an intense federal crackdown in the state.
Homeland security officials said the initial focus of the effort would be on the roughly 5,600 refugees in the state who do not yet have green cards. It comes as the federal government has escalated its immigration enforcement operation in the state, deploying about 2,000 officers to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.
“Minnesota is ground zero for the war on fraud,” the department said in a statement. “This operation in Minnesota demonstrates that the Trump administration will not stand idly by as the U.S. immigration system is weaponized by those seeking to defraud the American people.”
The effort to re-examine claims began in mid-December, and any cases of fraud and other crimes are passed along to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the statement.
Tensions between federal and local officials in Minnesota have risen after the killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman who was shot by a federal immigration officer on Wednesday. Although state and local officials have urged federal agents to leave Minneapolis, Trump administration officials have pledged to continue their operations. Documents obtained by The New York Times on Thursday suggested that more than 100 federal agents and officers were being deployed to Minnesota from other cities.
Some groups that provide assistance to immigrants in Minnesota expressed concern about the federal effort, saying it would fuel more fear and anxiety.
“It doesn’t really have a clear rationale other than to take away people’s status and make it easier to remove those people,” said Julia Decker, the policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
Ms. Decker underscored that refugees have already completed background checks and other reviews to enter and remain in the United States.
“In a lot of ways this is a redundancy for processes that already exist,” Ms. Decker said.
The Trump administration has focused on Minnesota in recent weeks following revelations about a fraud scheme that siphoned money from social service programs in the Minneapolis area in recent years. More than 90 people, most of them of Somali origin, have been charged with felonies. The president has used xenophobic language to attack Somalis living in the United States.
Minnesota is home to the largest diaspora of Somalis in the world. Roughly 80,000 people of Somali ancestry live in the state, and the majority are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents. Somali refugees began arriving in the 1990s after the Somali government collapsed and the nation descended into civil war.
The announcement on Friday builds on the Trump administration’s recent efforts to tighten legal pathways for migrants to enter or remain in the United States. In December, federal officials said they would review approved applications filed by migrants from countries subject to the president’s travel ban who entered the United States since the start of the Biden administration. The effort, they said, was necessary to promote safety and ensure that proper screening was conducted.
Federal officials have also said they will review the more than 50,000 asylum applications that were approved by the Homeland Security Department during the Biden administration.
Madeleine Ngo covers immigration and economic policy for The Times.
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