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Location of start Security brokers were in Minneapolis on Monday “conducting a massive investigation on child care and other rampant fraud,” DHS Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledged. 

Two DHS officials told CBS News that brokers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Location of start Security Investigations branch were anticipated to peek over 30 websites in the metropolis on Monday by myself. 

Noem and DHS posted movies of HSI brokers inspecting several websites, including one that appears to be like to be a smoke store. 

Many of their targets came no longer from pointers from the FBI, but from a video posted on social media over the weekend. The viral video, posted by conservative YouTuber Slash Shirley, alleged nearly a dozen day care centers in Minnesota that are receiving public funds are no longer in fact providing any carrier. 

HSI has traditionally investigated legal exercise with a world or immigration nexus, akin to limited one exploitation, drug smuggling, identification theft and fraud. Under the second Trump administration, many HSI brokers beget been assigned to work alongside ICE’s immigration enforcement branch to search out and arrest immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally.

Asked whether or no longer the trouble in Minneapolis is targeted on the suspected fraud there or immigration enforcement, a senior DHS official acknowledged, a “little of everything.”

The HSI investigation comes a day after FBI Director Kash Patel called old fraud arrests in Minnesota “just the tip of a very large iceberg.” He acknowledged that the agency has “surged personnel and investigative resources” to the tell to investigate fraud. 

Earlier this month, federal prosecutors acknowledged the total fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid programs will be as great as $9 billion, a figure that Gov. Tim Walz and assorted tell officials beget disputed. 

The accusations from federal prosecutors prompted a neighborhood of Minnesota Dwelling and Senate Republicans on Monday to call on Walz to resign. In response, the governor’s space of job acknowledged Walz has been working for years to crack down on fraud and has asked the tell Legislature for extra authority to take aggressive action.

This summer season, Walz agreed with a old estimate from First Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson that fraud across all programs, including the Feeding Our Future design, which is no longer a DHS-administered program, could per chance well additionally total $1 billion. 

Thompson told reporters that there are federal investigations into all 14 of the Medicaid programs deemed “high risk” for fraud, which are additionally field to a 3rd-birthday celebration rate audit.

Extra than 90 of us beget been accused, and in many cases convicted, of bilking a total bunch of hundreds of hundreds of bucks from the tell, inserting Walz’s administration in the hot seat and drawing attacks from President Trump.