A supermajority of Americans has been begging the federal government for years to stem the flow of all immigration into the United States. Polls have shown that 70% of Americans support reducing not only illegal immigration, but also the legal immigration pipeline. It’s just been too much for too long. The country looks nothing like it did 30 years ago. ICE just conducted a major sweep of Minneapolis-St. Paul, and what they found should shock every American.
This was a quiet operation. It wasn’t a typical ICE raid where they rush in and arrest everyone in the Home Depot parking lot. ICE spent the last two weeks paying visits to more than 1,000 homes in Minneapolis-St. Paul where legal immigrants live.
They found that 50% of all legal immigrants in the Twin Cities are engaged in some form of immigration fraud. Half of them.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director Joseph Edlow held a press conference about the home visits on Tuesday.
“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,” he told reporters.
Minnesota has a huge legal immigrant population. Many are from India, Vietnam, and Mexico. The group that gets the most attention, however, is the Somalis. More than 82,000 Somalis have been resettled in Minnesota in the last 30 years, and it’s been all downsides for the Americans living there.
Edlow says that the biggest fraud problem that they found in the Twin Cities was fake marriages. If an immigrant gets married to a US citizen, it makes the process much faster for them to obtain US citizenship. It also shields an illegal immigrant from automatic deportation. Much of the immigrant population, including the Somali refugees, enters short-term fake marriages to gain US citizenship.
And that’s how we ended up with an obnoxious communist like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) in Congress. You knew that was coming, right? It’s impossible to hear this story and not think of Omar marrying her own brother to help him obtain US citizenship.
The good news for the Twin Cities is that any form of immigration fraud, including marriage fraud, is automatic grounds for deportation under 8 USC § 1227. In half of the households that ICE just visited in Minneapolis-St. Paul, at least one person was taken into custody for deportation.
ICE found a Kenyan national who had paid $100 for a fake death certificate for his Kenyan wife. He used the fake death certificate to then marry an American woman, in hopes of getting US citizenship for himself. ICE also located the man’s Kenyan wife. She was living in Minneapolis with their five kids.
“Incidentally, he has another wife living in Sweden with whom he has an additional three children,” said Edlow.
They caught another migrant who is the son of a known terrorist on the no-fly list. He tried to commit marriage fraud multiple times before being scooped up in this operation. A third example that Edlow mentioned was an immigrant who conned an elderly American woman into marrying him.
The really good news is that Edlow says this operation is only getting started. The legal immigration system in our country has been dysfunctional for decades, and everyone knows it. Edlow says the Twin Cities operation was a success, and his agency will be duplicating it in many additional cities across the country.
“This is the first of many,” he said. “Any city should be prepared to be the site for an operation of this magnitude.”
ICE also managed to capture quite a few illegal aliens during the sweep. They snuck into the country and were living with their legal immigrant relatives. Harboring an illegal alien is also a federal crime, so this will hopefully send a powerful message to some of the legal immigrants. We expect them to be law-abiding if we allow them the privilege of living in our country.
The real takeaway from this operation in Minneapolis-St. Paul, however, is that we need a total immigration moratorium in America. If 50% of the legal immigrant households in the US are committing at least one form of immigration fraud, then we have a much larger problem on our hands than we thought. All immigration should be shut down for at least 30 years so we can get these problems sorted out.