By In one of the least surprising circumstances possible, another fraud has been found in Minnesota, once again proving that liberals in charge of the state are a rare mixture of incompetent and corrupt. Hennepin County has shut down a $2 million grant program created to compensate businesses for losses during a federal immigration crackdown after officials flagged more than two-thirds of the applications for potential fraud.
The Small Business Recovery Fund was approved in March by the Hennepin County Housing and Redevelopment Authority to help locally owned businesses that claimed to have suffered at least a 30 percent revenue decline during Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration enforcement operation that began in December 2025.
Businesses could receive grants of between $3,000 and $10,000, generally intended to cover two months of rent or commercial mortgage payments.
Instead, county officials found themselves confronting another wave of suspicious claims in a state already reeling from massive fraud scandals involving government programs, explained Fox News.
Hennepin County and nonprofit administrator NextStage received roughly 300 applications for the program. Following document reviews and site visits, just 82 applications were approved, accounting for about $500,000 in grants. More than 200 were flagged for potential fraud.
Officials said none of the suspected fraudulent applications received grant money. The county is now redirecting the roughly $1.5 million left in the fund toward lower-risk business assistance, including consulting services.
Hennepin County Commissioner Jeffrey Lunde said the warning signs appeared quickly. Reviewers discovered identical or repeated paragraphs in supposedly unrelated applications, language that appeared to have been generated using artificial intelligence, inflated expenses and addresses where the businesses supposedly seeking assistance did not appear to operate.
In some cases, applications were even submitted using the names of legitimate businesses whose actual owners said they had never applied.
“We caught the fraud before we spent any money,” Lunde told CBS Minnesota.
“As we dug deeper in, and we started to see patterns, and those patterns were not — they were fraudulent patterns.”
Eventually, county officials concluded there was little reason to continue processing the remaining applications.
“It was short of $2 million that we ended up saying, ‘You know what? We’re getting diminishing results. We were finding more and more fraud.’ We just said, ‘OK, we’re just gonna stop,’” Lunde said.
“Then at a certain point we’re like, ‘OK, we’re getting declining results on that.’ And so we said it’s time to stop the program. So we just stopped processing at that point.”
The episode comes against the backdrop of Minnesota’s sprawling public-fraud scandals, which have involved hundreds of millions of dollars in alleged or proven fraud across government programs. Lunde said the willingness of applicants to submit questionable claims despite those scandals demonstrated that potential fraudsters remain undeterred.
“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. “Until we get it where people fear things, then they’re gonna keep doing it.”
In a separate statement to FOX 9, Lunde said, “Clearly, fraud and people who want to commit it are still very active, as they do not fear the penalty.”
His assessment of Minnesota’s broader fraud problem was even harsher. Lunde said “the whole fraud statewide just makes me want to vomit” and called the people responsible “the lowest scum on the earth.”
County spokeswoman Carolyn Marinan said officials are moving away from emergency grants and toward other forms of business assistance.
“We’ve moved beyond the urgent need for immediate grant relief and are focusing our efforts on strategies that support the long-term vitality and sustainability of businesses,” she said.
The county is also planning an after-action review, while the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office has been asked to examine the suspicious applications. Lunde said accountability now needs to follow the county’s decision to stop the questionable payments before they went out the door.
“We need to prosecute some people. People need to be held accountable,” he said.
The grant program was among several local responses to Operation Metro Surge, a large federal immigration enforcement action launched in December 2025. Minneapolis and St. Paul officials have separately estimated that businesses and workers lost hundreds of millions of dollars during the operation.
Hennepin County’s experience produced a different lesson: Every giveaway that liberals push for political reasons tend to end up in the pockets of scammers (or activists). When will the people of Minnesota say enough is enough?
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