On the presidential marketing campaign path in 1976, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan (R) repeatedly advised audiences about an Illinois girl who had used false identities to steal 1000’s of {dollars} from the federal government.
“She used 80 names, 30 addresses, 15 phone numbers to gather meals stamps, Social Safety, veterans’ advantages for 4 non-existent deceased veteran husbands, in addition to welfare,” Reagan advised a lunch crowd in Asheville, North Carolina, including that “her tax-free money earnings alone has been operating $150,000 a 12 months.”
The stunning story — primarily based on a real-life girl named Linda Taylor who had been the topic of in depth reporting in Illinois newspapers — helped gasoline a furor over welfare fraud, each actual and imagined. The uproar would result in a rise in prosecutions and lay the groundwork for the eventual dismantling of the federal authorities’s foremost money program for poor, single moms.
The tales President Donald Trump and his allies are telling about Minnesota right this moment match into the identical custom, one which predates Reagan and can doubtless reside past this administration. For so long as the U.S. authorities has offered monetary help to the poor, tales about folks dishonest the system — usually true, generally exaggerated — have enraged sure components of the general public.
That rage, nevertheless, has at all times performed out inside the regular Democratic course of: by way of op-eds, court docket rulings, prosecutions and legislative reforms. They haven’t, till Trump and Minnesota, resulted in state-sanctioned violence.
Trump despatched greater than 2,000 federal legislation enforcement personnel to Minnesota this month in response to fraud allegations in opposition to Somali People, although federal prosecutors had already pressed costs in opposition to practically 100 folks, the overwhelming majority of whom have been of Somali descent, as the White House likes to note.
Octavio JONES / AFP by way of Getty Pictures
The federal brokers are “taking the combat to those sanctuary jurisdictions that permit these prison, unlawful aliens to roam the road and reap the benefits of the general public help that ought to be there for each taxpaying American,” Todd Lyons, the appearing director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, explained to Newsmax when the officers deployed firstly of January.
Molly Michelmore, a historian at Washington and Lee College who has written a e-book on tendencies in welfare politics, mentioned Trump’s militarized police response to welfare fraud was unprecedented in American historical past.
“I can’t consider something just like that,” Michelmore advised HuffPost. “It hasn’t been armed police forces surging into communities.”
There was in depth and well-documented welfare fraud in Minnesota, with some 98 prison defendants accused of embezzling a whole bunch of thousands and thousands in federal funds by billing the federal government for social companies they didn’t truly present to needy Minnesotans. Whereas ICE brokers had been deployed to the state since October, the Trump administration surged manpower to present ranges after a viral video purported to indicate Somali-run day care facilities containing no youngsters.
Now the clampdown on Minnesota has seemingly taken on a lifetime of its personal, with immigration authorities responding violently to protesters, together with by fatally taking pictures an American girl in her automobile. This incident has prompted much more protests — and threats from the president to ship within the U.S. army. A number of of the U.S. attorneys who led the federal authorities’s fraud prosecutions in Minnesota additionally resigned after the administration pushed them to analyze the partner of the lady who was killed.
The Division of Homeland Safety has highlighted its arrests of alleged prison unlawful immigrants in Minneapolis, however hasn’t disclosed any connections to the underlying fraud. In response a request for an replace on its investigation into fraud, the division referred HuffPost to a Monday social media update from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem that mentioned company investigators “are on the bottom in Minneapolis conducting vast scale investigations to get justice for the American individuals who have been robbed blind.”
In a press release, White Home spokesperson Abigail Jackson mentioned the administration’s response merely meets the size of the crimes dedicated underneath the watch of Minnesota’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, and the Democratic mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey — each of whom now face prison investigations from the Justice Division.
“The scale and scale of the Trump administration’s response to Minnesota is straight correlated with the scale and scale of the completely huge fraud scandal unfolding in state, enabled by Democrat politicians like Walz and Frey,” Jackson mentioned. “Minnesota Democrats have allowed Somali fraudsters to tear off hardworking People, and it could’t proceed. The Trump administration will implement the legislation with out apology.”
On Tuesday, Trump appeared on the White Home press briefing and held up pictures of among the folks ICE has arrested in Minnesota. Whereas many of the suspects whose mugshots ICE highlighted weren’t from Somalia, Trump shared his ideas about folks from that war-torn nation.
“They don’t have something that resembles a rustic. And if it’s a nation, it’s thought-about simply concerning the worst on this planet,” Trump mentioned. “They arrive right here, they usually change into wealthy, they usually don’t have a job.”
Regardless of the unprecedented nature of the state of affairs, there are nonetheless parallels between what’s occurring in Minnesota and previous welfare scandals, Michelmore mentioned.
“They’re telling a narrative about widespread prison fraud in a specific racially identifiable group that then, as a result of they’re outlined as inherently prison, justifies this sort of a crackdown,” Michelmore mentioned. “They’re not truly concerned about welfare fraud. … It’s a approach of speaking about racial politics with out utilizing phrases and phrases you’re not allowed to make use of within the post-1965 period.”
Following the passage of the Social Safety legal guidelines within the Nineteen Thirties, which created federal unemployment insurance coverage, old-age advantages and welfare applications, reporters wrote tales about ladies dishonest the Support to Households with Dependent Kids program, which was designed to offer money help to single moms.
Within the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, newspapers described ladies hiding their lovers, mendacity about their poverty and utilizing their welfare advantages to purchase steak. The scandals provoked FBI investigations, crackdowns by state governments and sustained grumbling about folks mooching off the federal government.
Ronald Reagan then made Linda Taylor, already nicknamed “welfare queen” by the press, a key a part of his stump speech throughout his unsuccessful 1976 presidential marketing campaign. Though Reagan bought some particulars fallacious, Taylor actually was a shameless George Santos-style fabulist. Taylor was additionally worse than Reagan let on, since she was suspected of homicide and kidnapping along with the assorted felony fraud costs that finally put her in jail.
But the main points have been nearly irrelevant. The aim of Reagan’s anti-welfare rhetoric was to create an us-against-them mentality amongst white voters.
Josh Levin, a journalist whose book about Taylor tracked the rise of anti-welfare politics from the Nineteen Thirties, mentioned the assaults on Somali People in Minnesota are a continuation of the sample.
“If there’s a gaggle that’s already villainized, or that could be a handy scapegoat, then in the event you discover a actual instance of fraud or against the law that’s being dedicated, then it’s simply naturally going to get elevated,” Levin advised HuffPost.
The better public deal with fraud has prompted extra vigilance by states and the federal authorities. Between 1970 and 1979, the variety of AFDC instances referred to legislation enforcement rose from 7,500 to greater than 52,000, Levin reported in his e-book.
Within the Nineties, Invoice Clinton gained the presidency partly on a promise to “finish welfare as we all know it” ― and he did so. Clinton signed a invoice into legislation altering AFDC from an open-ended promise of money advantages for low-income single moms to a restricted grant that states might use for advantages and companies.
Sarcastically, the federal government’s choice to emphasise companies over direct advantages created a gap for Minnesota’s fraudsters to function middlemen and bilk the federal government on a scale no particular person welfare queen might have achieved.
“We’re on this period the place Trump is basically pushing anti-immigrant rhetoric. And so, in every period, we get quite a lot of welfare scandal that, I don’t need to say that we deserve, however we get the number of welfare scandal that matches the occasions,” Levin mentioned.
