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fraud
Trump State Dept. Accused of ‘Largest Fee Fraud in History’ of US Immigration System
An immigration researcher at the Cato Institute found that the Trump administration is "raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to."
Mar 24, 2026
The US State Department under President Donald Trump has been accused of stealing more than a billion dollars from immigrants and sponsors in what experts are calling “the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system.”
A report published last week by the Cato Institute, written by director of immigration studies David J. Bier, found that the State Department and Department of Homeland Security were receiving millions of applications from immigrants whom Trump has made ineligible for legal status and pocketing the fees without ever processing the requests.
"The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications," said Austin Kocher, a fellow at Immigration Lab and a professor at Newhouse and Syracuse University in a social media post breaking down the report on Monday. "No denials. No refunds. Just silence."
The report zeroes in on a series of policies signed by Trump and enacted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) head Joseph Edlow, which have collectively barred nationals from 92 countries from immigrating to the US.
One proclamation signed by Trump in December bans legal entry and most visas for the nationals of 40 nations—including Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, and Haiti—based on nationality. A memo sent by Edlow extended the freeze to many USCIS immigration-benefit applications for people from targeted countries already living in the US, including work authorization and permanent residency filings
Another State Department policy bans visa applications from immigrants in 75 countries from being processed indefinitely, purportedly based on data showing that residents of those countries use welfare at disproportionately high rates.
These policies block more than 320,000 people abroad from entering the US and potentially as many as 561,000 potential permanent residents when those already living in the US are considered.
Although people from these countries are categorically denied immigrant visas and most other visa types under a series of travel bans signed by Trump, the government is still collecting fees for visas, work permits, and green cards.
The report cited evidence that the department has directed consular officers that they "should not counsel applicants or advise them" that they are subject to the bans when they come in for their interviews, because it "could be seen as pre-adjudication."
Upon revealing this directive last month, immigration attorney Curtis Morrison described it as a way that "embassies scam visa applicants subject to the travel ban out of fees."
As Bier explained:
To immigrate to the United States or to obtain authorization to work or travel internationally, noncitizens must usually pay a fee to have their applications processed. USCIS’s immigration fee revenues were nearly $7 billion, and the Consular Affairs budget was about $6 billion.
The fees stack up. For instance, to sponsor a spouse, a US citizen must pay a $675 fee to USCIS to petition for their spouse to obtain lawful permanent residence. Then, the immigrant must pay $1,440 to adjust status from temporary to permanent residence. That application takes so long that people usually pay $560 for the spouse to receive an employment authorization document, so the total fees can add up to $2,675.
Bier estimated that more than 2 million applications were affected by the bans, with fees coming primarily from work permit filings and permanent residency or immigrant visa applications.
He explained that these fees are difficult to track precisely because the government does not publish detailed statistics on them. He was also forced to rely on out-of-date fee statistics from 2023-24 because the Trump administration "has simply stopped publishing most statistics."
That said, Bier noted that the numbers are most likely to “understate reality” because they include only those who likely had their requests processed in the past year, not those whose processing was delayed by backlogs.
Of the more than $1 billion in fees the Trump administration would have collected for services it never rendered, data from previous years suggested that about $543 million came from Cuban immigrants, who filed about 935,000 applications during the period under review.
The next highest were Venezuelans, who paid an estimated $138 million in fees. Iranians, Haitians, and Afghans were also among the nationalities with the highest numbers of unprocessed applications.
The Trump administration has used high-profile instances of fraud committed by members of immigrant groups, such as Somalis in Minneapolis, to cast aspersions upon entire nationalities and target them for immigration bans and attacks by federal law enforcement.
However, as Bier explained before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, based on the findings of a Cato report, "immigrants aren't to blame" for most welfare fraud, accounting for just 5% of it, 31% less per capita than native-born US citizens.
He argued that the Department of Homeland Security "isn't anti-fraud" but instead "openly carrying out the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system... raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to."
"DHS and State can deny anyone who fails to make their case. Instead, this administration is pocketing thousands of dollars from hardworking Americans and their relatives, including spouses and minor children of US citizens, and then not even looking at their applications," he said. "This is a scam. This is fraud."
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If Trump Really Cared About Fraud in Minnesota, Critics Say, He Would Go After UnitedHealth
"Most of the perpetrators are lodged within large corporations run by white executives with excellent and expensive legal representation," wrote one journalist.
Jan 28, 2026
US President Donald Trump has used unsubstantiated allegations of large-scale fraud in Minnesota's Somali community as a pretext to surge federal agents into the state—with deadly consequences—and cut off federal childcare funding.
But unlike the Somali community, which Trump has subjected to grotesque attacks that have left many fearing for their safety, Minnesota-based UnitedHealth Group (UHG) has not faced the president's public ire.
One of the nation's largest for-profit health insurance companies, UHG is the leading beneficiary of a long-running Medicare Advantage fraud scheme that could cost US taxpayers $1.2 trillion over the next decade—a sum that dwarfs even the White House's wildest claims about the costs of fraud allegedly committed by Somali-run daycares.
The $1.2 trillion estimate comes from a report published earlier this month by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC), which found that federal overpayments to privately run, publicly funded Medicare Advantage plans will total around $76 billion this year in part due to a practice known as upcoding, whereby insurers present patients as sicker than they actually are to reap larger payments.
UnitedHealthcare, UHG's insurance division, is the leading Medicare Advantage provider in the United States. Stephen Hemsley, UnitedHealth Group's CEO, received a base salary of $1 million last year and a one-time equity award worth $60 million.
ICE/CBP swarms into Minnesota to crack down on government fraud. Somehow they sidestep the orders-of-magnitude higher government fraud by Minnesota-based UnitedHealth, who leads a Medicare Advantage fraud that government analyst MedPac estimates as costing America $76 billion/yr pic.twitter.com/dECnwgUCRV
— David Dayen (@ddayen) January 27, 2026
A Senate report released on January 12 found that UnitedHealth Group uses "aggressive strategies" to maximize patients' so-called "risk-adjustment scores" in an effort to receive larger Medicare Advantage payments from the federal government.
"UHG has turned risk adjustment into a major profit-centered strategy, which was not the original intent of the program," states the report, which was based on more than 50,000 pages of company documents obtained by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Senate report cited a 2024 Wall Street Journal investigation showing that "insurer-driven diagnoses by UnitedHealth for diseases that no doctor treated generated $8.7 billion in 2021 payments to the company... UnitedHealth’s net income that year was about $17 billion."
"A real crackdown on fraud would go after those big fish first."
While the US Justice Department—headed by former corporate lobbyist Pam Bondi—is currently investigating UnitedHealth Group over its Medicare billing practices, the Trump administration has enabled the conglomerate's continued expansion and abuses.
Last August, the DOJ settled a Biden-era legal challenge aimed at preventing UnitedHealth Group from absorbing yet another competitor. According to a tracker run by the American Economic Liberties Project, the corporation is still denying necessary care to patients, overbilling the federal government, and engaging in anticompetitive behavior on the Trump administration's watch.
Journalist Merrill Goozner wrote last week that "there is no doubt greedy operators ripped off Minnesota safety net programs," observing that "several of the nearly 100 people under investigation have already pleaded guilty."
"But if federal officials in Minnesota really want to go after industrial-scale fraud, they ought to step up their slow-motion investigation of UnitedHealth Group," Goozner wrote. "The nation’s tattered social safety net, under assault by the Trump administration and shrinking daily, remains prone to abuse by unscrupulous operators. Medicare and Medicaid are especially juicy targets. Most of the perpetrators are lodged within large corporations run by white executives with excellent and expensive legal representation."
"A real crackdown on fraud," he added, "would go after those big fish first."
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Walz Says Trump Is Exploiting Minnesota Fraud Issue to Defund State’s Childcare Programs
"He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans," said the Democratic governor.
Dec 31, 2025
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Tuesday accused US President Donald Trump and his administration of sensationalizing and exploiting a real problem—fraud in the state's social services system—to advance their broader agenda of gutting the safety net.
"This is Trump’s long game," Walz wrote on social media after the US Department of Health and Human Services announced it was suspending all federal childcare funds to Minnesota, alleging "blatant fraud that appears to be rampant."
Walz added that fraud is "a serious issue—but this has been [Trump's] plan all along."
"He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans," the governor wrote.
This is Trump’s long game.
We’ve spent years cracking down on fraudsters. It’s a serious issue - but this has been his plan all along.
He’s politicizing the issue to defund programs that help Minnesotans. https://t.co/7ByWjeXxu0
— Governor Tim Walz (@GovTimWalz) December 31, 2025
The right-wing media ecosystem and Republican politicians have fixated on fraud in Minnesota in recent weeks, using it to launch bigoted attacks on the state's Somali community and call for mass deportations of Somalis.
The issue exploded over the weekend after Nick Shirley, a right-wing influencer and YouTuber, released a video claiming to expose fraud in Minnesota day care centers. The video went viral and was shared by top Trump administration officials, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Vice President JD Vance. Kristi Noem, head of the US Department of Homeland Security, said in the wake of the video's publication that federal agents "are on the ground" in the state and "conducting a massive investigation."
Minnesota Public Radio reported that the state's House speaker, Rep. Lisa Demuth (R-13A), confirmed that her caucus directed Shirley to the day care sites that he visited.
"Those featured in his widely viewed video have been part of a state-administered childcare program using federal money, although some recently had operations or payments suspended," the outlet noted.
The Guardian noted that "despite claims by conservatives on social media that the allegations of fraud were ignored until now, there have been years of fraud investigations that began with the indictments in 2022 of 47 defendants for their alleged roles in a $250 million scheme that exploited a federally funded child nutrition program during the Covid-19 pandemic."
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