Senator Marsha Blackburn Leads Senate Republicans to Take Action Against Immigrant Fraudsters
Tennessee Today

Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), along with Senators John Cornyn (R-Texas), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), and Ted Budd (R-N.C.), is seeking to amend current immigration policy to include fraud of all dollar amounts as a deportable offense. Under this act, naturalized citizens convicted of fraud would also face denaturalization under the proposed changes. 

This legislation, known as the Fraud Accountability Act, comes in response to allegations of expansive fraud in Minnesota, totaling up to $9 billion dollars of stolen taxpayer money, according to an estimate from federal prosecutors. Childcare centers run by Somali immigrants have been a central point of the controversy as a viral YouTube video began circulating, bringing this issue into the national spotlight.

With a public investigation of this magnitude, the conversation has turned to intense scrutiny of Minnesota governor and former vice presidential candidate, Tim Walz, resulting in his announcement that he will not be running for reelection. The Trump administration has since frozen over $10 billion dollars in federal grants to 5 states suspected of having suffered widespread fraud and dispatched around 2,000 federal agents to Minneapolis in an effort to crack down on immigration. 

Senator Blackburn spoke has shared her opinion on the situation by stating, “Anyone who comes to the United States and steals from American taxpayers by committing fraud should be deported. The fraud schemes we have seen in Minnesota and across the country are a betrayal of hardworking American taxpayers, and individuals like the Somali scammers in Minnesota should be subject to both deportation and denaturalization for these crimes. The Fraud Accountability Act would hold these criminals accountable for robbing American taxpayers.”