🚨MORE MINNESOTA FRAUD!! The state was forced to shut down Hennepin County’s $2 million anti-ICE business fund!! ⠀ The Hennepin County Board had set the money aside for shops claiming losses from Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration push that started in December 2025. Minneapolis sits in that county. ⠀ Applications ran March 18 to March 25 through NextStage, a nonprofit lender. About 300 packets came in. ⠀ More than 200 were flagged. Officials paid about $500,000 to 82 applicants and then stopped the machine. ⠀ KSTP said $1.5 million was still sitting in the account. The board dumped that remainder into a “lower-risk” consulting program for new entrepreneurs. ⠀ Reviewers found the same AI-generated paragraphs pasted onto different business names. Site visits found addresses that were not businesses at all. ⠀ Other files used a real shop’s details with the wrong owner. Some padded the losses. County staff say no flagged application got a check. ⠀ Commissioner Jeff Lunde said, “We caught the fraud before we spent any money.” He also said, “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.” ⠀ Lunde told Fox the results kept getting worse, so they halted processing. He called the pile overwhelmingly fraudulent. ⠀ This is the same metro that already burned through federal social-service and Medicaid fraud scandals. They still built a taxpayer pot for businesses “hurt” by ICE, then watched the applications arrive pre-written. ⠀ #Minnesota# #HennepinCounty#