Senate Republicans set their sights on immigration fraud at a judiciary hearing on Tuesday, assembling witnesses who highlighted widespread abuse of immigrant-tied government benefits in the midst of Minnesota’s massive Somali fraud scandal.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), chairman of the Subcommittee on Border Security and Immigration, noted during opening remarks that Somali scammers overwhelmingly made up most of the fraudsters who were federally indicted in Minnesota over the past few years.
According to Cornyn, out of the 98 federal Minnesota fraud cases filed so far, 85 defendants are of Somali descent.
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“Much of the fraud is committed by aliens, many of them criminal aliens,” Cornyn continued.
The senator cited a 2023 report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which calculated that Medicaid lost approximately $8 billion in funding a year due to fraud attributable to illegal aliens.
“A quick internet search will reveal numerous instances of foreign nationals who’ve been convicted for fraud, everything from wire fraud, manufacturing and selling counterfeit documents, fraudulently obtaining mass numbers of H-2B visas, and much more,” Cornyn said.
Several of the GOP’s invited guests focused on Somali fraudsters, in particular, targeting and subsequently tapping immigration benefits with little government oversight.
Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s border security and immigration center, said that, as a former consular officer who was tasked with adjudicating visa applications, he encountered rampant visa fraud in high-corruption countries like Somalia.
Hankinson said that, in his experience, the amount of visa fraud in a given country tended to track with the country’s general level of corruption.
“Somalia is one of the most corrupt countries on Earth. Not surprisingly, Somalis commit fraud at high rates when applying for U.S. visas,” Hankinson told the subcommittee. “They continue to commit immigration fraud at high rates once in the U.S. and when seeking additional benefits, such as bringing relatives to the United States or becoming permanent residents and citizens.”
In 2012, a U.S. State Department inspection of Somalia’s conditions found that its “chronic instability has made it a haven for transnational terrorism, piracy, and a threat to stability in the region.” Not much has improved over the years. In 2025, the United Nations Development Program ranked the African nation 192nd of 193 countries on its Human Development Index, meaning it is the second-least developed country in the world after South Sudan.
“Fraud is not exclusive to undeveloped countries, but it is far more common in poor, corrupt, or badly governed states,” Hankinson said. “Somalia is all three.”
Rebecca Gambler, chief quality assurance officer and managing director of audit policy at the Government Accountability Office, testified about the fraud risks that the agency has found throughout federal immigration relief programming.
In early 2024, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services identified indicators of fraud spread throughout the humanitarian parole processes for Ukrainians, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans. Suspicious trends indicating fraud included information belonging to deceased individuals and thousands of applications containing fictitious records.
USCIS at the time faulted insufficient internal controls in its vetting system, for instance, a lack of automated monitoring to prevent or detect possible fraudulent activity. Nearly two years later, GAO discovered in December that USCIS has not yet developed an internal control plan to help proactively mitigate fraud, concerns which the federal watchdog raised previously.
Back in September 2022, GAO recommended that USCIS should take steps to ensure its anti-fraud efforts are effective by taking a risk-based approach that aligns with leading fraud prevention practices. Since then, USCIS has failed to fully implement GAO’s recommendations.
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FAIR’s deputy executive director Matthew O’Brien, a former assistant chief immigration judge, lamented that reliable data about immigration fraud is “remarkably scarce.” Agencies release occasional program-specific reports, but there is no consistent governmentwide picture to capture the true scale of immigration fraud, O’Brien said.
O’Brien blamed “the lack of a coordinated federal strategy” on the multiplicity of agencies with overlapping jurisdictions.
Responsibility for detecting and prosecuting immigration fraud is scattered across USCIS, the State Department, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection, and the Justice Department, among other agencies.
“The cost of this systemic neglect is enormous,” O’Brien said. “Although no official estimate exists for immigration-specific fraud, the fiscal cost of illegal immigration, which is driven in large part by fraudulent access to taxpayer-funded programs, has been estimated at roughly $150 billion annually. And that figure does not capture the everyday identity theft, tax evasion, and document fraud that ripple through our communities and institutions.”
Some of the Republican senators also pointed to the prevalence of public assistance fraud in certain immigrant communities and their overreliance on social services, calling into question whether the United States should reconsider the refugee status of those fraud-prone and government-dependent groups.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked the panelists one by one if “importing vast numbers of people from an impoverished nation, putting the majority of them on public welfare for years and decades at a time, and then turning a blind eye while they steal billions of dollars from the taxpayers” is helping or hurting America.
“We know that Somalia is a high-fraud country,” Phillip Linderman, of the Center for Immigration Studies, said. “To bring people from that country who cannot integrate into our systems is not in the U.S. national interest.”
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O’Brien added, “I believe it was Milton Friedman who said you can have a welfare state or you can have open borders, but you can’t have both.”
University of Minnesota public affairs professor Eric Schwartz, appearing on behalf of the Senate Democrats, said that “it is not unusual for immigrant populations to have a high degree of assistance early in their arrival.”
However, he insisted, “We are already seeing statistics that the net benefit economically of Somali presence in the United States far outweighs the cost.”
“Sir, the Minnesota taxpayers who had $9 billion stolen from them, it has not helped them,” Cruz countered, “and the American taxpayers who are supporting a dependent population who are here for one reason and that is to vote Democrat and give money to elect Democrats.”
“If it robs the American taxpayers and endangers our security for our Democrat colleagues, that is a perfectly acceptable trade-off?” Cruz retorted.
Democrats on the subcommittee, meanwhile, claimed that it is “racist” to suggest that scams are common within the Somali community.
“We’re having our second hearing in two weeks demonizing an entire community based on a few individuals’ misconduct,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said.
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Durbin added, “Refugees are some of the most vulnerable and most vetted individuals in the United States. We can target fraud without shackling and detaining them in the dead of night.”
“It is time we reject these racist attacks and restore order and humanity in our immigration system,” Durbin urged.
