On Monday in Minneapolis, Minnesota, federal immigration and law enforcement agencies launched a publicly coordinated operation targeting alleged “fraudulent” daycare and healthcare centers operated by Somali Americans.
Under conditions where Trump’s popularity is collapsing over his cover-up of the Epstein files, warmongering and self-dealing, the police action against immigrants is being widely promoted by senior officials in the administration and right-wing propagandists.
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) propagandist Tricia McLaughlin promoted the campaign on X, formerly Twitter, writing:
Right now in Minneapolis, Homeland Security Investigations @ICEGov are on the ground conducting a large scale investigation on fraudulent daycare and healthcare centers, as well as other rampant fraud. More to come.
DHS likewise issued an official statement declaring:
Our agents are conducting a massive operation to identify, arrest, and remove criminals who are defrauding the American people at daycares, healthcare facilities, and other suspected sites. We will not stop until we’ve rooted out this rampant fraud plaguing Minnesota.
The campaign was immediately amplified across federal agencies. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer wrote on X: “We will bring an end to the Somali fraud network.”
Chavez-DeRemer, endorsed by Teamsters President Sean O’Brien earlier this year, tied the police action back to Trump’s attacks on Minnesota Democrats Governor Tim Walz and Rep. Ilhan Omar, the first and currently only Somali American elected to Congress: “The massive Minnesota fraud network has abused federal funds across multiple federal agencies thanks to unbelievably miserable ‘leadership’ from politicians like @GovTimWalz and @Ilhan.”
In support of the administration’s deportation operation, billionaire Elon Musk retweeted Chavez-DeRemer’s posts along with his usual anti-immigrant bile. On Saturday Musk repeated and promoted the Great Replacement Theory on X, writing that:
The radical left has been using fraudulent government programs for a long time to import and retain vast numbers of illegal (and legal, in some cases) immigrants to win elections and turn America into a single-party state, destroying any real democracy.
Musk claimed that the same process “is happening in Europe, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.”
The political narrative now being used by the Trump administration to justify raids in Minnesota originates with a series of videos produced by far-right social media personality Nick Shirley.
Shirley was among the fascist influencers invited to an October 8 White House roundtable convened to promote claims about the alleged danger posed by “antifa.” The meeting, as the WSWS previously analyzed, “was used to legitimize fascism, brand anti-fascism as ‘terrorism,’ and mobilize the repressive machinery of the state against the population.”
Starting with the first Trump administration, Shirley aligned himself with domestic and international far-right movements. Earlier this year he traveled to the Center for Terrorism Confinement in El Salvador, known as CECOT, to film social media videos in support of the Trump administration’s mass deportation program, which sends detainees to the mega-prison without trial. He also traveled to Britain, where he marched alongside fascist leader Tommy Robinson and conducted multiple promotional interviews with him that were distributed across his social media platforms.
In the last week Shirley released a series of videos shot in Minnesota in front of alleged childcare and healthcare centers. In the videos he attempts to enter workplaces and confront staff, demanding proof of children, books and enrollment records while asserting that the facilities are fronts for a coordinated Somali fraud network.
The videos do not present audited evidence, court findings or verified investigative reporting. Instead, they advance Trump’s anti-immigrant conspiracy theory that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Representative Ilhan Omar deliberately oversaw a vast fraud scheme as part of what Shirley and allied Republican officials describe as a get-out-the-vote operation for Somali immigrants.
This narrative is a contemporary rebranding of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which claims that Democratic Party officials and wealthy elites are deliberately importing immigrants to replace Americans of European ancestry and prevent Republicans from winning elections. The theory has long been associated with antisemitic propaganda and has been cited in the manifestos of multiple mass shooters in the United States, Oceania and Europe.
Shirley’s propaganda videos have been heavily promoted by Trump administration officials. Senior officials at the departments of Homeland Security, Labor and Education have directly amplified his material, while the Trump administration’s social media apparatus has framed his claims as the basis for what DHS calls a “massive operation” to “identify, arrest, and remove” people in Minnesota.
While federal officials promote the Minnesota raids as an anti-fraud campaign, newly released body camera footage has exposed the criminal character of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and the falsity of official claims used to justify their violence.
Earlier this year ICE agents shot Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a popular TikTok streamer in Los Angeles. For months DHS officials publicly claimed that Parias had used his vehicle as a weapon against agents, forcing them to open fire in self-defense.
The release of body camera footage has now conclusively refuted those claims.
The video shows ICE vehicles ramming and boxing in Parias’ car. Parias remains inside his vehicle with his hands visible. An agent smashes the passenger-side window. Moments later, an ICE officer fires a round that strikes Parias in the elbow. The ricochet from the bullet also injures another federal agent.
Immediately after firing, the ICE agent is heard on the recording saying: “Oh. Fuck.”
Another agent asks: “Who shot?”
The agent replies: “I shot, I shot.”
Despite the fact that Parias did not shoot, strike or threaten any officer, federal prosecutors charged him with assault on a federal officer following the October 21 shooting.
On Saturday, U.S. District Judge Fernando M. Olguin dismissed the case with prejudice. The court found that Parias’ rights had been violated and noted that he had been denied legal counsel while being held in ICE custody at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, where he remains detained and faces deportation.
Evidence has also emerged refuting official claims surrounding an ICE shooting in Maryland last week.
ICE initially and continues to assert that the passenger injured in the Glen Burnie shooting had been riding in the van that agents fired upon. However, reporting by the Baltimore Banner, citing statements from the injured man’s attorney, shows that this account is false.
According to attorney statements, Solomon Antonio Serrano-Esquivel was already handcuffed inside an ICE vehicle when he was injured in a car accident. ICE vehicles had engaged in a pursuit of the van and crashed into it while Serrano-Esquivel was handcuffed. He suffered injuries, including whiplash, as a result of the collision.
The official narrative released by ICE misrepresented both the circumstances of the injury and the position of the victim at the time it occurred.
As in the Los Angeles shooting, ICE publicly framed the incident in a manner that obscured its own actions and deflected responsibility, while criminalizing those subjected to its use of force.
The false public framing of immigration raids as operations targeting violent criminals has also been systematically disproven by large-scale arrest data.
The Chicago Tribune recently analyzed 64 days of arrests carried out during what the Department of Homeland Security called “Operation Midway Blitz,” an operation that resulted in more than 4,500 immigration-related arrests.
DHS claimed the operation targeted “the worst of the worst.” The Tribune found, “...only about 1.5% of those detained for immigration-related reasons had been convicted of a violent felony or sex crime.”
Among the 4,500 people detained by federal immigration Gestapo during the fascistic raids was Leodegario Martínez Barradas, who had no known criminal record. He was arrested in a parking lot in Archer Heights and deported to Mexico within a week. At the time of his detention he had been selling flowers on a street corner.
The raids unfolding across the country, framed by the Trump administration as either a “crime fighting” or an “anti-fraud” campaign, are in reality part of a national system of repression aimed at the entire working class regardless of immigration status. At the core of this system is profit and coerced labor.
The Supreme Court is currently hearing a lawsuit brought by immigrants, who were detained in 2014 in a private prison operated by GEO Group during the Obama administration. The detainees allege that they were forced to work for $1 a day and, in some cases, for no pay at all. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, the GEO Group reported $2.4 billion in revenue last year, with 41 percent of that revenue stemming from contracts with ICE.
The lawsuit alleges that detainees who refused to work were punished with solitary confinement or denial of basic privileges. In practice, the detention system operates as a modern forced labor regime in which corporate profit depends on mass incarceration, deportation quotas and the suppression of basic legal rights.
The bipartisan origins of this system are paramount. The forced labor allegations stem from detentions carried out under a Democratic administration. The deportation machinery that Trump now wields was built, expanded and normalized by both parties. The Democratic Party refused to dismantle the detention regime, refused to hold the Trump administration accountable for the failed January 6 coup attempt and preserved the very structures now being used to carry out mass raids, deportations and shootings.