Stephen Miller was on a quest.
The president’s fierce loyalist, at the time his deputy chief of staff, pressed administration officials for evidence of fraud related to immigrants, Minnesota and the state’s Somali population nine times in a span of about 10 minutes during a December 2025 call, according to a recording obtained by The Washington Sun.
Miller cut one official off as they were describing a fraud problem in Florida, a hot spot for bad actors who siphon off government benefits, according to the government’s own data. He appeared uninterested in the official’s description of fraud when it didn’t prominently feature immigrants.
At one point, Miller was told about an active criminal investigation into a national fraud case out of the Eastern District of Virginia.
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“I hear you, but that’s a long way off from Minneapolis,” Miller responded.
The call is one of several previously unreported instances since the fall of 2025 in which Miller pushed administration officials to target a small population of immigrants in a single state. A White House official told The Sun in a statement that the call “was focused on rooting out fraud in Minnesota” and that there is “no denying the Somali population was a large part of the massive fraud in the state.”
Miller has repeatedly sought to wield the full weight of the federal government against the roughly 100,000 Somalis who live in Minnesota, targeting the state’s federal funds, installing an ally of his immigration agenda in a key position at the Justice Department and clashing with career and political officials in the process.
“It’s like a passion project for him,” one source close to the White House said.
Miller has only strengthened his power in the aftermath of a brutal election for his party. On Friday, President Donald Trump named Miller his chief of staff — a personal achievement for Miller that makes explicit his long-standing dominion over the president’s domestic agenda.
Miller’s fraud push emerged in the aftermath of a major scandal over fraudulent payments in Minnesota, in which a disproportionate number of people of Somali descent were charged with pilfering hundreds of millions from government programs. Miller’s offensive has had its own seismic impact.
The administration sent thousands of federal officers to the state for immigration enforcement, a surge that resulted in two Americans being killed by federal agents. It froze hundreds of millions in Medicaid funding and threatened millions more in child care and food stamp programs.
Mosques and day cares in Minneapolis have been forced to hire additional security in response to a demonization campaign accelerated by the federal government. The funding cuts threaten instability for millions of state residents of all ethnic backgrounds.
“We have literally seen a full government response to attack the community on the ground through propaganda, economic sanctions and the invasion of one state as if we were a hostile territory that had to be dominated,” said Doran Schrantz, a board member and former director of Faith In Minnesota, a grassroots nonprofit.
Miller’s focus on the Somali population in Minnesota has frustrated some in the administration who have sought a more holistic approach to rooting out fraud, two administration officials told The Sun.
The focus “was not necessarily fraud writ large,” but on “the specific population of immigrants,” one of those officials said, calling the campaign “inane.”
Miller, newly empowered, is under intense pressure from his right to to do even more to go after Somalis in Minnesota.
“Miller is pushing this fraud stuff desperately to get his reputation back on the right because he’s getting hammered for being a sellout who did nothing,” one former Trump aide said. “There’s been no mass deportations. This is all brand salvaging from him.”
In a statement to The Sun, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said, “President Trump has launched an all-out war on fraud across the entire federal government, holding criminals accountable and saving taxpayers billions of dollars. This administration has a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who steals from the American taxpayer.”
How Miller directed a government crackdown on Minnesota
Miller’s directives on fraud in Minnesota reached at least five federal agencies in the last year, attempting to touch everything from how Somalis and other Minnesotans receive access to nutrition assistance and health services to how they send money to their families.
In the fall of 2025, Miller pushed Treasury officials to scrutinize bank reports generated in Minnesota in an attempt to identify transfers of ill-gotten money out of the U.S.
Treasury aides, including Trump appointees, pushed back: The action Miller was seeking wouldn’t capture what he said he wanted, which was anything suspicious between government agencies and Somali-run private nonprofits, two sources with direct knowledge of the conversations said.
Miller pressed Treasury officials to find other ways to use the financial system to crack down on Somali immigrants. In response to the pressure, Treasury implemented an order requiring financial firms in two Minnesota counties to report all international transactions over $3,000.
Treasury staff was concerned that doing so violated constitutional protections against overly broad law enforcement searches, the two sources said. Somali businesses have said the federal action has created a panic about their ability to send money home. In internal conversations, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been supportive of aggressively using financial tools to root out fraud, one source said.
Administration officials were especially taken by a Nov. 29, 2025, New York Times article about Minnesota’s fraud crisis, concluding they needed to mount “a strong public response,” one source familiar with the fraud work told The Sun.
Around that time, the administration issued a barrage of threats against Minnesota, some at Miller’s request.
Miller’s team pushed top political officials multiple times to cut up to $150 million in Department of Agriculture funding to the state late last year and early this year, including food assistance, according to an administration official.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Minnesota in early December to submit a plan by January to combat Medicaid fraud or risk losing funding. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins did similarly just over a week later, demanding Minnesota recertify the over 100,000 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program participants in four counties in and around Minneapolis in only 30 days — a process that includes in-person interviews — or face administrative funding cuts. (A judge later blocked Rollins’ demand.)
The administration’s actions toward Minnesota went into hyperdrive after conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley published a viral video on Dec. 26 in which he visited Minnesota day cares, purporting to uncover fraud. Within weeks, Trump established a new fraud division within the Justice Department, CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz informed Minnesota of his intention to withhold up to $2 billion in annual Medicaid funding, and Rollins announced on X that her department was freezing nearly $130 million in funding to Minnesota, and specifically to Minneapolis.
The Administration for Children and Families, too, froze federal funds for child care services to Minnesota and four other states.
While ACF has authority to address suspected fraud, it bypassed its own process, said Ruth Friedman, who directed the office of child care at ACF under the Biden administration. The letters to states “were extraordinarily unusual and did not follow established procedure and regulation,” she said. Courts quickly blocked the freezes and ACF later walked them back.
The administration partially justified its immigration enforcement surge in the state by pointing to the growing fraud scandal. The surge exploded into national outrage in January, when federal agents killed two U.S. citizens, Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
The political outcry over the killings, including from some Republicans, led the White House to lessen its physical law enforcement presence in the state. But at least one of Miller’s allies in the law enforcement surge would go on to become a key figure in the fraud fight.
Miller and the administration, the source close to the White House said, viewed going after fraud in immigrant communities as a “more politically opportune way to highlight the issue with immigration rather than ramping up enforcement in the same graphic way.”
In his State of the Union address, Trump announced that Vice President JD Vance would be leading a “war on fraud” and cited “Somali pirates.” Days later, Vance announced that the government was freezing nearly $260 million in Medicaid funding to Minnesota. The anti-fraud task force was formalized in March, with Vance in charge and Miller as a senior advisor.
One month later, the Justice Department swore in Colin McDonald as its first ever assistant attorney general to lead the new fraud enforcement division. Ever since, he has been Miller’s “top lieutenant” within the Justice Department, according to a senior administration official.
“He’s basically doing Miller’s bidding,” the official said.
Miller maintains a direct pipeline to McDonald, a relationship they previously established when the assistant attorney general was Miller’s point person within the DOJ on immigration. That included the administration deporting Venezuelans without due process under the Alien Enemies Act, as well as law enforcement surges in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities.
Because Miller saw the fraud work as nearly singularly focused on immigration, the senior administration official said, McDonald became a natural fit to lead the Justice Department’s new push. Miller now turns to McDonald for any issue related to fraud.
“For fraud, Somali fraud in Minnesota was his biggest target,” the official said of Miller.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Treasury Department said in a statement that “the entire administration is completely united in rooting out waste, fraud and abuse.” HHS declined to comment. The Agriculture Department said fraud has been a priority from Day One of Trump’s presidency and did not respond to a request for comment on Miller’s role.
Fraud as an immigration issue
In the backdrop of Miller’s focus on Minnesota and the immigrant population is a real fraud problem in government programs that worsened during the pandemic. The Government Accountability Office estimates the government loses $233 billion to $521 billion every year to fraud.
In Minnesota, the sprawling fraud scandal across the state’s social services programs included one nonprofit, Feeding Our Future, fraudulently obtaining and dispersing $250 million in federal funds, according to the Justice Department.
By the end of last December, almost 100 people had been charged with schemes to defraud social safety net programs meant to treat children with autism, feed children and house vulnerable Minnesotans with disabilities. More than 80 of those charged were people of Somali descent.
Many in the Trump administration came into office intent on culling back what they saw as government programs drowning in waste after the pandemic. That work remains underway, and in some corners of the federal government, officials feel they’ve made progress — in part due to the top-down pressure from the White House.
Several administration officials say Miller’s focus has been more narrow. Fraud, in Miller’s telling, is an immigration issue.
“If you’re a middle-class taxpayer in this country, before President Trump came along, you spent half your working life paying for fraudsters and scammers, many of whom are refugees, illegal aliens and foreigners who came to this country to loot and plunder us,” Miller told the press during the launch of a new fraud tip line in October.
Miller’s extreme messaging has shut out some who may have been natural allies in anti-fraud efforts.
“There is an actual fraud problem here. It’s just not a fraud problem related to immigration, and it’s not even a fraud problem related primarily to individual beneficiaries,” said Linda Miller, president of the Program Integrity Alliance who worked at the Government Accountability Office on fraud for a decade. “It’s a much bigger, more systematic problem.”
The leader of a security-focused trade group heavily focused on reducing fraud, granted anonymity to speak freely, told The Sun that the group’s members don’t want to work with the White House because of the rhetoric.
“You have to have some really screwed up messaging when a coalition of companies — most of whom are dedicated to fighting fraud — are reticent to engage with a White House that’s trying to do more on it,” they said, “because the way that they have framed it has made the politics so toxic that they’d rather just stay away.”
In an interview with The Sun, Oz said Miller was not as involved as other task force members in the nuts and bolts of addressing chronic fraud in government health care programs.
Miller’s rhetoric, Oz said, is “not frustrating at all” and highlights “something all of us need to acknowledge.”
“We built our social infrastructure, our safety net system in a high-trust society,” Oz said. “If you allow our communities to become so corrupt that everyone expects there to be people stealing from the poor, that’s a massive problem for the country.”
Pressure from the right is growing
To Liam Donovan, a longtime Republican strategist, the focus on Minnesota was as an effort to reconstitute the best moment of the election cycle for Republicans: After Shirley’s YouTube video about fraud went viral, but before federal agents shot and killed American citizens.
The administration has been “looking for another Nick Shirley moment,” Donovan said.
That was “political bliss,” he said.
Miller is now facing a very different environment in the face of overwhelming Democratic wins in the midterms. The Republican party is facing a reckoning from the left, but Miller, at the center of Trump’s agenda, is still facing pressure from the right.
Ryan James Girdusky, founder of the right-wing 1776 Project PAC, praised Miller and noted he was constrained by the legal obstacles that make it difficult to deport Somalian immigrants, who are largely here legally. But Gidursky also acknowledged Miller was under pressure from the right to carry out more aggressive actions. “Some people always want more.”
Gregory Bovino, former top official at Customs and Border Patrol who left the administration after intense fallout from the fatal shootings of Good and Pretti, called Miller an immigration hawk whose wings had been clipped.
“We should have doubled down and hit that community even harder,” he said, saying that to really address fraud, the administration needs to conduct mass deportations.
“You have to do large-scale, uniformed, hard immigration enforcement because that’s how you shut it down,” he said. “You have to put varsity squad there, whether it looks good or not.”
Fraud, he said, isn’t enough to sell Trump’s immigration promises to the base. Bovino argued Miller must do more in the last two years of Trump’s presidency.
“We’ve had the softer approach, the targeted enforcement … the very, ‘I’ll do a fraud case or two,’ gaslight the American public into thinking, OK, well we’re doing fraud cases’ when they’re really not,” he said. “And that’s what’s happening now in Minnesota and nationwide.”
The White House official said that “the administration has never wavered from it’s [sic] promise to arrest and deport illegal aliens.”
As the election neared, administration officials raced to right-wing television, social media and the Oval Office to tout their efforts to fight fraud. Top-level Cabinet members went to St. Cloud, Minnesota, days before Election Day to announce new anti-fraud measures.
“Let me be clear: This is still the beginning of our work in Minnesota,” said McDonald, the Miller point person in the DOJ. “We will be here for as long as it takes to punish the wrongdoers in Minnesota.”
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