You know that friend who swears their car is running perfectly, but the second a mechanic pops the hood, every hose is duct-taped and the engine’s held together with prayers? That’s the U.S. immigration system. For four years, nobody looked under the hood. Now Trump’s team is in the garage, and what they’re finding is ugly.
Sixty-five percent. That’s the fraud rate. Not suspected. Not flagged for review. Confirmed fraud in 65% of the cases USCIS investigators actually completed. Two out of every three cases they cracked open had somebody lying their way into the country.
Let that marinate.
The Numbers Nobody Wanted You to See
USCIS Director Joe Edlow dropped the receipts in front of Congress this week, and they landed like a brick through a window. Since Trump took office, USCIS officers have made nearly 33,000 fraud referrals — a 138% increase over the yearly average under the previous administration. They completed investigations into more than 21,000 cases. They conducted over 7,000 site visits and 26,000 social media checks.
That’s not a crackdown. That’s an excavation. They’re digging up fraud the way archaeologists dig up ruins — everywhere they point a shovel, something turns up.
The obvious question: if 65% of investigated cases are fraudulent, what’s the real number across the entire system? Because USCIS hasn’t investigated every case. Not even close. These are just the ones that got flagged. The ones that looked suspicious enough to warrant a second glance.
Imagine what’s hiding in the cases nobody’s looked at yet.
Minnesota: Ground Zero
If you want to know where the rot goes deepest, follow the trail to Minneapolis-St. Paul. USCIS launched Operation Twin Shield last year targeting marriage fraud, H-1B visa fraud, and student visa fraud in the region. Over 1,000 cases with fraud indicators. Two thousand attempted site visits. Nearly 1,500 in-person interviews.
The result? Denied benefits, removal proceedings, and nearly a dozen ICE arrests. And that operation was just the appetizer.
It led directly to Operation PARRIS — a full-scale re-review of thousands of refugee cases in the Twin Cities, with an initial focus on 5,600 refugees from Somalia who haven’t yet received permanent resident status. Background checks. Reinterviews. Merit reviews. The kind of basic due diligence that should have been happening all along but mysteriously wasn’t.
The Previous Administration’s Strategy: Don’t Look
Here’s the thing about the 138% increase in fraud referrals. It doesn’t mean fraud suddenly exploded the day Trump walked into the Oval Office. It means the previous administration wasn’t looking. You can’t find what you refuse to search for.
Under Biden, the strategy was simple — process applications as fast as possible, ask as few questions as possible, and for the love of all that is political, don’t publish numbers that make the open-border crowd uncomfortable. It worked beautifully. Not for national security. Not for American workers getting undercut by fraudulent H-1B holders. Not for legitimate immigrants who played by the rules. But for the narrative? Chef’s kiss.
Now that somebody’s actually checking IDs at the door, the whole house of cards is coming down.
What This Really Means
Every fraudulent visa is a slot stolen from someone who did it the right way. Every fake marriage case is a mockery of people who waited years, filled out mountains of paperwork, and followed the law. Every bogus refugee claim dilutes the protection owed to people fleeing genuine persecution.
The left will frame this as Trump being cruel. They always do. But there’s nothing compassionate about a system so broken that two-thirds of the cases they investigate turn out to be lies. That’s not immigration. That’s a con game with a government stamp on it.
And the only cruel thing about what’s happening now is that it took this long for someone to start checking.