REGIONAL—The recent staff exodus at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Minnesota has set back years of  successful fraud-fighting work by federal and local law enforcement, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar said Tuesday.
At least 14 federal prosecutors have resigned since a U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis last month. Among them was Joe Thompson, the star fraud investigator Klobuchar said she personally asked Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to tap as the state’s top federal prosecutor. 
Referring to reporting by The New York Times and other media outlets, Klobuchar, a fourth-term Democrat now running for governor, said Thompson and his colleagues left because senior U.S. law enforcement officials asked them to investigate Good’s partner rather than the shooting itself.
“If we’re going to go after fraud, losing that talent is a huge problem,” Klobuchar said, previewing the anti-fraud pitch she hopes will land her in the governor’s mansion next year.
Klobuchar spoke at a Senate subcommittee hearing on “Somali fraud in Minnesota.” The nearly three-hour meeting was convened by Sen. John Cornyn — a Republican whose reelection bid this year is imperiled by a strong primary challenge from right-wing firebrand and current Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
In his opening remarks, Cornyn cited Thompson’s claim at a Dec. 18 press conference that as much as $9 billion in claims paid out by certain state-run Medicaid programs since 2018 may have been fraudulent. Gov. Tim Walz, who at the time was running for a third term, suggested the following day that the figure was invented. Cornyn did, however, cite other statistics that he said exposed rampant criminality among Somali Americans and other immigrant groups.
The subcommittee’s Democratic witnesses painted a sunnier picture of immigrants’ relative contributions to society and offered a very different prescription for Minnesota’s problems.
“People of any birthplace, background, and ethnicity can be assets in a free society,” said David Bier, immigration studies director for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. A recent Cato white paper found immigrants paid $14.5 trillion more in taxes than they received between 1994 and 2023. Without that contribution, U.S. public debt would have been twice as high at the end of the period, at levels Cato said would be consistent with a fiscal crisis.
In Minnesota alone, immigrants who entered the U.S. from 1990 to 1993 generated $140 billion in fiscal benefits, Bier said.
“That is because these people work … and they are providing goods and services to us as Americans,” he said.
The only committee witness based in Minnesota was Eric Schwartz, chair of global policy at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. 
Hailing Somali Americans’ “vital role” in Minnesota’s economy generally and in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood in particular, Schwartz criticized the “framing of this hearing (which) risks tarring an entire community with the presumption of criminality.” He called out the Trump administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics for causing “personal anguish… that I have unfortunately witnessed firsthand.” 
Later, Schwartz spoke of a student whose wife, a hospice care provider, was taken by federal agents. She was “so traumatized by the experience (and) the treatment she faced” in detention that she subsequently returned to her home country, he said.
“These are the hallmarks of (civil rights) violations we more readily associate with countries like China and Russia,” Schwartz said.