Free Republic

Posted on December 27, 2025 by Bill Glahn in Crime, Illegal immigration, Judiciary Rule No. 4 I spent countless hours in 2025 sitting in the back of federal courtrooms in Minnesota observing two types of cases play out: illegal immigration and welfare fraud. The one thing that both had in common was the application of Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals Rule No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” It’s a distillation of the Cloward-Piven “overwhelm the system” strategy. Federal bureaucracy was designed to handle a system where we had a few thousand illegal immigrants...

This writer is old enough to remember that the debate over whether or not food stamps should cover junk food isn't a new thing. It goes back years. She's also old enough to remember when Democrats pushed for soda taxes as a way to discourage the consumption of unhealthy foods. ...Starting next year, however, 18 states will ban junk food for SNAP users....“It’s just a classic government operation where they’ve thrown this out there, and well-meaning though they may be, it’s caused mass confusion, and it’s making some retailers question whether they’re going to stay with the program or not,”...

Former Madera County benefits eligibility worker Leticia Mariscal, 55, of Madera, was arrested today on charges that she stole tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of other people’s CalFresh benefits during a multiyear scheme, U.S. Attorney Eric Grant announced. CalFresh is a financial assistance program that provides qualifying California residents with monetary benefits they can use to buy food. It was formerly known as the food stamp program. According to court records, between December 2020 and April 2025, Mariscal improperly used county databases to which she had access through her job to obtain identifying information for individuals who were elderly...

Recently appointed Chief Executive Officer of the federal Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Frank Bisignano predicted that "94% of taxpayers will see tax reductions from President Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' legislation. Many families will receive annual income tax reductions in the $10,000 to $20,000 range. Social Security recipients will see annual net increases in benefits ranging up to $6,000 due to the legislation's elimination of taxes on benefits." Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) called these tax reductions "inherently unfair. Only the richest 50% of Americans pay income taxes. Those too poor to pay these taxes and those on welfare will get no...

The CEO for a Battle Creek nonprofit has been charged with welfare fraud of over $500, according to court documents.

More than 125 congressional Democrats are pushing the Trump administration to withdraw a proposed rule that would open the door to denying a person a green card if they use public assistance, including Medicaid or food stamps. "This proposal punishes families for caring for their children. It would scare parents away from health care, food assistance, and early education that U.S. citizen children are legally entitled to, putting kids at risk and destabilizing entire communities," Rep. Adriano Espaillat, D-N.Y., chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said in a statement to The Hill. "Congress never intended public charge to be used...

The Department of Justice is closing a Democrat-created bureaucratic loophole that has allowed legal and illegal migrants to get a huge quantity of taxpayer aid since 1997, despite a 1996 law limiting aid to citizens. The loophole was created by President Bill Clinton’s administration after Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), which was intended to “strengthen… the principle that [legal and illegal] immigrants come to America to work, not to collect welfare benefits.” “We now retract that [1997] opinion and offer the best reading of the phrase ‘Federal means-tested public benefit,'” President Donald...

Housing and Urban Services Secretary Scott Turner said a majority of illegal alien families in the United States rely on taxpayer-funded welfare programs, costing tens of billions of dollars each year and placing significant strain on housing, healthcare, education, and public safety systems. Turner said roughly 59 percent of illegal alien families use at least one welfare program, at an estimated annual cost of $42 billion.

Summers in the city could get a little cooler for apartment dwellers with the recent passing of a New York City Council bill. Intro 994, also known as the Cool Homes For All legislation, passed the City Council on Thursday, paving the way for tenants to get free cooling systems from landlords at their request. “All tenants deserve a safe, livable home, and as our summers get hotter, that means guaranteeing access to air conditioning,” said Council Member Lincoln Restler, who sponsored the bill. The legislation will require building landlords to provide cooling systems capable of maintaining 78 degrees in...

Federal prosecutors have charged a longtime California welfare worker with carrying out a multi-year fraud scheme involving food assistance benefits and dead people. The U.S. Department of Justice announced the arrest of former Madera County benefits eligibility worker Leticia Mariscal, 55, of Madera. Prosecutors alleged that Mariscal stole tens of thousands of dollars in CalFresh benefits by exploiting her access to county databases. CalFresh is California’s version of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. According to the Justice Department, the alleged scheme took place between December 2020 and April 2025. Mariscal is accused of improperly accessing identifying information for elderly and...

Screenshot/Rumble/KMOV A Missouri woman on Thursday receiving Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds complained about only being able to buy “real food” with the program, according to St. Louis TV station KMOV. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced Wednesday the approval of a waiver request from Missouri and five other states to restrict the purchase of candy, sugar-sweetened drinks and other items after Oct. 1, 2026. Hannah Moore complained to KMOV reporter John Kipper in a story that the restrictions were “not even cool.” “What is the point of food stamps if it’s just for ‘real food?’” Moore asked. WATCH:...

"What is the point of food stamps if it’s just for 'real food?'" - Hannah Moore to @KMOV reporter John Kipper.

Trump’s tariffs and immigration raids are driving the latest farm crisis. White farmers have stood by him year after year—and still do. On Monday, Donald Trump announced that his administration will give farmers a $12 billion bailout—a tacit admission that his trade policies suck. Farmers have spent much of the last year complaining about rising production costs, falling crop prices and the loss of multiple markets due to Trump’s tariffs and the trade wars they have launched. All in all, farmers are projected to lose roughly $44 billion in profits this year, in large part because of Trump administration policies....

A whistleblower claims that the Somali migrant community in Ohio is also involved in the same sort of massive social services funding fraud being uncovered day-by-day in Minnesota. Ohio attorney Mehek Cooke says that the same sort of theft of public funding seen in Minnesota has been occurring in the Buckeye State for more than a decade, Fox News reports. Cooke also accuses Ohio doctors of “rubber stamping” the fraud by failing to do any due diligence on those who are filing for aid. “They’re just rubberstamping a lot of these. And then that same individual, a week later, that’s...

PORTLAND, Ore. (KATU) — The Oregon Department of Human Services (ODHS) says work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits are now being enforced in every county in Oregon. The policy changes at the USDA follow the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill (H.R.1). ODHS said about 37,000 Oregonians are immediately affected. The statewide rules took effect on Dec. 1, 2025, expanding the work requirements from six counties. The shift affects adults classified as able-bodied adults without dependents (ABAWDs). These are people aged 18 to 64 who do not live with children under 14. Those individuals must now...

More than 8-in-10 households headed by Somali refugees in the state of Minnesota are on one or more forms of American taxpayer-funded welfare, new data published by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) reveals. The data, based on 10 years of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), shows drastic disparities between native-born American households and Somali-born households in Minnesota, where nearly 80,000 residents have Somali ancestry compared to zero who had Somali ancestry in 1990. In particular, the data shows that 81 percent of Minnesota households headed by Somali refugees are on one or more forms of...

Why do we have a constitution? How and why did it come into existence? Just what, exactly, prompted the calling of the Constitutional Convention, which gave birth to it? Most Americans believe, logically enough, that after we sent His Britannic Majesty packing, it was time to create a new government. This is false, and it entirely overlooks the fact that we already had a functioning government at the time of the Convention. That government had been in effect for the entirety of the Revolution and for six years following the final British defeat at Yorktown. No, the Convention was prompted...

The Trump administration announced $12 billion in one-time payments to farmers in the wake of this year's tariff hikes on Monday, primarily targeting farmers who grow crops such as soybeans and corn. The move was outlined during a White House roundtable event, featuring farmers affected as well as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. Trump touted the program in relation to the revenue the government is taking in as a result of his sweeping tariff program and also referenced his popularity among farmers. "What we're doing is we're taking a relatively small portion of that, and we're...

President Donald Trump is poised to roll out a $12 billion farm aid package to support farmers, according to the White House. The aid package will provide up to $11 billion toward the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new Farmer Bridge Assistance Program, which is designed to provide single payments to row crop farmers, while the remaining $1 billion will go to farmers whose crops do not qualify for the program. Further details will be hashed out as the USDA continues to evaluate market conditions, according to the White House. The president is expected to unveil the new aid package...

If you keep up with current events at all, it is unlikely that you have missed in the past week the explosion of the Minnesota Somali welfare fraud scandal into the national, and even international, news. Not that the enormous Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota is something new. The bloggers at Powerline, who are based in Minnesota, have been covering the subject since at least 2018. Here is a May 2018 City Journal piece by Scott Johnson (of Powerline), reporting on an investigation of Somali-owned daycare centers in Minneapolis suspected of stealing millions by billing the government for inflated number...