Ernesto Londoño

And I think it's useful to remember what was happening in the state at the time.

This fight is unfolding as Minnesota is grappling with the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, which, of course, set off a national reckoning over race.

So in the state at that time, nobody wanted to be called a racist, even if it was wholly unfounded.

And I think the consensus now among people who have watched the sequence of events was that that really had a paralyzing effect on people in state government who knew something funny was going on, but didn't really want to stick their necks out and stop it.

Correct.

But I think there's another layer to this, and that is that Somali Americans have become politically quite powerful in the state.

And I think...

Democratic lawmakers have seen them as a really vital constituency.

And there were instances in which the people who were responsible for some of these fraud schemes came to state lawmakers and asked for help, asked for intervention, or became important donors to their campaigns.

So I think there is a sense that beyond the threat of being called racist, some Democratic elected officials in the state were just really worried that any action they took to question or intervene in a way that would maybe stop these schemes could have alienated a really important constituency.

Well, that certainly caused a huge amount of outrage in the state, but I don't think anything necessarily changed in the immediate aftermath.

It was actually later, it was this year, this summer, when there was a change of guard at the local U.S.

Attorney's Office in Minnesota.

And what happened was the prosecutor who had been leading these fraud cases, Joe Thompson, became the acting U.S.

Attorney.

And he took it upon himself to really turn up the volume on the nature and the scope of the problem.

He started giving press conferences and interviews in which it started feeling like he was doing more than just indicting individuals who were committing fraud.

He started speaking in a way that felt like he was indicting the whole system that had allowed this to metastasize.

And his argument was,

We can't indict our way out of this problem.