Tag: taxes

Illegal Alien Indicted by Federal Grand Jury for Numerous Crimes Including Voter Fraud and Theft of Government Funds

An illegal alien from Mexico was indicted by a federal grand jury this week for numerous crimes, including voter fraud, making a false statement applying for a passport, and unlawful possession of a firearm.

Fredy Avila Gomez is also being indicted on wire fraud and stealing government funds.

Based on court records, from 2017 to 2026, Gomez intentionally defrauded US government agencies and the State of Idaho. The list of agencies included Health and Human Services, Idaho Department of Health and Welfare, and the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services.

Gomez allegedly made false claims to be a citizen of the United States in order to vote in elections.

He has his first court appearance scheduled for September 21st in the US District Court for the District of Idaho. Gomez is looking at a maximum of 20 years in federal prison if he is convicted on the charges.

The prosecutors handling the case are Assistant US Attorneys Sean Mazorol and Darci Crane.

The DOJ created the National Fraud Enforcement Division earlier this year to prosecute individuals committing fraud against the United States and its citizens.

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HHS Awards $42.3 Million To Push ‘Treatment First’ Model For Homelessness & Addiction

A federal agency within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) awarded $42.3 million in new supplemental cash Friday to states and territories with the goal of speeding up the implementation of the Treatment First model for homelessness tied to addiction.

The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funding supports the initiative falling under President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” and the relevant Best Practices Toolkit that followed. That order from July 2025 directed agencies to put treatment and recovery ahead of the old approaches.

“President Trump has directed us to break the cycle of homelessness and addiction by putting treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency first,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. “These investments will help states move people from crisis into treatment and from treatment into lasting recovery, stable housing, and work. We are funding results that help people reclaim their health and independence.”

About $17.3 million of the funds went to Community Mental Health Services Block Grant recipients. Officials say it builds systems, partnerships, workforce capacity, policies, and the technical pieces needed to make Treatment First a success. The funds will go toward technical assistance, training, policy work, and coordination across systems.

Roughly $25 million went to Substance Use Prevention, Treatment, and Recovery Services Block Grant recipients to expand options for safe, licensed, certified, or chartered sober and recovery housing, as well as the requisite technical assistance to ensure that more recovery residences open and quality standards tighten.

“Treatment First means building a system that does not leave people cycling between homelessness, emergency rooms, and the criminal justice system,” SAMHSA Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Christopher D. Carroll said. “These investments will help states strengthen the infrastructure – partnerships, data, workforce, and recovery supports – needed to connect people with serious mental illness and addiction to effective treatment and support them on a path toward lasting recovery, stable housing, employment, and self-sufficiency.”

In June, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a $4.04 billion Continuum of Care notice. It walked away from the Housing First model, which provided permanent housing with no strings attached. Chronic homelessness climbed 81 percent from 2013 to 2025, despite the number of taxpayer-funded beds increasing 151 percent, HUD figures show.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner called Housing First a failure that “warehoused the vulnerable without results.” Housing alone will not fix a crisis driven by addiction and mental illness, he said.

Kennedy earlier this year announced more than $700 million for related work, of which nearly $100 million went to the STREETS program for homeless people dealing with addiction or serious mental illness. In February, he introduced the $100 million STREETS effort itself, built around continuous contact from the street through recovery, jobs and self-sufficiency.

A federal appeals court this week allowed HUD to forge ahead with funding shifts after lower-court challenges. The department has earmarked $1.3 billion for transitional housing and supportive services.

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YOU CAN’T MAKE THIS UP: Minnesota’s $2 Million “Anti-ICE Relief Fund” Shut Down After More Than 200 Applications Get Flagged as Fraud

Hennepin County, home of Minneapolis and the epicenter of America’s most infamous welfare-theft machine, just had to shut down a taxpayer slush fund created to “help” businesses allegedly hurt by Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

According to Fox News, the county received approximately 300 applications. More than 200 were flagged for potential fraud, while only 82 applicants were cleared and received roughly $500,000 in assistance.

Officials reportedly discovered applications containing identical, AI-generated language submitted on behalf of different businesses. County investigators also conducted site visits and found that some of the businesses listed on applications did not even exist.

Hennepin County Commissioner Jeffrey Lunde said the county eventually stopped processing applications after officials saw the number of legitimate claims decline.

Lunde said:

“Clearly, fraud and people who want to commit it are still very active, as they do not fear the penalty. Thanks to county staff and our partner, we were able [to] thwart these efforts by devoting more time and effort to tighter oversight, in-person inspections and increased scrutiny. As the fraudsters continue their efforts, we need to ramp up our game as well. This is the new normal for all levels of government in Minnesota.”

The county insists that no taxpayer money was lost to fraudulent applicants because the claims were caught during the review process. However, the scale of the attempted fraud forced officials to terminate the program.

The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office has been asked to review the applications for possible criminal charges. Lunde wants prosecutions and says the legislature may need to tighten the law so that attempting to loot a grant program is a real crime, not a paperwork inconvenience.

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58 Democrats join House vote to grant Trump additional war and tariff powers

Fifty-eight Democrats in the House of Representatives voted with Republicans Wednesday to grant US President Donald Trump additional war and tariff powers, including the authority to put tariffs as high as 100 percent on goods from China and India.

The 58 House Democrats included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, former Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who co-wrote the bill in the House.

The vote is only the latest expression of the fact that the Democrats, far from opposing Trump’s program of global war, support escalating it and criticize Trump for being insufficiently aggressive against Russia.

The majority of House Democrats, who voted against the bill, fully support the sanctions against Russia and Iran, and the ongoing wars but objected to giving Trump additional tariff authority.

The bill is named after the warmongering Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died suddenly in July after returning from a trip to Kiev. It comes amid a spiraling escalation of the Ukraine war. On Sunday Russian forces struck a passenger train with a drone at Yahodyn station, 2 kilometers from the Polish border, shortly after a train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had left it.

On Tuesday Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz announced that soldiers of the 18th Engineer Regiment were reinforcing the checkpoints and border guard posts on the Ukrainian border; and on Thursday Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in a provocative speech to parliament, accused Russia of planning drone or rocket strikes on Poland and other countries supplying Ukraine. Early Tuesday an Italian fighter jet flying for NATO shot down a drone carrying an explosive charge over Lithuania, and Poland and Romania scrambled jets against Russian drones near their borders.

The Russian strike was the response to months of NATO escalation: Germany’s lifting of range restrictions on the weapons it supplies to Ukraine, Germany’s agreement in Kiev in May to build “deep-strike” drones jointly with Ukraine, Ukraine’s attacks on oil refineries in Perm and Tatarstan on September 7, and the visit of Johnson and other European officials to Kiev.

The sanctions and tariffs are instruments of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, and the bill turns them against China and India, two of the largest buyers of Russian crude oil.

It also extends for five years the US sanctions on the energy and arms industries of Iran, which the United States and Israel attacked on February 28 and which US warships are blockading.

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Brussels Is Robbing America Blind — And Someone In Washington Is Letting Them Get Away With It

In recent years, Brussels has conducted a bitter economic war against America’s most successful companies: Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Brussels uses an array of fines, investigations and even forcing the companies to hand over key technologies in return for exemption from other regulations. Brussels even has imposed a number of very far-reaching rules that are nothing more than a large scale expropriation of their IP. Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have already had to pay out to the European Union many billions of dollars, not because they failed in any way to come up with better products and services than their competitors, but because Brussels’ draconian rules and regulations are so difficult for them to comply with.

President Trump saw it and said enough.

When on July 24th the US President Donald Trump announced the opening of a Section 301 investigation concerning the campaign of fines and regulation of large tech companies by Europe, he started by criticizing the European Commission’s latest move against Google. In two separate decisions Google has been fined for almost $1 billion for alleged breaches of the Digital Markets Act. The US President called those fines “another example of Europe robbing American companies and, in turn, the American taxpayer”.

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer laid out the reasons why a Section 301 investigation into the EU’s fines on Google and other big tech companies is fully warranted. “The European Commission’s practices with respect to Google amount to de facto forced technology transfer and intellectual property theft, supported by unfair and unreasonable financial penalties,” Greer said in a statement. He noted that Google’s EU fines alone would total more than two percent of the EU’s annual budget.

More than seven weeks have now passed since Trump gave his Trade people their instructions concerning the EU’s ‘robbing’ of American technology companies.

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SURPRISE! Study Finds Blue States With the Strongest Teacher Unions Also Have the Lowest Reading Scores

Liberals would have you believe that strong teacher unions equate with strong schools and solid results, but a new study found the exact opposite.

Of the states included in the study, blue states with the strongest teacher unions also happened to have the lowest reading scores.

Conversely, red states cited in the study, which give less attention to teacher unions, score much higher.

FOX News reports:

Powerful teachers’ unions share striking link with states struggling to teach kids to read

States with stronger teachers’ unions tend to have weaker literacy performance and have adopted fewer of the policies credited with improving reading outcomes, according to a new analysis from a center-left think tank.

Eight of the 10 states to score among the worst in the Progressive Policy Institute’s (PPI) assessment of early-literacy policies were home to powerful teachers’ unions. Among the top 60% of states in terms of early-literacy policy scores, only four had strong teachers’ unions.

Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina and Indiana, all Republican-leaning states with weak unions, were among the states with the best literacy outcomes. Maine, New York, Illinois, Hawaii, Washington and Rhode Island, blue states, were among the worst.

The pattern isn’t universal. Maryland, a blue state with a strong teachers’ union, has posted strong reading results, while South Dakota, a red state with a weaker union, has struggled. The differences suggest union strength and party control alone don’t explain states’ reading performance.

It’s kind of amazing, isn’t it?

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Maduro Ally Pleads Guilty In Miami To Scheme That Stole Venezuelan Welfare Funds

The former minister of industry for Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro’s regime pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a global money laundering conspiracy that skimmed millions from a Venezuelan public welfare program.

According to a Department of Justice (DOJ) news release, Alex Saab, 54, who was extradited from Venezuela in May and charged days later, conducted a decade-long scheme that defrauded a Venezuelan welfare program for food and medicine, netting hundreds of millions of dollars for himself and associates.

Saab, a Colombian businessman, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to launder monetary instruments before federal district Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami. He faces a maximum sentence of 20 years.

“Criminals like Alex Saab who stole from the people of Venezuela and worked to exploit and misuse American financial institutions to fund illicit activities will be held accountable,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in the news release.

Saab is accused of bilking the welfare program known as Local Committee for Supply and Production, or CLAP (Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción).

The ex-minister admitted to using a system of bribes and illegal payments to public officials. Entities controlled by conspirators in the scheme would be rewarded with lucrative contracts from the Venezuelan government to import food and medicine under CLAP.

Saab and his conspirators did not fulfill the contracts and would instead use fake companies, false invoices and shipping records, and other fraudulent documents to unlawfully obtain millions while concealing their association with the scheme, the DOJ said.

Saab further admitted he used shell companies outside his country to launder the illegal proceeds around the world, including in the United States.

DOJ Assistant Attorney General Andrew Duva said Saab exploited the American financial system to profit off Venezuelans, creating a “complex web of front companies, shell accounts, and false records to perpetuate his scheme.”

Saab previously was in U.S. custody until former President Joe Biden released him in December 2023 as part of a prisoner swap with Venezuela. The deal included the Venezuelan regime’s release of 30 prisoners, including 10 Americans.

“The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela celebrates with joy the liberation and return to his homeland of our diplomat Alex Saab, who until today was unjustly kidnapped in a U.S. jail,” the Venezuelan government said following the prisoner-swap deal.

Saab was removed from his position earlier this year by acting leader Delcy Rodríguez, who previously served as Maduro’s vice president until he was captured by U.S. forces in an overnight raid on Caracas in January.

Saab was initially charged in July 2019 on money laundering counts.

He was detained about a year later in the Republic of Cabo Verde at the request of the U.S. government and was eventually extradited to American custody.

“President Biden granted Alex Saab clemency while he was awaiting trial in [Miami], and Saab was released from federal custody and returned to Venezuela. But that was not the end of the story,” said U.S. Attorney Jason Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida.

Quiñones’s office secured a new indictment against Saab in January 2026, and by May he was back in Miami federal court.

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Grandmother jailed for six months after facial recognition mistake launches $10 million lawsuit against Fargo and detective

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.

The arrest stemmed from an investigation into bank fraud cases in April and May 2025. Detectives reportedly reviewed video of a woman using a fake US army ID to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars.

By using facial recognition software, the investigators identified Lipps as a possible match. She was charged with eight felonies, the most serious of which carried a 10-year prison sentence.

But Lipps had never been to North Dakota in her life, and bank records later confirmed she was more than 1,200 miles away at the time of the alleged crime.

She was held in a Tennessee county jail for 108 days before being transported to North Dakota. Jail staff allegedly denied her access to her dentures and medication for extended periods.

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Don’t Look Away

After spending millions of dollars redecorating the White House and transforming D.C. monuments, President Trump approved, on September 15, 2026, an additional 2.8 billion dollar sale of heavy bombs to Israel, including 40,000 one-ton bombs, 20,000 of the 2,000 lb. bombs, and 20,000 bunker-busting penetrator warheads. Israel has used these bombs to destroy homes, families and crucial infrastructure in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.

This latest U.S. weapons package will replenish Israel’s stockpile of bombs that human rights groups have condemned after documenting their use over the past two and a half years to kill, maim, bereave, and forcibly displace Palestinians. Survivors whose homes have been reduced to rubble now live in makeshift shelters, including flimsy tents, while Israel continues to restrict deliveries of supplies that could protect Gazans from harsh weather, disease, rodent and insect infestations, and other hardships of displacement.

In June of 2026, the Norwegian Refugee Council estimated that 170,000 households in Gaza, equivalent to nearly one million people, were living in tents. “Another 5,000 households sleep outdoors,” they reported, “while 52,000 households live in overcrowded shelters.” As Gazans enter the rainy and cold months of winter, they still lack emergency shelter items. They need plastic sheeting, plywood, and rope. Genocidal war and siege drive the crisis they face as the Israelis continue destroying Gazan homes and shelters and imposing restrictions which block desperately needed relief.

Over the past two years, members of the Global Solidarity for Peace in Palestine coalition have held weekly online meetings with Palestinians living in the West Bank. They update our coordinating committee about their experiences amidst ongoing, U.S. provisioned Israeli genocide against Palestinians. They speak with anguish about people in the West Bank and Gaza enduring persecution, travel restrictions, hunger, inadequate medical care, land theft, contamination, and an alarming rise in pogrom-style attacks by illegal settlers who are often assisted by Israeli military and police forces.

Our Palestinian coalition members living in the West Bank long to extend a helping hand to people trapped in Gaza. They recently raised the dilemma of Gazan children who have already lost years of education. Many live in wretched tent encampments, lack adequate food and medicine, and struggle with psycho-social traumas because of having lost their loved ones.

A Palestinian NGO, PYALARA, (Palestinian Youth Association for Leadership and Rights) suggested that our coalition could assist with practical measures to assist Gazan children who are eager to learn but who lack basic school supplies. The children are bereft of paper, pencils, pens, books, desks, and bookbags.

Recently, for UN News, an interviewer spoke with Julia Dicon, the Director of Education for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Association). Dicon described what education means for Palestine refugee children and why sustained support is critical. She expressed deep respect for the many ways that Palestinians maintain capacities to educate their children, even in these dire times.

The interviewer asked her to tell a story about Palestinian young people who represent courage in the face of unspeakable adversity as they continue efforts to learn and teach.

Dicon talked about two Gazan sisters, 17-year-old Tala Mousa and her 15-year-old sister, Farah Mousa, who were recently named winners of the 2026 Middle East Earth Prize. The young women regularly looked at rubble surrounding their home which Israel had bombed. Unlike President Trump who is undertaking expensive and unnecessary renovations, they longed to rebuild homes which Israelis decimated, using U.S. manufactured bombs.  Fala and Farah puzzled over how they and their neighbors could begin creating the indispensable equipment to reconstruct housing: bricks. Together, using their scientific knowledge, they developed a practical way to transform rubble into reusable blocks for garden beds, pavement, and partitions.

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USDA Says Crackdown On SNAP Fraud Prevented $5.8 Billion In Taxpayer Losses

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins announced nearly $6 billion in total savings tied to efforts to eliminate fraud in the government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

Rollins outlined the wins in a Sept. 15 post to X, saying that $5.8 billion in taxpayer losses have been prevented by the anti-fraud initiatives implemented during President Donald Trump’s second term.

This was done through the shutdown of nearly 1,840 illegal SNAP devices that processed Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) cards and the disqualification of 5,335 fraudulent retailers.

“Those who defraud SNAP are stealing from taxpayers and taking resources away from Americans who genuinely need assistance,” Rollins said. “We have zero tolerance for this abuse, and we will continue pursuing bad actors and protecting the integrity of the program.”

There are several ways an ineligible person can be counted in SNAP, including illegal immigrants being certified in error or by fraud, and deceased household members continuing to receive benefits.

This comes just over three months after the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) released a report in early June about their discovery that 185,986 deceased people in 29 states were receiving food stamps.

Trump issued an executive order in March 2025 directing federal agencies to obtain lawful and “unfettered access” to data from federally-funded programs such as SNAP to facilitate an audit of government spending.

The SNAP integrity team was created in May 2025 to review state SNAP data against federal databases to identify potential fraud.

The maximum monthly food assistance offered through SNAP is set for its annual increase in line with the cost-of-living adjustment in October.

The benefit ceiling for a family of four will reach $1,023 for most of the nation, which is an increase from the current maximum of $994. Total benefits vary based on family size and income. In May 2026, the average monthly benefit received by U.S. households was $344.51.

The overall cost of the monthly SNAP benefits have fallen in recent years, from $13.4 billion in October 2022 to $6.8 billion in May 2026, largely because pandemic emergency allotments largely ended in 2023 and fewer people on the program.

Separate state cost-sharing penalties for high payment-error rates, enacted by the Republican-led Congress in the 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act, are scheduled to begin in October 2027. More than 40 states and territories recorded SNAP payment-error rates above 6 percent in fiscal year 2025, the level that triggers the penalty.

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