The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 vests in the states the administration of the federal means-tested programs on condition that the state maintain safeguards sufficient to prevent the misuse of the funds the household disburses. The personal responsibility named in the statute’s title is not incidental to the title; it is the architecture. The state is the steward of the household’s accounts, and the household is entitled to know that what it gives is what the household receives.
Minnesota has not kept that ledger. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the welfare fraud was perpetrated mostly by Somali immigrants, that the magnitude of the loss was sufficient to compel Governor Tim Walz to withdraw his candidacy for a third term, and that the governor’s chief of staff has testified to Congress that senior officials attended meetings where the misuse was discussed and declined to act. The household’s accounts were betrayed by the steward the household had charged with their keeping.
Michele Tafoya, who won Minnesota’s Republican primary last month, has made the restoration of that stewardship her platform. She has proposed mandatory prison minimums for the perpetrators, stronger penalties for noncitizens who commit welfare fraud, and federal funding penalties for states that cannot demonstrate adequate anti-fraud safeguards. The measures she proposes are the instruments the household uses to reclaim the stewardship the prior administration allowed to lapse. The apostle, writing to the Romans, calls the magistrate “God’s servant for your good” (Romans 13:4, ESV); the magistrate’s good here is the good of the household’s accounts. The magistrate’s good requires that the stewards who failed the household be replaced by those who will serve it, and that the perpetrators of the breach be answered according to the standing the breach has disclosed.
Tafoya’s candidacy also distinguishes itself on three smaller matters. She affirmed that Joseph Biden won the 2020 election. She holds that a woman ought to be free to terminate a pregnancy in its first trimester. She said she was glad the Secretary of Homeland Security was dismissed after federal immigration officers killed two Minneapolis residents in January, calling the events “tragic and awful.” The moderation is consistent with the larger measure. A candidate who reads her office as a stewardship reads the details of her office the way she reads the principal matter.
On the same week the State Fair booth announced the candidate was stepping off the sidelines, the intake desk at Shakopee accepted another body the candidate’s program would impose.
Call her by the name her three children still call her at night. The city is left unrecorded. She was twenty-three in the year the federal refugee resettlement program placed her family in the apartment the housing voucher paid for. She had worked the warehouse nights and the cleaning service days since she could carry a bucket. Three children she bore — all American citizens by the place of their birth, all enrolled in the schools Minnesota funded for them, all now wards of the grandmother’s two-bedroom Minneapolis apartment.
The fourth year of the federal housing assistance, the quarterly recertification asked whether the household had earned income the recertification had not counted. The cleaning service had paid her in cash for several months. The cash was nine thousand dollars over twelve months. The number, under the statute Minnesota enforced, was a felony.
The caseworker who conducted the audit referred the case to the county attorney. The county attorney charged the woman with welfare fraud. The court accepted her plea. The Department of Corrections conveyed her to the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Shakopee, a women’s prison built on the prairie the river bottoms drain. The minimum the court imposed on her is the minimum the candidate Tafoya has campaigned to extend.
The housing unit Shakopee assigned her holds two women in a cell of the dimensions the facility’s classification plan sets — a bunk, a desk, a steel combination toilet-sink, a narrow window the security grille obscures. The fluorescent fixtures in the housing unit are never fully extinguished; the body’s melatonin production falls to fragments within weeks. The mattress is a thin plastic-covered pad over a concrete slab. The meals are commissary portions — bread, processed protein, rice — insufficient to maintain body weight under the chronic cortisol exposure of the confinement. Her hair thinned within the first year. The skin of her forearms shows the marks she made with her own fingernails when no guard was close. She attended the facility’s GED program through one semester and did not return to the second. She answers staff when spoken to and does not speak otherwise. The body inside the cell has been carrying the cell’s conditions for thirty-eight months.
If the Department of Homeland Security moves, upon her release, to place her in removal proceedings under the Immigration and Nationality Act — as the combination of a fraud conviction of this character and her noncitizen status would authorize — the proceedings will subject her to mandatory detention pending a removal hearing, and the hearing will order her removed. The country the order will return her to is the country of her birth, the country of the refugee camp the resettlement program had first admitted her to, the country she has not seen in twenty-three years.
Somalia is a country in which the federal government controls only portions of the capital, in which Al-Shabaab controls territory in the south and the east, in which the population faces documented famine and displacement and lethal violence by armed groups that operate without state restraint. The State Department has issued Somalia a Level 4 travel advisory, its highest warning, advising United States citizens not to travel to the country “due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, and health issues,” and noting that “terrorist attacks have occurred in various locations in Somalia” and that “kidnapping for ransom is a serious threat.” The receiving country does not provide transit from the airport to the place of origin the returnee names. The receiving country does not provide housing. The receiving country does not provide employment. The receiving country does not provide protection from the armed groups that operate in the territory to which the charter will carry her.
Her three children are wards of the grandmother’s two-bedroom Minneapolis apartment. The eldest son has not spoken aloud since the day the federal officers came to take his mother to the county jail. He attends the third grade and does not raise his hand. He sleeps with the overhead light on. He is nine years old. The light is on in his room because he cannot yet tolerate dark.
Two other Minneapolis residents were killed, in the month of January, by federal immigration officers conducting enforcement operations in the city. The Secretary of Homeland Security was dismissed over the killings. Their names were carried in the local press. The candidate Tafoya, asked about the dismissal, called the killings “tragic and awful” and went on to step off the sidelines.
She stands outside the covenant the household extended to her. She stood inside it on the day the refugee resettlement program placed her family in the apartment the housing voucher paid for; she stood inside it on the day Minnesota’s schools enrolled her American-citizen children; she stood inside it on the day the household disbursed the funds the unreported income shorted. The standing she holds today is the standing the household has now assigned. The prison is the prison the standing discloses. The removal, if it follows, is the removal the standing requires. The country to which the removal will return her is the country the household of her birth assigned her, and the country the household of her adoption has determined she no longer belongs to.
Paul told the Athenians, on the Areopagus, that God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the bounds of their habitation” (Acts 17:26, ESV). The bound of her habitation, when the household took her in, was the apartment the housing voucher paid for. The bound of her habitation, when the household revoked her standing, is the prison cell at Shakopee, and the country the removal order will return her to. The bound of her habitation, in whatever the household next does with her, will be wherever the household determines she belongs. The household she defrauded has spoken. The magistrate has done what the magistrate was ordained to do. The wall of the household, where it has always run, runs between those the household acknowledges and those it does not.