The White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud is revealing that the scale of fraud committed by foreigners in the U.S. has deprived American taxpayers of hundreds of billions of dollars. The task force, led by Vice President J.D. Vance, hosted a round table event this week, revealing that billions of dollars in fraud have been uncovered just in the past several weeks.

“In just two months, we exposed billions of dollars in benefits that have been stolen from the American people,” Vance announced. “We referred over $22 billion in fraudulent small business loans back to the Treasury for collection. We deferred more than $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicaid reimbursements that were coming from various states, particularly California.”

The vice president reported that the Task Force had recovered taxpayer dollars stolen in a $135 billion COVID-19 fraud scheme and more than $6 billion in fraudulent government contracts. Vance affirmed that the Task Force believes “that we’re protecting two classes of victims here. We’re protecting the American taxpayers who shouldn’t have their money stolen by fraudsters, and of course, we’re protecting the people who need these services. Fraud is not a victimless crime.” He continued, “This is not somebody who gets to make some money for violating the law, and otherwise it’s not a big deal.” Instead, fraud deprives the sick and elderly of critical services that they rely on, strips students relying on student loans of the funds that they need, and abuses the loans systems that small businesses rely on to survive, to grow, and to hire and pay workers. “All of these people, all of our fellow Americans, have been taken advantage [of] by fraudsters,” Vance said, “and the Task Force is here to stop it.”

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson charged that the mass immigration encouraged by Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden has filled the U.S. with people who do not respect the American way of life and are quick to abuse American generosity for personal profit. “Our benefits programs and our whole society [were] designed for a high-trust people. The American people rightly expect that their fellow citizens will deal with them and with the government honestly and fairly,” Ferguson stated.

He recounted that, up until recent years, retail stores did not need to affix security devices to everyday products and keep cosmetic items, snack foods, and small electronics behind glass barriers. “We didn’t have to worry about organized retail theft or industrial-scale scammers of the type you all protect your citizens from every day, nor did we have to worry about radical fraudsters raiding our benefits program,” he added. “But sadly, that is no longer true. It’s become clear that huge groups of people in this country are taking advantage of our long-standing culture of trust to enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.”

“Huge segments of the population have decided to take advantage of this generosity and trust of American citizens through deception and fraud and billions and billions of dollars each year leave our programs into the hands of pirates, fraudsters, scammers, and gangs who treat American generosity as little more than a get-quick-rich scheme,” Ferguson said. “We shouldn’t have to live this way. [The] American people are right to long for a period where we could trust each other. But while we are living this way, the government must act now to protect American citizens and their social programs.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller reiterated the point. “I do want to just touch on one of the points that Andrew hit on in his remarks. All of the systems in our country, whether you’re talking about voting, whether you’re talking about entitlements, whether you’re talking about welfare benefits, were set up based on the honor system,” he said. “They’re set up based on the idea that you could trust the average person through their own morality, to abide by the rules and comply with the law. And so, the way most welfare works in most states and most places is we take your word for it.”

Miller noted that the rampant fraud committed by immigrants from the Third World, such as the widespread fraud committed by Somali immigrants in Minnesota, Ohio, and other places, demonstrates that certain cultures are incompatible with American culture. “What’s happened to our country is we became a society, as we’ve seen with the Somali refugee problem in Minnesota, where you have a large number of people that are not following the honor system, they’re not playing by the rules, they’re not abiding by our laws.”

Miller also addressed the massive scale of the fraud, which he said has bled the nation’s resources nearly dry. “The amount that has been fleeced from us is in the hundreds of billions of dollars,” he confirmed. “I believe based on what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard is that we could balance the federal budget if the only dollars that went out of the Treasury went to individuals who were properly, lawfully, correctly eligible to receive them, and that ultimately is going to be what we have to do as a country.”

Ferguson also asserted that the Task Force has been working for months to bolster protections in taxpayer-funded programs and has already, over the past two months, prevented billions of dollars from lining the pockets of fraudsters. He noted that the Biden administration “turned off” many of the federal anti-fraud safeguards that had long been in place, adding that the Task Force has not only turned those safeguards back on, but has implemented those safeguards in agencies and programs that did not previously have any protections in place. Ferguson said that, in addition to preventing fraud via internal protections, it is important to deter fraud via aggressive prosecutions.

Fifteen state attorneys general joined Vance and Task Force leadership and have committed to assisting the White House in identifying and preventing rampant fraud. “The reason we brought you all here is that we must restore deterrence by finding, prosecuting, and punishing fraudsters. Unless fraudsters believe that there will be consequences attached with attacking America’s benefits programs, they will keep doing it,” Ferguson told the gathered prosecutors. “Our fraud detection systems will stop much of it, but cannot stop it all. The only way to defeat the fraudsters is by making sure that they know, every single one of them, that if they try to commit fraud, they will be pursued, arrested, prosecuted, and jailed.”

“I appreciate these leaders for being here, because we’re going to work together, state and federal governments trying to combat fraud,” Vance said. “This is not a partisan effort,” he added, noting that representatives from Connecticut’s and Oregon’s attorneys general had joined the effort. “As I’ve said repeatedly, this does need to be, this should not be a partisan effort. Everybody should care about fraud, everybody should care about rooting out fraud, everybody should care about saving the American taxpayers money,” the vice president shared. “Importantly, everybody should care about actually protecting the programs that only work and are only properly funded if the money funding those programs isn’t being stolen by fraudsters.”

Before moving the meeting behind closed doors away from the press, Vance emphasized that the Task Force is protecting Americans, sharing a story which he said “highlights how particularly egregious some of these fraudsters can be.” One of the fraudsters indicted last week in Minnesota, Vance related, was billing Medicaid reimbursements for “home health care” services, which included looking after an elderly man. The fraudster, however, never actually went to the homes he said that he was visiting, never checked in, and simply pocketed the Medicaid reimbursements. “The vulnerable elderly man that he was supposed to be protecting and looking after… That man died,” Vance related. “One day before he died,” the fraudster “submitted his final reimbursement for services he never provided for a man he never cared for. And that man lived his final moments on this earth neglected, while a fraudster got rich by providing services that he never actually provided.” Vance asserted, “That’s what we’re trying to stop, ladies and gentlemen. That’s what we have to fight back against.”

President Donald Trump praised Vance’s work leading the Task Force in a cabinet meeting Wednesday. “If he does really great, we’ll have a balanced budget without having to do anything. This is the kind of money they stole. They’re crooks, they’re thieves,” the president said. “They’re all crooks. The Somalians are — what they’ve done to Minnesota. The Somalians, they’re crooked as hell,” he added.

“I’m proud of you guys,” he said to Vance and Task Force leaders. “In two months, we’ve exposed tens of billions of dollars of defrauded taxpayer money, prosecuted numerous fraudsters, and stopped billions of suspicious payments. Very suspicious.” The president said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. The kind of — just hundreds of billions of dollars was stolen, and no other administration would do what we’re doing. They’d let it go. Everybody was getting rich.”