The Trump administration has begun a massive deployment of hundreds of Department of Homeland Security agents to the Twin Cities area as it escalates its federal crackdown amid a widening fraud scandal in Minnesota, multiple law enforcement officials familiar with the plan told CBS News.

The crackdown could involve roughly 2,000 agents and officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation branch and Homeland Security Investigations, the agency’s investigative arm tasked with fighting transnational crimes, the officials said. They requested anonymity to discuss operations that have not been publicly announced.

The plan is for the agents and officers to oversee a 30-day surge in operations in the Twin Cities area, making the region the first major target of the Trump administration’s expanded immigration crackdown in the new year, officials said. Agents deployed from Homeland Security Investigations are expected to probe alleged cases of fraud, building on last month’s inspection of dozens of sites in the Minneapolis area.

Officials said U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commander Gregory Bovino, who has overseen controversial immigration roundups in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte and New Orleans, is expected to arrive in Minnesota to help lead immigration enforcement efforts, along with an unknown number of U.S. Border Patrol personnel.

The deployment, which began Sunday, represents one of the largest concentrations of DHS personnel in an American city in recent years. The move greatly expands the federal law enforcement footprint in Minnesota at a time of heightened political and community tension there.

According to senior law enforcement officials, the surge includes several hundred additional agents from Homeland Security Investigations, as well as hundreds of officers from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which carries out immigration arrests and deportations. Tactical units known as Special Response Teams are also slated to be part of the operation, along with a layered command structure of dozens of high-ranking supervisors.

One former law enforcement official described the scale as extraordinary, noting that the number of HSI agents being sent to Minneapolis is roughly equivalent to the entire HSI workforce assigned to the state of Arizona. “This is a massive resource allocation,” the official said, adding that Minneapolis is effectively becoming “the new Chicago,” referencing past large-scale federal enforcement deployments in Illinois.

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The new surge comes amid intense state and federal scrutiny of Minnesota following years of high-profile fraud cases involving federally funded programs. {snip}

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