Nevada
Welfare fraud sees 650% increase in Nevada
LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) – Scammers are targeting Electronic Benefit Transfer cards by using fake devices at grocery stores to steal from low income families trying to put food on the table, and are doing so at an alarmingly increasing rate.
It’s something California officials have been catching criminals doing on camera recently, and the Nevada Division of Welfare and Supportive Services says the same tactics are impacting families in Nevada.
Last week, FOX5 talked with Anthony, a father of three who had the entire balance on his EBT card for the month of April drained, save for six dollars. His card was refilled early Wednesday morning, but for nine days, he had to worry about how he was going to feed his kids.
“Thankfully, family pulled through, so it wasn’t as horrible as I was expecting it to be,” Anthony said about the last week and a half. “But it was still a struggle. It was still bare minimum, and me and the wife were skipping meals.”
Anthony is one of an exponentially increasing number of victims of this kind of crime in Nevada as of late. In July 2023, the state gained approval from the federal government to start replacing stolen benefits, and since then, the state has averaged about 200 claims per month. In just the first ten days of April, though, there have been about 1,500 claims, with more still coming in.
“These thieves are actually placing a skimming device on the credit card machine at a retailer,” Marni Whalen, Deputy Administrator of the Nevada Division of Welfare & Supportive Services, told FOX5 Wednesday. “When somebody uses their EBT card there, their information is skimmed and then replicated somehow and made into another cloned card.”
Once that information is replicated, Whalen says the thieves can then use it to take the services meant for families in need, for themselves.
“They could produce an actual physical card or they could just be storing the information and processing it that way online,” she explained.
Whalen says the state has not identified the specific retailers where this is happening, but it’s part of an ongoing investigation. She added that most of the time, it takes 10 to 30 days for the state to replenish the cards that have been drained by criminals.
Anthony hopes everyone gets their card refilled in less time than that, like he did.
“It was like we just won something,” Anthony said of the moment he saw his card had been replenished. “Everybody jumped up and we ran to 7-11 and got some snacks and drinks.”
He hopes no other family has to suffer like his at the hands of welfare thieves.
“It was just really nice to be able to go shopping and not have to worry about what I’m feeding them for dinner tonight instead,” he said, fresh off a trip to the grocery store Wednesday evening. “My fridge is full, and even if I wanted to fit more in my freezer, I couldn’t at this point.”
Whalen says the team in charge of investigating these crimes needs more resources to address the issue and restore the lost benefits in a timely way. She adds these crimes tend to happen at the beginning of the month when people are expecting their benefits to come in.
Anyone who is impacted can find resources here.
Copyright 2024 KVVU. All rights reserved.
LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — The man convicted and serving a sentence of up to life for the murders of a Nevada couple died in a state prison last week.
The Nevada Department of Corrections said Robert Dunn, 63, was pronounced dead at Northern Nevada Correctional Center in Carson City on Feb. 5.
An autopsy was requested and Dunn’s family was notified, according to a press release. No other details were disclosed.
Dunn was convicted of the murders of Joaquin and Eleanor Sierra. Authorities said that in 2013, the Sierras’ bodies were found in trash cans in a Las Vegas storage unit as federal officials investigated their social security benefits.
A medical examiner told a grand jury that both Sierras had ingested a sedative and showed signs of sharp force injury, but the coroner’s office couldn’t make official rulings on the causes of their deaths because of the state of their “mummified” remains.
Investigators believed Dunn befriended the couple and killed them in 2003 to cash their retirement benefits over multiple years.
Prosecutors at one point sought the death penalty for Dunn, accusing him of being a con man with possible victims in other states.
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Dunn reached an Alford plea with prosecutors last year, meaning he did not admit to any guilt but acknowledged there was enough evidence to convict him at trial. He was sentenced to 24 years to life in prison.
Nevada has not seen the barrage of armed federal officers carrying out immigration enforcement that other cities have seen, but immigration arrests in the state increased drastically last year, with at least 2,155 detained in the first 10 months of President Donald Trump’s second term.
The number of people arrested in immigration enforcement and removal operations under Trump is three times larger than former President Joe Biden’s final year in office in 2024, which saw 634 arrests throughout the state.
The Deportation Data Project, a group of academics and lawyers that collects and shares U.S. government immigration enforcement datasets, has compiled data or arrests nationwide through Oct. 15.
All arrest data was obtained through public information requests and litigation and most likely doesn’t represent the full scale of arrests or deportation efforts.
Roughly 70% of people who were arrested in Nevada had been detained through local jails and detention without any clear indication in the data of what their underlying offenses were, and more than 40% had no criminal convictions or records.
In an email to Nevada Current, Deportation Data Project explained that street-based arrests or “immigration raids,” which are a smaller portion of the numbers of those arrested, can show up in the data as “non-custodial arrest” and “located” categories.
The Current analyzed the data and found 273 “non-custodial” arrests and 326 identified under “located” categories, a 700% and 300% increase respectively from 2024.
In Biden’s final year of office, the project only found 34 “non custodial” arrests and 83 under the “located” categories.
Of those arrested, a large majority — 1,276 people — were from Mexico while 175 people were from Guatemala and 154 were from El Salvador.
Nevada immigrant advocates and civil rights attorneys say there are many unanswered questions about who is being arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But the one thing that is becoming clear is “the story of 2025 was a story of massive increase in ICE arrests,” said Michael Kagan, director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic.
“Just because we don’t have people in armed fatigues walking through East Las Vegas does not mean that ICE has not ramped up considerably,” Kagan said. “ICE is here and is making more arrests than ever.”
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to numerous requests for comment.
The UNLV Immigration Clinic and the ACLU of Nevada have both struggled to track the full scope of people detained, arrested and deported.
Despite submitting records requested to DHS and local agencies to figure out who is being detained, the numbers “are not typically put out in a very transparent fashion,” said Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the ACLU of Nevada.
He also doubts federal agencies’ willingness to provide accurate information, adding the administration “is insistent and open to lying.”
The data collected by the Deportation Data Project confirms what the UNLV clinic is seeing through client intakes and calls from the community, Kagan said. People accused — not always convicted — of low-level offenses are being swept up in immigration enforcement and the deportation process.
The data might be incomplete, but it does provide a snapshot of what is happening in Nevada.
“The hard part is because the enforcement actions are often taking place on residential streets and neighborhoods, there’s no way to accurately understand the full gamut of how they’re operating here,” Haseebullah said.
They haven’t had their day in court
The data analyzed by the Current showed 43% of cases — 934 arrests — were listed as “pending criminal charges” without any indication of what those charges could entail.
“I think it’s really key and important to remind people that an arrest means nothing,” Haseebullah said. “It’s indicative of nothing. You haven’t had your day in court. If we started basing everything off arrests alone, then our system of justice would be useless.”
Trump and White House officials repeatedly claim immigration enforcement is going after the “worst of the worst.”
But from the cases Kagan has seen through the clinic, these arrests are commonly DUIs and other issues like “low level drug offenses” like simple possession.
“You’re not talking about the worst of the worst, as they usually describe it,” he said.
The aggressive immigration enforcement is circumventing the normal criminal justice system and people’s ability to challenge the offenses they are accused of.
“We have clients who have a pending DUI charge and have a very strong account for why they think they are innocent of the DUI,” Kagan said. “I think that the district attorney probably has never heard their version of events, and that’s unfair.”
Another 44% of the cases, 951 arrests, are listed as having a criminal conviction, but again the data doesn’t specify what the conviction was for or how long ago the arrest was.
The category of what could be considered a criminal conviction is too broad, Kagan noted, and doesn’t distinguish between crime like low-level drug possession or a Class-A felony such as murder.
The ambiguity plays on the “rhetoric casting all immigrants as if they are Class-A felons,” he said.
The administration’s implementation of its crackdown “makes no distinction between a homicide conviction and trespass,” Kagan said. “I think to meaningfully talk about this the way normal people would think of it, you’d need to know what kind of crime” the people being arrested have been accused of, “and they don’t provide that data.”
Another lingering question is how old some of these convictions are, Haseebullah said.
There have been cases where people are being swept up on decades-old convictions.
Haseebullah said he was informed of an arrest and a conviction for a DUI that occurred in 1990.
Another 270 cases in the data are categorized as immigration violations. The data doesn’t provide any further information on those violations.
Two systems of justice
The increased immigration enforcement is not only sweeping more people into deportation, but also created two systems of justice, Kagan said.
For a U.S. citizen, if they are arrested for an offense like DUI or low-level drug possession, they would have their day in court where they are innocent until proven guilty.
Immigrants will never face trial and instead will “just be handed over to ICE.”
The initial arrest “is just the front end of the deportation pipeline,” Kagan said. “We find, anecdotally, with our cases, some of them have no criminal record. Some of our clients and prospective clients were arrested on something like a DUI.”
For those who could be found guilty and convicted of a crime, “they may actually not face the punishment that a citizen would face,” Kagan said.
The system makes ICE a “getaway driver” for cases that could normally carry serious prison time.
Local police at the ‘front end’ of deportation system
The largest number of immigration arrests in Nevada last year — more than 1,500 — were people who were already incarcerated by state and local law enforcement, according to the Deportation Data Project.
Clark County Detention Center accounted for 633 of the arrests through Oct. 15. There were 140 immigration arrests at the jail in 2024.
“That means that basically Las Vegas (Metropolitan Police Department) and other police departments are the front end of the deportation system,” Kagan said.
The data only found one instance of law enforcement complying with 287(g) agreement, by which local authorities help ICE holding people in custody after their release.
LVMPD ended its 287(g) involvement in 2019 but authorized a new agreement in summer 2025. The new agreement is likely not yet reflected in the available data, Haseebullah noted.
Laken Riley Act one year later
Trump’s focus on carrying out more immigration enforcement by detaining and deporting was part of a campaign promise. The Laken Riley Act, which he signed into law during his first month of office and touted as part of his fulfillment of that promise, was a mechanism that critics warned would give the administration more leeway to detain more immigrants by depriving them of their due process rights.
The legislation allowed for undocumented immigrants arrested or charged with crimes like shoplifting, theft and larceny to be detained even if there isn’t a conviction.
Nevada’s entire Democratic delegation voted for the bill despite heavy pushback from immigration attorneys and groups.
Haseebullah said the bill was terrible “namely because it sort of crushed the notion of civil liberties in due process.”
It’s hard to get a full understanding how the act has affected people in Nevada, he said.
The UNLV Immigration Clinic has only successfully litigated one case “to prevent the application of the Laken Riley Act to someone who had been found innocent by a jury,” Kagan said.
The case has been sealed and he was unable to provide further details, except that “DHS pressed forward and wanted to detain them as if they were still guilty.”
If federal agents only relied on the Laken Riley Act to detain more immigrants, “that would have been bad enough,” Haseebullah said.
“It seems almost as if they saw a hurdle in the form of Laken Riley Act and jumped over it,” he said. “Now they just ignore the Fourth Amendment” which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures “and every basic constitutional protection as a whole.”
Kagan agreed that current tactics by federal immigration officials essentially rendered the Laken Riley Act irrelevant.
Instead, the administration is focused on mandatory detention “of basically every undocumented immigrant,” he said.
Though it seems agents have bypassed the federal legislation, Kagan said Democrats should have never voted for the Laken Riley Act.
“I think it does not speak well of an elected official when they can only stand for immigrants, when Gallup polls tell them that the weather is good,” Kagan said. “I think that they would do better to indicate to the public that they stand firm in a position even when the polls run one way or the other.”
The Nevada Highway Patrol on Wednesday released video footage from an early Sunday traffic stop that led to a trooper firing a round into a woman’s vehicle.
Col. Michael Edgell said during a news conference Wednesday afternoon that Barbara Lu, 51, was taken into custody during a traffic stop in Las Vegas early Sunday after she pulled out a handgun and pointed it at a trooper.
Trooper body camera footage showed Lu inside her vehicle after she was pulled over on an Interstate 15 on-ramp at St. Rose Parkway at around 1 a.m. on Sunday.
Dramatic video
As a trooper approached her vehicle and attempted to get Lu to exit, a dog came out of the vehicle and made an aggressive move at the trooper, the video footage showed.
Lu can be heard screaming and at one point said “I will shoot.”
Moments later, a trooper dash cam video showed two troopers outside Lu’s closed driver’s side door as one attempted to break the window.
In body camera footage from another trooper, that trooper can be heard saying “she’s got a gun” before he darted to the back area of the vehicle.
Seconds later, a trooper identified by Edgell as Kenneth Ducut fired one round that went through the driver’s side window and the vehicle’s windshield.
Video clearly showed the flash from Ducut’s shot. Lu then dropped what was in her hand and raised both empty hands.
Edgell said he was proud of how the troopers handled the situation.
“We never fire a warning shot whatsoever and I don’t think any police department will,” Edgell said. “We train our people that you only shoot to stop the threat. She had a gun in her hand and she pointed it at a trooper. She had a gun in her hand when he fired that shot.”
Edgell said Lu, who was taken to a local hospital before being taken into custody, was not seriously injured, though she did have some scratches on her neck.
“In a perfect world, she would have gotten out of the car and we would have conducted business on the side of the road,” Edgell said. “Unfortunately, she was in control of that situation and we have to be as safe as possible. We weren’t going to approach that vehicle without another cover unit and we didn’t know what to expect at that point.”
Multiple charges
According to Las Vegas Justice Court records, Lu was charged with assault on a protected person with use of a deadly weapon and resisting with a firearm, both felonies, along with misdemeanor counts of DUI, failing to obey a red light, and parking a vehicle on the highway.
A Clark County Detention Center online jail roster showed Lu listed as an inmate as of Wednesday afternoon. A Montana resident, Lu is scheduled for a preliminary court hearing over the felony charges on Feb. 25, according to online records.
When they searched Lu’s vehicle, troopers later found a Sig Sauer 9mm pistol with one round chambered in the vehicle, Edgell said.
Along with the dog that appeared to attack one of the troopers, Lu also had another dog in her vehicle. The Metropolitan Police Department investigated the incident and Edgell said the ongoing investigation into the matter would likely last several months.
Contact Bryan Horwath at bhorwath@reviewjournal.com. Follow @BryanHorwath on X.
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