BOSTON — Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday morning promoted a federal benefit-fraud case under the banner “TUESDAY TAKEDOWN,” posting a booking photo of a Lawrence, Massachusetts, woman and announcing that nine people had been charged in nearly $1 million in alleged fraud.
The charges are real and documented. They are also not new. The U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts announced the nine cases on March 26, noting they had been brought “over the past nine weeks,” and the woman Rollins named, Mercedes Orquidea Soto Capellan, 53, was arrested March 9 and indicted April 23, according to the federal docket in Boston.
“Nine individuals charged. Nearly $1 MILLION in alleged benefit fraud,” Rollins wrote in the post, which described Soto Capellan as “a Dominican national unlawfully residing in Massachusetts, who allegedly used a stolen identity to obtain approximately $65,521 in SNAP and MassHealth benefits.”
The $65,521 traces to a Homeland Security Investigations affidavit sworn March 6 and filed with the criminal complaint. Special Agent Timothy Taber wrote that Massachusetts records show Soto Capellan received $16,052 in SNAP benefits between February 2021 and June 2025 and roughly $49,469 in MassHealth benefits between January 2021 and April 2025, all while using the identity of a Puerto Rico woman identified only by initials. About three-quarters of the figure Rollins cited is state-administered Medicaid, not food stamps; the SNAP count is the only charge against her.
Investigators wrote that the identity was used to obtain a Massachusetts driver’s license and a U.S. passport in 2004, and that agents linked the passport photo to Soto Capellan’s Dominican national identification card. The affidavit states she was arrested in January 2016 under the stolen name after a search of a Tewksbury home turned up 30 kilograms of suspected heroin and about $20,000, and was convicted in 2018 under that name of heroin trafficking and related counts, drawing five to seven years in state prison.
The docket shows she is represented by a federal public defender, Joshua Hanye, waived her appearance at arraignment April 30 and has the case before U.S. District Judge William G. Young. The SNAP charge carries up to 20 years. No plea appears on the public docket.
“Tuesday Takedown” is a weekly item on Rollins’ account, running at least since late July: Sept. 1 for an EBT skimming case, Aug. 25 for a $19 million South Florida SNAP scheme, Aug. 11 for an Albany, New York, grocery. This week’s installment reached back six months, and carried none of that chronology. One user replied with the March release and wrote in Spanish, “Esta noticia es de Marzo 2026” — this news is from March 2026 — listing the defendants by name. Rollins and USDA had not publicly addressed the date as of Tuesday afternoon.
The underlying enforcement push is not invented. The March release said nearly $9 million in benefit fraud had been uncovered in the district since December 2025, and prosecutors charged 15 more people in a $1.4 million scheme in June. The March cases totaled about $943,197 in losses — $149,775 in SNAP, $776,715 in MassHealth and $16,707 in Social Security.
The release describes seven of the nine as Dominican nationals in the country unlawfully. One, Efrain Rivera, 54, is listed as a U.S. citizen from Puerto Rico living in New Bedford; another is a lawful permanent resident. Eight lived in Massachusetts and one in Salem, New Hampshire. One is charged as a John Doe whose true identity is unknown. All are presumed innocent.
The investigative method has a direct Pennsylvania connection. Agents found the case, the affidavit says, by running SNAP recipient data in January 2025 to spot identities drawing benefits in two places at once, which turned up about 495 identities receiving benefits in both Massachusetts and Puerto Rico in December 2024. That cross-state matching is now federal policy through the SNAP National Accuracy Clearinghouse, which Pennsylvania joined June 16, 2025. All states must be on it by October 2027.