Two church non-profits have taken in at least $62 million to build the Somali community in Minnesota — leading to the rise of Ilhan Omar and the fraud scandals that have gripped that state, The Post can reveal.
Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services were at the forefront of reshaping the frigid Land of 10,000 Lakes thanks to generous government contracts stemming back generations.
“This is a very big pile of government money and a whole bunch of different groups have come to get their own slice of it,” Parker Thayer, an immigration expert at the Washington, DC-based Capital Research Center, told The Post.
He added the total money pouring into Minneapolis resettlement programs alone is “in the hundreds of millions.”
He noted that since 2021, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, the body overseeing Catholic Charities, has received $140 million in migrant resettlement contracts from the federal government.
“It is hurting the ability of these organizations to fundraise in arguably more important areas of their work. I imagine a lot of donors are being pushed away by something that is very reasonably viewed as highly controversial by a lot of people,” Thayer said.
Before Minnesota became Somali central, it was known as the Hmong hub.
The state first became a test ground for a Vietnam-era resettlement program — with powerful advocacy from then-Vice President Walter Mondale and Minnesota’s Democrat governor Al Quie, according to local historians.
Mondale, a Democrat from Minnesota who served as President Jimmy Carter’s veep, traveled with Quie to Asia to visit refugee camps and came back describing the horrid conditions they saw.
That led them to become interested in resettling the Hmong people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group recruited by the CIA to fight a “Secret War” against communist forces in Laos.
Dang “Donald” Hawj and his pregnant wife Shoua were the first Hmong to arrive in Minnesota in 1975, and the family is still celebrated by locals today.
Mondale then headed the US delegation to the United Nations in 1979, where he delivered a speech which helped secure international commitments to resettlement, framing the crisis in moral terms by comparing it to a failure to protect Jewish refugees before and during World War II.
Within a couple years, the Twin Cities’ Hmong population was in the thousands.
Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services — the latter now called Global Refuge — had built an extensive resettlement operation as far back as World War II to help Christians displaced from war-torn Europe, so were a natural go-for the federal government to help with its mass resettlement.
During World War II, however, their operations were largely funded from the pews, not Uncle Sam, said Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group CatholicVote.
“I don’t think there’s a recognition of how generous the US has been,” she told The Post.
While the current pope and his predecessor have been strong advocates of open border migration policies, Reinhardt says the gospel is also very clear on the importance of nationhood.
“We have to look to the gospel origins on this. The gospel mandates the welcoming of strangers but there’s no unbridled welcoming of people, for example those who hate you or who are going to kill or steal from you,” she told The Post.
“We need to ask difficult questions of what our national sovereignty means. What extent are we able to assimilate people? Is the vetting sufficient?”
When Somalia was thrown into civil war in the 1990s and the US decided to take in refugees, the Minnesota operation was already an established, well-oiled machine.
The two church groups have resettled an estimated 29,000 Somalians into Minnesota since 1993, collecting a reported $2,500 per refugee to cover costs like food, initial housing and social workers.
The population today is over 100,000 in Minnesota according to data, thanks to chain migration (also known as “family reunification”) and the state’s generous welfare system, which became a magnet for Somalis, including those initially placed elsewhere in the US.
“They picked Minnesota because it had extremely generous state social safety net policies and welfare programs, which of course made resettling refugees there easier,” Thayer said. “Refugees from Somalia then moved to Minnesota after they were resettled elsewhere, in places like South Dakota.
“A lot of these people, while claiming to be refugees, you look at their Facebook pages, or you look at indictments and find that they routinely travel out of the US back to the place they are supposedly a refugee from,” he added.
The Biden administration oversaw the largest jump in living memory of migrant resettlement operations.
Minnesota has been a flashpoint in the controversial effort, where a gob-smacking $9 billion in estimated welfare fraud, largely stemming from the Somali community, was uncovered in the last year — speculated to be the largest welfare scam in the history of the US.
On Monday, the home of Democrat congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a native Somalian whose district includes Minneapolis’s “Little Mogadishu,” was raided by federal immigration officials as part of a criminal investigation.
“They’re creating multiple problems by resettling large numbers of people in one area at the same time they’re creating isolated ethnic enclaves across America, which seem to be causing some cultural problems,” Thayer said.
A spokesperson for Catholic Charities Twin Cities said they closed their refugee and immigrant programs in 2018. Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment.