Two church-affiliated nonprofits — Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services — have received at least $62 million in government funding connected to Somali resettlement efforts in Minnesota, according to a report examining the financial backbone of the state’s immigration infrastructure.
The funding flows through long-running government contracts that have supported refugee resettlement work in Minneapolis and St. Paul for decades, predating the current Somali population by years.
“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, said. Thayer added that total resettlement-related funding flowing into the Minneapolis area runs “in the hundreds of millions.”
Roots in the Vietnam Era
Minnesota’s role as a resettlement hub did not begin with Somali migration. The state first became a testing ground for federal resettlement policy during the Vietnam War, when then-Vice President Walter Mondale and Minnesota Governor Al Quie, a Republican, pushed for the resettlement of Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia, according to local historians cited in the report.
Mondale and Quie traveled to Asia to visit refugee camps and returned describing severe conditions there. The Hmong were an ethnic group the CIA had recruited to fight alongside American forces during the so-called “Secret War” in Laos.
A Program Under Scrutiny
Minnesota’s Somali community has grown substantially in the decades since, concentrated largely in the Twin Cities. The state has also become the site of significant fraud investigations involving public programs, including child care, hospice care and food assistance funding, with officials alleging disproportionate involvement from within the Somali community in several of the schemes.
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who rose to prominence from within that same community, is currently under federal investigation for alleged immigration fraud. That investigation reportedly began during the Biden administration.
The report does not allege that Catholic Charities or Lutheran Social Services were involved in any fraud themselves. Taxpayers, however, are footing the bill for the underlying resettlement contracts regardless of how the funds are ultimately used, and the scale of spending — tens of millions of dollars routed through just two religious charities — raises questions for a public increasingly focused on where federal and state dollars actually go.
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