Two major Christian charities took in at least $62 million resettling tens of thousands of Somalis in Minnesota, a taxpayer-funded pipeline critics link to massive welfare fraud and concentrated political power.
The New York Post reported that Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, now called Global Refuge, stood at the center of building the state’s Somali community through federal resettlement contracts.
The groups resettled an estimated 29,000 Somalis into Minnesota since 1993. They collected a reported $2,500 per refugee to cover food, initial housing, and social workers.
Minnesota’s Somali population now exceeds 100,000. That growth tracks with the rise of Democrat Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Somali native whose district includes Minneapolis’s heavily Somali enclave.
Federal immigration officials raided Omar’s home on Monday as part of a criminal investigation. The timing lands amid wider scrutiny of how resettlement money, welfare rules, and chain migration reshaped the Twin Cities.
Parker Thayer, an immigration expert at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., told the Post the total money pouring into Minneapolis resettlement programs alone sits “in the hundreds of millions.”
"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,"
Thayer said. Since 2021, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which oversees Catholic Charities, received $140 million in migrant resettlement contracts from the federal government, he noted.
The Biden administration oversaw the largest jump in living memory of those migrant resettlement operations. Catholic Charities Twin Cities closed its own refugee and immigrant programs in 2018, a spokesperson said. Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment.
Thayer argued the funding model now collides with donor priorities. He said the controversy hurts the groups’ ability to raise money for other work.
"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,"
he said.
Thayer said Minnesota became a destination because of policy, not chance. Refugees first landed elsewhere, then moved.
"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.”
That secondary migration concentrated large numbers in one metro area. Thayer warned the pattern creates isolated ethnic enclaves and cultural friction.
"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,"
he said. He also pointed to travel patterns that raise questions about refugee claims.
"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,"
Thayer said.
The Post tied the resettlement story to an estimated $9 billion in welfare fraud uncovered in the last year, largely stemming from the Somali community and described as potentially the largest welfare scam in U.S. history. Taxpayers are left holding the bill while contractors and advocates collected steady federal fees.
Recent coverage has detailed how federal agents searched Omar’s home in a related immigration fraud probe, underscoring how enforcement pressure is finally reaching political figures tied to the same networks.
Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services built extensive resettlement operations going back to World War II, when they helped Christians displaced from war-torn Europe. Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of the nonprofit advocacy group CatholicVote, said those early efforts were largely funded from the pews, not federal contracts.
That model shifted. Reinhardt said Americans rarely hear how much the country has already done.
"I don’t think there’s a recognition of how generous the US has been,"
she said. She argued the gospel call to welcome strangers has limits.
"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,"
Reinhardt said. She called for harder questions on sovereignty, assimilation, and vetting.
"We need to ask difficult questions of what our national sovereignty means. What extent are we able to assimilate people? Is the vetting sufficient?"
she said.
Minnesota’s modern resettlement machine took shape after the Vietnam era. In 1975, Dang “Donald” Hawj and his pregnant wife Shoua became the first Hmong arrivals in the state. Within a couple of years the Twin Cities Hmong population reached the thousands.
Then-Vice President Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat, headed the U.S. delegation to the United Nations in 1979. His speech helped secure international resettlement commitments. He had traveled with Minnesota Gov. Al Quie to Asia refugee camps to push the case, comparing the crisis to the failure to protect Jewish refugees before and during World War II.
When Somalia’s civil war produced new refugee flows in the 1990s, the Minnesota operation was already running. The same church networks that once resettled Hmong families turned to Somali arrivals under federal contracts.
Investigators have since subpoenaed Omar’s relatives as the immigration probe expanded, showing the scrutiny now reaches family networks as well as public officials.
Omar’s district includes the Minneapolis area long shaped by these resettlement waves. The Post framed her political rise against the same funding and migration patterns that built the local Somali community.
Separate reporting has examined whether the federal probe focuses on her father’s immigration paperwork rather than other theories, keeping attention on how entry documents and family claims are vetted.
Legal analysts have also mapped the steep climb required in any effort to challenge citizenship status tied to marriage-fraud allegations, a reminder that immigration enforcement faces high procedural barriers even when investigators move.
Omar has pushed legislation to slash enforcement resources, including a measure to strip nearly $140 billion from ICE and redirect it elsewhere. That stance collides with the fraud losses and contract totals now under public review.
A former prosecutor’s analysis of the legal hurdles in the marriage-fraud probe shows how difficult accountability remains once someone holds office and citizenship.
The core numbers remain stark. At least $62 million went to two church nonprofits tied to Somali resettlement in Minnesota. An estimated 29,000 people arrived through those channels since 1993. The broader Minneapolis resettlement pot reaches into the hundreds of millions. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops alone booked $140 million in migrant contracts since 2021.
Against that inflow sits the estimated $9 billion welfare-fraud hit uncovered in the past year, described as concentrated in the same community the contractors helped expand. Catholic Charities Twin Cities had already shuttered its refugee programs years earlier. Lutheran Social Services offered no public defense of the record.
Thayer’s critique cuts to incentives. Generous state benefits pulled secondary migrants into Minnesota. Federal per-head payments rewarded volume. Enclaves formed. Travel back to Somalia undercut the refugee narrative in individual cases tied to indictments and public social-media trails. Political influence followed demographic concentration.
Reinhardt’s questions land on the same fault line: how much welcoming is required, and what sovereignty and assimilation demand in return. The postwar church model once drew from voluntary pew donations. The modern version runs on government contracts measured in nine-figure totals.
Minnesota’s experience shows what happens when resettlement volume, welfare magnets, and weak follow-up meet. The contractors collected their fees. The state’s safety net absorbed the strain. Fraud investigators are still adding up the losses. Voters are left to ask why the same agencies and nonprofits faced so little pushback while the bills piled up.
Open borders and no-strings contracts do not produce assimilation or clean books, they produce enclaves, scandals, and a political class that treats enforcement as the real problem.
