An American flag flew upside down on a city flagpole during a Somali Independence Day celebration at Lake George Park Pavilion in St. Cloud, Minnesota, on July 3, the eve of the nation's 250th birthday, and the community response has been anything but quiet.
The St. Cloud Police Department confirmed it received a complaint call at 5:29 p.m. that evening. An officer arrived, corrected the flag without objection, and the banner was right-side-up before the first speaker took the stage at 6 p.m. But by then, video of the inverted Stars and Stripes had already spread across social media, drawing sharp reactions from local officials, military families, and residents who say an apology issued nearly a week later did not come fast enough.
The event, which drew roughly 500 people at peak attendance, was held under a permit issued by the City of St. Cloud to Internal Housing Assistant, a local nonprofit that helps immigrant communities find housing. Its executive director, Omar Podi, told Fox News Digital the incident was an accident. He took "full responsibility" and insisted the upside-down display "was never meant as a sign of disrespect to the United States, its citizens, its veterans, or anyone who attended our celebration."
Podi said he is "committed to ensuring that it never happens again." In a phone conversation with Fox News Digital, he acknowledged that people are "frustrated" given what he called the "fraud issue and everything", an apparent reference to ongoing federal scrutiny of fraud schemes connected to Minnesota's Somali community.
St. Cloud City Councilman Scott Brodeen learned about the flag from a Facebook friend's message on the evening of July 3. He drove to the event, but by the time he arrived, the police had already fixed it. What he saw next bothered him more than the flag itself: silence from every elected official and campaign operative on site.
Brodeen told Fox News Digital:
"I was disgusted by it and then disgusted that it wasn't seen, wasn't caught."
He pressed the point further. The AFL-CIO and the Minnesota Democratic, Farmer, Labor Party both had booths set up at the event. Politicians were there campaigning. Yet none of them, Brodeen said, raised the alarm or spoke up publicly.
"If it was accidental, how could it not have been caught by organizers or politicians that were down there campaigning?"
That question still has no public answer. Fox News Digital's reporting does not identify which specific politicians attended or whether any of them responded to the controversy.
Brodeen brought the matter before the St. Cloud City Council at its Monday meeting. He framed the incident against the weight of the holiday weekend and the sacrifice the flag represents. Minnesota's broader political environment, where Governor Tim Walz's approval rating has fallen to record lows amid deepening fraud investigations, gives his frustration added context.
"It really bothered me, especially with the people campaigning on the weekend of our nation's birthday, a big milestone, 250th, that they would remain silent, not to take a stand for our flag really what the flag represents too is, that's the key here that is really bothersome."
Brodeen was careful to distinguish between legal rights and civic duty. He acknowledged that Americans have the legal right to fly a flag upside down in protest. But he drew a clear line.
"People can fly a flag upside down and protest, not saying you can't, just saying, you shouldn't."
He added:
"You know, be grateful for the country that has given so much. Part of my thinking, like brave men and women died for that flag and for what it represents, so don't disrespect it in a way that's almost unfathomable."
Brodeen told Fox News Digital he does not want to "manufacture outrage", but said the anger right now feels "very well warranted."
Kathy Neumeister, a Sauk Rapids resident whose husband served 36 years in the military, saw video of the flag circulating online and went to the event herself. What she found confirmed what she had seen on her phone.
"There were like 500 Somalians, they were celebrating, most of them kids in the splash pad, and then there's the upside-down flag, and I'm like, you can't make this up."
Neumeister called the mayor's office. She said a spokesperson suggested a city staffer may have "made a mistake." She was not persuaded.
"I said, I'm sorry, who do you have on your staff that doesn't know how an American flag is supposed to fly?"
Her verdict on the accident explanation was blunt:
"I really don't buy that."
St. Cloud sits at the center of one of the largest Somali communities in the United States. Minnesota, by far, has more Somali immigrants than any other state. That demographic reality makes incidents like this especially charged, and makes the lack of a swift, public response from officials on the ground all the more conspicuous.
St. Cloud Mayor Jake Anderson did not issue a public statement until Thursday afternoon, nearly a week after the flag was flown upside down. He provided the event permit and a written response to Fox News Digital.
"The event organizer has relayed to the City that this was done so unintentionally and has apologized for the mistake."
Anderson added that the city "takes the proper display of the American flag seriously and understands the significance it holds in our community." He noted the city has worked with the event organizer for more than 11 years and that "this has never happened before."
The mayor's office also expressed appreciation for residents who called police and noted the flag was corrected before the program began. But for residents like Neumeister and officials like Brodeen, the timeline of the apology itself is part of the problem. The flag went up wrong on July 3. The apologies didn't start surfacing until nearly a week later.
The incident has also drawn attention to the event's sponsors. U.S. Bank was identified as a sponsor, and social media users directed criticism toward the company. Fox News Digital reached out to U.S. Bank for comment, but no response was reported. The broader pattern of federal fraud allegations involving Minnesota's Somali community has only amplified public skepticism.
Several basic facts remain unclear. Who physically raised the flag that day, a city employee, an event volunteer, or someone else? Was the flag already inverted when the celebration began, or was it changed at some point during the event? The mayor's office suggested a city staffer may have erred, but no one has been publicly identified or held accountable.
The viral video was filmed by Omar Podi and posted on Facebook. A version also appeared on the Facebook page "Rocks & Cows of Minnesota," an account named after a remark attributed to Governor Walz describing rural Minnesota as "mostly rocks and cows." The connection between Podi and that account is unexplained.
Meanwhile, the political figures who were present at the event, campaigning at DFL and AFL-CIO booths on the eve of Independence Day, have not been named publicly or asked to account for their silence. That silence is its own kind of statement. In a state where whistleblowers have called for elected officials to testify about massive fraud, the pattern of looking the other way has become familiar.
Brodeen, for his part, is not letting the matter drop at the council level. And residents like Neumeister, married to a man who gave more than three decades to the armed forces, are not inclined to accept "it was an accident" when no one in charge seemed to notice or care until the internet forced the issue.
The deeper question raised by the ongoing federal investigations into fraud in Minnesota's nonprofit and community organizations is whether the institutions meant to serve immigrant communities have adequate oversight, or whether political alliances have shielded them from scrutiny for too long.
An upside-down American flag is, by the U.S. Flag Code, a signal of dire distress. It has also been adopted as a form of political protest. Brodeen acknowledged the legal right to display the flag that way. His objection, and the objection shared by many in St. Cloud, is not about legality. It is about what it says when a flag flies wrong on a city pole, at a publicly permitted event, on the eve of the Fourth of July, and nobody in authority says a word until the cameras force them to.
Five hundred people were at that event. The AFL-CIO had a booth. The DFL had a booth. Politicians were working the crowd. And the American flag hung upside down on a city flagpole until a single police officer, dispatched by a citizen's complaint, walked over and fixed it.
When the people who are supposed to lead won't even look up at the flag, it tells you everything about where their attention really is.
