Report: Churches paid $62 million to resettle Somalis in Minn.
Two religious nonprofits received at least $62 million in government funding to resettle Somali refugees in Minnesota over roughly three decades, the New York Post reported Friday.
According to the Post, Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services have placed an estimated 29,000 Somali refugees in the state since 1993. The groups collected a federal payment for each refugee, about $2,500, according to the Post, to help newcomers get established.
A spokesperson for Catholic Charities Twin Cities told the Post that the organization shut down its refugee and immigrant programs in 2018. Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota did not respond to the newspaper’s request for comment.
Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center, a conservative think tank, criticized the arrangement.
“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 told the Post.
He argued that the state’s generous social safety net drew refugees to Minnesota. He said placing so many newcomers in one area has kept communities separate from the wider population.
Kelsey Reinhard, president of the advocacy group CatholicVote, told the newspaper that the Gospel calls for welcoming strangers but that the nation must also weigh its sovereignty and capacity to assimilate newcomers.
“Is the vetting sufficient?” she asked.
Religious charities have run resettlement operations since World War II, when they helped displaced Europeans. The federal government turned to those networks when it expanded refugee programs during the Vietnam War era.
The Hmong, who fought for the CIA in Laos during the war, began arriving in Minnesota in 1975. Walter Mondale, the Minnesota Democrat who later served as vice president, championed their resettlement.
In 1979, he led the U.S. delegation to a United Nations conference that produced international commitments to take in Indochinese refugees.
Minnesota’s Somali population is now far larger than the number of refugees placed there, as families reunited and Somalis resettled in other states moved in. The state has one of the largest Somali communities in the country.
Minnesota is the focus of federal investigations into widespread fraud in state-administered social services programs, many involving defendants from the Somali community.
On Monday, federal agents searched the Washington home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., a Somali-born lawmaker, as part of a criminal investigation related to her immigration records.
Refugee resettlement in Minnesota and across the country largely halted after President Donald Trump suspended the U.S. refugee admissions program in 2025.
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Report: Churches paid $62 million to resettle Somalis in Minn.
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