Two Christian Groups Were Paid $62M to Resettle Tens of Thousands of Somalis in Minnesota

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.

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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.

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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.

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