Two church nonprofits, Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, received at least $62 million through government contracts tied to Somali refugee resettlement in Minnesota, according to a report by The Post. The report linked that sprawling operation to the growth of the state’s Somali community, the rise of Democrat Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, and fraud scandals gripping Minnesota.

Parker Thayer, an immigration expert at the Washington, DC-based Capital Research Center, described a lucrative network of organizations competing for public funds. “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,” he told The Post.

Thayer said the total amount flowing into Minneapolis resettlement programs alone is “in the hundreds of millions.” Since 2021, he noted, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which oversees Catholic Charities, has received $140 million in federal migrant resettlement contracts.

THE ROT WITHIN ! Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services were paid at least $62M for settling Somalis in MN .

Just “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.” *Article in comments. — VeBee ✝️ (@VeBo1991) October 16, 2026

The government funding has also complicated private fundraising, according to Thayer. He said donors may be driven away because refugee resettlement has become highly controversial among large portions of the public.

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Before Minnesota emerged as a major destination for Somalis, it was widely associated with Hmong resettlement. The state became a testing ground for a Vietnam-era refugee program with strong advocacy from then Vice President Walter Mondale and Minnesota Governor Al Quie, according to local historians.

Mondale and Quie traveled to refugee camps in Asia and returned describing the conditions they witnessed. They became interested in resettling the Hmong, a Southeast Asian ethnic group recruited by the CIA to fight communist forces in Laos during the “Secret War.”

Dang “Donald” Hawj and his pregnant wife, Shoua, became the first Hmong arrivals in Minnesota in 1975, and their family remains celebrated by local residents. In 1979, Mondale led the US delegation to the United Nations and delivered a speech that helped secure international resettlement commitments.

Within several years, the Hmong population in the Twin Cities numbered in the thousands. Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services, now called Global Refuge, already had substantial resettlement operations that dated to World War II, when they helped Christians displaced from Europe.

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Those earlier operations were largely supported by churchgoers rather than taxpayers, according to Kelsey Reinhardt, president and CEO of CatholicVote. “I don’t think there’s a recognition of how generous the US has been,” Reinhardt told The Post.

Reinhardt said the current pope and his predecessor have strongly supported open border migration policies, but she argued that the gospel also recognizes the importance of nationhood. “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,” she said.

She also raised questions about sovereignty, assimilation, and screening. “We need to ask difficult questions of what our national sovereignty means. What extent are we able to assimilate people? Is the vetting sufficient?”

When Somalia descended into civil war during the 1990s and the United States began accepting refugees, Minnesota’s resettlement infrastructure was already established. Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services have resettled an estimated 29,000 Somalis in Minnesota since 1993.

The organizations reportedly collected $2,500 per refugee to cover expenses including food, initial housing, and social workers. Minnesota’s Somali population has since grown to more than 100,000 through family reunification and migration by refugees who were initially placed in other states.

“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. He said Somali refugees placed elsewhere, including South Dakota, later moved to Minnesota.

The Biden administration oversaw the largest increase in migrant resettlement operations in living memory. Minnesota became a flashpoint as an estimated $9 billion in welfare fraud, described as largely stemming from the Somali community, was uncovered over the previous year.

Federal immigration officials raided Omar’s home on Monday as part of a criminal investigation. Omar is a Somalia native whose district includes the Minneapolis neighborhood known as “Little Mogadishu.”

Thayer argued that concentrating large numbers of refugees in the same places creates isolated ethnic enclaves and cultural problems. Catholic Charities Twin Cities said it closed its refugee and immigrant programs in 2018, while Lutheran Social Services of Minnesota did not respond to a request for comment.

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