Catholic Charities, Lutheran Social Services were paid $62 MILLION in gov grants to resettle thousands of Somalis in Minnesota: report

$62 million was paid out to two Christian groups to build up and settle a sizeable portion of the Somali community in Minnesota, which eventually led to the growth of the Somali population in the state.

Both Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services have been at the forefront of shaping the region in Minnesota with the heavy Somali population, in part because of government contracts that have been going back generations, per the New York Post.

Parker Thayer, an immigration expert at the Capital Research Center in Washington, DC, told the outlet, "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 that the money flowing into immigration programs in Minneapolis is "in the hundreds of millions.” Since 2021, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has been given over $140 million in federal resettlement contracts, Thayer said. The US Conference of Catholic Bishops oversees Catholic Charities.

“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 added.

Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services have spent decades performing immigration resettlement in the US, even going back to World War II, and have been a go-to organization to help with mass resettlement. However, back then, the funding was mostly coming from church members, not grants from the US government.

President and CEO of CatholicVote Kelsey Reinhardt told the Post, “I don’t think there’s a recognition of how generous the US has been." Although there is a Christian edict to welcome the stranger, Reinhardt said that this has to be bound in some respects.

“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,” she said.

Reinhardt added, “We need to ask difficult questions of what our national sovereignty means. What extent are we able to assimilate people? Is the vetting sufficient?”

The two church groups have moved around 29,000 Somalis into Minnesota since 1993. Today, the Somali population in Minnesota is around 100,000, thanks in part to chain migration, where family members migrate to the same area as those who have already arrived.

“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 told the Post. “Refugees from Somalia then moved to Minnesota after they were resettled elsewhere, in places like South Dakota."

“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,” he added.