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.“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,” Thayer said.Before Minnesota became Somali central, it was known as the Hmong hub.The state first became a test ground for a Vietnam-era resettlement program — with powerful advocacy from then-Vice President Walter Mondale and Minnesota’s Democrat governor Al Quie, according to local historians.Mondale, a Democrat from Minnesota who served as President Jimmy Carter’s veep, traveled with Quie to Asia to visit refugee camps and came back describing the horrid conditions they saw.That led them to become interested in resettling the Hmong people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group recruited by the CIA to fight a “Secret War” against communist forces in Laos.Dang “Donald” Hawj and his pregnant wife Shoua were the first Hmong to arrive in Minnesota in 1975, and the family is still celebrated by local...