Catholic Charities has taken in millions to build Somali presence in Minnesota

The agencies collected a reported $2,500 per refugee to cover initial food, housing, and social services. This primary placement infrastructure helped seed the networks that, combined with chain migration and secondary migration drawn by Minnesota’s welfare system, grew the state’s Somali population past 100,000 — the largest concentration in the United States.

But this story begins earlier when, after the Vietnam War, Minnesota built a resettlement apparatus for Hmong refugees, advocated by then-Vice President Walter Mondale and Gov. Al Quie.

Catholic Charities and Lutheran Social Services already operated post-World War II programs that had initially relied on private donations from the pews to aid displaced European Christians.

Once federal contracts became available, the same organizations became natural partners for large-scale resettlement. As Kelsey Reinhardt, president of CatholicVote, observed in the Post report: “I don’t think there’s a recognition of how generous the U.S. has been.”

Parker Thayer of the Capital Research Center told the Post that “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,” adding that funding flowing into Minneapolis-area resettlement programs alone reaches “in the hundreds of millions.”

Since 2021, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops — which oversees Catholic Charities — has received $140 million in federal migrant resettlement contracts. Thayer offered that heavy dependence on such contracts “is hurting the ability of these organizations to fundraise in arguably more important areas of their work,” as donors recoil from work many view as controversial.

And the scale of such immigration has come with enormous unforeseen costs for Minnesota, including roughly $9 billion in welfare fraud scandals, much of it linked to the Somali community — the largest such case in U.S. history.

Additionally, Thayer observed that large-scale concentrated resettlement creates “isolated ethnic enclaves” that “seem to be causing some cultural problems.” He added that some individuals “routinely travel out of the U.S. back to the place they are supposedly a refugee from.”

Catholic Charities of the Twin Cities closed its refugee and immigrant programs in 2018 after cuts from the first Trump administration, and Lutheran Social Services (now Global Refuge) offered no comment to the Post.

Such large-scale activities being performed by the institutional Church once again raise questions regarding the priorities.

Michael Hichborn, founder of the Lepanto Institute, has repeatedly highlighted the disparity, noting last year that “The USCCB has a massive budget of around $200 million, and 90 percent (90%) of that budget went to immigration, refugee resettlement stuff” while “one percent (1%) of that budget was used for pro-life activities.”

He has stated that “annually the USCCB collects all kinds of money for immigrant refugee resettlement programs, and never once has it ever collected for pro-life activities. Not once.” In his analysis “A Question of Charity,” Hichborn examines how government grants have turned Catholic Charities into a large-scale operation in which substantial portions of revenue go to salaries and compensation rather than traditional, evangelically oriented works of mercy.

With regard to such large expenditures, Reinhardt urged caution grounded in the Gospel itself, proposing that “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 called for serious questions about national sovereignty, assimilation, and proper vetting.

Hichborn’s work frames the broader issue as one in which federally funded “charity” risks becoming an industry that subordinates the Church’s primary mission — the salvation of souls — to temporal political projects.

The Minnesota case illustrates how that model, once impacted by government contracts, can reshape communities faster than assimilation or integration can keep pace while diverting institutional energy and donor trust from other works of greater priority.