I have a bunch of posts backed up that I haven’t gotten to and this is one of those. It is from February 23rd. Remember that triple murder in Minneapolis I told you about here. Well, it turns out that defense lawyers for one of the alleged murderers is questioning the age of his client.
It’s an issue we have rarely (if ever!) mentioned here, but when refugees have no documented birth date, they are given January 1 of whatever year the authorities guess they were born in. I didn’t realize the number of those January first birthdays was so large. This is from Fox 9 News in the Twin Cities:
MINNEAPOLIS – Birthdays are one of the dates that define us. But, research shows that New Year’s babies are not that unique
Abdi Bihi is a social worker, who works closely with the 75,000 Somalis who now call Minnesota home. And many, if not the majority, share one thing in common: They all have the same January 1 birth date.
In Somalia, birthdays are not traditionally celebrated. It is the same way in Sudan, Ethiopia and even the Hmong from Laos. The January 1 birthday is assigned in the refugee camps, based on the family’s best guess of the year the child was born.
Of the 80,000 refugees, who resettled in the U.S. last year, nearly 11,000 have January 1 birthdays.
The January 1 birthday has become an issue in the triple murder at a Somali market. One of the teenage suspects, Mahdi Ali, has the birth date of January 1, 1993, making him barely 17. He is old enough to automatically stand trial as an adult.
Defense Attorney Fred Goetz says his client may be 16, or even younger, meaning his case should be handled as a juvenile matter.
Ali was raised by his grandmother and his parentage is uncertain. And in a country ravaged by 20 years of civil war, finding birth records will be next to impossible.
Whenever I see one of these ‘raised by granny’ Somalis mentioned, I can’t help but think about those fraudulent P-3 applications that caused the State Department to suspend the family reunification program for Africa. Is Mahdi Ali one of the 36,000 Somalis the State Department believes is in the US illegally?
For new readers:
We learned recently that 270 Somali illegal aliens who entered the US recently through Mexico are being sought by ICE. The fear is that they are connected to the terrorist group, Al-Shabaab here.
For information on Somali missing youths, American citizens who have gone to Somalia to learn the Jihad trade, some leaving through Mexico, use those search words. We have written dozens of stories on the case. For more on Al-shabaab (sometimes spelled Al-shabab) also use our search function.
The US State Department has admitted over 80,000 Somali refugees to the US (this linked post continues to be one of the most widely read posts we have ever written) in the last 25 years and then in 2008 had to suspend family reunification because widespread immigration fraud was revealed through DNA testing. That specific program has not yet been reopened (that we know of), but will be soon.
Nevertheless, thousands of Somali Muslims continue to be resettled by the State Department as I write this. We recently learned that we will be taking 6000 Somalis this year from one camp in Uganda and as many as 11,000-13,000 total from around the world.