A shooting at a liquor store in Hudson, Wisconsin resulted last Sunday when rival Somali gangs met outside a Hudson liquor store (Minnesota liquor stores are closed on Sundays).
Investigators say the weekend shootings of three men at a Hudson liquor store involved members of rival gangs from Minneapolis. Saint Croix County prosecutors filed a total of 30 felony charges Tuesday against 22-year-old Guled Abdi and 26-year-old Ahmed Hirsi. Both men remain in the Hennepin County jail awaiting extradition to Wisconsin, where they will each face six charges of attempted first-degree intentional homicide, six counts of reckless endangerment, and three counts of reckless injury.
The shootings occurred Sunday morning outside Spirit Seller Liquor in downtown Hudson. Investigators said six members of the Somali Outlaws gang were partying Saturday night, and drove their SUV to Hudson in the morning because liquor stores in Minnesota are closed on Sundays. Two people went in the store to buy the liquor, but their credit card was rejected. Outside, two men in a car approached and offered the group alcohol and cigarettes. A derogatory remark was apparently said during the exchange, and shots were fired at all six in the SUV. Three were wounded and one woman, 28-year-old Fartun Aidid, remained in critical condition at last word at a Saint Paul hospital. [Will the taxpayers,or the hospital, be paying her medical bills?—ed]
Another trial on the horizon? Another case where the local jurisdiction should be allowed to seek reimbursement from the US State Department for a refugee criminal case?
Why so many Somalis in Minneapolis? This 2011 post remains almost daily one of our top-read posts. Thank the US State Department and three of its top Minnesota resettlement contractors: Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities, and World Relief (Evangelicals).
Normally we are critical of the US State Department for its open-door policy to large segments of the Muslim world, but it seems they are now holding up some questionable visa applications of Somalis who can’t prove who they are.
Perhaps they have learned a lesson.
State Department is holding up the visa for a Somali man in Kenya who can’t prove who he is. ‘Wife’ Amina Awnur has Rep. Keith Ellison going to bat for her.
Of course keep this in perspective and your enthusiasm in check—we admitted over 100,000 Somalisto the US over the last few decades and in 2008 we learned that the US State Department had admitted tens of thousands of Somalis to the US who had fraudulently claimed a family relationshipto someone who got in ahead of them. Family reunification for Somalis was closed for years, but the fraudulent “family members” got to stay!
Not one peep in this latest news about the fraud that shut down family reunification for Somalis for YEARS!
And, before you read the latest news about how the State Department is holding up some visas for Somalis, much to the consternation of Rep. Keith Ellison and the two Senators from Minnesota who want to get more Somali voters, keep this in mind: We are bringing in Somalis at near record levels (almost as high as the Bush Administration!).
7,608 new Somali refugees were resettled in the US in FY2013, click here.
Hundreds of Somalis are struggling to get their families reunited in the United States.
Amina Awnur is in Willmar. Her husband is in limbo.
For four years, Awnur has been trying to get U.S. authorities to allow her husband to come to Minnesota from Kenya. He has repeatedly gone to the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi with documents, but officials tell him they need more. [The reporter should make it clear that family re-unification for Somalis, the so-called P-3 program, was only re-opened in 2013. So she may have applied four years ago, but applications like hers weren’t going anywhere.—ed]
“I am really frustrated and very tired, because it has taken so long,” she said through an interpreter. [What, no English after being in the US for over 8 years!—ed]
The 30-year-old Somali-born woman, who now is a U.S. citizen, is among hundreds of refugees whose family members are hung up in Africa, struggling to prove to the State Department that they are who they say they are.
Waiting sometimes for years to have their visas approved, they are children, parents, siblings and spouses displaced by the continuing upheaval in Somalia. Stuck in Kenya, they have been unable to provide satisfactory paperwork establishing their identity, according to immigration lawyers in the Twin Cities. [DNA testing is available for blood relatives, that should easily prove who they are.—ed]
“It’s a huge problem,” says Leslie Karam, whose firm recently filed a lawsuit against a State Department official in Nairobi on behalf of a Minnesota man who is trying to get his wife out of Kenya. “The U.S. consulate in Nairobi has indicated their administrative processing can take several months,” the lawsuit says. “It has been almost two years.”
Again, this reference (below) to 1,000 visas being given to Somalis only pertains to those applying for family reunification. We let in 7,608 Somalis in FY2013 who we sure hope were all able to prove who they are!
She [State Dept. Spokeswoman] said that Somalis are treated the same as applicants from other countries, and more than 1,000 visas were issued to Somalis in the 2013 federal fiscal year, which ended on Sept. 30.
“At the same time, we must ensure that applicants do not pose a security risk to the United States and otherwise are eligible for a visa” she said in an e-mail. “Applicants sometimes require additional screening to determine whether they are eligible.”
Toward the end of the piece we learn a little about the star of the story—Amina Awnur. How much do you want to bet this is a case of immigration marriage fraud?
Awnur came to Minnesota in 2005 with her mother, three brothers and one sister. Two sisters were killed in the civil war.
She works as a meat cutter on the production line of a Jennie-O Turkey Store processing plant, and sends her husband money to help pay his $200-a-month rent in Nairobi. She became a U.S. citizen in 2011.
In 2008, she said, she flew to Kenya and married Hassan Noor, 31, whom she’d met in Kenya in 2002. She returned to Minnesota and applied for a visa for him in January 2009. Her application was approved by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in March 2010. [but, not by the State Department—ed]
There is probably a very good reason the State Department is holding up Noor’s visa!
An afterthought: This postis one of our most visited posts of all time and it explains how Catholics, Lutherans and Evangelicals brought the Somalis to Minnesota (and are still bringing them) as contractors to the US State Department. The initial big attraction was Minnesota’s generous welfare system (and meatpacker employers).
The Census Bureau has a new tracking program (Census Explorer) which allows users to follow the demographic changes in cities and towns across America. Here is what the Star Tribunereported on Tuesday (emphasis mine):
Yussuf Shafie admits it wasn’t easy being among the first Somali immigrants to arrive in Burnsville’s schools.
Yussuf Shafie opened his Burnsville African restaurant in 2012. Photo by John Gessner
“It wasn’t as diverse as it is today, I’ll tell you that. It was hard to communicate with peers and stuff.”
But now that there’s a “huge Somali population” in the area, he says, things are going swimmingly at his year-old Tawakal Restaurant in the suburb’s downtown. Nor is the place just for immigrants; it functions as an easy point of contact for all kinds of cultures.
“It’s open to everyone who has a wallet,” he cheerfully declares. “If you have a wallet, we can get along!”
He is part of what one analyst on Tuesday called a “dramatic shift” of immigrants out of the central cities after the U.S. Census Bureau released its latest batch of data tracing demographic change.
Burnsville and Eagan emerge among the state’s top 10 destinations for East Africans, while nearby Shakopee is among the leaders for Southeast Asians. Eden Prairie is the state’s leading home for immigrants from India.
“We recently did an analysis showing that every big minority group is now majority suburban,” said University of Minnesota demographer Will Craig.
[…..]
Those moves are visible in a new online mapping program the Census Bureau unveiled on Tuesday, called Census Explorer.The program allows people to easily trace key changes in their own neighborhoods from 1990 to 2000 to today.
And, come to think of it, we have been told over and over again that immigrants are re-building the inner cities in places like Buffalo or Erie, PA, this news would indicate that is just a bunch of spin and that the immigrants want to get out of the cities as fast as they can. This news also means that ‘Welcoming America’ (Tom Negri and David Lubell) are selling Cleveland a bill of goods when they want Cleveland to seek more immigrants to re-build that city. Sure looks like the immigrants will be out of there soon too!
The photo is from Sun This Week, here. Just FYI Burnsville has a new mosquetoo!
Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, symbols for MNsure. Immigrants want to know who the heck they are!
MNsure, of course, is Minnesota’s Obamacare exchange. They are looking for the young, healthy, legal immigrants to make it work. The part I don’t get is, how is it going to help premiums for all if the immigrant is unemployed and will likely just be pushed onto Medicaid?
Here is the news from Minnesota Public Radio about how to get tens of thousands of Somalis signed up:
The Somali 24 Mall and mosque in Minneapolis is a serpentine maze of stalls, where merchants selling sandals, cell phones, prayer rugs and pots try to lure the throngs of shoppers.
Most days you won’t find health insurance among the wares. But that’s what Asli Ashkir was trying to sell recently — in Somali and English.
Ashkir isn’t an insurance agent. She leads Somali Health Solutions,* an organization designed to introduce people to MNsure, the state’s new online health insurance marketplace.
Minnesota is home to at least 83,000 uninsured immigrants who may be eligible for health coverage through the state’s new insurance marketplace. But convincing them to use the new exchange is proving to be a communications challenge.
“The government will be at your side…..”
Ashkir’s organization has crafted a decidedly Somali outreach plan that includes telephone and in-person assistance in Somali. On her visit to the mall, Ashkir enlisted the imam in the mall’s mosque to talk about the program during the midday prayer.
“Whatever the Imam says is highly respected,” she said. “He is the leader in the religion.”
Setting up shop at the mall also was strategic. On Fridays, when few Somalis work, the shopping center attracts young, uninsured men — a demographic that’s critical to the economics of the exchange. [They would have to be employed men with a decent salary to make it work! Right?—ed]
Hassan Abdi of Minneapolis followed the imam’s advice and stopped by. Abdi, who is unemployed, dropped his health insurance earlier this year because it cost too much and covered too little. He had not heard of MNsure and wanted to know the cost.
“Sometimes, it’s difficult to get the insurance that covers all of your needs,” he said.
Price is a chief concern among the people she’s talked to about MNsure, Ashkir said.
“But there’s help available from the federal as well as the state, that’s what we keep telling them,” Askir said. “You will be supported if you don’t make enough. The government will be at your side to help you. Then, they like that.”
*By the way, I tried to find some financials for Somali Health Solutions, but could not. I couldn’t even figure out in my cursory search if they are a non-profit organization.
In the wake of the brutal slaughter in Kenya (don’t open this linkif you have a weak stomach) by Somali Jihadists a little over a week ago, I’m struck by the fact that the mainstream media is running one story after another about America’s growing Somali population, but the word “refugee” never makes it into the telling. I can’t say never, but I just reviewed a bunch of recent stories in The New York Times, The Washington Postand Timemagazine and searched for the “R” word. It was not there!
A seriously wounded girl is carried away from the Westgate mall in Nairobi as Al-Shabaab’s terror reign unfolded.
And, by the way, I still haven’t seen any further report on whether Americans have been officially identified among the killers. Have you?
Do you think the average reader, someone not following immigration issues daily, wonders how a particular group of immigrants ‘found their way’ to America? I think they do, so why does the media rarely mention the legal programs through which the US government is changing America’s demographic make-up?
Below is an example from aNew York Times story entitled, ‘Somali Community in U.S. Fears New Wave of Stigma After Kenya Attack.’
Would this help you know anything about how the Somalis got here, how they in fact became a “community” (through the US State Department’s Refugee Resettlement Program going back three decades)? The “R” word does not appear in the story:
More than 32,000 people of Somali ancestry live in Minnesota, census figures show, and local leaders say the true number is far higher. Some came in the 1990s after fleeing civil war, and others are their children, many of them born in this country. [By the way, the number is way higher than 32,000 in Minnesota, in addition to the tens of thousands in other preferred resettlement states—ed]
They “came….after fleeing civil war.” What! they just got on a plane and said “here we are America,” “let us in,” and then picked Minnesota on a map?
Regular readers of RRW know how it happened (here and here), but do the reporters not know or do they deliberately cover-up the truth about LEGAL immigration programs gone wrong?
By the way, there is a good article (at Powerline, hat tip: Judy) about the problems the media is glossing-over with the Somali “community” in Minnesota, but it too doesn’t use the word refugee. Why is that?
