The Somalization of a Minnesota Town

“Faribault has become our city,” a Somali interviewed by the Minnesota Post bragged.

Faribault, Minnesota, is a small city about an hour’s drive from Minneapolis. On paper it should have the smaller crime rate of the alphabetically similar Farmington which is nearly the same size and only a half hour away. Instead, Faribault has more than twice as much violent crime, aggravated assaults, burglaries and car thefts, 30% more rapes, and 8 times as many robberies. Farmington has no arsons, but Faribault has the most arsons of any city outside major strongholds like Minneapolis, St. Paul or Duluth.

But Faribault has something Farmington doesn’t: diversity. Especially from its Somalis.

The city of over 20,000 used to be much less diverse. In 1990, it was even 98% white. Or as the Minnesota Post described it, with a shudder, “an almost entirely homogeneous white community, not much different from many towns across Minnesota.” But Faribault was an hour away from Minneapolis at a time when it was being overtaken by Somali mass migration, and it had a meat processing plant, now partly shut down, which is always a draw for illegal aliens and migrants.

Now Faribault is much more diverse and it has problems that it didn’t used to have.

Faribault was the epicenter of a $2.6 million Somali Medicaid ride fraud scam in which 8 Somalis, two of them named Mohammed, stole hundreds of names to bill taxpayers for rides, interpreters and acupuncture services that never happened.

It was also part of the $250 million Somali meal scam that first broke open Somali fraud.

Faribault’s part in the massive fraud in which nonprofits claimed to be providing free meals to hundreds of thousands of Somali kids who didn’t exist came through the Somali American Faribault Education (SAFE) run by Mohamed Hussein and Lul Bashir Ali, who made off with $5 million in meal funds after claiming that their restaurant in Faribault, which only had 9 tables, was serving meals to 1,600 children a day and had served a total of 700,000 meals.

The Somali American Faribault Education (SAFE) nonprofit also claimed to be providing meals to 2,500 children a day. Sizable amounts of kickbacks were paid to a man who then fled to Somalia. The Minnesota Post’s article praising the Somali takeover of Faribault had hailed SAFE, claiming that it “provides refugees with ESL programs and connects them to jobs”.

The other non-profit promoted by the Post article, the ‘Somali Community Resettlement Services’, which operates out of the massive 115-year-old historic Gale Mansion, often used as a wedding venue, has been linked to one Faribault meal site that claimed to be offering 2,000 meals a day.

The ‘Somali Community Resettlement Services’ solicited nearly $3 million for the free meals and Somali elected officials had proposed bills that would pour millions into the organization.

The fraud also penetrated the Faribault public school system as investigators are also trying to figure out where $1 million in grant money to stop Somali drug abuse solicited by Lul Bashir Ali, initially identified only as a Somali mother, went.

“‘We need help.’ This sentiment, expressed by a Somali mother about the specific concern of youth drug use and the more general frustration of trying to parent in a new culture, captures the heart of this grant proposal.” The Minnesota Department of Human Services responded with nearly $1 million for the Faribault schools that was supposedly used to provide Somali services.

Faribault is much more diverse now with an estimated 4,600 Somalis out of 25,000 people. The white population has dropped to 65% and the school system is even more diverse.

Minority enrollment in the city’s schools was up 243% in twenty years. By 2018, minority students made up a majority of the school system. Today, 60% of the school district is minority and only 36% white. A population of older white homeowners is subsidizing education and services for Somali and South American migrant meatpacking plant workers with their property taxes.

The Faribault School Board has recently been debating teaching science, health and social studies in Somali. As of 2022, there were over 900 Faribault students who didn’t speak English.

The Somali education program was proposed after complaints from Somalis and other migrants that their “home languages were being lost as students became more English-dominant” and “parents and children no longer shared a common language, weakening communication and cultural connections within families.” Rather than expecting their parents to learn English, Faribault schools are expected to prevent their children from learning English, instead teaching them in Somali.

Faribault might as well teach the students in Somali because state test proficiency scores showed that math proficiency was at 13.7%, science was at 16.1% and reading was at 29.8%. Test scores, graduation rates, attendance and every possible metric are below state standards.

What would Faribault be like if it were less diverse and Somali? Faribault school statistics show that students for whom English is their native language perform over three times better on math, science and more than twice as well on reading. Students who aren’t on welfare perform four times as well on math and science. Call it the ‘Somali Effect’.

Faribault is more diverse, it’s also more dangerous and has linked up with the epicenter of Somali fraud in the Twin Cities. Its schools are failing and it has no future.


(Image above from Hormel meatpacking plant video showcasing its Somali workers.)

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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