Culture clash laid bare as violent Somali gangs grip suburban communities: ‘These kids are different’

Chief Booker Hodges says the young suspects don’t fit traditional gang profiles, while investigators struggle to explain why online disputes are escalating into gunfire.

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More than 100 rounds fired in a Minnesota neighborhood have left police struggling to explain a troubling pattern: Somali-American youths from financially comfortable households are turning online disputes into bursts of gang violence.

[snip]

“They’re coming from families. They got money, and they have resources,” Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges told Fox News Digital of the young Somali-American gang members under investigation.

Those questions follow a late-night Bloomington gunfight that left one person injured amid a string of shootings across suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul.

Hodges said the suspects defy traditional drug- or money-driven gang profiles. Asked what drives the violence beyond social-media disputes, he acknowledged investigators lack a clear answer.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell you. I really wish I could.”

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Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, believes one possible explanation lies in how refugees have been resettled.

“We have to remember also that this population’s origins were as refugees who were a vulnerable population; and traumatized in many cases,” Vaughan told Fox News Digital.

“But they were settled in clusters in certain places in the United States. And I believe that is a policy that has facilitated the formation of these gangs, because it removes a lot of the incentives for people to assimilate.”

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Stanford sociologist Tomás Jiménez cautioned against treating gang involvement among a small subset of second-generation immigrants as evidence that an entire community has failed to integrate.

“I would actually not think of it as like a failed assimilation, as much as a particular kind of assimilation,” Jiménez said.

He noted that Italian, Irish, Mexican and Salvadoran communities experienced gang activity while broader integration continued.

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Donald Tricarico, an Italian-American immigration scholar at Queensborough Community College, drew parallels between Italian and Irish immigrants, who established close-knit ethnic communities in New York. He said Italian families often followed relatives from the same villages into the same neighborhoods and occupations — a pattern known as chain migration.

“They came to the same neighborhoods… what migration historians call ‘chain migration,’ and they … went to the same neighborhoods,” he said, citing his own family’s multigenerational experience in New York City.

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Tricarico noted that some Sicilian immigrants arrived with ties to existing Mafia networks overseas, a criminal element distinct from the broader Italian immigrant population. Hodges, meanwhile, said investigators have found no evidence that longstanding clan rivalries in Somalia are driving the Minnesota violence.

Somali-American community figures have offered their own explanations, including the challenges facing immigrant parents.

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Vaughan, meanwhile, warned that the gangs have not reached the sophistication of transnational organizations such as MS-13 but could become more entrenched without intervention.

She pointed to families and schools as critical to preventing recruitment and argued that local institutions and law enforcement must intervene before the groups become more organized.

Vaughan acknowledged she had not established that specific Minnesota schools or resettlement policies caused the shootings.

Asked whether longstanding Somali clan rivalries were fueling the shootings, Hodges said investigators found no evidence supporting that explanation.

[snip]

He warned the Bloomington gunfire could have endangered innocent bystanders had it occurred during daylight.

“If that had been one o’clock in the afternoon, it would have been a different story on that block,” he said.

(*) Full article: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/culture-clash-laid-bare-violent-somali-gangs-grip-suburban-communities-these-kids-are-different