Sioux Falls' Somali population exceeds 1,600

A group of 45 people, including Somalian refugees, takes the oath of allegiance during a naturalizaion ceremony in 2011 at the U.S. Courthouse in Sioux Falls. (Photo: Devin Wagner)

By Steve Young
Sunday, May 31, 2015

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It sits on the eastern horn of Africa, a country shaped like the number 7.

Somalia and its capital, Mogadishu, has had no stable central government since the regime of former leader Siad Barre collapsed in 1991.

Since that time, the country's landscape has been ravaged by civil war and drought – so much so that as of 2013, more than 1.1 million Somalis had been displaced internally, and nearly one million refugees had moved into neighboring countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia, and Yemen.

Here in America, the first large groups of Somali refugees arrived in 1993 in Minnesota, brought there by volunteer agencies like Lutheran Social Services, Catholic Charities and World Relief Minnesota.

Today the Twin Cities has the largest Somali population in the country, almost 40,000 among the 84,000 who have been admitted into the United States over the past 25 years.

Tim Jurgens, director of Lutheran Social Services' Center for New American, estimates that there are between 1,600 and 1,800 Somali refugees now in Sioux Falls, though "it's difficult to tell as the Somali have a tendency to migrate to Minnesota on a frequent basis," he said.

There are at least two distinct factions of Somalis in Sioux Falls. The smaller of the two, the Somali Bantu, has grown to about 24 families and 226 members locally since the first of their group began arriving here in 2004.

They are an ethnic minority group in Somalia, descended of people from various Bantu ethnic groups who were captured from Southeast Africa and sold into slavery in Somalia and other areas of Northeast Africa as part of the 19th century Arab slave trade.

They have been marginalized within Somalia ever since their arrival in that country.

The larger group in Sioux Falls is collectively referred to as Somalians.

Since 2006, at least 27 young Twin Cities Somali-Americans have left for East Africa, allegedly recruited to take up arms in Somalia's civil war. Authorities believe those young people joined al-Shabaab, a radical Islamic militia group vying to topple Somalia's weak transitional government.

Though the number joining the al-Shabaab ranks from Minneapolis and St. Paul began to dwindle in 2011, the recent trend has been in young men and women from there flying overseas to join the Islamic State — a result, law enforcement officials say, of a connection made between al-Shabaab and ISIL.

There has been no confirmation that those groups are involved in any such recruitment here in Sioux Falls.

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