“Since December, Minnesota has been under occupation by ICE and federal forces. In that time, our communities have been subjected to extraordinary violence and fear.” Thus declares the Headwaters Foundation for Justice, a Minneapolis nonprofit dedicated to the proposition that enforcing U.S. immigration law is a moral crime. Such overheated panic-peddling is what one expects from an entity propped up by multibillionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. OSF several years ago donated $300,000 to Headwaters, one of several far-Left local groups it has funded to transform Minneapolis into a zone of radicalism. As evidenced by recent news, they’ve been all too successful.
Once again, as in 2020, the Year of George Floyd, a revolution is happening on the streets of Minneapolis. For the last couple months, and virtually on a daily basis, demonstrators, cell phone cameras in hand, are gathering at outdoor locations to protest the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Protestors often have resorted to physical aggression, as also has been the case in Los Angeles, Memphis, Pittsburgh and Portland. But Minneapolis is their symbolic capital. Whether assembling by the dozens, hundreds or thousands, they march, chant and otherwise demand that our country serve as a Third World sanctuary without numerical limits. Thousands of protestors on Friday, January 23, took off work to assemble in downtown Minneapolis, an act that inspired a nationwide general strike one week later.
Why is Minneapolis so receptive to rainbow radicalism? Part of the reason goes way back in time. The city’s growth period, the late-19th and early-20th centuries, was driven mainly by German and Scandinavian immigration. Heavily Lutheran and liberal, these settlers defined the genial, conflict-averse personality that came to be known as “Minnesota nice.” They assimilated fairly easily. During the last half-century, however, their descendants, along with other ethnic groups, entranced by the prospect of multiculturalism in one nation, expanded the altruism and retrofitted Christianity to it. This enabled liberalism to morph into radicalism. During this century, this hybrid of world-saving and moral scolding has dominated local discourse. The Minneapolis Left, who are mostly white, are the self-anointed protectors of “vulnerable” people of color, especially Somalians.
Somalian immigrants in the U.S., many of them naturalized citizens, unfortunately, are not so nice and assimilable. Radicals, wedded to illusion, don’t care. Over the past year, they have been hellbent on rescuing them from the clutches of President Trump. What better way to display moral superiority than to block Somali deportations? These activists are oblivious not only to our nation’s laws but also to the reality that Somali culture is instinctively insular and does not adapt well to contemporary American life. They are also blind to the fact that the predominant Somalian religion, Islam, is intensely adversarial toward the West. A few months or even years in America is not going to change that, whether here or back in Somalia, whose crime-ridden capital, Mogadishu, is a garbage dump – literally.
The Lutheran Church, in partnership with our government at all levels, has played a central role in bringing Somalians here and incentivizing their staying here. With lavishly compensated contractors doing the dirty work, the Church has “rescued” many Somali from Somalia and lined them up with public social service agencies. Predictably, Lutheran clergy and laymen are condemning the Trump administration for the recent deportations. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and the Lutheran Heritage Foundation are urging congregations in Minnesota to stand up for their Somali neighbors. Ann Corcoran, founder and head of Refugee Resettlement Watch, and a genuine patriot, had witnessed this over a decade ago. She exposed how the St. Paul-based Lutheran Social Service of America, working on federal contracts, had foisted well over 10,000 Somali refugees upon selected communities in the state without the latter’s consent.
Somalians indeed are upending Minnesota’s demography and culture. As late as 1990, the year before civil war broke out in their native country, their presence in America was negligible. It’s anything but negligible now. The U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey recently estimated that about 34,000 ethnic Somalians live in Minneapolis; another 50,000 live elsewhere in the metro area; and still another 24,000 live outside that area but within Minnesota. Their pathology isn’t hard to find. Abusing our system of public benefits is for many a way of life. Benefit fraud, tax fraud and rent-skipping, much of it revealed by courageous free-lance investigative reporting, are normal, even admirable, in their moral universe. Under the guise of providing day care, health care, child nutrition and other services, Somalians have scammed federal and state agencies out of enormous sums of money. The Justice Department estimates the total haul at $9 billion. Thankfully, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, on a visit last month to Minneapolis, announced several steps launched by the Trump administration to put these fake enterprises, and related money-laundering networks, out of commission.
One would think that local residents, particularly those who pay taxes, overwhelmingly would support deportations and scam shutdowns. But understand, this is Minneapolis. Many of its residents strongly identify with the lawbreakers, whom they see as marginalized victims of racism. And since everyone in the world has a moral right to come to and remain in America, they argue, it is not for us to deny them that right. They view President Trump as a “fascist” for rejecting this assertion. White House border czar Tom Homan’s announcement on February 4 of a drawdown of 700 federal officers from Minneapolis, keeping the remaining 2,000, has not impressed the locals.
As unofficial guardians of persons scheduled for deportation, the anti-Trump protestors, possessed of unyielding intergroup altruism, have resorted to extralegal methods of preventing ICE and other federal agents from carrying out assigned duties. Among their tactics, the demonstrators have shouted insults at law enforcement officers, physically assaulted them with fists or foreign objects, vandalized or set fire to their motor vehicles, placed caltrops (i.e., spikes) in front of the tires of parked ICE vehicles, and parked their own vehicles in the middle of a street to block ICE personnel from driving away. In two separate incidents, such tactics resulted in the needless death of a protestor. The victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, each were shot point blank by an ICE agent after aggressively provoking one or more officers and resisting arrest. To the Left, they are now martyrs.
The Minneapolis rallies, far from being acts of spontaneous populist combustion, are part of a long-range strategy of managed conflict. The goal is regime change; President Trump’s removal from office is the first step. The people running this radical coalition are experienced in the dark art of mass instigation via email, text messaging and social media. Working in tandem through encrypted Signal chats, street alerts, and “abductor” tracking footage, these organizations communicate with “rapid responders” (i.e., rioters) to ICE staging grounds. This is nothing short of urban guerrilla warfare. But why do the insurgents seem to win more than lose? Winning takes time and money. Fortunately for them, the Soros philanthropy network has plenty of both.
The New York City-based Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros in 1993 and chaired by his favored son Alex since June 2023, currently has roughly $25 billion in assets. Through donations, especially during the past decade, it has enabled Leftist activist groups with a national scope and a Minneapolis presence, such as Indivisible, MoveOn and Sunrise Movement, to political prominence. National Legal and Policy Center explained last year the dangers they pose (see here and here). Yet while their impact can’t be underestimated, the focus here is on groups based in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. For the anti-ICE aggression in the streets of Minneapolis would have been much more difficult in absence of local guidance and funding.
The Open Society Foundations’ “grants past” web pages under the key words Minnesota,Minneapolis and Twin Cities are revealing. Combined OSF donations under these categories during 2016-24 totaled $6,037,240, all of it transferred prior to 2022. Fully $5,628,000, or about 93 percent, was contributed during 2019-21 – the three-year period covering the year immediately before, during, and immediately after the George Floyd riots. Even allowing for the possibility that OSF double-counted certain donations (to be explained shortly), that’s enough money to build local cadres.
So where has the money gone? Some recipients are simply too broad in their mission to make assumptions about how they’re spending their money. These include Regents of the University of Minnesota ($973,000); Minnesota Education Trust ($70,000); and a fellowship ($130,500). But others, far more problematically, are dedicated to race and gender egalitarianism. These include the following: Vote Yes 4 Minneapolis ($1,150,000); Faith in Minnesota ($650,000); Headwaters Foundation for Justice ($300,000); Somali Artifact and Cultural Museum ($23,740); Comunidades Latinas Unidas en Servicio ($40,000); and Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs ($2,700,000). The recipient of the largest grant, Social and Environment Entrepreneurs, is a donor-advised nonprofit organization. That is, it serves as a middleman between the original donor and the recipient, with the identity of the original donor kept secret upon request. It is possible that a portion of that $2.7 million went to other Minnesota beneficiaries. This would explain why the $500,000 check to Vote Yes 4 Minneapolis in 2020 is listed twice, once each under separate key words. As such, the composite aid to this group would be $650,000 instead of $1,150,000. Yet even allowing for double-counting, it must be said that George Soros has invested in Minnesota radicalism.
The following are summaries of some of the grantees of the Open Society Foundations. Brace yourselves.
Vote Yes 4 Minneapolis. After the 2020 riots subsided, the Minneapolis City Council approved putting a referendum on the November 2021 ballot to disband the city police department, replacing it with a “public safety” department – as if public safety isn’t the purpose of any police department! “The Yes 4 Minneapolis campaign,” organizers declared, “is a Black-led, coalition model campaign that seeks to replace the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) with a new department of public safety by amending the Minneapolis City Charter. We have the moral responsibility – and the power – to defend Black lives and transform public safety together. The murder of George Floyd and years of data have made clear that the crisis and the failing of the MPD is bigger than any one Mayor or Chief can solve.” The proposal, which would have shifted a portion of City funds from law enforcement to social services, also would have removed language in the city charter mandating a minimum number of police employees in the name of “flexibility” in meeting “urgent safety needs.” Crucially, the city council, not the mayor’s office, would control this new agency. Anyone with street smarts could realize this was a blank check to place police at the mercy of community activists in every neighborhood. Criminals would have had a field day.
Voters rejected the measure by 56 percent to 44 percent, proof that there remains some intelligent life in Minneapolis. Yet while the Open Society Foundations’ investment didn’t deliver an initial return, it’s doing that now. In the early months of 2025, the Minneapolis City Council, in separate rounds, voted to award contracts to local violence interrupter groups to assist police at crime scenes, and counsel families and gang members. Supporters of de-policing across the U.S. routinely tout these “interrupters” as essential to public safety. In practice, these low-paid street bureaucrats, supposedly equipped with the power to persuade criminals to go straight, tend to be unaccountable to the public, have a criminal history in their own right, and take orders from gang leaders. Many of them work undercover. And they experience real danger. With police presence reduced, how could it be otherwise?
Faith in Minnesota. When it comes to recycling the inanities of the Religious Left, Faith in Minnesota is assuredly a leader. The St. Paul-based 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization calls itself “a political home for people of faith who are acting boldly and prophetically to create a new, people-centered politics in our state – one rooted in abundance, where everyone is in and no one is out.” Of Donald Trump in an unstated presidential election race, these pious socialists tell us: “(W)e are faced with a stark choice. We can choose to go backward into an all-too-familiar politics of scarcity, division, and fear. Or can choose to move forward into a new politics of abundance, generosity, and love, in which everyone is included, especially those have been excluded, ignored, or scapegoated in politics as usual.” Look for this rainbow socialist bunch to be well-funded for this year’s midterm elections. Its abundant $650,000 check from the Open Society Foundations in 2019 may seem distant but could be a prelude to something even bigger.
It’s worth noting that Faith in Minnesota is the political arm of a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, ISAIAH, which in its own words, is “a statewide multiracial group of faith communities, Black barbershops, childcare centers, and more fighting for racial and economic justice in Minnesota.” Founded in 2000 as a merger of three church-based community groups, these latter-day prophets don’t hide their contempt for national borders.
Here are a couple of its programs. Under “Driver’s Licenses For All,” ISAIAH is dedicated to “restoring access to driver’s licenses regardless of immigration status.” Under “Healthcare Access and Affordability,” it supports “establishing a prescription drug affordability board and a pathway for MinnesotaCare as a public option, including undocumented children and adults.” With organizations like these, it isn’t hard to guess why Minnesota is such a popular destination for Somalians. As of the end of 2024, ISAIAH had not yet directly received money from the Open Society Foundations. Then again, it might not have to ask. It has a mega-donor in Mackenzie Scott, the multibillionaire former wife of Amazon founder-executive chairman Jeff Bezos. In March 2024, she contributed $2 million to ISAIAH through her own philanthropy, Yield Giving.
Social and Environmental Entrepreneurs (SEE). This group, like the Tides Center, is a donor-advised nonprofit that assumes the role of “fiscal sponsorship” of smaller, fledgling nonprofits. Established in 1994, with roots in a late-1980s U.S.-Soviet Union cultural exchange program, the Calabasas, Calif.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit’s mission is to “empower, encourage and catalyze projects so that we can collaborate and facilitate positive change.” This vision of change includes funding Black and Pink, Inc., which advocates the abolition of police, courts and prisons, and the California Environmental Justice Coalition, which describes itself as “in resistance against environmental racism and injustice.”
SEE is well-capitalized. For the year 2024, the group pulled in $94.6 million in revenues while incurring only $82 million in expenses. From a net worth angle, the situation looks even brighter. Total assets at the end of 2024 were $103 million, whereas total liabilities were a mere $6.66 million. Being a California entity, it almost certainly passed along portions of its Open Society Foundations $2.7 million donation to Minnesota-based causes – why else would OSF list the donation under the key word “Minneapolis?”
Headwaters Foundation for Justice. While the beginning of this article quoted this outfit, that didn’t begin to convey this group’s histrionic self-righteousness. The Headwaters website reads: “ICE is terrorizing Minnesota. Donate today to support organizations defending immigrant communities across the state.” That’s for openers. Here’s more. “Since 1984, Headwaters Foundation for Justice has resourced movement organizations that are too often overlooked or excluded by mainstream philanthropy,” the site notes. “Our grantmaking supports organizations and groups on the front lines of social change. We believe that the people who directly experience society’s injustices are the ones who know the path to collective liberation.” This is preposterous. Radical organizations of the sort supported by Headwaters aren’t “overlooked” or “excluded” by mainstream philanthropy; they are mainstream philanthropy as far as beneficiaries are concerned. It’s “society” who pays the price.
Headwaters doled out $4.1 million in grants during 2024 via five program categories: Black Radiance Network, Giving Project Grant Program, Fund of the Sacred Circle, Rapid Response Fund, and Wellspring Fund. These programs, amplified by Leftist buzz words (e.g., “dignity,” “systemic,” “ecosystem”), seemingly rest on the assumption that America isn’t worth maintaining insofar as white people have any say in its governance. These people advocate direct action. The Rapid Response Fund, for example, mobilizes community resources to the front lines of conflict. Perhaps a better term would be the Riot Reinforcements Fund. Knowing the identities of those in charge of the front lines isn’t easy because Headwaters is a donor as well as a recipient. Since 2014, according to a Daily Caller analysis of tax records, the foundation has forwarded over $3.3 million to at least 16 area organizations. “What we are seeing on the streets of Minneapolis and across Minnesota right now is a fight for collective liberation in real time,” Headwaters stated in an Instagram post.
That Soros-funded organizations have real power in Minneapolis is indisputable. But it is also indisputable that their power is the bitter fruit of the City’s enactment of an immigration sanctuary ordinance back in 2003. That law bars local law enforcement from cooperation with federal authorities as it relates to the removal of “undocumented” immigrants. Police and other city employees are not allowed to inquire about a criminal suspect’s immigration status unless the inquiry is relevant to a specific crime being investigated. This ordinance eventually led to an immigration crisis and ICE’s high-profile presence.
The state’s political establishment, being either useless or corrupt, defends sanctuary laws. And its leaders practice what they preach. Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar all have vowed not to cooperate with federal law enforcement regarding deportations of illegal aliens. Indeed, Governor Walz not only has justified the recent anti-ICE riots but may also have enabled them. Investigative journalist Cam Higby infiltrated a Signal chat group that seemingly was obstructing ICE operations in Minneapolis. His suspicions proved sound. The chat group was doing just that. And it was led by a strategist for Walz’ reelection campaign, Amanda Koehler. An embarrassed Walz this January 5 dropped his campaign. Other participants in the group included Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan and Minnesota State Senate candidate Anita Smithson. Governor Walz, after a chat with President Trump, agreed to cooperate with ICE. Even assuming the governor isn’t pulling a bait-and-switch, it’s hard to believe that he or any other Minnesota politician will offer more than minimal help.
In “blue” states, Immigration and Customs Enforcement carries an extra burden in the face of mounting public pressure to abolish or curtail the agency. This situation was avoidable. The controversies surrounding ICE’s practices were manufactured by people who reject the very idea of border and interior enforcement. Fittingly, this problem hasn’t occurred in states cooperating with ICE. During January 5-19 of this year, ICE agents arrested over 650 illegal immigrants in West Virginia, a sizable portion of whom had an extensive criminal history. They were aided by more than a dozen state and local law enforcement agencies participating in ICE’s 287(g) program. In Texas, deportations likewise are going smoothly. “We deport 10 times the number of illegal aliens out of Texas than we do out of Minneapolis,” remarked U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Meet the Press. “Why do we hear nothing out of Texas about any of the same problems that we have in Minneapolis? I’ll tell you why. Because in Texas, we have the cooperation and support of local law enforcement so that we can do these operations safely, keeping U.S. citizens and others protected and safe. That is not what we have in Minneapolis.”
Minneapolis is no longer just a city. It’s also a rallying cry for the global Left. The Open Society Foundations is as much aware of this as anyone. And the people who run this network, from the Soros family on down, for years have backed up their convictions with money. The donation dollar figures for Minneapolis and elsewhere in Minnesota for 2025 and 2026 won’t be made public, respectively, until late 2026 and 2027. When released, they could reveal subsidies equal to or exceeding those of a half-dozen years ago. After all, there’s a revolution going on.
Carl F. Horowitz is an NLPC senior fellow.
