Lewiston, Maine, Proves Minnesota Isn’t the Only Somali Story
Most of the coverage we've seen on the influx of Somali immigration seems to point to Minnesota. But not so.
Take, as an example, this report from Fox News' Paul Steinhauser:
LEWISTON, Maine - A New England city transformed by an influx of refugees and immigrants is now grappling with a youth gun-violence crisis, as police report 35 gun-related incidents this year, 22 involving juveniles.
"I don’t feel safe. I fear for my life," Mohamed Muhumed, a Lewiston teenager, told Fox News Digital. "I saw someone get punched in the middle of the sidewalk over there. It’s crazy."
The city, Maine's second most populous city and home to a large population of refugees from Somali and other African nations, is experiencing a serious youth gun violence problem. Lewiston Police Chief Carly Conley called the gun violence "one of the most serious public safety challenges" facing the city.
Gee. Almost like Chicago, or maybe Minneapolis, but with lots more pine trees.
A little history is in order here, because Lewiston didn't get here overnight. About a quarter century ago, which by the way, was the last time I visited the place, refugees and secondary migrants started relocating to the old mill city on the Androscoggin River. (Yeah, I had to triple-check the spelling on that one).
They came chasing cheap rent and quiet streets. The arrivals came fast. In 2002, then-Mayor Larry Raymond asked Somali leaders to discourage more people from coming, arguing that the rapid influx was straining city resources.
Well, anyone who has been watching things can guess how that went. The national press treated him like a man who'd kicked a puppy on live television. A mayor of a small, broke city said, in effect, "Please slow down so we can keep up," and the country's moral betters decided in typical kneejerk fashion, that the problem was the mayor being a racist.
Today, Lewiston has one of the highest per capita Muslim populations in the country, mostly Somali, along with refugees from other African nations. And Jon Fetherston of The Maine Wire, who has covered the violence extensively, told Fox that history proved Raymond right: too much, too fast.
Twenty-four years later, the city isn't arguing about school budgets. It's arguing about kids shooting kids, to say nothing about the crimes associated with that violence. Perhaps the cleanest link to that violence is drug trafficking. On September 22, police arrested a 13-year-old for allegedly firing a gun at Knox and Maple streets. The 16-year-old arrested alongside him was charged with drug trafficking, and both were already on probation. On October 22, police arrested a 17-year-old with cocaine base and more than $2,000 in suspected drug proceeds. He had previously been charged in shootings in March 2024, April 2024, and June 2025, and his attempted murder charge from a year ago was dropped after a court found him incompetent to stand trial. Chief Carly Conley has also said guns bought through straw purchases often get traded through the drug trade.
Conley says teens get guns by stealing them from careless owners or unlocked cars, and through straw buyers like girlfriends. The numbers bear that out. In one May crackdown, police seized seven guns, four of them stolen. May and June enforcement produced 11 guns, five stolen. Flock cameras have also turned up stolen weapons. Conley has publicly listed auto theft alongside juvenile gun violence and repeat offenders as the problems pushing the city’s public safety system to the brink.
Some of the shootings look like gang feuds rather than random gunfire, suggesting the crime problem is a larger one than the numbers alone suggest. After a May 30 shooting at a Pierce Street apartment house, three teens were charged with conspiracy to commit murder, and the intended victims told police they’d been warned beforehand that they might be shot. In early May, five juveniles were arrested after video showed them beating someone. Earlier this month, a 15-year-old was charged with attempted murder over a daytime downtown shooting.
The numbers are ugly enough on their own: 35 gun-related incidents this year, 22 of them involving juveniles. Fetherston says teenagers commit the majority of the violence, and that police keep arresting them, only to watch the courts turn them loose. The district attorney, by his account, is as frustrated as everybody else.
Rick LaChapelle, a former city council president now running for mayor as a Republican, described one young man who has been arrested something like five times for the same thing. He gets picked up, taken to the youth center, and released. Lather, rinse, repeat.
And repeat they do.
This thread runs through everything. So far this year, 22 juveniles have been involved in the 35 gun incidents, and 11 of them in at least two. One teen has had more than 70 (!) police contacts in two years. A city councilor put it bluntly: kids involved in a shooting on Friday are back at parties drinking, using drugs, and getting guns again by Tuesday.
The city's answer so far: $200,000 in extra police overtime and a polite request that the state rethink how it handles repeat violent juvenile offenders. Mayor Carl Sheline promised shooters that police "will find you," then added that parental involvement and accountability hold the key.
He's not wrong about the parents, of course. But police finding the shooters was never the problem. Police find them over and over. The system keeps putting them back on the street.
Now, honesty compels a point the usual suspects will throw at me anyway, so let me get there first. Fox itself notes that no official city or police data shows Somali residents as a group driving the violence. LaChapelle says that's who police keep arresting. A local teenager told Fox it's youth in general, not just Somali kids. And Ifraax Saciid, a Somali native who moved to Lewiston from Atlanta, says the root cause is poverty, and that she has watched the same thing unfold in Atlanta, Miami, Ohio, Kentucky, and Minnesota.
Fair enough. Let's take her at her word. Lewiston is poor. It was poor before the first refugee family ever arrived, a mill town whose mills had largely gone quiet.
Which is exactly the point. Somebody... possibly in the White House, a decade ago or so, decided that a struggling small city with a shrinking tax base made a fine destination for thousands of newcomers who needed housing, schools, translators, and services, then left the locals to sort out the bill. When the mayor objected, the same somebodies called him a bigot. If poverty breeds violence, then steering vulnerable families into a place that couldn't absorb them not compassion. It is at least malpractice. Further, it's quite probably intentional, in my view.
LaChapelle, a French Canadian whose own ancestors came to Lewiston as immigrants, put it plainly: America needs legal immigration, but it has to happen logically and legally. When his family arrived, he noted, nobody handed them a gravy train, and today the city still has people on public assistance decades later.
That's not nativism. (Why is nativism considered a bad thing?) That's a guy who knows exactly how assimilation worked for his own family, and can see it isn't working the same way now. And the reason: Local pols are not demanding it.
Lewiston has unsurprisingly also landed at the center of fraud scandals involving MaineCare, the state's joint federal-state Medicaid program. Saciid insists fraud happens everywhere, and with every skin color. True enough, as far as it goes. But it's hard to read about Lewiston without hearing an echo of Minneapolis, where the Feeding Our Future scheme bilked taxpayers out of some $250 million meant to feed hungry kids.
And that's the larger lesson here. Minnesota gets the headlines because it has the biggest Somali community and a congresswoman who can't seem to keep her own name and age straight, much less her loyalties.
Thing is, the pattern isn't Minnesota's, or Maine’s. It's Washington's. The federal government resettles refugees, secondary migration concentrates them wherever housing runs cheapest, and small cities such as Lewiston absorb the consequences with no say in the matter and no plan for what comes next.
It shows up in Columbus, Ohio. It shows up in suburban Seattle. And it shows up in a quiet corner of Maine where a teenage kid now tells a reporter he fears for his life on the sidewalk. And don’t even get me started on Dearborn. Something of a pattern taking hold here? Do you think anyone besides you and I will notice?
Back in 2002, Larry Raymond got hammered as a bigot for asking his city's newest residents to give Lewiston time to catch up. Turns out he wasn't a bigot. He could just count.
Oh, wait, that’s right…. Math is racist, right? I keep forgetting.
https://pjmedia.com/eric-florack/2026/10/24/lewiston-maine-proves-minnesota-isnt-the-only-somali-story-n4958644?utm_source=pjmediavip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl_pm
