Over 100 rounds erupted in a Minnesota suburb from Somali-American gang members who come from comfortable families—and the police chief charged with explaining it admits he has no idea what's driving it.

This is what decades of bipartisan refugee resettlement policy look like on the ground: American neighborhoods turned into gunfight zones, and the loudest community voices respond by blaming the country that took them in.

Bloomington Police Chief Booker Hodges told Fox News Digital the suspects defy every traditional gang profile. "They're coming from families. They got money, and they have resources," Hodges said. Asked what drives the violence beyond social-media disputes, he was blunt: "I don't know. I can't tell you. I really wish I could."

The late-night Bloomington gunfight left one person injured amid a string of shootings across suburban Minneapolis-St. Paul. These aren't kids driven by poverty or drug trade—the usual engines of American street gangs. Something else is at work, and nobody in authority wants to name it.

More than 111,000 Somali refugees were admitted to the U.S. between 2001 and 2023 through the federal refugee resettlement program, spanning the Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. Minnesota became a major destination. That's a bipartisan pipeline, and the results are now playing out in residential streets.

Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, pointed to cluster resettlement as a key factor. Refugees 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," she told Fox News Digital. Vaughan described an emphasis on preserving homeland cultures rather than encouraging integration as a "missed opportunity" that leaves immigrants in a "separate society within the larger Minnesota community."

The community's designated spokesmen have a different explanation: it's America's fault. At a public forum, one speaker insisted, "This is not a Somali community [issue] … This is a gun violence issue." Another speaker, Asad Aliweyd, declared: "This is not simply a Somali problem. It's a youth violence and gun violence problem and we must address it together."

What HotAir noted and the mainstream press won't highlight: Aliweyd is the executive director of a nonprofit that was ordered to pay back $1.1 million to the state for "fraudulent claims," according to reports. He has not been charged with any crime. The man telling Minnesotans the violence is their problem, not his community's, ran an organization that allegedly looted taxpayer funds.

The same week, the DOJ and FBI announced they thwarted a planned ISIS-inspired terrorist attack on the Mall of America by 18-year-old Sheikhdoon Abdullahi Mohamud, a Somali who allegedly planned to kill 30 to 60 non-Muslims and had purchased an AK-47 and 200 rounds of ammunition.

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," he told Fox News, noting that Italian, Irish, Mexican and Salvadoran communities experienced gang activity while broader integration continued over generations.

Maybe. But those earlier waves didn't produce ISIS-inspired mall shooters and 100-round suburban gun battles within a single generation—and their community leaders didn't respond by blaming the host country while their nonprofits siphoned public funds.