New Americans Respond to Recent Crimes

Sorry, this video is no longer available

Coming to America and learning a completely new culture is difficult for nearly every immigrant. And when fellow immigrants partake in criminal behavior, it can be difficult on the groups, as we have seen this past week here in the metro.

We spoke with local immigrant groups about the past week’s series of crimes and how it has affected their community.

“I mean everything was white,” says Denil Saintal.

Denil Saintal reflects on landing at Hector International Airport 24 years ago from Haiti never seeing snow before.

“I said, ‘Well this is a strange country I mean the dirt is white,” Saintal says.

And the weather was just one aspect of life that Denil was going to have to get used to.

“We could not go places because we didn’t know anywhere to go. We had a case worker that usually stopped by the house once a week for simple things. We didn’t even know how to go shopping,” says Saintal.

But once adjusted, Denil felt at home and compares the United States to his homeland.

“The Somalian, the Haitian, the African, I mean those are people that, you know, come from a very bad part of the world and come here to make a living, you know, come here to get new opportunities,” Saintal says.

That’s something that Fargo Police’s Cristie Jacobsen says is imperative for the public to understand, despite the recent conflict and arrests involving two international men, Luke Goodridge and Isaac Nyemah.

She works very closely with New Americans in the Fargo Police’s cultural outreach program.

“That’s not a cultural issue it’s a criminal one. A couple individuals decided to handle a dispute in an inappropriate way. It had no direct reflection upon their culture or their greater cultural community,” says Fargo Police’s Cultural Liaison Officer Cristie Jacobsen.

Salad Adan moved to Fargo in 2009 after living in Somalia and Kenya. He says that this week’s criminal activity is no reflection of local immigrant groups.

“Maybe there are some people that are bad people but most of them, 90% are good people,” says Adan.

“If you have a few bad apples in the whole group that doesn’t mean the whole group community is not good,” Saintal says.

The primary immigrant groups in our area are from Bhutan, Somalia and Iraq.