In the days since the president said he would be ending a legal immigration status program for Somalis in Minnesota, local elected officials and community members said they will fight back.
On Truth Social on Friday, Trump wrote that he would be “terminating, effective immediately” temporary protected status for Somalis in Minnesota. Trump wrote that Minnesota was a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity”. “Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!” he wrote.
Community advocates said the rhetoric smearing all Somalis is inaccurate and puts them at risk. They worry about increased targeting for immigration enforcement and demonization of the Somali community.
The move comes after several high-profile instances of fraud in state programs including by Somali residents, which rightwing media have amplified. A recent piece alleged these fraudulent activities meant Minnesota taxpayers were funding terrorist groups in Somalia. Minnesota’s Republican members of Congress then elevated that claim a letter seeking an investigation.
“If anyone, regardless of their race, religion, or ethnicity, committed fraud, they should be held accountable under the law as individuals,” Khalid Omar, an organizer with interfaith group ISAIAH, said. “Collective punishment is wrong and racist, and using the actions of a few people to attack an entire community is un-American.”
TPS allows people from countries with unsafe or unstable conditions to live legally in the US. An administration can grant or remove it, through the Department of Homeland Security, as the Trump administration has done for countries such as Venezuela since Trump took office in January. The department has so far not removed Somalia from the countries under the status.
Typically, the removal of TPS would apply nationwide, not just to a single state like Minnesota, making Trump’s promise to remove it solely for the state, and seemingly not related to Somalia’s stability, legally questionable.
“Obviously, fraud investigations in the United States do not have anything to do with whether conditions in Somalia have stabilized or not,” said Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota.
Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali population, most of whom are US citizens. Ilhan Omar, a congresswoman and frequent target for Trump and his allies, said in a statement on X, in response to supporters of Trump’s announcement: “I am a citizen and so are majority of Somalis in America. Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate. We are here to stay.”
TPS currently protects about 700 people from Somalia residing across the US from deportation – a small number compared with the tens of thousands of Somalis who live in Minnesota.
“Not to say that for those people who will be impacted, it is not incredibly concerning, of course, because it means that they will lose the ability to work to support themselves, and they will face having to leave the country, potentially being arrested and detained and deported if they don’t leave,” Decker said.
Somalia has been covered by TPS since 1991, receiving extensions to the protected status dozens of times. Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem said she was evaluating whether to extend the status, which is set to expire in March.
Keith Ellison, the state’s attorney general, said his office was “exploring all of our options” to respond if Trump removes TPS.
“Trump’s announcement of termination of Somali TPS holders in Minnesota is legally problematic – while a president does have a lot of authority to designate and revoke TPS, he cannot legally wield that power to discriminate against an ethnic group or to target a state, like MN. This ain’t over,” Ellison wrote on X.
Omar said the community held a potluck this weekend in response to Trump’s targeting, where members of the Somali community and their neighbors and supporters gathered to show solidarity. He said people feel Trump’s lashing out at Somalis is a distraction from the affordability crisis and Trump’s other woes - something Minnesota governor Tim Walz also indicated in his reaction to the president’s post. “It’s not surprising that the President has chosen to broadly target an entire community,” Walz wrote on X. “This is what he does to change the subject.”
Omar said Somalis in Minnesota are a “backbone of this community”, who worry about and experience the same struggles as all Americans. “They’re not going anywhere,” he said.
“The only thing that we know that can stop this administration from attacking people is for everyday people to stand up and to push back on this narrative,” he said.
