Around Minnesota on Wednesday, Somali residents called immigration lawyers with urgent questions. Advocacy groups for immigrants urgently tracked reports on social media that federal agents had been spotted on the streets of Minneapolis.
And some East African immigrants, including those with legal immigration status, wrestled with whether it felt safe to go to work, or even to send their American-born children to school.
A widespread sense of anxiety and foreboding was palpable in Minnesota, home to the largest diaspora of Somalis in the world, a day after President Trump in the Oval Office referred to Somalis as “garbage” amid his administration’s new crackdown on East African immigrants in the state who may be subject to deportation.
“What is happening now goes far beyond immigration enforcement,” said Abdiqani A. Jabane, a Somali American immigration lawyer in Minneapolis. “It is creating an atmosphere of xenophobia, where an entire community feels targeted and unsafe.”
The Trump administration this week deployed roughly 100 federal agents to Minnesota as part of an effort to detain hundreds of Somali immigrants. The surge of officers came days after Mr. Trump spoke about a pocket of Somali Americans in Minnesota who have been implicated in federal fraud schemes targeting the state’s social services programs.
Minnesota is home to roughly 80,000 people of Somali ancestry, the vast majority of whom are American citizens or legal permanent residents. Somalis began arriving in the state in large numbers in the 1990s as their nation descended into civil war. The state has long had a robust network of nonprofit organizations assisting refugees, including Somalis, and a generous safety net system.
As of Wednesday afternoon, there were no signs of large-scale arrests around the Twin Cities, according to city officials and immigrant rights organizations. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not immediately respond to an inquiry about the number of arrests the administration has made so far.
But Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said fear about what might unfold already was upending people’s lives.
“People are incredibly scared,” said Mr. Frey, a Democrat who has visited gathering places for the Somali community over the past few days to try to reassure constituents. “I’ve gotten questions about whether they should go to the grocery store, whether they should drop off their kids at school, are classrooms going to be targeted.”
Immigration experts said that the Trump administration faces a particular challenge as they pursue immigration violations within the Somali community. The number of people subject to deportation, the experts said, is relatively small. According to census data from 2024, 83 percent of the approximately 98,000 Somali immigrants in the United States are U.S. citizens.
Over the past five years, the United States has admitted 9,312 Somali refugees, and those individuals generally are eligible to apply for green cards and eventually for citizenship. A smaller number of immigrants — just over 700 — have temporary legal status for people from countries experiencing significant turmoil. Mr. Trump has said he intends to end that status for Somalis.
Dieu Do, a community organizer with the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, said teams of activists were driving through Minneapolis on Wednesday trying to corroborate reports on social media and group chats of sightings of immigration agents. The teams carried whistles, which activists have used in several cities to alert people about the presence of federal agents.
Many of the reports of agents, Ms. Do said, had proven to be unfounded so far, as of Wednesday afternoon.
“There is a completely understandable level of panic that the Somali community and other immigrant communities are feeling right now,” she said.
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy.
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