President Trump’s pledge to terminate temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota is triggering fear in the state’s deeply rooted immigrant community, along with doubts about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.
In a social media post late Friday, Trump said he would “immediately” strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.
The announcement was immediately challenged by some state leaders and immigration experts, who characterized Trump’s declaration as a legally dubious effort to sow fear and suspicion toward Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the nation.
“There’s no legal mechanism that allows the president to terminate protected status for a particular community or state that he has beef with,” said Heidi Altman, policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
“This is Trump doing what he always does: demagoguing immigrants without justification or evidence and using that demagoguery in an attempt to take away important life-saving protections,” she added.
The protection has been extended 27 times for Somalis since 1991, with U.S. authorities determining that it was unsafe for people already in the United States to return to Somalia.
The Trump administration could, however, move to revoke the legal protection for Somalis nationally. But that move would affect only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis living in Minnesota. A report produced for Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at 705 nationwide.
“I am a citizen and so are [the] majority of Somalis in America,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat born in Somalia, said in a social media post Friday. “Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate.”
Still, advocates warned the move could inflame hate against a community at a time of rising Islamophobia.
“This is not just a bureaucratic change,” said Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric.”
In his social media post, Trump claimed, without offering evidence, that Somali gangs had targeted Minnesota residents and referred to the state as a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
Federal prosecutors have in recent weeks brought charges against dozens of people in a social-services fraud scheme. Some of the defendants are from Somalia.
Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has noted that Minnesota consistently ranks among the safest states in the country.
“It’s not surprising that the president has chosen to broadly target an entire community,” Walz said Friday. “This is what he does to change the subject.”
Community advocates say that the Somali diaspora in Minnesota has helped to revitalize downtown corridors in Minneapolis and plays a prominent role in the state’s politics.
“The truth is that the Somali community is beloved and long-woven into the fabric of many neighborhoods and communities in Minnesota,” Altman said. “Destabilizing families and communities makes all of us less safe and not more.”
As part of a broader push to adopt hard-line immigration policies, the Trump administration has moved to withdraw various protections that had allowed immigrants to remain in the United States and work legally.
That included ending TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection under former President Biden. The Trump administration has also sought to limit protections previously extended to migrants from Cuba and Syria, among other countries.
Offenhartz writes for the Associated Press.
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