Natalie Kitroeff

Today, my colleague Ernesto Londano on the story of how Somalis became the president's latest target in his ongoing effort to reshape America's relationship to its immigrant communities.

It's Thursday, December 4th.

Ernesto, the president's comments about Somali immigrants this week were, I think for a lot of us, truly shocking, even for a president who's known for making extreme comments about immigrants.

He called an entire group of people garbage in a nationally televised cabinet meeting.

You're in Minnesota as a national correspondent.

So tell us, how were these comments received there?

Tell me about the terror that you described.

What is prompting the fear in the community specifically?

Hmm.

You're saying people are seeing this as potentially giving people permission to act on their worst instincts.

It's a permission structure.

Correct.

Okay, I want to talk about why this is happening, why the federal government has turned its attention to this community of 80,000 people.

In his diatribe, Trump hinted at the reason for the hostility.

He said that Somalis had stolen all of this money.

This is a story you've been covering, right?

Walk us through how Somalis became the subject of this vitriolic attack from the president.

Right.

This is something we've known about, right?

This was part of the widespread fraud that we saw where pandemic programs were taken advantage of.