Chapter 1: What xenophobic remarks did President Trump make about Somali immigrants?
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These aren't people that work. These aren't people that say, let's go, come on, let's make this place great. These are people that do nothing but complain.
During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Trump delivered perhaps the most blatantly xenophobic public remarks of his political career.
And we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.
attacking Somali Americans in Minnesota and calling them garbage.
You know, they came from paradise and they said, this isn't paradise. But when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.
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.
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Chapter 2: How did the Somali community in Minnesota react to Trump's comments?
I spoke to a defense lawyer who has represented people involved in some of these schemes, and he said that among the people who were stealing money over the years, they kind of came to think that it had become so easy to tap into these funds and. you know, get rich fraudulently, that they kind of assumed state officials were tolerating this, if not outright authorizing it.
And the way he described it was, you know, it was like people were stealing from the cookie jar one day and the next morning they had refilled it.
You're saying this went far beyond just pandemic fraud and that almost everyone involved in these schemes was Somali Americans. But if the figures were so big, how did it go unnoticed?
That is a great question that state officials are really struggling to answer. But I think it's useful to go back in time a little bit and kind of remember the context in which this took hold. So there were red flags that emerged in 2020 when money was gushing into this program to feed children.
And when state officials felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of business owners who wanted in on the program, who wanted to be serving meals and be reimbursed for them, and when they started reviewing the invoices that were coming to them, They had questions. And those questions were met with an extraordinary accusation. Which was what?
The largest group that was organizing meal providers in this program was called Feeding Our Future. It was a nonprofit organization. And in response to questions from state officials, they essentially said the state was slow-walking this new petition for people who wanted in on the program because they were being racist against East African immigrants.
And I think it's useful to remember what was happening in the state at the time. This fight is unfolding as Minnesota is grappling with the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, which, of course, set off a national reckoning over race. So in the state at that time, nobody wanted to be called a racist, even if it was wholly unfounded.
And I think the consensus now among people who have watched the sequence of events was that that really had a paralyzing effect on people in state government who knew something funny was going on, but didn't really want to stick their necks out and stop it.
Right. This was happening in a very particular place at a very particular time when tensions over race are extremely high.
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Chapter 3: What fears are Somali-Americans facing in light of recent ICE operations?
Yeah, I think there's a sense that in this current era, they feel emboldened to say the quiet part out loud and to say things that would have been unimaginable and career-ending for mainstream politicians in the not-too-distant past. But all of a sudden, we are seeing these ideas and these notions become mainstream policies and mainstream subjects of debate.
And to be clear, the people that Trump is talking about here are Somalis, most of whom you've told us have legal status or are citizens. So I want to ask, given that, what do you expect the ICE operations to look like there? I mean, what are they going to do? Who are they looking for?
Yeah, I think this is a very challenging mission for ICE and I think it's likely to look very different from what we've seen earlier this year in places like Chicago or Los Angeles. You know, for starters, the number of people who may be subject to deportation appears to be pretty small.
We may be talking about just a few hundred people who may have outstanding deportation orders and who can sort of be put into the system. And there's kind of a more mundane challenge. And that is that this week has been bone chilling in Minnesota. And people are spending as little time as possible on the streets.
And agents, I think, are facing real pain if they're out and about knocking on doors, staking out businesses and residences. That in and of itself is going to be a monumental challenge for ICE.
Can we pull back here for a minute? Because it's worth saying what we're seeing here isn't just an immigration operation. Trump's comments and these actions seem to be just as much about delegitimizing a group of people who either emigrated here and became American citizens or their parents did.
The president is calling into question their American-ness and really calling into question whether your ability as an immigrant or a child of immigrants to call yourself an American depends on where you're from.
Yeah, I think this is a really painful question that... Somali immigrants are now wrestling with is, you know, what do you do to prove that you're an American? Like, to what length do you need to go to truly feel like you belong and that you're part of the fabric of this nation? We're talking about people in many cases who were born here and have known no other homeland.
Others arrived here decades ago and have long considered themselves patriots who have been helping build the state, paying taxes, working in really difficult jobs. So, yeah, I think this really leaves people with unsettling questions about what they need to do to be brought into the fold of this country in this political era.
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