President Donald Trump’s promise to end temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota is stoking fear in the state’s deep-rooted immigrant community, along with questions about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.
In a Social Truth post late Friday, Trump said he would “immediately” remove Somali residents in Minnesota from Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.
The announcement drew immediate pushback from some state leaders and immigration experts, who characterized Trump’s statement as a legally dubious effort to sow fear and suspicion toward Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the nation.
“There is no legal mechanism that allows the president to end protected status for a particular community or declare that he has a beef with it,” said Heidi Altman, policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center.
“This Trump is doing what he always does: demagogue immigrants without justification or evidence and use that demagoguery in an attempt to remove important life-saving protections,” she added.
The Trump administration has until mid-January to revoke legal protections for Somalis at the national level. But that move will affect only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis who live in Minnesota. A report to Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at just 705 nationwide.
“I am a citizen and the same as (the) majority of Somalis in America,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Somalia, said Friday in a post on social media. “Good luck celebrating a policy change that really has little impact on the Somalis you love to hate.”
Still, lawyers warned that the move could incite hatred 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 post on social media, Trump claimed, without offering evidence, that Somali groups targeted Minnesota residents and referred to the state as a “center of fraudulent money laundering activity.”
Federal prosecutors in recent weeks filed charges against dozens of people in a social services fraud scheme. Some of the accused come from Somalia. “Accountability is coming,” Minnesota Republican Tom Emmer wrote in response to that story.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, noted that Minnesota consistently ranks among the safest states in the country.
“It’s not surprising that the President chose to broadly target an entire community,” Walz said Friday. “That’s what it does to change the subject.”
In response to Trump’s announcement, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said his office was “exploring all of our options,” adding that Trump “cannot end TPS for just one state or on a bigoted whim.”
“Somali people came to Minnesota fleeing conflict, instability and hunger, and have become an integral part of our state, our culture and our community,” he added.
Protection has been extended 27 times to Somalis since 1991, with US authorities determining it was unsafe for people already in the US to return there.
Somalia for decades was considered one of the most dangerous countries in the world. People have been fleeing since leader Siad Barre was ousted in 1991 by clan-based militias and civil war broke out. The chaos later led to the rise of the al-Qaida-linked al-Shabab militant group, which still holds parts of the country and carries out deadly attacks in the capital, Mogadishu, and elsewhere against the fragile federal government.
Community advocates note that the Somali diaspora in Minnesota has helped revitalize downtown corridors in Minneapolis and plays a prominent role in state 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 us all less safe, not more.”
As part of a broader push to adopt hardline immigration policies, the Trump administration has moved to withdraw several protections that have allowed immigrants to stay in the United States and work legally.
This included ending TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection under President Joe Biden. The Trump administration has also sought to limit protections previously extended to migrants from Cuba and Syria, among other countries.