Ilhan Omar, the Somali-American US Representative has been one of Donald Trump’s most frequent targets for invective. Photo: @ilhanmn (Instagram)
Just before Christmas, US President Donald Trump launched yet another xenophobic and dehumanising assault on Somali immigrants in Minnesota, dismissing them as unwanted “garbage” and insisting that Somali gangs were “taking over” the state, “roving the streets” and “looking for prey.” Shortly afterwards, he flooded Minneapolis and St Paul with thousands of federal agents in a sweeping crackdown that triggered widespread unrest and resulted in the killings of American citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Trump’s comments and the violence in Minnesota were not about public safety or immigration enforcement. Instead, they reflected his longstanding obsession with the Somali diaspora, which has come to symbolise everything he believes is wrong with the US immigration system.
One of Trump’s most frequent targets for invective is Somali-American US Representative Ilhan Omar, who arrived in the United States at age 12 after fleeing Somalia’s civil war and spending four years in a Kenyan refugee camp. He has mocked her for being “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab,” and suggested that his Justice Department would investigate her finances, leading to an increase in death threats against her.
Trump has also repeated false claims that she entered the US illegally and married her brother to obtain citizenship. In response, Omar belittled Trump’s “creepy” obsession with her and condemned his administration’s “blatant racial profiling”.
But Trump has not limited his attacks to Somali immigrants; he also disparaged their homeland, describing it as “hell” and the “worst, and most corrupt, country on earth.” At a rally in Pennsylvania, he claimed Somalia lacked functioning institutions, asserting that its people “don’t know what the hell the word parliament means. They have nothing. They have no police. They police themselves. They kill each other all the time”.
That hostility has helped shape the administration’s immigration policies. In November, Trump announced his intention to revoke Temporary Protected Status for about 700 Somali migrants, putting them at risk of deportation.
Adding fuel to the fire, Trump has seized on a high-profile fraud case in Minnesota in which 78 individuals – most of them Somali – were charged with misappropriating approximately $250 million in federal funds intended to feed children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the mastermind behind the scheme was a white American woman, Trump has continued to insist that Somali immigrants were responsible for “up to 90%” of the fraud.
Trump’s attacks on Somali communities are not arbitrary; they are part of a broader campaign to demonise black and brown immigrants as criminals and civilisational threats whom he complained were “poisoning the blood of our country.” That logic was laid bare in November, when he threatened to end all federal benefits for non-citizens and deport those he deemed “non-compatible with Western civilisation.”
None of this should come as a surprise. Trump, after all, entered the political arena by promoting the “birther” conspiracy theory that falsely claimed President Barack Obama was not born in the US. More recently, he was forced to remove a Truth Social post depicting Obama and his wife, Michelle, as apes. During his first term, Trump told Omar and fellow Democratic Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Ayanna Pressley – all women of colour, three of whom were born in America – to “go back” to “their countries.”
Trump’s vision for America is defined as much by whom he lets in as by whom he keeps out. During his first presidency, he argued that the US should reject immigrants from “shithole countries” in favour of “nice” immigrants from Norway, Sweden and Denmark, a statement he denied at the time but has since reiterated. In his second term, even as his administration blocked most asylum applications, it made exceptions for white South African farmers whom he falsely claimed were facing a “genocide” at the hands of their Black-led government.
Likewise, the reality of Somali-American life contradicts the racist caricature Trump promotes. Despite his repeated portrayal of the community as overwhelmingly illegal, nearly 58% of Somali-Americans are US-born and 87% of foreign-born Somalis are naturalised citizens. Over the years, they have built vibrant, well-integrated communities across the country, working as teachers, police officers, entrepreneurs, doctors and elected officials.
In Somalia itself, Trump’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAid) has had a devastating impact on the country’s fragile health sector. With American humanitarian assistance falling from an annual average of $450 million over the previous decade to $128 million in the first nine months of 2025, dozens of medical centres have been forced to close, leaving an estimated 300,000 people without access to health and nutrition services. As Trump moves to strip protections from Somali migrants in the US, his actions worsen conditions in the country he wants to deport them to.
The great irony, of course, is that the presence of large Somali communities in the US is partly the result of America’s involvement in the civil war that has ravaged Somalia since 1991. During the Cold War, the US armed and funded the authoritarian Somali regime of Siad Barre as part of its strategic rivalry with the Soviet Union, which backed then Marxist Ethiopia in a war that ravaged the Horn of Africa. When Barre’s regime collapsed, Somalia descended into chaos. The resulting instability fuelled the rise of extremist groups like the al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Shabab, which now controls nearly one-third of the country and drove many Somalis to seek refuge in the US.
This history – along with America’s role in it – does not figure into Trump’s portrayal of Somali immigrants as alien intruders. That omission is revealing: his Somali fixation is not really about Minnesota, nor even about Somalia. It is emblematic of his effort to subordinate immigration policy to a cultural crusade in which he is cast as the last defender of Western civilisation. — Project Syndicate
Adekeye Adebajo, a professor and a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship, served on UN missions in South Africa, Western Sahara and Iraq.
Discussion about this post