Why is Trump waging war on Somali immigrants?

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. 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.

[paywall]

They kill each other all the time”. 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.” 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.

[/paywall]