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President Donald Trump has said he doesn’t want Somali immigrants in the US.
The AP reports that he said the residents of the war-ravaged country are too reliant on the US social security safety net and add little to the United States.
in the United states.
Trump’s description of the immigrant community is the latest example of him pointedly attacking the Somali diaspora. Somalis have been coming to Minnesota and other states, often as refugees, since the 1990s.
His comment came days after his administration announced it was halting all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington. Although the suspect is originally from Afghanistan, Trump has used the moment to raise questions about immigrants from other nations.
Trump, for years, has criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who emigrated from Somalia in 1995 as a child. But he picked up his attacks on Somalis on social media last week after Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist, published unsubstantiated allegations in a magazine called City Journal, citing unnamed sources, that money stolen from Minnesota programs has gone to al-Shabab. This al-Qaida-linked militant group controls parts of Somalia.
Trump vowed last week to send Somalis “back to where they came from,” and alleged Minnesota, home to the largest Somali community in the United States, is “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.” On Tuesday, the president said Somalis in the US should “go back to where they came from and fix it.”
He specifically pledged to terminate temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota, a move that is triggering fear in the state’s deeply rooted immigrant community. But there are doubts whether the white House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.
Some state leaders and immigration experts characterized Trump’s declaration as a legally dubious effort to sow suspicion toward Minnesota’s Somali community.
Trump said of Omar, whose family fled the civil war in Somalia and spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya, before going to the US, “We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way, if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
On Tuesday, Omar punched back at Trump. She said, “His obsession with me is creepy. I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said, “They have started businesses and created jobs. They have added to the cultural fabric of what Minneapolis is. To again, villainize an entire group is ridiculous under any circumstances. And the way that Donald Trump is consistent in doing it, I think, calls into question major constitutional violations. And it certainly violates the moral fabric of what we stand by in this country as Americans.”
