Even for a president who has long made clear he’s no fan of Somalia, the latest round of White House contempt was a shock Wednesday in the country’s largest Somali community.
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” President Donald Trump told reporters during a Tuesday Cabinet meeting. “We can go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”
Hamse Warfa, a Somali-born entrepreneur who now lives in the Minneapolis area, sees things differently.
“I am not garbage,” said Warfa, who has started a series of successful businesses and now runs a nationwide education nonprofit, World Savvy. “I’m a proud American citizen.”
He notes that anti-immigration rhetoric has long been a powerful political tool, such as the Haitian migrants in Ohio who Trump vilified ahead of the 2024 elections.
“Last presidential election it was the Haitians and how they eat cats and dogs,” he said. “The next iteration now is Somalis.”
Refugees from the East African nation have been coming to the frigid plains of Minnesota since the 1990s, drawn in part by the state’s generous social services and then by the ever-growing diaspora community.
They have become fixtures in the Twin Cities, opening businesses and revitalizing neighborhoods of empty storefronts. They are also increasingly politically prominent, serving in the state Legislature and on the Minneapolis and St. Paul city councils. Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar — a regular target of Trump, who on Tuesday singled her out as “garbage” — serves in the U.S. House.
Over the past few years they have also struggled with being typecast after dozens of people, many of them Somalis, were arrested in connection with schemes to defraud social service agencies of what some officials say could total hundreds of millions of dollars. Many of the arrested Somalis are U.S. citizens.
Last week, Trump called Minnesota “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” after a report by a conservative activist said fraud money flowed to the militant group al-Shabab, an affiliate of al-Qaida that controls parts of Somalia. But there has been little, if any, evidence, showing such a link, and federal prosecutors have not charged any defendants with supporting terrorists.