He said it four times in seven seconds: Somali immigrants in the United States are \u201cgarbage.\u201d <\/p>\n
It was no mistake. In fact, President Donald Trump\u2019s rhetorical attacks on immigrants have been building since he said Mexico was sending \u201crapists\u201d across the border during his presidential campaign announcement a decade ago. He\u2019s also echoed rhetoric<\/a> once used by Adolf Hitler and called the 54 nations of Africa \u201cs\u2014-hole countries.\u201d<\/a> But with one flourish closing a two-hour Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump amped up his anti-immigrant rhetoric even further and ditched any claim that his administration was only seeking to remove people in the U.S. illegally.<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t want \u2018em in our country,\u201d Trump said five times of the nation\u2019s 260,000 people of Somali descent<\/a>. \u201cLet \u2019em go back to where they came from and fix it.\u201d The assembled Cabinet members cheered and applauded. Vice President JD Vance could be seen pumping a fist. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, sitting to the president\u2019s immediate left, told Trump on-camera, \u201cWell said.\u201d<\/p>\n The two-minute finale offered a riveting display in a nation that prides itself as being founded and enriched by immigrants, alongside an ugly history of enslaving millions of them and limiting who can come in. Trump\u2019s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and deportations have reignited an age-old debate \u2014 and widened the nation\u2019s divisions \u2014 over who can be an American, with Trump telling tens of thousands of American citizens, among others, that he doesn\u2019t want them by virtue of their family origin.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat he has done is brought this type of language more into the everyday conversation, more into the main,\u201d said Carl Bon Tempo, a State University of New York at Albany history professor. \u201cHe\u2019s, in a way, legitimated this type of language that, for many Americans for a long time, was seen as outside the bounds.\u201d<\/p>\n A question that cuts to the core of American identity<\/p>\n Some Americans have long felt that people from certain parts of the world can never really blend in. That outsider-averse sentiment has manifested during difficult periods, such as anti-Chinese fear-mongering in the late 19th century and the imprisonment of some 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.<\/p>\n Trump, reelected with more than 77 million votes last year, has launched a whole-of-government drive to limit immigration. His order to end birthright citizenship \u2014 declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens despite the 14th Amendment \u2014 is being considered by the Supreme Court. He has largely frozen the country\u2019s asylum system and drastically reduced the number of refugees it is allowed to admit. And his administration this week halted immigration applications<\/a> for migrants from 19 travel-ban nations. <\/p>\n Immigration remains a signature issue for Trump, and he has slightly higher marks on it than on his overall job approval. According to a November AP-NORC poll, roughly 4 in 10 adults \u2014 42% \u2014 approved of how the president is handling the issue, down from about half who approved in March. And Trump has pushed his agenda with near-daily crackdowns. On Wednesday, federal agents launched an immigration sweep in New Orleans<\/a>,<\/p>\n There are some clues that Trump uses stronger anti-immigration rhetoric than many members of his own party. A study of 200,000 speeches in Congress and 5,000 presidential communications related to immigration between 1880 and 2020 found that the \u201cmost influential\u201d words on the subject were terms like \u201cenforce,\u201d \u201cterrorism\u201d and \u201cpolicy\u201d from 1973 through Trump\u2019s first presidential term.<\/p>\n The authors wrote<\/a> in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that Trump is \u201cthe first president in modern American history to express sentiment toward immigration that is more negative than the average member of his own party.\u201d And that was before he called thousands of Somalis in the U.S. \u201cgarbage.\u201d<\/p>\n The U.S. president, embattled<\/a> over other developments during the Cabinet meeting<\/a> and discussions between Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. envoys<\/a>, opted for harsh talk in his jam-packed closing. <\/p>\n Somali Americans, he said, \u201ccome from hell\u201d and \u201ccontribute nothing.\u201d They do \u201cnothing but bitch\u201d and \u201ctheir country stinks.\u201d Then Trump turned to a familiar target. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., an outspoken and frequent Trump critic, \u201cis garbage,\u201d he said. \u201cHer friends are garbage.\u201d <\/p>\n His remarks on Somalia drew shock and condemnation from Minneapolis to Mogadishu.<\/p>\n \u201cMy view of the U.S. and living there has changed dramatically. I never thought a president, especially in his second term, would speak so harshly,\u201d Ibrahim Hassan Hajji, a resident of Somalia\u2019s capital city, told The Associated Press. \u201cBecause of this, I have no plans to travel to the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n Omar called Trump\u2019s \u201cobsession\u201d with her and Somali-Americans \u201ccreepy and unhealthy.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are not, and I am not, someone to be intimidated,\u201d she said, \u201cand we are not gonna be scapegoated.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s influence on these issues is potent<\/p>\n But from the highest pulpit in the world\u2019s biggest economy, Trump has had an undeniable influence on how people regard immigrants. <\/p>\n \u201cTrump specializes in pushing the boundaries of what others have done before,\u201d said C\u00e9sar Cuauht\u00e9moc Garc\u00eda Hern\u00e1ndez, a civil rights law professor at Ohio State University. \u201cHe is far from the first politician to embrace race-baiting xenophobia. But as president of the United States, he has more impact than most.\u201d Domestically, Trump has \u201cremarkable loyalty\u201d among Republicans, he added. \u201cInternationally, he embodies an aspiration for like-minded politicians and intellectuals.\u201d<\/p>\n In Britain, attitudes toward migrants have hardened in the decade since Brexit, a vote driven in part by hostility toward immigrants from Eastern Europe. Nigel Farage, leader of the hard-right Reform U.K. party, has called unauthorized migration an \u201cinvasion\u201d and warned of looming civil disorder.<\/p>\n France\u2019s Marine Le Pen and her father built their political empire on anti-immigrant language decades before Trump entered politics. But the National Rally party has softened its rhetoric to win broader support. Le Pen often casts the issue as an administrative or policy matter.<\/p>\n In fact, what Trump said about people from Somalia would likely be illegal in France if uttered by anyone other than a head of state, because public insults based on a group\u2019s national origin, ethnicity, race or religion are illegal under the country\u2019s hate speech laws. But French law grants heads of state immunity.<\/p>\n One lawyer expressed concerns that Trump\u2019s words will encourage other heads of state to use similar hate speech targeting people as groups.<\/p>\n \u201cComments saying that a population stinks \u2014 coming from a foreign head of state, a top world military and economic power \u2014 that\u2019s never happened before,\u201d said Paris lawyer Ari\u00e9 Alimi, who has worked on hate speech cases. \u201cSo here we are really crossing a very, very, very important threshold in terms of expressing racist \u2026 comments.\u201d<\/p>\n But the \u201cAmerica first\u201d president said he isn\u2019t worried about others think of his increasingly polarizing rhetoric on immigration.<\/p>\n \u201cI hear somebody say, \u2018Oh, that\u2019s not politically correct,\u2019\u201d Trump said, winding up his summation Tuesday. \u201cI don\u2019t care. I don\u2019t want them.\u201d<\/p>\n ___<\/p>\n Contributing to this report are Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Linley Sanders in Washington, John Leicester in Paris, Jill Lawless in London, Evelyne Musambi in Nairobi, Kenya, and Omar Faruk in Mogadishu. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He said it four times in seven seconds: Somali immigrants in the United States are \u201cgarbage.\u201d It was…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":426064,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[7779,69,40783,57,198347,26974,409,2066,149024,198349,3466,181121,2851,3663,3669,50,25930,198348,6986,80,2068,73283,61,322,67,370,132,68,274,93,107],"class_list":{"0":"post-426063","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"category-us","9":"tag-africa","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-france-government","12":"tag-general-news","13":"tag-ibrahim-hassan-hajji","14":"tag-ilhan-omar","15":"tag-immigration","16":"tag-jd-vance","17":"tag-jill-lawless","18":"tag-john-leicester","19":"tag-language","20":"tag-local-news-for-apple","21":"tag-marine-le-pen","22":"tag-minnesota","23":"tag-mn-state-wire","24":"tag-news","25":"tag-nigel-farage","26":"tag-omar-faruk","27":"tag-pete-hegseth","28":"tag-politics","29":"tag-race-and-ethnicity","30":"tag-somalia","31":"tag-u-s-news","32":"tag-u-s-republican-party","33":"tag-united-states","34":"tag-united-states-government","35":"tag-unitedstates","36":"tag-us","37":"tag-vladimir-putin","38":"tag-washington-news","39":"tag-world-news"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":"Validation failed: Text character limit of 500 exceeded"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=426063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/426063\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/426064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=426063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=426063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=426063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}