WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.
Trump’s contemptuous description of the entire immigrant community is the latest example of him pointedly attacking the Somali diaspora in the United States. Somalis have been coming to Minnesota and other states, often as refugees, since the 1990s. The president made no distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
The president’s comment came days after his administration announced it is halting all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington. The suspect in last week’s incident is originally from Afghanistan but Trump has used the moment to raise questions about immigrants from other nations, including Somalia.
“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”
Trump for years has criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat who emigrated from Somalia in 1995 as a child. But he picked up the pace of 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, an al-Qaida-linked militant group that controls parts of Somalia.
Trump vowed last week in a social media post 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 U.S. 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, along with doubts about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.
The announcement drew immediate pushback from some state leaders and immigration experts, who characterized Trump’s declaration as a legally dubious effort to sow suspicion toward Minnesota’s Somali community.
The move would affect only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis living in Minnesota. A report produced for Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at just 705 nationwide.
Trump also renewed his criticism of Omar, whose family fled the civil war in Somalia and spent several years in a refugee camp in Kenya before coming to the U.S.
“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,” Trump said. “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
On Tuesday, Omar punched back at Trump on social media, saying, “His obsession with me is creepy. I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”
He added about Somali immigrants, “These aren’t people that work. These aren’t people that say, ‘Let’s go, c’mon. Let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey called Trump’s message “wrong” and said that Somali immigrants have helped improve his community.
“They have started businesses and created jobs. They have added to the cultural fabric of what Minneapolis is,” Frey sad. “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.”
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AP writer Steve Karnowski in Minneapolis contributed reporting.
