The Twin Cities has become the latest site of a coordinated national escalation against immigrant communities. Last week, federal ICE officials began carrying out “enhanced operations” in Minneapolis and St. Paul, targeting an area with one of the largest Somali populations in the United States. Within days, ICE announced a list of arrests and echoed the same racist criminalization used to justify earlier crackdowns on Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio and across the country.
These raids come as President Donald Trump intensifies attacks on Somali immigrants, saying, “I don’t want them in our country,” and claiming the United States would “go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” These comments are not just hateful rhetoric. They are part of a coordinated policy shift aimed at stripping immigrants of legal protections. The Trump administration has ordered all Somali green cards to be reexamined and is openly threatening to end Temporary Protected Status, a federal program that provides temporary legal status and work authorization to people fleeing war, disasters, or other crises.
The rollback of TPS would endanger the livelihood of thousands of immigrants who rely on TPS for stability and the ability to work. These policy moves are paired with inflammatory claims that portray Somali communities as a security threat, despite the complete lack of evidence.
Trump revives the anti-immigrant playbook
The attacks on Somali communities in Minnesota are part of a long history of racist immigration policy in the United States.This is the latest example of how the political establishment has relied on anti-Black and anti-immigrant rhetoric to justify discriminatory policies, surveillance, and deportation campaigns. In the 2010s, under Obama, these narratives were used to depict Somali refugees as potential terrorists, which federal agencies then used to justify launching “Countering Violent Extremism” programs that framed the Somali community as a population requiring constant monitoring and intervention by law enforcement.
During Trump’s first term, these narratives resurfaced in new and more visible forms. Executive Order 13769, and later Executive Order 13780, widely known as the “Muslim ban,” targeted Somalia and several other Muslim-majority countries. The ban drew directly on years of racist messaging that portrayed Muslim and African migrants as dangerous and unassimilable. The order implied that Somali communities were not recognized as part of the social fabric of American society.
Rudy Giuliani later confirmed that Trump had directly asked him to help design a Muslim ban and to assemble a team that could figure out how to implement it in a way that would appear legally defensible. At the same time, Trump held rallies across the Midwest that singled out Somali communities as threats to national security and to what he called “American values.” At the time, federal officials and right-leaning media outlets often portrayed Somali refugees as security risks, supporting efforts to restrict immigration from Muslim-majority countries.
The racist framing used in Minnesota almost perfectly mirrors the language used to attack Haitian immigrants in recent months. In Springfield, Republican leaders including Donald Trump and JD Vance, along with right-wing media outlets, spread false stories portraying Haitian migrants as criminals, public burdens, and carriers of disease. Vance even alleged they were “draining social services and causing chaos,” claims that local health data and officials have repeatedly debunked.
This disinformation fed directly into violent threats against Haitian families. The false claims triggered more than thirty bomb threats, repeated school evacuations, and the cancellation of community events. Haitian residents reported feeling unsafe in their own city as rumors portraying them as criminals fueled a wave of harassment and fear.
The use of dehumanizing language, calling Somali immigrants “garbage,” serves a clear political purpose. The Trump Administration is trying to create a climate where repression is treated as normal and where even basic acts of community self-defense are framed as threats to public order. These narratives are meant to turn communities against each other and justify the expansion of federal policing.
Trump rolls back TPS, ICE raids escalate
The operations in the Twin Cities are happening as the Trump Administration moves to dismantle TPS for several migrant communities. TPS was originally created so people fleeing war or environmental disaster could remain in the United States with legal status and work authorization. In late November, the administration announced plans to terminate TPS for Haitian nationals, stripping protections from more than 340,000 people despite acknowledging that Haiti remains engulfed in severe political collapse and a government unable to exercise basic control. Federal notices defended the termination as a “strategic vote of confidence” in Haiti’s future, even as the country remains under a State Department travel warning due to kidnappings and widespread instability.
This move is not isolated to Haiti. The Department of Homeland Security has simultaneously pushed to end TPS for migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, and other countries, framing the program as a national security threat. In August, DHS celebrated a federal court victory that allowed it to proceed with revoking TPS for these groups, claiming that previous administrations had allowed “hundreds of thousands of foreigners into the country without proper vetting. This unanimous decision will help restore integrity to our immigration system to keep our homeland and its people safe.” The Trump administration is working to eliminate long-standing immigration protections and shut down the few remaining humanitarian pathways. Trump himself describes the result as “the largest deportation in the history of our country.” Taken together, these actions show a government working to manufacture a crisis in order to justify unprecedented mass removals. By targeting multiple communities at once and dismantling the very programs designed to offer safety, the administration is already carrying out a sweeping deportation campaign that is reshaping the lives of thousands.
Now, Minnesota faces a new stage of the administration’s anti-immigrant offensive. For Somali TPS holders, the rollback of protections is designed to create instability. It pushes people into a position where working, accessing services, and supporting their families all become harder, narrowing the options that allow people to remain secure. When thousands are forced from lawful presence into uncertainty, raids become easier to carry out and families become more vulnerable to disruption. That instability is then used to justify even more aggressive ICE enforcement operations, which is not only about immigration control. It also creates a climate of fear with real economic and political consequences that benefit employers and reactionary politicians who want to weaken collective organizing and sow division among workers.
The US destabilizes countries, forcing migrants to flee
Any serious discussion of immigration must confront the fact that U.S. foreign policy has helped create the very conditions that drive people to migrate in the first place.
For decades, the United States has carried out military interventions in the Middle East and Africa. Under the Obama administration, Somalia became one of the most heavily targeted sites for U.S. drone warfare outside Afghanistan. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism notes that “there were ten times more air strikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama’s presidency than under his predecessor, George W. Bush.” These operations were justified in Washington as counterterrorism measures, but on the ground they contributed to prolonged displacement and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.
By the time Trump entered office, drone warfare in Somalia had already expanded into a normalized tool of U.S. foreign policy. These strikes continued under Trump’s first term and expanded significantly after he loosened several Obama-era rules meant to limit civilian casualties and restrict the use of lethal force outside formal war zones. In 2017, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration granted the Pentagon broader authority to conduct airstrikes and raids in Somalia, reducing oversight and lowering the threshold required for approving lethal operations.
U.S. foreign policy has played a major role in creating the conditions that force people to migrate. This is not unique to Somalia. In Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Yemen, U.S. airstrikes and proxy wars have destroyed hospitals, power grids, and farmland, pushing entire communities into crisis. The U.S. institution of drone warfare has normalized a form of violence that creates no clear battlefield and offers no real accountability for civilian deaths. The result is a global pattern in which millions of people are forced to flee wars and crises shaped in part by U.S. intervention.
Mass and organized resistance grows in Minnesota
Despite the federal government’s escalation, immigrant communities in Minnesota are not standing alone. The Twin Cities has also been the center of repeated fights against deportations, police violence, and anti-Black racism. That history of organized struggle is already shaping how people are responding now.
In Minneapolis, neighborhood organizations, immigrant right groups, and student organizations have begun coordinating rapid response networks to monitor ICE activity. These networks provide on-the-ground support by verifying raids, distributing legal resources, and ensuring that families are not isolated. Public response has continued to grow as Trump’s attacks escalate, and observers in these rapid-response networks have seen a clear connection between rising racist political rhetoric and ICE’s escalating attempts to intimidate lawful protesters. Many Minnesotans are linking the struggle against deportations to broader fights taking place across the state. The same communities targeted by immigration raids are dealing with cuts to public services, rising housing costs, and political disenfranchisement.
The coming months will be critical. However, the organized response in the Twin Cities shows that resistance is growing.
Over the past year, rhetoric has become more direct and openly hateful. People across the United States are living through a turbulent political moment, and the situation facing immigrant communities is deeply frightening. Yet even in this moment, communities are refusing to face this alone. Across the country, people are organizing, defending one another, and proving that solidarity is stronger than fear. The crackdown on Somali Minnesotans is part of a national racist political project that dismantles legal protections and draws on a long history of U.S. intervention abroad, but communities in Minnesota are resisting and must continue organizing collectively.
Every advance in Minnesota, from labor protections to civil rights to past fights against deportations, was won because ordinary people chose to act together. That responsibility falls to us now. The networks forming today need more volunteers, more legal observers, and more neighbors checking in on one another and refusing to let families be torn apart in silence. In a moment defined by fear, we must choose to stand with our communities.
Feature image: A family attends the Somali Independence Day street fair in Minneapolis. Credit: Flickr/Fibonacci Blue (Creative Commons license)
