Federal immigration authorities this week began conducting enhanced operations within the Minneapolis-St. Paul space, a U.S. official informed CBS Information, focusing on a area with a big inhabitants of the Somali immigrants President Trump usually rails in opposition to.
The surge by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is anticipated to focus on people within the Twin Cities space with deportation orders, the official mentioned. The precise scope and length of the operation should not clear to this point.
Late Thursday, ICE launched an inventory of 12 individuals who have been arrested since Monday, describing them in a information launch as “a few of the worst of the worst legal unlawful aliens” detained within the Twin Cities operation. Half of the arrestees have been from Mexico, 5 have been from Somalia and one was from El Salvador, the company mentioned. Simply over half had legal convictions, and the remainder had arrests or fees, based on ICE.
The crackdown comes as Mr. Trump castigates Minnesota’s massive group of Somali immigrants, often pointing to the nation — usually in incendiary phrases — as a justification for his administration’s sweeping mass deportation marketing campaign.
Throughout a Cupboard assembly Tuesday, Mr. Trump known as individuals from Somalia “rubbish” and claimed they “contribute nothing.”
“I do not need them in our nation. I will be trustworthy with you,” the president mentioned Tuesday. “Their nation’s no good for a cause. Their nation stinks.”
In latest days, the Trump administration has halted all immigration cases, together with citizenship ceremonies, for individuals from Somalia and 18 different nations on its journey ban, and has ordered a reexamination of all inexperienced playing cards issued to immigrants from these international locations, CBS Information has reported.
And final month, Mr. Trump said he was ending a deportation safety program known as Momentary Protected Standing for Somali immigrants in Minnesota, claiming with out proof that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the individuals.” The TPS program for Somalia is about to run out in March 2026, although the Division of Homeland Safety has not formally introduced its termination.
Mr. Trump has additionally introduced consideration to a massive public assistance fraud scandal that has dogged Minnesota politics for years, wherein dozens of defendants — most of whom are of Somali descent — have been accused of bilking a whole bunch of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} from meals support, autism companies and housing packages. The president has blamed Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the fraud schemes and claimed Somali immigrants have “ripped off that state.”
Democratic officers and members of Minnesota’s Somali group have denounced Mr. Trump’s statements, with Walz on Thursday calling them “vile, racist lies and slander in direction of our fellow Minnesotans.”
“I’m not rubbish,” Hamse Warfa, a Somali-born entrepreneur who lives within the Minneapolis space and runs a nationwide schooling nonprofit, informed CBS News Minnesota. “I am a proud American citizen.”
Minnesota has one of many nation’s largest Somali populations, with some 76,000 individuals of Somali descent statewide — representing simply over 1% of the state’s inhabitants, based on 2024 information from the U.S. Census Bureau.
The state’s Somali community grew after the East African nation descended into civil battle within the early Nineteen Nineties, inflicting scores of individuals to flee Somalia, which nonetheless faces instability, threats of insurgency and poverty.
In some instances, Somali refugees have been resettled elsewhere within the U.S. earlier than shifting to Minnesota, drawn in lots of instances by job alternatives, security, good faculties and a longstanding community of nonprofits within the state that help refugees, Somali American and Macalester School professor Ahmed Samatar told CBS News Minnesota in 2019. Simply over half of Somali Minnesotans arrived within the U.S. earlier than 2010, and one in 5 moved to the U.S. earlier than 2000.
As of final 12 months, the overwhelming majority of Somali Minnesotans have been Americans. Some 52% have been born within the U.S., and one other 42% are naturalized residents, leaving simply over 4,000 — or greater than 5% — who do not maintain U.S. citizenship, based on Census Bureau figures.
From the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second time period in January to Oct. 15, ICE made 117 arrests of individuals with Somali citizenship nationwide, 28 of which have been in Minnesota, based on figures from the Deportation Knowledge Undertaking. The company made 1,694 whole arrests in Minnesota over the identical time interval — round 1% of nationwide arrests.
Mr. Trump’s plan to finish TPS for Somali immigrants may impression a really small variety of individuals. Simply over 700 immigrants from Somalia had been authorized for TPS as of March of this 12 months, based on federal government data. The Immigrant Regulation Middle mentioned Minnesota was dwelling to 430 of these Somali TPS-holders in 2023.
