ST. PAUL, Minnesota: Democratic Gov. Tim Walz denounced President Donald Trump on Thursday for calling Minnesota’s Somali community “garbage” and dismissing the state as a “hellhole.”
Walz said Trump slandered all Minnesotans and that his expressions of contempt for the state’s Somali community — the largest in the US — were “unprecedented for a United States president. We’ve got little children going to school today who their president called them garbage.”
Republican legislative leaders stopped short of accepting the governor’s invitation to join him in condemnation, and countered that the dispute wouldn’t have erupted if Walz had acted more effectively to prevent fraud in social service programs.
What Trump has said about Somali people
Trump’s rhetoric against Somalis in the state has intensified since a conservative news outlet, City Journal, claimed last month that taxpayer dollars from defrauded government programs have flowed to the Somali militant group Al-Shabab, an affiliate of Al-Qaeda.
On Thanksgiving, Trump called Minnesota “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity” and said he was terminating Temporary Protected Status for Somalis in Minnesota, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.
The president went further Tuesday, saying at a Cabinet meeting that he did not want immigrants from the war-torn East African country to stay in the US. “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,” he said.
And Trump kept it up Wednesday, saying Minnesota had become a “hellhole” because of them. “Somalians should be out of here,” he told reporters. “They’ve destroyed our country.”
Immigration enforcement in Minnesota
Federal authorities have prepared an immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota this week that a person familiar with the planning said would focus on Somalis living unlawfully in the US.
A congressional report put the number of Somalis with protected status at around 700 nationwide. Within that, Walz estimated the number of Minnesota Somalis to be around 300.
Walz and community leaders said they didn’t have figures on how many people might have been detained in recent days. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement press office did not reply to requests for details Wednesday or Thursday.
The Minneapolis-St. Paul area is home to about 84,000 people of Somali descent, who make up nearly one-third of the Somalis living in the US Almost 58 percent of the Somalis in Minnesota were born in the US, and 87 percent of the foreign-born Somalis in Minnesota are naturalized US citizens.
Uncertainty around fraud in government programs
It’s unclear how much loss there’s been due to fraud schemes against government programs in Minnesota. Many but not all of the defendants in those cases are Somali Americans, and most are US citizens.
Federal prosecutor Joe Thompson — who led the investigation into the $300 million Feeding Our Future scandal, which has led to charges against 78 people — estimated in an interview with KSTP-TV this summer that the total across several programs could reach $1 billion.
Walz said an audit due for completion by late January should give a better picture, but allowed that the $1 billion figure “certainly could be” accurate. He said his administration is taking aggressive action to prevent additional fraud.
Republicans are treading lightly
“Demonizing an entire group of people by their race and their ethnicity, a very group of people who contribute to the vitality — economic, cultural — of this state is something I was hoping we’d never have to see. This is on top of all the other vile comments,” Walz told reporters during a briefing on the state’s budget.
Republican Minnesota House Speaker Lisa Demuth, who is running for governor and has said she hopes to win Trump’s endorsement, hedged when asked if she would condemn the president’s remarks, too.
“In no way do I believe any community is all bad. Just like I don’t believe any community is all good,” Demuth said. “What we need to do is call the fraudsters in any community accountable for their actions and stop it here in the state of Minnesota.”
GOP state Sen. Eric Pratt, who is running for the suburban congressional seat being vacated by Democratic US Rep. Angie Craig, went a little further.
“It wasn’t said the way that I would have said it,” Pratt said. “But what I will say is, I share the president’s frustration in the amount of fraud and corruption that’s effectively gone on in the state. I mean, it’s really put a black eye on the state, and we are in the national news for all the wrong reasons.”
Lawmakers in Ohio speak out
The president’s attacks also drew condemnations Thursday from lawmakers in Ohio, which has the second-largest Somali population in the US.
“Our Somali neighbors deserve to live in a state where they are respected for their contributions and not singled out by divisive commentary,” said state Rep. Terrence Upchurch, president of the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus.
“President Trump’s comments about Somali immigrants are xenophobic, dangerous and wholly unacceptable from any public official, let alone the President of the United States,” the Ohio Jewish Caucus said in a separate statement.