MINNEAPOLIS — The corridors of Karmel Mall, usually a hive of bargaining and chatter, were hushed on a recent afternoon. Steel shutters rolled down over rows of storefronts. A bakery still perfumed the air with fried dough, the central heating hummed, and low recitations from the Quran drifted from a few open doorways. Mostly, though, vendors waited alone.
“It’s been like this for three weeks now,” said Abdi Wahid, who works at his mother’s convenience store inside the sprawling Somali business complex in south Minneapolis. “Everywhere it’s all been closed up, all the stores.”
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The slowdown at Karmel Mall — a warren of more than 100 small enterprises that has become an economic and cultural cornerstone for the nation’s largest Somali community — is the most visible sign of a wider chill. Business owners, workers and customers say the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, branded “Operation Metro Surge,” has emptied aisles and waiting rooms far beyond this mall, leaving immigrant families and U.S. citizens alike reluctant to shop, travel or even leave their homes.
Federal officials defend the ramped-up enforcement as focused on immigration status, not identity. “A person’s immigration status makes them a target for enforcement, not their skin color, race or ethnicity,” Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement, adding that law enforcement uses “reasonable suspicion” to make arrests under the fourth amendment.
Inside Karmel Mall on Thursday, the fear felt more blunt than any policy brief. Wahid said early afternoons at the family shop once brought 15 to 20 customers. Now, it’s hard to get one. The anxiety, he said, runs through everyone — including citizens. He pointed to a recent ICE raid at Roosevelt High School in south Minneapolis and the killing of Renee Good, events that he said shook people who worry they could be singled out “just because of their race.”
“I think that caused a lot of people to not even want to come,” he said.
Opened in the 1990s and expanded over the years, Karmel Mall is more than a marketplace. Alongside stalls offering clothing, perfume, halal food, mobile phones, insurance and accounting services, the complex includes a mosque, Quran classes and housing. It functions as a community center — a place where families run errands, pray and gather. When its walkways go quiet, the economic and social reverberations echo well beyond its walls.
Those shocks have deepened as national rhetoric has sharpened. After a recent government fraud case in Minnesota that included a number of Somali defendants, President Donald Trump has singled out Somali immigrants in his deportation remarks, calling them “garbage” and saying “they contribute nothing.” Business owners here say the words land like warnings. Even longtime residents who are U.S. citizens are changing routines.
Upstairs, in a small office suite, Bashir Garad runs Safari Travel & Accounting Services. He has watched his customer base — mostly East Africans and nearly all U.S. citizens — evaporate over the past month. Those who do come by are canceling trips, afraid they won’t be allowed back into the country after visiting family abroad.
“They see a lot of unlawful things going on in the city,” he said. “They look at something bad, and then they think some bad things may happen to them.”
He believes enforcement can be targeted without stigmatizing a community. “The government is not doing the right thing,” Garad said. “If there’s a criminal, there’s a criminal. Regardless, there are ways to find the criminal, but to marginalize the community’s name, and a whole people, that is unlawful.”
Two doors down, electronics seller Ibrahim Dahiye shuffled receipts and rent notices. Winters are always slower, he said, but “now it’s totally different. No one comes here. All the stores are closed, few are open.” He estimates his business is down $20,000 a month. With income plunging, he is pooling funds to make rent. His employees are too scared to come to work. He keeps his passport in his jacket pocket, just in case.
“I don’t know what we can do,” he said. “We believe in Allah, but we can’t do anything.”
The effects spill into the broader Minneapolis economy. Suppliers aren’t making deliveries. Restaurants hold back on buying inventory. Families postpone appointments. And at Karmel, proprietors say some merchants have stopped opening their gates entirely because they don’t expect customers to materialize.
Fear compounds quietly. In hallways where children once raced past racks of shimmering dresses and men compared phone plans over tiny cups of tea, conversations now hover at thresholds. A shopper peers in, weighs the risk, and moves on. A vendor glances to the corridor before stepping out to greet a neighbor.
Wahid, a U.S. citizen, said that distinction offers little comfort in practice. Customers talk about routes to avoid, windows of time when roads feel safer, whether a stop could escalate. Others question travel they once considered routine, even within the city.
Garad hears the same anxieties from clients who clutch blue passports but feel newly vulnerable. They worry about changing rules at airports, about a chance encounter that derails a life. “They still hesitate to travel,” he said.
At the same time, the Somali community’s ties to Karmel Mall make its slowdown uniquely painful. Businesses here are often family enterprises, their profit margins slender and their roles multipurpose — a clothing kiosk is also a place to ask about a job; a coffee counter doubles as a de facto help desk for newcomers. The mosque provides a spiritual anchor, the classes a way to keep language and faith alive.
On Thursday, with the outer city roaring beyond its parking lots, the mall felt suspended. A seamstress adjusted bright fabrics on a mannequin that no one paused to admire. A grocer straightened rows of spices whose scents hung in the empty air. The central heating kicked in again, drowning the silence for a moment.
Local officials have offered few specifics about “Operation Metro Surge” beyond the talking points that enforcement is targeted and lawful. For merchants confronted with daily losses and a shrinking sense of safety, that distinction is abstract. What they see are blank ledgers and darkened shops, a community turned inward, and a hub meant for gathering now defined by its absences.
“Everywhere it’s all been closed up,” Wahid repeated, gesturing down the corridor. In a mall built to bring people together, the most pressing question for its keepers has become how long it can wait for them to return.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
