In Minneapolis, confrontations between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and protesters have become a pressure point for something older and deeper than a dispute over deportations. For Somali Americans in Minnesota — home to more than 100,000 people of Somali descent — the scenes on the streets are the latest chapter in a generational experience of displacement, stigmatization and resilience. Across a tightly connected global diaspora, the anxiety is acute, but so is the resolve.
Over much of his second term, President Donald Trump has zeroed in on Somali Americans and Somalia, combining denigration with policy proposals aimed at curbing immigration and accelerating removals, particularly in Minnesota. The fixation is personal and political. Minnesota U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, a frequent target of Trump’s attacks, has become a proxy for a wider population. After Omar was assaulted this week by a man who sprayed her with an unknown substance, Trump responded by calling her a fraud who “probably had herself sprayed.”
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But the broader strategy, experts say, is about convenience and symbolism. Idil Abdi Osman, a professor at Leicester University, described an international “political thunderstorm” in which Somalis have become a ready stand-in for anxieties over race, religion and migration. “They become an embodiment of the kind of communities that Trump can easily target and use as a scapegoat — that is convenient for the populist narrative,” she said.
The Somali American experience sits at the intersection of three identities — Black, Muslim and immigrant — that have been politicized in the U.S. and across parts of Europe. While the sharpest and most personalized version of this targeting is playing out in Minnesota, Somali communities in the U.K. and elsewhere recognize the pattern. Policies tightening asylum, restricting family reunification and expanding deportations — once fringe demands of far-right movements — are now threaded into mainstream agendas.
That shift lands with particular force on a diaspora forged primarily by war, not by elective migration. The largest waves left after the Somali civil war began in the late 1980s. Forced migrants tend to maintain unusually strong language, cultural and financial ties to their homeland, Osman noted — sometimes stronger, in certain respects, than among those who never left. The result is a network that is global, immediate and emotionally elastic: shocks in one place reverberate almost instantly in another.
For Jawaahir Daahir, founder of the U.K.-based Somali Development Services, those reverberations are familial as much as political. “We respond to all events through strong family networks and solidarities,” she said, describing how settlement programs in the U.S. split large families across multiple countries for years at a time. “I have more than 30 members of my extended family in the U.S. If my brother is having trouble in Minnesota, I am feeling it here in the U.K.”
What gets lost in headline cycles, Daahir added, is how public rhetoric penetrates private spaces. “We focus on politics or policy headlines, but how do these debates actually land in homes? For many, the current climate has created heightened concerns about safety, belonging, and whether we are seen as equal citizens. Young people are navigating schools and identity, and parents are worried about their children’s safety and discrimination.”
In Minnesota, those worries have practical consequences. A local academic, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, said some parents fear sending their children to school lest they be swept up by immigration authorities — a fear that persists despite the fact that the vast majority of Somali American children in Minnesota are U.S. citizens. The academic compared the developmental and social toll to the isolation of the pandemic years, layered atop trauma carried by families who fled violence once before.
Three dynamics are shaping the moment:
- Politicized targeting: Somali Americans are used as shorthand in national debates over immigration, policing and national identity, with local communities absorbing the immediate risks.
- Deep diaspora ties: Family networks that span continents translate policy shifts and confrontations into shared, real-time stress across the U.S., Europe and East Africa.
- Grassroots resilience: Community institutions, mutual aid and interethnic solidarity are cushioning shocks, even as trust in “the rule of law” erodes.
On that last point, Daahir and Osman said Somali communities have long histories of grassroots organizing that now extend far beyond their own population. In Leicester, a center Osman’s mother helped establish in the early 2000s to assist new arrivals with housing, school registration and health care now serves a remarkably diverse clientele. Today, by Osman’s estimate, about 55% of the people seeking help there are from other communities, including more recent arrivals from Iraq and elsewhere.
That outward-facing solidarity is mirrored in Minnesota’s civic life, said Abdi Samatar, a professor at the University of Minnesota. He argues that state and local institutions — and ordinary Minnesotans — have repeatedly shown immigrants “opportunity and warmth,” even as federal enforcement escalates. “It’s very important to distinguish between central government and state and local governments,” Samatar said. Minnesota’s tradition of welcoming refugees and immigrants is rooted in the decentralized nature of U.S. policymaking, he added: Washington can set enforcement priorities, but it cannot fully dictate how communities respond.
In practice, that has meant neighbors showing up for one another during high-tension standoffs with federal officers; faith leaders and nonprofits coordinating food distribution and legal support; and elected officials pressing for due process and accountability. The solidarity has been costly. Confrontations have produced injuries and arrests, and they have widened a trust gap with federal agencies that community leaders say will be hard to close.
The cumulative effect is a test of civic muscle. For Somali Americans, the test is not just whether they can withstand another round of being scapegoated; it is whether the places they call home can still deliver fairness, safety and equal citizenship when national politics turns punitive. For Minnesota, the test is whether a state built on successive waves of migration — a Cold War legacy that shaped the fates of places like Somalia — can hold the line on its own values.
None of that is guaranteed. The normalization of emergency-style immigration enforcement and the coarsening of public rhetoric strain the same institutions that enable local resilience. Yet the communities most directly targeted continue to expand the circle of care. The organizing model sharpened by Somalis — mutual aid, multilingual navigation of bureaucracy, cash transfers and remittances, youth mentoring, interfaith coalitions — has become a template for others in the state and beyond.
Samatar hopes for a reversal of tone and policy: “that we will come back again to a world of civility and humanity.” In the meantime, Somali Americans and the wider diaspora are braced for what comes next. They have been here before — in refugee processing lines, in public hearings, in school cafeterias, at immigration courts — and their answer has been to build. The present storm is political, but the counterforce is social and local, made of habits and institutions that do not trend.
In Minneapolis, the images are stark: federal officers shoving demonstrators; families peering from apartment windows; teens livestreaming confrontations. Just beneath them, the story is cumulative — of trauma and tenacity shared across continents, and of a community that refuses to be reduced to a talking point.
What rises from that story is a quiet assertion with political consequence: the promise of the rule of law only holds if it is felt evenly. Somali Americans are insisting on that promise, and inviting their neighbors to insist with them.
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
