WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump repeatedly called Somali immigrants in the United States “garbage” during a televised Cabinet meeting, sharpening years of incendiary rhetoric on immigration and drawing swift condemnation at home and abroad.
In the meeting’s two-minute finale Tuesday, Trump said four times in seven seconds that “Somali immigrants are garbage,” then added five times, “We don’t want ’em in our country.” He continued: “Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.” Cabinet members applauded. Vice President JD Vance pumped a fist. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, seated to Trump’s left, told him on camera, “Well said.”
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The president went on to say Somali Americans “come from hell,” “contribute nothing,” “do nothing but bitch” and that “their country stinks.” He singled out Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., one of the most prominent Somali Americans in public life, saying, “She is garbage. Her friends are garbage.” Omar responded that Trump’s “obsession” with her and Somali Americans is “creepy and unhealthy,” adding, “We are not gonna be scapegoated.”
The remarks — rejecting not just unlawful immigration but people by national origin, including tens of thousands of U.S. citizens of Somali descent — marked a new crescendo in Trump’s yearslong campaign against immigration. The episode echoed a pattern that began with his 2015 campaign launch, when he said Mexico was sending “rapists” across the border; later, he used a profanity to deride African nations as “s—-hole countries” and echoed language once used by Adolf Hitler.
Reaction rippled from Minneapolis, home to one of the largest Somali communities in the U.S., to Mogadishu. “My view of the U.S. and living there has changed dramatically,” said Ibrahim Hassan Hajji, a resident of Somalia’s capital. “I never thought a president, especially in his second term, would speak so harshly.” He said he no longer plans to travel to the United States.
Trump was reelected last year with more than 77 million votes and has made immigration a centerpiece of his second term. He has ordered an end to birthright citizenship — declaring that children born to parents in the U.S. illegally or temporarily are not citizens despite the 14th Amendment — a move now before the Supreme Court. He has largely frozen the asylum system, slashed refugee admissions and this week halted immigration applications from 19 travel-ban nations. Federal agents launched an immigration sweep Wednesday in New Orleans.
Polling suggests Americans remain divided. Roughly 4 in 10 adults — 42% — approved of the president’s handling of immigration in November, down from about half in March, according to an AP-NORC survey.
Historians and legal scholars said Trump’s remarks push the bounds of mainstream political discourse. “He’s legitimated this type of language that, for many Americans for a long time, was seen as outside the bounds,” said Carl Bon Tempo, a history professor at the State University of New York at Albany, noting that the U.S. has cycled through waves of exclusion from anti-Chinese laws in the 19th century to the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
A study of 200,000 congressional speeches and 5,000 presidential communications on immigration from 1880 to 2020, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found Trump is the first modern president to express sentiment on immigration more negative than the average member of his own party — even before Tuesday’s “garbage” remark.
“Trump specializes in pushing the boundaries of what others have done before,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a civil rights law professor at Ohio State University. “He is far from the first politician to embrace race-baiting xenophobia. But as president of the United States, he has more impact than most.”
The United States is not alone in hardening rhetoric. In Britain, Nigel Farage has labeled unauthorized migration an “invasion.” In France — where public insults based on origin, ethnicity, race or religion can be illegal — lawyer Arié Alimi said Trump’s comments risk normalizing group-directed hate speech by other leaders. “We are really crossing a very, very important threshold,” he said. Heads of state in France have immunity from such laws.
As for political correctness, Trump closed his remarks with a shrug: “I hear somebody say, ‘Oh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want them.”
By Ali Musa
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
