On Friday evening, President Donald Trump announced that he would be “immediately” stripping the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, of Somalis living in Minnesota. The president described the state as a “hub of fraudulent money,” where Somali gangs “terrorize” residents.
In a Truth Social post on Friday, Trump wrote, “Minnesota, under Governor Waltz (sic), is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity. I am, as President of the United States, hereby terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota.”
The president added, “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER!”
In response, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said he’s not surprised by Trump’s directive. “It’s not surprising that the President has chosen to broadly target an entire community,” Walz posted to X. “This is what he does to change the subject.”
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How many Somalians could be affected?
It’s unclear how many people would be affected by Trump’s decision.
In August, Congress published a report on the number of immigrants with TPS designation living in the U.S. According to the report, 705 Somalians across the entire country had TPS. That designation was renewed on July 12, 2024, and is due to expire March 17, 2026.
Minnesota is home to the country’s largest Somali population. Data aggregator Minnesota Compass suggests that nearly 80,000 Somalis live in the state, a little more than half of whom are foreign-born residents. However, many of those individuals have American citizenship.
“I am a citizen and so are (the) majority of Somalis in America,” Somalia-born Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., posted to social media on Friday. “Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate.”
Minnesota lawmakers, CAIR respond
In a joint statement published Saturday, state Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy called Trump’s order “cruel” and “illegal.”
“Donald Trump is villainizing a small number of residents of Minnesota who came to this country seeking refuge from armed conflict and famine,” Murphy said. “They are the victims of violence and worthy of our protection and compassion. Ending their protected status would not make Minnesotans safer, but it would return these families to the danger they fled.”
Similarly, Murphy’s colleague, Zack Stephenson, accused the president of failing to address the country’s inflation and cost-of-living issues, instead focusing on “pitting Minnesotans against one another.”
“Minnesotans know that the Somali community is part of the fabric of our state,” Stephenson wrote in the statement. “We’ll always stand with our Somali neighbors when shameless politicians like Donald Trump try to use them for their political purposes.”
The Minnesota branch of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said that the Trump administration’s decision is based on “harmful misinformation” that is steeped in “external political motives.”
“This is not just a bureaucratic change; it is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric,” CAIR wrote. “We strongly urge President Trump to reverse this misguided decision.”
What’s behind Trump’s directive?
Trump’s post on Truth Social followed an X post from Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., in which he accused the state’s Somali community of pilfering millions through fraudulent autism diagnoses and then sending that money to terrorists.
“Somalis in Minnesota seem to have been over-diagnosing their children with autism so they can swindle millions from taxpayers to funnel to Al-Shabaab terrorists,” Emmer wrote. “Sounds crazy? It is. And it’s all been enabled by Tim Walz.”
This year has seen two fraud-related cases in Minnesota, one of which was directly tied to autism funding.
In September, a 28-year-old woman was charged with allegedly orchestrating a $14 million fraud scheme targeting a state Medicaid autism treatment program. And in March, the head of a Minnesota nonprofit was convicted for their role in a $250 million pandemic scheme.
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Trump administration works to peel back TPS
Congress created the TPS designation in 1990. It was aimed at protecting refugees from countries facing civil unrest, violence and natural disasters. As of March, 17 countries were granted TPS designations, including Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen.
However, ever since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has been working to peel back the decades-old protections.
In January, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attempted to revoke the status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in the U.S. That move has since been held up in the courts.
The administration is also working to end TPS for around 60,000 immigrants from Honduras, Nepal and Nicaragua. On Tuesday, a federal judge heard the case but did not issue a final ruling.
