Lawmakers Are Pushing Back Against Trump’s Attacks on Somalis

Some senators, including at least one Republican, are rebuking President Donald Trump for his racist comments about Somalis in America this week, which included referring to them as “garbage.”

Somalis have become a target for Trump and the Department of Homeland Security, which has latched onto a federal fraud case involving some Somalis in Minnesota accused of stealing from a COVID-era government assistance program. But some lawmakers have been fast to criticize the blanket statements from the administration about an entire community.

“This is what bigotry looks like,” said Sen. Tina Smith, a Democrat from Minnesota, when asked about Trump’s comments. “This is an individual who’s condemning an entire group of people, not because of who they are but because of who he thinks they are.”

Smith represents the state with the largest Somali population in the country, where Trump has focused most of his energy and a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation.

Sen. Angus King, an independent from Maine, called the comments “shocking.”

“It’s unconscionable that a president of the United States would make comments like that about a whole group of people. We have Somali residents in Maine. They’re good citizens, they pay their taxes, they work, support their families. And to use language like that is just flat unacceptable,” King told NOTUS.

Maine is home to thousands of Somali citizens, and was the state with the first Somali mayor ever elected in the U.S.

“I totally disagree,” Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, told NOTUS in response to Trump’s comments. “We have a number of Somalis who have come to the state of Maine in the last 15 years, and they’ve been great citizens — some residents, some citizens — of our community.”

Collins was an outlier among Republicans in taking issue with the president’s statements. Several of her colleagues, including Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio, who represents a state with a large Somali population, demurred.

“I’m not going to get into commentating on Donald Trump’s comments on things that I haven’t heard him say personally,” Husted said.

Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas told NOTUS that although he was unfamiliar with the president’s exact comments, he shared the administration’s worries about crime.

“I think we’re all just concerned that even though we’ve secured the border, there’s still hundreds of thousands of violent, illegal criminals in the country still. It’s going to take a decade for us to recover from Joe Biden’s open borders,” Marshall told NOTUS.

Trump ranted about Somalis during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, saying he did not want them in the U.S. and that “we’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

The comments continued Wednesday in the Oval Office, where he said Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is a Somali American, should not be allowed to be a lawmaker.

“The Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain,” Trump said Wednesday.

Minnesota’s Somali population is around 79,000 people, many of whom came to America in the early 1990s to escape the Somali Civil War.

The ICE operation playing out in the state is intended to target undocumented Somalis. But data from the Census Bureau shows that around 60% of Somalis in Minnesota were born in the United States, and 87% of those born outside of the U.S. are now naturalized.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a Democrat like Smith, told NOTUS she’s been a “major supporter” of going after the fraud cases in her state, but disagreed with the president’s decision to condemn all Somalis.

“The president has gone way beyond that and indicted an entire group of 70,000 people in my state by calling them names and putting them at risk. And the vast majority of them are citizens that came to this country in the 1990s,” Klobuchar said.

Other Democratic lawmakers representing states with significant Somali populations shared a similar sentiment.

“It’s so wrongheaded,” Sen. Maria Cantwell said. “We love our Somali population in the state of Washington.”