Black Immigrants

An article on Somali immigrants, including how recent events have affected their lives.


In 1990, there were around 3,000 Somali-born people nationwide. Many of them were in Southern California where the climate was familiar, according to Ahmed Ismail Yusuf, a writer and teacher who was raised in a nomadic family in Somalia and now lives in Minneapolis.

In 1992, though, a handful of young Somali men found work at a poultry plant in southwest Minnesota, and word began to spread of a friendly (if cold-weathered) place with plenty of jobs, good wages and a low cost of living.

Now there are 260,000 people across the country with Somali heritage, and roughly 42 percent of them live in Minnesota, mostly in and around Minneapolis and -St. Paul. The majority are U.S.-born, and more than 92 percent are U.S. citizens. The rest have various forms of legal protection, including visas and asylum, or are undocumented.

Nationwide, about 700 Somalis nationwide were living and working under the Temporary Protected Status program, a humanitarian initiative for people from troubled nations. Trump officials have long targeted the program, and in November they moved to revoke the program’s protection of Somali immigrants.
 
In 2016, after President Trump denounced Somali refugees at a nearby campaign rally, the Dar Al-Farooq mosque in Bloomington, Minn., which has a largely Somali congregation, began receiving threatening emails and calls. The harassment peaked in 2017 when a white supremacist bombed the mosque.

The last few weeks, though, have felt altogether different.

Armed immigration agents have been marching through apartment complexes and shopping malls, demanding to see documents and handcuffing some people. Black tinted S.U.V.s have circled residential blocks while local volunteers kept watch and blew whistles to warn others in the neighborhood that the agents were coming.
 
Somali-American schoolchildren have come home in tears, saying that classmates had called them “garbage.” Strangers with no evident connection to the government have walked into cafes and Somali-run businesses and demanded to see people’s papers.

“Just going to the grocery store, people look at you differently,” said Mina Omar, 27, a nurse who was born and raised in Minneapolis. She recalled coming to the defense of an elderly woman recently when another shopper demanded that the woman “go back home.”

Sidewalks in Somali neighborhoods, once bustling, are now quiet.

Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said on Saturday that “claims law enforcement officers are ‘terrorizing the Somali community’ is absolute garbage.”

“Our law enforcement are arresting criminal illegal aliens who are terrorizing American citizens,” she said.
 
Abdulahi Farah, a Somali American community organizer, and other Somali leaders said that fraud should be investigated and rooted out because child care and senior centers are desperately needed in Minnesota and should function with integrity. But he and others said they saw in the White House’s reaction an orchestrated attempt to entirely take away the services, denigrate all Somali immigrants and use them as scapegoats.

“It’s a way to distract Americans,” Mr. Farah said.

Fraud allegations in Minneapolis first became public years ago, but the viral video, which was posted online in late December, attracted sudden, intense nationwide scrutiny to a community that was used to being overlooked.

“We are just like a blip, literally — in a population of, like, 330 million, we are such a small, insignificant group,” said Mr. Mohamed, the Ohio state representative. “I don’t think I would have naturally thought that the vice president and the president, Elon Musk and everyone would be tweeting about Somalis.”
 
Trump started with Mexicans. Then he moved on to the Haitians. Then the Somalis. The list of who could potentially be next is a long one.
 
Now, the killing of Ms. Good has felt like another turning point. Some Somali Americans said they have felt heartened by the surge in protests against the Trump administration’s actions. Mr. Farah, the mosque leader, likened the spirit of Ms. Good to that of the neighbors and community volunteers who helped rebuild his mosque and who stood outside with signs spelling messages of love and solidarity to successfully deter harassers.

On a snowy Saturday evening, Mr. Farah and other organizers were passing out Sambusas, or East African pastries, they had bought from ailing Somali restaurants to people stopping by to pay their respects at a memorial for Ms. Good.

A day earlier, Taher Muse, 38, the owner of an auto shop in Minneapolis, ran toward a man who had been stopped by federal immigration agents down the block, shouting at him that he had a right not to answer any questions. Within minutes, a caravan of black S.U.V.s pulled up outside Mr. Muse’s garage.

Mr. Muse, who was born in Mogadishu, arrived in Minneapolis when he was two years old, as his parents fled the Somali civil war. He became a U.S. citizen long ago, and opened his auto repair shop last year after working at a laundry list of other jobs — including as a poultry factory worker, a truck driver, and an employee at a rental car company.

Now federal agents were asking Mr. Muse and his workers for their identification. Among the agents was Gregory Bovino, a top Border Patrol official and key figure in the federal immigration crackdown. Mr. Muse and the other workers at the garage refused to answer any questions and waved the agents off.

“I thought they would stop after killing Renee Good, but they are still out here harassing people,” Mr. Muse said later Friday afternoon, after the federal agents had left. Still, he said, he believed there were limits to what the administration could do.

“This country is better than they think it is,” he said.
 
nsacpi said:
Trump started with Mexicans. Then he moved on to the Haitians. Then the Somalis. The list of who could potentially be next is a long one.
Click to expand...
Trump may not see skin color, he may just see thieves and want to get rid of them.

It could be Catholics next if their fraud gets uncovered.
 
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