Hello and welcome to The Long Wave. This week, distressing scenes continue to unfold on the streets of Minneapolis, as confrontations between US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and protesters intensify. Behind the headlines, there are communities, in the US and beyond, for whom this is a generationally traumatic moment. I spoke to Somali experts and activists across the diaspora, in Mogadishu, and in the state of Minnesota, which has the largest Somali community in the US. The picture that emerged was of anxiety but also solid resolve.
For almost all of his second term, Donald Trump has been fixated on Somali Americans, making derogatory comments about both them and Somalia, linking his opinion of them to justify anti-immigration policies in general, but particularly in Minnesota, a state that is home to more than 100,000 people of Somali descent. He appears to be particularly personally exercised by Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar, who is of Somali origin, and who has exchanged barbs with him, taking his revenge on her entire demographic. So deep is his hatred that when Omar was attacked this week by a man who sprayed her with an unknown substance, Trump responded by calling her a fraud who “probably had herself sprayed”. But the broad reason for picking on the Somali community, according to Prof Idil Abdi Osman, at Leicester University, is that it is convenient. The shift towards the right in Europe and the US, she told me, constitutes a “political thunderstorm” that “Somalis have become absorbed in” because “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”.
