TRUMP ON SOMALIS
In the context of a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, Trump said about Somalia and Somalis on 12/2/25: {Somalia} “stinks and we don’t want them (Somalis) in our country…We could go one way or the other and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country… {Regarding US Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali who has been a US citizen for 25 years} She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.”
Kristi Noem, Sec. of Homeland Security, said on 12/1/25 that she recommended that Mr. Trump enact “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
Somalis have done a great deal to rejuvenate Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as Lewiston in our own state of Maine. But this is not the point: the point is that high officials of the US government have no right to vilify and demean whole groups of people, including and perhaps especially, groups who are mostly US citizens. This sort of vilification could even lead to violence against these groups.
Source: The New York Times,12/2/25