President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.
Even for Mr. Trump — who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries — his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry. And it comes as he started a new ICE operation targeting Somalis in the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.
“These are people that do nothing but complain,” Mr. Trump said at the tail end of a cabinet meeting at the White House, during which he sometimes appeared to be fighting sleep. But when the subject turned to immigration, Mr. Trump made a point of lashing out.
“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.
He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”
“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,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”
Mr. Trump has used this kind of rhetoric throughout his rise in politics, including in his first term as president, when he demanded to know why the United States would accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, which he described as “shithole countries,” rather than, say, Norway.
But he has long been especially fixated on Somalis in the United States, and on Ms. Omar in particular.
“His obsession with me is creepy,” Ms. Omar wrote in a post shortly after the cabinet meeting. “I hope he gets the help he desperately needs.”
Mr. Trump has seized on immigration as a potent political weapon, demonizing immigrants and equating them with crime and disease. He often returns most furiously to the topic when he is on the defensive, as he is now, over issues like the economy and the Epstein files.
On Tuesday, when asked about Mr. Trump appearing to doze off in the cabinet meeting, his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, pointed to his remarks about the Somalis, which she described as an “epic moment.”
Mr. Trump significantly stepped up his anti-migrant stance after the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington last week, by a gunman identified by the authorities as an Afghan national.
Since Mr. Trump took office for a second time, his administration has sealed the country to refugees around the world, including to Somalis, reserving a limited number of slots for mostly white South African Afrikaners.
The mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul said on Monday that they found Mr. Trump’s remarks about Somali immigrants to be reckless and dangerous.
“The words that founded this country start with the words ‘We the People,’” said Mayor Melvin Carter of St. Paul. “The sacred moments in American history are the moments when we have to decide who the ‘we’ is. Who gets to be included in the ‘we.’ Do we mean Black people? Do we mean women? Do we mean immigrants?”
Mr. Trump began his cabinet meeting on Tuesday by complaining about the coverage of his schedule and questions about his physical stamina after he appeared to doze off in the Oval Office last month.
As cabinet officials took turns mixing a summary of their agency’s work with flattery for the president, Mr. Trump appeared restless, tired and at times uninterested. He occasionally leaned back in his chair and repeatedly narrowed and closed his eyes.
But then, when a reporter asked Mr. Trump about how Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota handled a fraud scheme in his state, Mr. Trump used the opportunity to reset the conversation.
“Walz is a grossly incompetent man,” Mr. Trump said. “There’s something wrong with him. There’s something wrong with him. And when you look at what he’s done with Somalia, with Somalia, which is barely a country.”
Mr. Trump and his aides have in recent days focused on an investigation into fraud that had taken place in pockets of the Somali diaspora in Minnesota to make broad assertions about the community. Federal prosecutors charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program meant to keep children fed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
On Thursday, Mr. Trump said that Somalis were “taking over” Minnesota and that Somali gangs were “roving the streets looking for ‘prey.’”
Mr. Trump added that Ms. Omar was “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab” and that Mr. Walz was “seriously retarded” for welcoming immigrants from Somalia.
His top officials have also used dehumanizing language against immigrants. On Monday, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said 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.”
Robert Pape, a professor at University of Chicago who has studied political violence for 30 years, said such language from the Trump administration was dangerous.
“They’re not just like nasty metaphors — they’re especially dehumanizing metaphors,” Mr. Pape said. “‘Garbage.’ You’re not thinking of something that is human, you’re thinking of it as something that can be easily thrown away, so that is exactly the kind of metaphor we have just found for really decades is likely to increase support for violence.”
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