Donald Trump has been singling out the Somali population in Minnesota since the campaign trail, from his Truth Social account and from numerous cabinet meetings over the past year. He has done so again on Wednesday during a White House press briefing regarding JD Vance’s task force on fraud, and with language that was as expansive as any to come from him.
In the course of comments at his May 27 cabinet meeting regarding VP JD Vance’s White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, Trump declared, “They’re all crooks. The Somalians, what they’ve done to Minnesota, the Somalians, – crooked as hell, Ilhan Omar, crooked as hell, they’re all crooks,” Trump said.
The comments come as Trump was celebrating Vance’s work on the task force, comparing him to famous fed Eliot Ness and touting what the VP has characterized as tens of billions in fraud exposed, and hundreds of arrests over the past two months.
The pivot to Somali immigrants and Omar came in the middle of the announcement without an added specific allegation or accusation attached to either.
The nature of the specific conduct Trump was accusing Omar of is unknown. There is nothing of substance that Omar has been accused of in connection with any fraud investigation.
The Department of Justice has repeatedly maintained that the Feeding Our Future scheme, a $250 million COVID-era fraud in a child nutrition program, was headed by a white woman named Aimee Bock.
However, dozens of Somali-American defendants were charged with and convicted of participation in it. Trump, for some reason, has fixated on Somalis in Minnesota since at least last year, and the comments on Wednesday were hardly the first time he has made disparaging blanket statements about Omar and the entire Somali community.
Internet Reacts To Trump Calling Somali Immigrants in Minnesota Crooks
The comment section split sharply. Several responses pushed back on the framing directly. “Minnesota collectively will not agree with that. It’s true a very large fraud involving feeding children was driven by Somalians, but Somalians generally are very welcome in MN. They are entrepreneurs and productive people and their culture adds so much to ours,” one person wrote.
Another drew a pointed comparison: “Trump calling Somalians crooks while he is stealing billions from Americans. Also, he is racist.”
Others sided with the broader claim. “Most of the folks involved in fraud – and not just in Minnesota but other states also – he is not wrong. Ilhan Omar is a thief using taxpayers’ money to fund Somali. She encouraged fraud within the Somali community,” one comment read.
Another took a global perspective: “Imagine if the international community’s opinion on the USA was based on the behavior of the USA’s president. We would be pure trash.”
One comment introduced the legal distinction that keeps getting overlooked in these exchanges: “When was Omar convicted of fraud 34 times?” And one person simply stated: “He’s not wrong – look at the fraud in Minnesota.”
The Somali population in Minnesota is the largest Somali diaspora in the United States, numbering in the tens of thousands. They have settled throughout the Twin Cities, the great majority having nothing to do with fraud of any kind.
The Feeding Our Future case involved 86 defendants (all but eight of Somali descent). Nothing that Trump said Wednesday in the cabinet came anywhere close to such a distinction.
