How Somalis Became the New ‘Welfare Queens’

HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM announced on Tuesday that the federal government is revoking “temporary protected status” for more than 2,000 Somali refugees. The ostensible rationale is that “country conditions in Somalia have improved,” which is a strange thing to say about a place very much still wracked by political turmoil and in the throes of a humanitarian crisis.

Not that anybody takes the rationale seriously. The move comes after weeks of hostile Trump administration rhetoric toward Somali immigrants, including the president calling them “garbage” and “lowlifes” ” and vowing to “send them back from where they came.” Lately his administration has been trying to do just that through a massive immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, home of a large Somali diaspora—and where last week an immigration officer killed local resident Renee Good, who was protesting the enforcement action.

The spark—or, at least, the excuse—for the crackdown and rhetoric was a welfare fraud controversy involving mostly Somali-run service organizations stealing money that’s supposed to finance programs to support needy Minnesotans. The decade-old scandal attracted national attention in December following new indictments from federal prosecutors and a now-viral video from a MAGA-aligned, self-described “citizen journalist.”

Animus toward Somalis is nothing new for Trump and his supporters. The uptick in just the last week is almost certainly linked to the administration’s desperation to justify the killing of Good, a native-born, white U.S. citizen. But something else is going on here too. What you’re seeing and hearing is the fusing of two parts of the Trump administration’s agenda.

One is its war on immigration, which every day seems less like an attempt to control the border and more like an effort to minimize—and bully—America’s non-native, non-white population. The other is Trump’s war on the welfare state, which feels less like an effort to cut waste and more like an attempt to gut core programs that provide health care, childcare, and other critical services to many millions of Americans

You can imagine why Trump and his supporters are putting these two narratives together. And that’s especially true if you’re familiar with a political trope that first became part of the national conversation fifty years ago—one that, like the Somali fraud story, twisted some real facts and mainstream policy arguments into a fictional tale that leveraged ugly sentiments against a minority group in