MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL, Minn.—The Minnesota AFL-CIO has joined the mass defense of the state’s 80,000-person Somali-American community—the largest in the U.S.—after a hate-filled xenophobic and racist attack by President Donald Trump.
Trump launched his rant against Somalis after an Afghan refugee who had worked for the CIA in his home country, and who was an interpreter for U.S. forces there, drove across country and shot two West Virginia National Guardspeople patrolling D.C. after their governor sent them there. One died, and the other was seriously wounded.
Trump promptly jumped to the erroneous conclusion the attacker was a Somali.
“We’re going to keep going the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage,” he ranted at a Cabinet meeting about the Democratic-Farmer-Labor lawmaker U.S. representative, a Somali refugee a long time ago.
“She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. These are people that say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’ These are people that do nothing but complain,” Trump snarled.
“I don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from.” An overwhelming majority of Somali-Americans were born here.
Minnesota public officials, including Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Gov. Tim Walz, both DFLers, jumped to defend both Omar and Somali-Americans. So did state AFL-CIO President Bernie Burnham.
“In the labor movement, an injury to one is an injury to all. By vilifying our Somali-American co-workers and neighbors and threatening military-style raids in Minnesota’s communities, President Trump is attacking our state’s entire labor movement,” Burnham declared.
“Like he always does, President Trump is trying to turn working people against one another to distract us from his own policy failures. You only need to look at prices at the grocery store to see it’s getting even harder for working people to make ends meet.
“Somali-Americans are part of our labor movement and have been contributing to Minnesota for more than three decades—just like every generation of immigrants and refugees that decided to call our great state home. Union members refuse to let anyone, even the president, divide us based on what we look like, where we were born, or how we pray.
“President Trump and his cronies are hoping working people will forget immigrants aren’t standing between us and a better life—billionaires are. We refuse to let them break our solidarity.”
Omar herself, in the New York Times, had her own reply to Trump, in much the same vein, but with more detail.
“On Tuesday, President Trump called my friends and me ‘garbage.’ This comment was only the latest in a series of remarks and Truth Social posts in which the president demonized and spread conspiracy theories about the Somali community and about me personally.
“For years, the president has spewed hate speech in an effort to gin up contempt against me. He reaches for the same playbook of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and division again and again. At one 2019 rally, he egged on his crowd until they chanted ‘Send her back.’
Trump, Omar said, uses hate to divert attention from his economic failures in controlling prices and his other policies that hurt the vast majority of people in the U.S. “His policies have only worsened the affordability crisis for Americans. And now, with Affordable Care Act tax credits set to expire, health care costs…are primed to skyrocket, and millions of people risk losing their coverage.
“Mr. Trump denigrates not only Somalis but so many other immigrants, too, particularly those who are Black and Muslim. While he has consistently tried to vilify newcomers, we will not let him silence us. He fails to realize how deeply Somali Americans love this country.”
Over 90% of Minnesotan Somalis are citizens.
Trump’s tirades set off death threats against Omar, her family, and her staffers, Omar reported. She and another Muslim-American U.S. representative, Rashida Tlaib of Detroit, have had to hire extra security guards at their own expense due to the volume of threats.
While Somali-Americans “are resilient” and while Omar can hire extra security guards, the lawmaker said that “what keeps me up at night is that people who share” her identities as Black, Somali, and immigrant “will suffer the consequences of his words, which so often go unchecked” by Republicans “and other elected officials. All Americans have a duty to call out hateful rhetoric when we hear it.”
Omar also put Trump’s attacks on her and her community in the context of his overall “dehumanizing and dangerous attacks” on migrants and people of color, starting even before his first election to the White House in 2016.
Those attacks include characterizing African nations and Haiti as “shithole countries,” his 2017 Muslim immigrant ban (later overturned), and Trump’s copying of the lie Vice President JD Vance perpetrated that Haitian migrants in Ohio ate people’s pets. He’s also repeatedly accused Mexico of “sending rapists and drug dealers” across the U.S.-Mexico border, using that excuse for a massive and violent crackdown there, including at least one murder by the Border Patrol—a teenager on the Mexican side whom agents shot.
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