Over the last few months, the Trump administration has escalated its efforts through the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport undocumented immigrants across the country. In particular, Minnesota has been a core focus of these efforts.
Somalis have been specifically targeted by the administration in light of COVID-era fraud that was concentrated in the Somali community in Minnesota, which has led to 59 convictions, according to The New York Times. However, instead of focusing on prosecuting fraud, the administration has spent its time demonizing Somali immigrants. Sec. of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revoked Somali’s temporary protected status, claiming that the decision puts “Americans first”.
The Trump administration launched large-scale ICE operations in Minneapolis targeting the Somali community, with President Trump publicly calling Somalis “garbage.” Somali immigrants are the latest victims in a line of racist attacks that the Trump Administration has lodged against various immigrant groups.
However, unlike attacks on previous immigrant groups, the attacks on Somali immigrants have struck a peculiar target: childcare centers. Even though only a tiny fraction of the COVID-era fraud committed by Somalis was through childcare centers, they quickly became a target after right-wing influencer Nick Shirley visited some of them, and after not being let in, promptly accused them of fraud.
Shirley is just one small part of a greater right-wing ecosystem that has continuously devolved into little more than a racist clout-chasing operation that they call “investigative reporting.” Instead of actually seeking the truth, Shirley came in with a preordained understanding of the world and tried to prove it. It’s reminiscent of the work done by Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, which tried to “debunk” images of starving children in Gaza by pointing out that many of them had pre-existing health conditions, ignoring that many of these were caused by the war.
Yet just like Weiss, instead of being ignored or laughed at, Shirley has become a star of the influencer space and has been praised by Vice President JD Vance, who said Shirley “has done far more useful journalism than any of the winners of the 2024 Pulitzer Prizes.”
The right-wing media ecosystem in many ways mirrors the Trump Administration, which rewards loyalty over competence and loves spectacle above all else. ICE enforcement around the country has been as much about terrorizing immigrants as it has been about making content for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE’s social media accounts.
Hidden in the spectacle of the latest wave of immigration enforcement has been the fact that the vast majority of Minnesotan Somalis — 87 percent per PBS— are citizens. Most Somalis came to the U.S. during or after the Somali Civil War 30 years ago. Even if you think that ICE should be targeting all unauthorized immigrants for removal, targeting Somali immigrants specifically does little to actually achieve this. By going after the Twin Cities, ICE has done little in the way of immigration enforcement and has instead mostly served the purpose of terrorizing citizens.
While being largely pointless from an immigration enforcement perspective, ICE operations in Minneapolis have done real damage, shown most shockingly by the case of Renee Good, a U.S. citizen who was murdered by an ICE agent after blocking an ICE vehicle and attempting to flee. Instead of cooperating with local police to bring the perpetrator to justice, federal law enforcement has doubled down and refused to cooperate. The raids have also had the effect of rendering Somali Minnesotans second-class citizens. Many now carry passports or other proof of citizenship, fearful that they will be detained by ICE if they don’t.
It’s worth reiterating that while COVID-era welfare fraud in Minnesota was disproportionately concentrated in the Somali community, only a small percentage of the overall community has been implicated in investigations, and that this fraud is only a small part of large-scale welfare fraud that took place not only in Minnesota but across the nation during the pandemic. Additionally, while some Somali daycares, including those that Shirley visited, are being investigated, this is a minuscule part of the overall fraud investigations centering on Minnesota’s Somali community. It’s also worth noting that even if Somalis had not been disproportionately perpetrators of COVID fraud in Minnesota, they likely would’ve still been targeted by people like Shirley. The facts fundamentally don’t matter. As long as there is any example of a member of an immigrant community doing something reprehensible — whether true or not — it is seen as a reason by the Trump administration to punish all members of the community. This was shown most clearly with the Haitian community, who will see their temporary protected status revoked effective Feb. 3, 2026, due to the ridiculous claim that they were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Targeting childcare centers allows the right to focus on one of their most hated groups: educators.
Over the last few years, the political right has declared an all-out war on education, limiting content in schools that talks about race or queer identity, shifting funding from public schools that the vast majority of students attend to private, often religious institutions, and freezing federal funding for universities that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideological goals. The targeting of daycares is just the latest effort to try to sow doubt in the education system. Fundamentally, Somali daycares were targeted not because they were fraudulent, but because they compellingly tied together two long-standing villains of the right: educators and immigrants.