US government considers ending deportation protections for Somalis

United States Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said on Sunday that the federal government plans to "evaluate" Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for people from Somalia.

TPS is a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.

“TPS is a program that was always meant to be temporary. It's a program that was put in place, and I believe, for Somalia over 30 years ago, and will need to be evaluated,” Noem said while speaking at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in Minnesota.

“It was never meant to be in asylum program. It was always meant to be put in place after an incident or an event on a temporary basis. And that's what the evaluation will be," she added.

Immediate pushback

In a Truth Social post late Friday, President Donald Trump said he would “immediately” strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status.

Trump’s pledge is triggering fear in the state’s deeply-rooted Somali community — the largest in the country — along with doubts about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.

The announcement drew immediate pushback from some state leaders and immigration experts.

“There’s no legal mechanism that allows the president to terminate protected status for a particular community or state that he has beef with,” said Heidi Altman, policy director at the National Immigrant Justice Center.

“This is Trump doing what he always does: demagoguing immigrants without justification or evidence and using that demagoguery in an attempt to take away important life-saving protections,” she added.

Somalia's TPS designation runs through March 17, 2026, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services. That gives the Trump administration until mid-January to revoke the legal protection for Somalis nationally, in order to respect the required 60 days' notice.

But that move would affect only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis living in Minnesota. A report produced for Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at just 705 nationwide.

“I am a citizen and so are [the] majority of Somalis in America,” Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar, a Democrat born in Somalia, said in a social media post Friday. “Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate.”

'A political attack'

Still, advocates warned the move could inflame hate against a community at a time of rising Islamophobia.

“This is not just a bureaucratic change,” said Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric.”

In his social media post, Trump claimed, without offering evidence, that Somali gangs had targeted Minnesota residents and referred to the state as a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, has noted that Minnesota consistently ranks among the safest states in the country.

“It’s not surprising that the President has chosen to broadly target an entire community,” Walz said Friday. “This is what he does to change the subject.”

As part of a broader push to adopt hardline immigration policies, the Trump administration has moved to withdraw various protections that had allowed immigrants to remain in the United States and work legally.

That included ending TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection under President Joe Biden.

The Trump administration has also sought to limit protections previously extended to migrants from Cuba and Syria, among other countries.