Minnesota on ICE: With the killing of Renee Good, Minneapolis has become the frontline of POTUS Trump’s incitement and the reasons why go back decades and across the globe to Somalia.
What Drew Trump’s Attention to Minnesota?
Most recently, two factors have likely drawn the attention of Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller: a media frenzy over fraud scandals and the presence of the largest Somali community outside of Africa.
The first has provided Trump and the broader right with a rich opportunity to attack social spending and entitlement programs.
The second is timely because of the continuing importance of Somalia, most specifically the breakaway Somaliland region, in geo-politics.
The Changing Demographics of Minnesota
Let’s put on our Stephen Miller glasses and try to imagine how Minnesota’s demographic trends are seen by our racists-in-charge.
This chart and paragraphs from Wikipedia’s entry on The Demographics of Minnesota is liable to make any blood-and-soil ethic supremacist type’s blood boil:
African Americans are 7.0% of the population, a figure that has steadily increased over the past three decades. This growth is in part attributed to the influx of immigrants from East Africa, particularly Somalia and Ethiopia, who reside mainly in cities like Minneapolis and St. Paul.
…
Significant shifts in racial demographics were evident by the turn of the 21st century. By 2010, the White population was 85.3% and the Black population increased to 5.2%. The Asian population rose to 4%, and those identifying as two or more races rose to 2.4%. This trend was reflected in the 2020 census as well.
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) January 12, 2026
But it took more than just a growing African immigrant population to make Minnesota and its Somali diaspora population an attractive target for POTUS Trump and put Minnesota on ICE.
Colton Baldus accurately summed up the goals of the MAGA campaign against Minnesota as being “to push the deportation agenda in a Democratic-governed state, defund programs that working people rely on, and flip Minnesota to the Republican column in the 2026 midterm elections.”
Trump Aims His Racist Rhetoric At Somali-Americans
In December Trump tipped his hand that Somali-Americans were a priority target with an “outburst (that) was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry” per The New York Times in early December. Here’s more from the NYT:
“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.
He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”
“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”
That’s the fascist value proposition in a few paragraphs: over-simplify history, name a scapegoat, and promise brutal and swift action. End result: Minnesota on ICE.
Right-Wing Echo Chamber Booming About Somali Minnesota
The proximate cause of the current Minnesota on ICE situation is right-wing influencer Nick Shirley and his YouTube video “I Investigated Minnesota’s Billion Dollar Fraud Scandal.”
The video, which has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube and millions more on other platforms, sparked a renewed crackdown in Minneapolis, with the Department of Homeland Security announcing on Monday it would visit 30 sites suspected of fraud across the city. A DHS official told CBS News Minnesota its agents would focus on a “little of everything,” when asked whether immigration enforcement would be a part of the crackdown. Threatening arrests, the agency posted a video to X in which agents enter a smoke shop and question an employee about a nearby day care center.
This isn’t the first time the conservative YouTuber has gotten the attention of the Trump administration. Shirley participated in President Donald Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa” in October after an altercation at an anti-ICE protest. At age 23, his videos aren’t merely influencing his audiences — they’re also influencing government action.
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State regulators said Monday that inspectors had visited the day cares mentioned in the video in the past six months, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune, that there was no evidence of fraud at the sites during those unannounced visits, and some of the centers have already been closed or suspended. According to Minnesota Public Radio, state Republican lawmakers had steered Shirley toward the day care centers he visited in the video.
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Despite Shirley’s insistence that race and religion have nothing to do with his investigation, the YouTuber has a long track record of using his man-on-the-street videos to target immigrants in the U.S., platforming individuals who spread xenophobic and Islamophobic beliefs and conspiracy theories. While Shirley’s videos include interviews with those protesting against such hate, he often presents immigration and Islam as a growing threat taking over the country. Combined with sensationalized headlines — “Exposing Dangerous Illegal Migrant Scammers” or “The UK’s Insane Migrant Invasion” — the end result is often a portrait of immigrants as lawbreakers, a societal threat, and a strain on government resources.
Regardless of media efforts to debunk Shirley’s claims, January 2, more than 2000 DHA agents were aiming to put Minnesota on ICE.
Just a few days later, the campaign landed a bigger catch: the political career of Governor Tim Walz, the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee.
Tim Walz Sunk by Scandal
On January 5, Walz released a statement announcing that he was ending his campaign for a third term as Minnesota governor.
Key quotes:
In September, I announced that I would run for a historic third term as Minnesota’s Governor. And I have every confidence that, if I gave it my all, I would succeed in that effort.
But as I reflected on this moment with my family and my team over the holidays, I came to the conclusion that I can’t give a political campaign my all. Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences.
So I’ve decided to step out of the race and let others worry about the election while I focus on the work.
Before he got to the money quote he tried to land a few counter-punches on Trump and attempted to defend his record in office:
For the last several years, an organized group of criminals have sought to take advantage of our state’s generosity. And even as we make progress in the fight against the fraudsters, we now see an organized group of political actors seeking to take advantage of the crisis.
I won’t mince words here. Donald Trump and his allies – in Washington, in St. Paul, and online – want to make our state a colder, meaner place. They want to poison our people against each other by attacking our neighbors. And, ultimately, they want to take away much of what makes Minnesota the best place in America to raise a family. They’ve already begun by taking our tax dollars that were meant to help families afford child care. And they have no intention of stopping there.
Make no mistake: We should be concerned about fraud in our state government. We cannot effectively deliver programs and services if we can’t earn the public’s trust. That’s why, over the past few years, we’ve made systemic changes to the way we do business.
We’ve gone to the legislature time and again to get more tools to combat fraud. We’ve fired people who weren’t doing their jobs. We’ve seen people go to jail for stealing from our state. We’ve cut off whole streams of funding, in partnership with the federal government, where we saw widespread criminal activity. We’ve put new locks on the doors of our remaining programs, and we’ve hired a new head of program integrity to make sure those locks can’t be broken.
It’s a sudden end to a political career that for a few weeks in 2024 seemed headed for The US Naval Observatory and possibly the White House itself.
But Trump wasn’t satisfied with Walz’ head on the White House trophy wall, there is social spending to slash.
Trump Regime Cuts Funds
By the 10th, POTUS Trump’s gang in the White House had seized the day to deliver what Elon Musk’s DOGE couldn’t: massive cuts to social services.
Per The Guardian:
The Trump administration announced it is suspending $129m in federal benefit payments to Minnesota amid allegations of widespread fraud in the state.
The secretary of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), Brooke Rollins, shared a letter on Friday on social media that was addressed to Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, and the mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, notifying them of the administration’s decision and citing investigations into alleged fraud conducted by local non-profits and businesses.
“Despite a staggering, wide-reaching fraud scandal, your administrations refuse to provide basic information or take common sense measures to stop fraud. The Trump administration refuses to allow such fraud to continue,” Rollins wrote.
Rollins asked Walz and Frey to provide the USDA with justification for all federal spending from 20 January 2025 to the present within 30 days. She is also requiring that all federal payments to the state moving forward require the same justification.
The cuts in Minnesota were part of a Trump admin attempt to freeze $10 billion in social services to five states. A judge has temporarily put that on hold, but time will tell who prevails.
I’ll come back to the fraud scandal that helped put Minnesota on ICE but first, there’s another bit of historical context to provide.
How did Minnesota become a target-rich environment for xenophobes in the Trump regime?
Why Are There So Many Somalis in Minnesota?
Let’s look at how the Somalis got to Minnesota. This Amazon review of Ahmed I. Yusuf ‘s book “Somalis in Minnesota” tells the story concisely and debunks Trump’s claims that the people of Somalia were solely responsible for their own suffering:
In the 1980s the young country of Somalia found itself stuck between two superpowers and wracked by violence and misery. A few years earlier, Somali General Siad Barre, backed by the Soviet Union, had invaded and claimed lands in neighboring Ethiopia.
The Soviet Union then surprisingly switched alliances and supported Ethiopia. Barre called on the United States and Britain for help, but in the end he had to pull out of Ethiopia. Subsequent coup attempts and executions destabilized and divided Somalia into war zones. Famine followed.
International food aid couldn’t penetrate the region’s carnage and corruption and the U.N. sanctioned humanitarian military intervention. An attempt to capture warlord Farrah Aidid, who had attacked Pakistani troops, led to the infamous “Black Hawk Down” incident.
American troops were killed and President Clinton ordered the U.S. to leave. All other countries followed suit, leaving a smoldering Somalia behind. With few options remaining, people fled.
A particular group of refugees went to Kenya and, following more indescribable hardship, some eventually found their way to San Diego. Lacking opportunities in California, a 1992 help wanted ad for a food processing plant inspired some to move to the considerably more frigid climate of Marshall, Minnesota.
They found work almost immediately, encouraging others northward. More and more followed. They established communities in Minnesota’s welcoming and relatively tolerant atmosphere. Even more followed.
Soon, some relocated to Minneapolis and continued building Somali communities. This continued until Minnesota, particularly the city of Minneapolis, could claim the largest population of Somalis in the United States.
And that population of Somalis busied themselves by building economic and political power.
The Somali Diaspora Grew and Thrived in Minnesota
Somali diaspora chronicler Ahmed I. Yusef spoke to The Sahan Journal and described what his community did in Minnesota after arriving:
The first Somalis to be directly resettled from refugee camps in Africa to Minnesota were largely people from Mogadishu who began arriving in 1996. The large influx of Southeast Asian refugees in the 1970s and ’80s paved the way for Somali resettlement in Minnesota, Yusuf said. Groups like Lutheran Social Services and Catholic Charities had experience helping refugees establish themselves in the North Star State.
The work done by African Americans in the fight for civil rights also helped ease the arrival for Somalis in Minnesota, Yusuf said. Progressive civil rights politicians from Minnesota like Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale helped create a welcoming climate.
…
The late ’90s and early 2000s saw hundreds of Somali entrepreneurs open businesses in Minnesota, and families establish themselves in areas of Minneapolis that had fallen into disrepair.“The entire landscape of south Minneapolis, particularly the area adjacent to downtown, has completely changed and been revitalized,” Yusuf said.
Soon, Somalis began to take seats in local government. In 2010, Hussein Samatar was elected to the Minneapolis school board, making him the first elected Somali official in the state. Three years later, Abdi Warsame became the first Somali elected to the Minneapolis City Council.
In 2016, Ilhan Omar became the first Somali elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives, and the first Somali woman to win election in Minnesota. Two years later, she won a seat in Congress.
Since then, several Somali Americans have been elected to the Minnesota House of Representatives. In 2020, Omar Fateh became the first Somali American elected to the Minnesota Senate; Zaynab Mohamed became the first Somali woman elected to the Minnesota Senate in 2022.
Astute readers will see why Trump, Vance, Miller and the MAGA movement see the Somali community in Minnesota as not only a target, but also a threat.
But like any community of recent immigrants, some Somalis have been tempted to take short cuts on the road to the American Dream.
The Fraud Is Real
While it’s never a good idea to take GOP noise machine claims at face value, there has been a massive fraud exposed in Minnesota under Walz’ watch that helps explain Minnesota on ICE.
Axios has a decent timeline of the whole thing that helps explain how “pressure from the Trump administration turned a state scandal that has periodically dominated Minnesota headlines for at least six years into national news.”
Some key quotes:
For the last several years, most attention in Minnesota has focused on what prosecutors called the largest-ever case of pandemic-aid fraud: a sprawling scheme to bilk a federally funded school meals program.
With program rules loosened to ensure children didn’t starve during COVID, prosecutors say fraudsters billed for at least $250 million-worth of meals that they did not serve. To date, more than 70 defendants have pleaded guilty or been convicted.
Walz administration officials have long maintained they tried to intervene to stop potentially fraudulent meal payments, but court challenges stymied their efforts.
But Minnesota’s independent Legislative Auditor has disputed their argument, concluding in a 2024 report that the state’s Department of Education “failed to act on warning signs” — and could’ve legally intervened to ensure money stopped flowing.
Minnesota Public Radio has a more detailed and Minnesota-centric timeline of the scandal that helps explain the current Minnesota on ICE situation.
This New York Times piece from November has more on the scandal:
Over the last five years, law enforcement officials say, fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided.
Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. Minnesota’s fraud scandal stood out even in the context of rampant theft during the pandemic, when Americans stole tens of billions through unemployment benefits, business loans and other forms of aid, according to federal auditors.
…
The first public sign of a major problem in the state’s social services system came in 2022, when federal prosecutors began charging defendants in connection to a program aimed at feeding hungry children. Merrick B. Garland, attorney general during the Biden administration, called it the country’s largest pandemic relief fraud scheme.The prosecutors focused on a Minneapolis nonprofit organization called Feeding Our Future, which became a partner to dozens of local businesses that enrolled as feeding sites.
Real But Overstated?
So the scandal is real, but The Center for Media and Democracy has made a strong case that the MSM has done its usual job of elevating right-wing agit-prop to the center of the national discussion.
Key quotes:
CBS—under its new owners, the Ellison family—along with the Murdoch trinity of Fox News, the New York Post and Wall Street Journal, have covered the story aggressively, at times picking up unconfirmed accounts from conservative influencers that have spun into wild charges about vote-buying and cover-ups.
The New York Times provided front-page coverage to a Sunday news story echoing key arguments made in Trump administration talking points: that a Nordic-style welfare state in Minnesota, combined with criminal tendencies inherent to the state’s Somali population, created an environment ripe for fraud. The Times also focuses on the defendants’ claims that they were being persecuted for racial reasons.
…More indictments were filed this year, extending the alleged fraud scheme to a housing stabilization program and a health care program. CBS, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post have all repeated DOJ claims that the frauds now exceed $1 billion. Joseph Thompson, the federal prosecutor leading the case, did not respond to repeated requests for comment from CMD asking for clarification on DOJ’s monetary estimates.
The only citations supporting the $1-billion claim in those stories come from a department that has been weaponized against its political enemies and is prone to “unprecedented errors” that seriously undermine its credibility.
Based on what the DOJ has actually filed in court, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune calculated the cost of the alleged fraud schemes to be $217.7 million over multiple years, while noting that the number was likely to grow.
I’ll conclude the tale of Minnesota on ICE on Wednesday with a look at the intra-Democratic party politics that helped land Minneapolis where it is today.
It will include a retelling of the 2025 mayoral primary that saw Mayor Jacob Frey hold off a spirited challenge from State Senator Omar Fateh. I should probably have covered it last summer along with my pieces on the New York City mayor’s race, California governor’s race and Maine US senate primary, but alas there wasn’t world enough nor time.
We’ll try to catch up on that, plus Frey’s role in the 2020 BLM protests and Minnesotans’ attempts to resist Minnesota on ICE, the connection to Somaliland (and Israel and the UAE) next time.
Long before the timeframe in the post, there was a substantial population from Eritrea in Minneapolis going back at least to the ’70s. Can’t say if there is a connection other than geographical proximity, as I haven’t been back since.
That’s good info. I’ll see what I can find on that angle. Thanks
Eritrea was founded on May 24, 1991, so those people must have been Ethiopians.
Eritrea goes back at least to the 19th Century Italian colonization. It only became part of Ethiopia in 1950 and the war of independence began in 1961.
Seems like people from that area would likely have been identifying as Eritrean well before 1991.
There’s also a large Hmong population in the twin cities, from the post-Vietnam war era, but I have never heard of any problems there. Guess they’re white enough for MAGAts to ignore.
I saw that when I was looking into MN’s demographics and almost included a mention but cut it in interests of space.
In general, the Somalis have become a more powerful ethnic group than the Hmongs, while simultaneously failing to assimilate as successfully as they have.
Somali street gangs in north Minneapolis have led to an increase in violent crime over the past decade, and Somali sex-trafficking rings were discovered to be operating out of the Mall of America a few years ago. The Somali day-care, kids’ meals, and autism center fraud was the real deal, and many traditional white liberals in the state were rocked by it, flabbergasted.
But I am uncertain to what extent ICE is specifically about Somalis. By far the majority of the people being harassed are Latino. I think the ICE deployment is very much about Trump trying to stick it to a traditonally well-functioning and very blue state.
I also think the ICE deployment is meant to get the American people used to extraordinary renditions in urban areas. Next up will be “antisemitic” protestors. Mark my words.
And then they will likely “protect” ballot stations in autumn 2026 from voters of colour.
Somewhere I saw someone claiming ICE was surprised and disappointed to find that the vast majority of Somalis in MN were citizens or legal residents so they improvised and started attacking Latinos and NatAms.
The Feds are worried about the ethnic makeup of a State that is 76% White?
We here in the Rancid Underbelly of the North American Deep South laugh uproariously at that.
Here, hold our beer as we show you how you run a State that is “only” 58% White.
On Mississippi, per the Census Bureau:
White alone, percent 58.6%
Black alone, percent (a)(a) 37.7%
American Indian and Alaska Native alone, percent (a)(a) 0.7%
Asian alone, percent (a)(a) 1.3%
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander alone, percent (a)(a) 0.1%
Two or More Races, percent 1.6%
Hispanic or Latino, percent (b)(b) 4.1%
White alone, not Hispanic or Latino, percent 55.4%
Maybe a better reason for the Elite displeasure with this particular group of immigrants is that they have quickly adapted and are now challenging said Elite’s hold on political and economic dominance.
The deployment of the ICE Goons to Minnesota is fully in line with the tactics used by the earlier Robber Barons, who, let it be said, many of today’s Elites wish they were as “good” as in wielding power. Consider the earlier use of private armies such as the Pinkertons to suppress populists and Union movements. Today, that tactic has been ‘normalized’ as a part of the remit of the State. I’ll go out on a rotten limb and suggest that what we are seeing is akin to old style Mussolini Fascism.
As Il Duce used to say; “Basta!”
Stay safe.
It’s the trendline, Minnesota going from 99% white before WW2 to 80% or so in 2010 to 75% white in 2020 is what’s freaking Miller and company out.
The South’s demographics have always been as they are so they won’t be alarming the race-sickness creeps like Stephen Miller.
But who knows, trying to understand that kind of crazy isn’t an exact science.
If the conflict was coming from inside the state I’d be more tempted to concede your point, but it’s not.
I was tempted to put in a reference to Union veterans of Norwegian descent destroying the confederate James-Younger gang at the Northfield robbery but I didn’t have room, just to emphasize Miller and company’s historical ignorance. There are white people and then there are white people.
Local boosterism tangent: Northfield stages re-enactments of the bank raid every year during their annual Defeat of Jesse James Days festival. Maybe Miller & Co. would like to join the fun!
https://www.djjd.org/bank-raid-re-enactments/
I love it. That is one of my favorite conflicts of the post-Civil War era. I love thinking about the stolid Scandinavian veterans hearing the James-Younger “rebel yells” (ancient Celtic war cries), rolling their eyes and digging their service rifles out of trunks. The next best thing is looking at the Younger Brothers’ post-capture photos. Those yahoos got theirs that day alright.
Any Celt should know not to mess with the Vikings if they can help it.
SC is 30 percent AA…my Upstate town 50 percent.
Of course we also had Strom Thurmond and Thurmond’s onetime assistant, Lee “Willie Horton” Atwater. It doesn’t seem very racist around here any more. Perhaps the South got it out of their system. How about where you live?
So arguably the Repubs used to be a lot more racist than they are now. Here’s suspecting the attacks on Somalis have more to do with religion than race.
I think a big part of what caused the extreme race-alienation among right-wingers was that they became less explicitly racist over the decades, but they felt like they were not getting any credit for it because the goal line kept moving. The goal-line moving, perceived to be unfair, ungrateful, and potentially to have no limits, is much of what a right-winger means by using “wokeness” as a pejorative.
One of the key new variables I have added to my own political/cultural/economic perspective is the role of family systems in determining our individual mentalities–initially based on the quite persuasive writings of Emmanuel Todd in this area.
Along such lines, Armin Rosen (County Highway, Nov-Dec. 2025) has noted in his interview with Ahmed Samara, the founding editor in Chief of “Bildhaan: An international journal of Somali Studies,” that a culture of civic virtue died with the Somali State in 1991:
“…American notions of civic virtue were never strong enough to displace the old country’s cynical and disenchanted attitude toward the public commons…There is a mentality there that comes here which is Grab what you can…Grab it now rather than banking on the possibility that mutual trust will be a way of creating a new life for yourself, your family and the future.”
According to Samara and Rosen, mutual trust hadn’t worked in Somalia and hadn’t even really been tested. What is the understandable mentality of Somalis living in Minnesota is that of the clan, not the mentality which apparently comes with the more civic-minded nuclear family structure operating in the U.S.
To fully understand real fraud in Minnesota, it seems quite important to also pay attention to the internal dynamics of Somali clan mentality.
You may be on to something with that but I avoided that line of analysis entirely because so much of the right-wing adjacent MSM analysis adopted the same stance. Can only do so much nuance in a blog post during a slide toward civil conflict.
“ But like any community of recent immigrants, some Somalis have been tempted to take short cuts on the road to the American Dream.”
I mean….fraudulent obtaining your wealth is American as apple pie so it proves this is all about racism.
There are plenty of PE firms milk the hospice industry but those are white executives doing the crime
Yes we live in an utterly corrupt society so bagging on immigrants for being involved in organized crime is probably passe, but nonetheless our most storied criminal organizations emerged from the Irish, Italian, Jewish/Ukrainian, Caribbean, Colombian, and Mexican diasporas so the Somalis (if they are disproportionately involved in fraud) are coming from multiple proud American traditions.
And dont forget that “game” is not strange to our dear orange leader
Excellent post and comments. In my work as a Silicon Valley prosecutor 1982-2017 I found myself tagged early in my career as someone who “knows how to talk to those dusky-hued people” and worked mostly on cases involving the Southeast Asian, Mexican, and Chinese diasporas (even a few Somalis).
I found a serious disconnect between what my superiors expected these groups to “know” about our laws and ethics and their lived experience. The federal and state governments had done nothing to educate them and I found that there were plenty of “locals” willing to exploit the immigrants’ ignorance, insecurity, and lack of habituation to American norms. You can’t simply plop a teenager from the Killing Fields of Cambodia into a K-Mart and expect everything to be hunky-dory from there forward.
After listening to Kristi Noem lying her fat ass off, I suspect that there is something sinister afoot. If ICE can tip Minneapolis back into chaos it will give Trump cover to invoke the Insurrection Act and to federalize elections and voting under the tender supervision of his amoral sycophants and goons. These people are that crazy. As Steve Bannon winked about Stephen Miller to Michael Wolff: “You see? Goebbels!”
Thanks for the kind words. Agree with all your points, especially the one about Stephen “Goebbels” Miller.
The State of Minnesota has just filed a lawsuit in federal court to try and stop the surge of ICE agents and, according to the press conference they are holding right now, are in the process of filing a temporary restraining order.
I’m skeptical about the impact of the courts on the conflict, but time will tell.
Agree. The roberts court only ignites fires with its kavanaugh stops, never pisses to put them out. (Said with sarcasm and dark humor, NWT, always looks forward to your post)
Thanks NWT. I got to this part and had to chuckle,
… More indictments were filed this year, extending the alleged fraud scheme to a housing stabilization program and a health care program. USians have polished A-level form in this department, with selective prosecution for some and an apparent green light for others. I will speculate with confidence that the amount of fraud connected to the MIC alone would dwarf these numbers over the same time frame. And healthcare, LOL. The hypocrisy and pearl-clutching (are those cultured pearls?) is mind numbing and speaks of racist/political motivations.
I’m not endorsing fraud here, just pointing out that these Somalis came to America and turned out to be skilled at well established American behavior. Apparently, we can’t tolerate that.
Trump wants another George Floyd … but he’s not going to get that. Instead he’s going to get more Renee Good’s.
He’ll never be able to run roughshod victimizing white women – Epstein Island notwithstanding.
Since Renee Good’s death, news of he murder of an African American man by an off duty ICE officer in LA (over NYE) has resurfaced. It had never even made national news when it happened. That’s the difference race can make. And every day it seems there’s another one, sadly.
Exhibit A (via X)
While race is the major thrust, lets not forget that MAGA machismo also bristles at empowered women – “f*ckin’ bitch” were the last words Renee Good heard.
There’ll be no female Floyd either. When Trump was elected, a lot of online African American women creators/influencers made it quite clear that they were pretty much “done” (with fighting/protesting etc). They declared themselves part of the “92%”, a reflection of percentage of black women reported to have voted for Harris. By comparison, 53% of white women are reported to have voted for Donald Trump (via NBC News).
Since America’s sub-Saharan African diaspora is not a monolith, the woes of Minnesota’s Somali’s will not translate with the same ubiquitous call for empathy that George Floyd’s death will. Empathy in 70% white Minnesota and beyond happens when the vast majority of this country can look at an ICE victim and internalize the sentiment ” … that’s someone’s son/daughter/brother/sister/mother/father”. A white woman can elicit those feelings for more frequently and with greater intensity than a brown skinned immigrant. Sad, but true. And that is what Trump faces – a thousand Renee Good’s, who are planning to start bringing their infants to protests. Predictably, DHS is on it – Exhibit B (via X).
Prepare for the worst there too. Remember, Sandy Hook didn’t “move the needle”.
Sadly the reaction to Good’s death I’ve seen from the MAGA chuds in my life is more homophobic and hateful than anything else.