From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitrov. This is the Daily.

These aren't people that work. These aren't people that say, "Let's go. Come on. Let's make this place great." These are people that do nothing but complain.

During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Trump delivered perhaps the most blatantly xenophobic public remarks of his political career. and we're going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.

Attacking Somali Americans in Minnesota and calling them garbage.

You know, they came from paradise and they said this isn't paradise. But when they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but we don't want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.

Today, my colleague Ernesto Londano on the story of how Somali became the president's latest target in his ongoing effort to reshape America's relationship to its immigrant communities. It's Thursday, December 4th.

Ernesto, the president's comments about Somali immigrants this week were, I think for a lot of us, truly shocking. Even for a president who's known for making extreme comments about immigrants, he called an entire group of people garbage in a nationally televised cabinet meeting. You're in Minnesota as a national correspondent. So tell us, how were these comments received there?

I think people here have been shell shocked by the comments. I think they're not surprised that the president would say things that are disparaging of the Somali community or about his immigration philosophy, but I I do think the tone and tenor of what was said at the White House yesterday struck people here as just beyond the pale. And it's induced a prevailing sense of terror among the 80,000 or so people of Somali ancestry that live in the state. The vast majority of whom are American citizens or legal permanent residents

and they're a big part of the fabric of Minnesota. They're ascendant in politics. There's many Somali Americans who are in the state legislature and hold other local office. They are business owners. They work bluecollar jobs. They work in healthcare and the idea that overnight their president refers to them as garbage and says that he wishes they would just all go home was truly jarring.

Tell me about the terror that you described. What is prompting the fear in the community specifically? This week we learned that the Trump administration has deployed roughly 100 immigration agents to come in and apparently look for Somalis who are subject to deportation orders. As we understand that this is a fairly small pool of people. We're talking about maybe a few hundred people who have pending asylum cases or for whatever reason came here legally but fell out of status because they may have committed a crime. So what's happened is there's a sense that a crackdown on immigration is starting to take root in Minnesota and that businesses and homes may become the targets of immigration raids. What this has meant so far is that people are thinking twice about whether they feel safe going to work even if they have legal status and just people kind of mulling whether they even feel comfortable going to the grocery store. And the fear is not merely about running into immigration agents. The fear also has become that this prevailing toxic rhetoric about Somali and Somali culture has empowered people who are racist to do and say things that amount to harassment and hatred. Hm.

I spoke to a Somali American immigration lawyer who said he's been flooded with calls, including from American citizens who report just being taunted and harassed on the street.

You're saying people are seeing this as potentially giving people permission to act on their worst instincts. It's a permission structure.

Correct.

Okay. I want to talk about why this is happening. why the federal government has turned its attention to this community of 80,000 people. In his diet tribe, Trump hinted at the reason for the hostility. He said that Somali had stolen all of this money. This is a story you've been covering, right? Walk us through how Somali became the subject of this vitriolic attack from the president. Yeah,

I think the origin of this saga dates back to 2020. And what happened was, you know, during the early weeks of the pandemic, state officials were really worried about whether people were being fed, were people going to be housed as many lost their jobs. And as we all sort of collectively descended into this fearful moment induced by COVID 19. And there was one specific program that state officials were managing to keep vulnerable kids fed during the pandemic. What happened was that turned into a magnet for fraudsters who began registering as meal sites saying that they were feeding tens of thousands of children when in reality what they were doing was submitting bogus invoices and stealing a staggering amount of money.

Right. This is something we've known about, right? This was part of the widespread fraud that we saw where pandemic programs were taken advantage of.

That's right. And even in the context of the stunning amount of money that people stole during the pandemic, targeting a wide range of programs, including business loans and unemployment benefits. What happened in Minnesota was unique in just the scale and officials have described it as the most brazen case of its kind just by the sheer number of people involved and the amount of money that was stolen.

How far did it actually go? Like what are we talking about here in terms of scale, in terms of scope?

Well, 78 people have now been charged in the scheme in federal court. The vast majority of them are Somali Americans. More than 50 have already been convicted in these cases. And initially, I think many local officials were outraged that this happened, but they essentially said this probably was a one-off abuse during the pandemic when there was a real sense of urgency about getting money to people who needed it.

Mhm.

However, in recent years, as prosecutors dug into court records and as they started interviewing witnesses, something really jarring came to their attention. This was not, in fact, a one-off. What they found was that networks of people had found loopholes in other programs that weren't COVID pandemic era programs, but just run-of-the-mill safety net programs designed to help people at risk of homelessness, kids with autism, and that they were charging a staggering amount of money for services that weren't rendered. And collectively, according to federal prosecutors, up to $1 billion has been stolen just in these three schemes.

Remarkable.

And what state officials have said was that fraud essentially became the business model and that these people were acting kind of above board. They had office space that they leased all around town. They had websites. They had business cards. and they were sort of stealing staggering amounts of money in plain sight and state officials tasked with overseeing and supervising these programs were just paying the invoices that came in.

Wow.

I spoke to a defense lawyer who has represented people involved in some of these schemes and he said that among the people who were stealing money over the years they kind of came to think that it had become so easy to tap into these funds and you know get rich fraudulently that they kind of assumed state officials were tolerating this if not outright authorizing it. And the way he described it was, you know, it was like people were stealing from the cookie jar one day and the next morning they had refilled it.

You're saying this went far beyond just pandemic fraud and that almost everyone involved in these schemes was Somali Americans. But if the figures were so big, how did it go unnoticed?

That is a great question that state officials are really struggling to answer, but I think it's useful to go back in time a little bit and kind of remember the context in which this took hold. So, there were red flags that emerged in 2020 when money was gushing into this program to feed children. And when state officials felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of business owners who wanted in on the program, who wanted to be serving meals and be reimbursed for them, and when they started reviewing the invoices that were coming to them, they had questions. And those questions were met with an extraordinary accusation

which was what

the largest group that was organizing meal providers in this program was called feeding our future. It was a nonprofit organization and in response to questions from state officials. They essentially said the state was sloww walking these new petition for people who wanted in on the program because they were being racist against East African immigrants. Hm.

And I think it's useful to remember what was happening in the state at the time. This fight is unfolding as Minnesota is grappling with the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd, which of course set off a national reckoning over race. So in the state at that time, nobody wanted to be called a racist, even if it was wholly unfounded. And I think the consensus now among people who have watched the sequence of events was that that really had a paralyzing effect on people in state government who knew something funny was going on but didn't really want to stick their necks out and stop it.

Right. This was happening in a very particular place at a very particular time when tensions over race are extremely high.

Correct. But I think there's another layer to this and that is that Somali Americans have become politically quite powerful in the state and I think Democratic lawmakers have seen them as a really vital constituency and there were instances in which the people who were responsible for some of these fraud schemes came to state lawmakers and asked for help, asked for intervention or became important donors. to their campaigns. So, I think there is a sense that beyond the threat of being called racist, some Democratic elected officials in the state were just really worried that any action they took to question or intervene in a way that would maybe stop these schemes could have alienated a really important constituency.

Got it. So, there was a perceived political risk there. Eventually though, prosecutors do start to go after this, right? So, as the details of this yearslong billion dollar scandal start to spill out into the open, do motans start to reckon with how this threat of accusing people of racism was used as a tool to allow this fraud to go on?

Well, that certainly caused a huge amount of outrage in the state, but I don't think anything necessarily changed in the immediate aftermath. It was actually later, it was this year, this summer, when there was a change of guard at the local US attorney's office in Minnesota. And what happened was the prosecutor who had been leading these fraud cases, Joe Thompson, became the acting US attorney. And he took it upon himself to really turn up the volume on the nature and the scope of the problem. He started giving press conferences and interviews in which it started feeling like he was doing more than just indicting individuals who were committing fraud. He started speaking in a way that felt like he was indicting the whole system that had allowed this to metastasize. And his argument was we can't indict our way out of this problem. There's just too many people who are stealing. There's too many programs that are now vulnerable. And unless and until people in the state truly start wrestling with what has taken root and start implementing stronger safeguards, the state is going to lose its ability to provide services to people who actually need them. And in my interview with him, he for the first time addressed the racial dimension of this and said that from his vantage point, weaponizing allegations of racism in Minnesota during the period when this happened played a big role in inhibiting a more forceful response from the kind of people who could have stopped this on the front end. So it is at this point a place that's doing some soularching about what happens when you know it's so lacks in the enforcement of its own rules and regulations around these liberal policies that those policies start to get taken advantage of and and potentially end up turning people against them.

Correct.

And in recent weeks we start seeing lawmakers start asking some of the right questions. we start seeing the governor implement stronger safeguards to try to prevent fraud and to detect fraud in other programs. So, I think we're seeing kind of the early phases of a constructive reckoning that people here were hoping would lead to less fraud. However, once this issue crosses the radar of the White House, once it's something that captures President Trump's imagination, that reckoning starts to take a very different shape.

We'll be right back.

Ernesto, you just told us that things on the ground in Minnesota have taken a very different turn since Trump started to focus on this. And I want to understand that. But first, can we just get to the question of why Trump decided to seize on this right now? Because you've described this scandal that's been playing out in the background for a while now, for years, with this steady drum beat of revelations coming out over time.

Yeah, I think there were a sequence of events that turned this into a front burner issue for the White House. The first one was a report by Chris Rufo, the conservative activist, which created the inference that some of the money that had been stolen in these schemes in Minnesota had wound up in the hands of terrorists in Africa, namely members of the group al-Shabaab in Somalia. So, this is a figure who has taken on universities and has become very influential in conservative circles. So the fact that he drew attention to this made it land in Washington DC

and Rufo here is specifically saying that this money from the fraud that it has a link to terrorism.

That's right. And to be clear, prosecutors have drawn no such link. None of these federal cases have featured any link whatsoever to terrorism. But nonetheless, the headline on this piece was quote, "The largest funer of al-Shabaab is the Minnesota taxpayer."

Wow. Okay. So, that got a lot of attention whether it was true or not.

That's right. And then a few days later, we published a piece that walked readers through how fraud got so pervasive in Minnesota and that examined the role racism and politics played in allowing it to metastasize over the years. And all this was happening at the same time as people in the nation's capital were reeling from that horrific shooting of two members of the National Guard. The gunman in that case was an Afghan man who had been admitted in recent years into the country. And I think that added an element that the administration had more political cover to be more draconian in its immigration crackdown, particularly as it pertained to countries that are riven with instability and conflict.

Right? This has really become a moment where the administration has turned its focus to specific groups of immigrants from places that, as you said, have a reputation for instability, for conflict. And the message the White House has been sending about these people is that they're importing cultures into America that are not welcome. You know, Steven Miller, Trump's domestic policy adviser, recently posted this on social media. He said, quote, "No magic transformation occurs when people from failed states cross borders." And then in his comments on Tuesday, Trump seems to pick up right where Miller left off.

That's right. And the desire by President Trump and people in his circle to limit immigration from specific countries dates back to his first term, obviously, and was met with tremendous push back both from the public and from the courts. I think now though they may feel that they have a little more leverage to push this through, to get more people in handcuffs and out of the country and to close the door to American immigration based on nationality. And at that cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Trump said the United States was at a crossroads.

You know, our country is at a tipping point. We could go bad. We're at a tipping point. I don't know if people mind me saying that, but I'm saying it. Uh, we could go one way or the other.

He said that he was fed up with people coming here from impoverished, conflictridden countries and as he sees it, leeching off the welfare state.

The welfare is like 88%. They contribute nothing. I don't want them in our country. I'll be honest with you. Okay. Somebody would say, "Oh, that's not politically correct." I don't care. I don't want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stakes.

It also just strikes me that this is all happening, this conversation so much more out in the open than it was in Trump's first term. I mean, I think a lot of us will remember the comment that Trump made about hole countries. That was behind closed doors. That was a comment made in private that was later revealed. Now he's doing this in front of his cabinet, in front of the cameras rolling.

Yeah, I think there's a sense that in this current era, they feel emboldened to say the quiet part out loud and to say things that would have been unimaginable and careerending for mainstream politicians in the not tooistant past. But all of a sudden, we are seeing these ideas and these notions become mainstream policies and mainstream subjects of debate. And to be clear, the people that Trump is talking about here are Somali, most of whom you've told us have legal status or are citizens. So I want to ask given that, what do you expect the ICE operations to look like there? I mean, what are they going to do? Who are they looking for?

Yeah, I think this is a very challenging mission for ICE and I think it's likely to look very different from what we've seen earlier this year in places like Chicago or Los Angeles. You know, for starters, the number of people who may be subject to deportation appears to be pretty small. We may be talking about just a few hundred people who may have outstanding deportation orders and who can sort of be put into the system. And there's kind of a more mundane challenge and that is that this week has been bone chilling in Minnesota and people are spending as little time as possible on the streets and agents I think are facing real pain if they're out and about knocking on doors, staking out businesses and residences. That in and of itself is going to be a monumental challenge for ICE.

Can we pull back here for a minute? Because it's worth saying what we're seeing here isn't just an immigration operation. Trump's comments and these actions seem to be just as much about delegitimizing a group of people who either immigrated here and became American citizens or their parents did. The president is calling into question their Americanness and really calling into question whether your ability as an immigrant or a child of immigrants to call yourself an American depends on where you're from.

Yeah, I think this is a really painful question that Somali immigrants are now wrestling with is, you know, what do you do to prove that you're an American? like to what length do you need to go to truly feel like you belong and that you're part of the fabric of this nation? We're talking about people in many cases who were born here and have known no other homeland. Others arrived here decades ago and have long considered themselves patriots who have been helping build the state, paying taxes, working in really difficult jobs. So yeah, I think this really leaves people with unsettling questions about what they need to do to be brought into the fold of this country in this political era and just how much further will this crackdown and this cloud of suspicion reach? What shape could this take in the months ahead? And I'd imagine whether their Americanness could be called into question anytime a single or a few members of their community make a mistake.

Absolutely. You know, we've heard from local elected officials who say they're deeply concerned that the stage is set for widespread civil rights violations.

The vast majority of our Somali community are citizens. So what he who he just attacked isn't just Somali. Who he attacked is Somali Americans. who he attacked as Americans.

St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter look back to history.

I believe that the sacred moments in American history are the moments we've had to decide who gets to be included in the Wii. Do we mean black people? Do we mean women? Do we mean immigrants? Who is a part of the Wii when we say we the people? And he said we should be thinking of this moment as one that may define who we are as Americans and as a nation.

And Ernesto, what about the reckoning that you described happening in Minnesota around the original scandal that prompted all of this, the fraud? I mean, you had said that the state was really starting to have a conversation about how this fear of being perceived as racist or called racist, the fear of a backlash had led to this very well-intentioned system being totally corrupted. Where does that conversation stand now?

Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to watch how this unfolds in the months ahead. You know, on the one hand, we're in a moment where nobody can turn a blind eye to the fact that fraud is a huge and systemic problem for Minnesota. There's going to be a governor's election next year. And Tim Walls, who's a Democrat, could lose that race if the people who are challenging him on the right from the Republican party succeed in making fraud the defining issue in the race. I think there's broad agreement that you need systemic change and that you need strong safeguards. And I think also we're starting to see a reckoning among people in the Somali community about the fact that this is a big problem and has created a significant perception issue that many people are now paying the price for.

But just as you know, Minnesota seemed ready to start having a more frank and constructive conversation about race and even to just talk about the fact that Somali were largely responsible for these cases of fraud. It's now been bulldozed by the debate over immigration and the xenophobic rhetoric that we're hearing from the president.

Right?

It's going to be really hard to disentangle these two issues. And I think the pragmatic change that you know will likely happen in the months ahead is going to be really hard to divorce from the national politics.

Well, Ernesto, thanks so much.

Natalie, it's been a pleasure.

We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, President Trump announced a plan to weaken fuel efficiency requirements for tens of millions of new cars and light trucks, calling them a scam. It was his latest move to gut fuel restrictions put in place by the Biden administration to help address climate change. Trump said the efficiency requirements made cars too costly for automakers to build and too expensive for Americans to buy. The administration claimed the new rules would shave $1,000 off the cost of a new car.

And in a report that's scheduled to be released on Thursday, the Pentagon's acting inspector general said that defense secretary Pete Hgsith risked endangering American troops earlier this year when he used a private messaging app to discuss military plans. The Pentagon's internal inquiry centered on Hexath's role in a group chat on Signal, the encrypted messaging app, where he discussed imminent strikes in Yemen with other senior Trump officials. The chat became public because a journalist was added to the group by mistake.

Today's episode was produced by Diana Wyn, Nina Feldman, and Stella Tan. It was edited by MJ Davis Lynn and Michael Benois. Contains music by Alicia Etup and Marian Lozano. And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That's it for the daily. I'm Natalie Kitroof. See you tomorrow.