President Donald Trump announced Friday evening that he is ending deportation protections for Somali nationals living in Minnesota under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, declaring the change “effective immediately.”
“Minnesota, under Governor [Tim] Walz, is a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
He continued, “I am, as President of the United States, hereby terminating, effective immediately, the Temporary Protected Status (TPS Program) for Somalis in Minnesota.”
Trump went on to claim that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State, and BILLIONS of Dollars are missing. Send them back to where they came from. It’s OVER! President DJT.”
Minnesota is home to one of the largest Somali communities in the United States. Under the TPS program, Somali nationals have been granted temporary legal status to live and work in the country due to ongoing dangerous conditions in Somalia.
In recent years, Minnesota has faced several high-profile fraud cases, most notably the Feeding Our Future scandal, in which hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 relief funds were allegedly embezzled.
Trump’s announcement follows the release of a new investigation by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, which alleges that millions of dollars connected to the Feeding Our Future scheme were funneled to the Somali terror group Al-Shabaab.
In their report, Ryan Thorpe and Christopher F. Rufo of the Manhattan Institute say they uncovered a network of fraud involving Minnesota’s Medicaid Housing Stabilization Services program, Feeding Our Future and other organizations.
They also said that federal counterterrorism sources confirmed that millions of dollars in stolen funds were sent back to Somalia and that this is how Al-Shabaab ultimately received the money.
