Federal immigration authorities this week began conducting enhanced operations in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, a U.S. official told CBS News, targeting a region with a large population of the Somali immigrants President Trump often rails against. 

The surge by Immigration and Customs Enforcement is expected to target individuals in the Twin Cities area with deportation orders, the official said. The exact scope and duration of the operation are not clear so far.

The crackdown comes as Mr. Trump castigates Minnesota’s large community of Somali immigrants, regularly pointing to the country — often in incendiary terms — as a justification for his administration’s sweeping mass deportation campaign.

During a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Mr. Trump called people from Somalia “garbage” and claimed they “contribute nothing.”

“I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you,” the president said Tuesday. “Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks.” 

In recent days, the Trump administration has halted all immigration cases, including citizenship ceremonies, for people from Somalia and 18 other nations on its travel ban, and has ordered a reexamination of all green cards issued to immigrants from those countries, CBS News has reported.

And last month, Mr. Trump said he was ending a deportation protection program called Temporary Protected Status for Somali immigrants in Minnesota, claiming without evidence that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people.” The TPS program for Somalia is set to expire in March 2026, though the Department of Homeland Security has not formally announced its termination.

Mr. Trump has also brought attention to a massive public assistance fraud scandal that has dogged Minnesota politics for years, in which dozens of defendants — most of whom are of Somali descent — were accused of bilking hundreds of millions of dollars from food aid, autism services and housing programs. The president has blamed Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz for the fraud schemes and claimed Somali immigrants have “ripped off that state.”

Democratic officials and members of Minnesota’s Somali community have denounced Mr. Trump’s statements, with Walz on Thursday calling them “vile, racist lies and slander towards our fellow Minnesotans.” 

“I am not garbage,” Hamse Warfa, a Somali-born entrepreneur who lives in the Minneapolis area and runs a nationwide education nonprofit, told CBS News Minnesota. “I’m a proud American citizen.”

Minnesota has one of the country’s largest Somali populations, with some 76,000 people of Somali descent statewide — representing just over 1% of the state’s population, according to 2024 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

The state’s Somali community grew after the East African country descended into civil war in the early 1990s, causing scores of people to flee Somalia, which still faces instability, threats of insurgency and poverty. 

In some cases, Somali refugees were resettled elsewhere in the U.S. before moving to Minnesota, drawn in many cases by job opportunities, safety, good schools and a longstanding network of nonprofits in the state that assist refugees, Somali American and Macalester College professor Ahmed Samatar told CBS News Minnesota in 2019. Just over half of Somali Minnesotans arrived in the U.S. before 2010, and one in five moved to the U.S. before 2000.

As of last year, the vast majority of Somali Minnesotans were American citizens. Some 52% were born in the U.S., and another 42% are naturalized citizens, leaving just over 4,000 — or more than 5% — who don’t hold U.S. citizenship, according to Census Bureau figures.

Mr. Trump’s plan to end TPS for Somali immigrants could impact a very small number of people. Just over 700 immigrants from Somalia had been approved for TPS as of March of this year, according to federal government data. The Immigrant Law Center said Minnesota was home to 430 of those Somali TPS-holders in 2023.