President Donald Trump moved Friday to immediately terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somali nationals in the United States, a decision that places Minnesota’s large Somali diaspora squarely at the center of his latest immigration crackdown. The announcement follows weeks of escalating political pressure and comes amid a surge of national attention on investigative reports alleging widespread welfare fraud schemes tied to members of the state’s Somali community, according to The Washington Post.
In a sharply worded post on his social media platform, Trump cast Minnesota as “a hub of fraudulent money laundering activity,” declaring, “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!” His remarks marked one of the most sweeping condemnations of a specific immigrant community since his return to the White House.
TPS, created by Congress in 1990, allows the Department of Homeland Security to pause deportations for people from countries facing war, natural disasters, or comparable instability. Minnesota—home to the nation’s largest Somali-American population—has long drawn arrivals fleeing Somalia’s civil war and relying on the state’s extensive social service network. But the actual number of Somalis protected under TPS is small. A congressional report issued in August estimated that only 705 Somali nationals nationwide currently qualify.
Trump’s move arrives on the heels of a November 19 exposé in City Journal by reporters Christopher F. Rufo and R. Kortnie Thorpe, which chronicled a dramatic explosion in Medicaid-funded autism claims in Minnesota, from $3 million in 2018 to $399 million in 2023. The report detailed a federal indictment involving a woman named Hassan and her associates, who prosecutors say paid parents monthly cash kickbacks of $300 to $1,500 per child to enroll them in sham autism programs. According to federal investigators, these payouts were pegged to the level of services approved by the Department of Human Services—creating a market in which parents threatened to change providers unless the kickbacks kept pace.
Absolutely bonkers story about Somalian immigrant communities in Minnesota over-diagnosing their own kids with autism so that they can funnel billions of Medicaid dollars back to terrorist cells in Somalia. https://t.co/B37pPUUIkK pic.twitter.com/FxVboB9QIF
— Edward L Hamilton (@EdwardLHamilton) November 19, 2025
The TPS termination represents one of the most aggressive steps in Trump’s promise to overhaul immigration policy and remove millions of undocumented or humanitarian-status migrants. His administration has already revoked TPS for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians designated under President Joe Biden, while pushing forward with efforts to curtail protections for individuals from Cuba, Syria, and other nations.
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