By David Morgan
WASHINGTON, Dec 7 (Reuters) – White House border czar Tom Homan on Sunday defended President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota, saying the state is home to a large illegal Somali community despite local officials’ comments that the vast majority of Somalis in the U.S. are American citizens.
Homan denied, however, that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had stepped up its deportation campaign in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area in response to Trump’s comments last week about Somali immigrants, whom the president called “garbage” that should be removed from the country.
Homan also said ICE agents are not targeting people based on their appearance.
“I’m not aware of what President Trump was thinking when he said that,” Homan told CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “But I agree with President Trump. From day one, he has said we are concentrated on public safety threats and national security threats.”
“We also know there’s a large illegal Somali community there, that there’s a large illegal alien community there,” he said, without providing evidence. “We’re going to arrest every illegal alien that we find there.”
U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Somali community’s most high-profile member and a target of Trump’s ire, on Sunday reiterated her criticism of the president’s comments about Somalis.
“It’s completely disgusting,” Omar told the CBS “Face the Nation” program, echoing comments she made to Reuters earlier this week. “These are Americans that he is calling garbage, and we feel like there is an unhealthy obsession that he has on the Somali community and an unhealthy and creepy obsession that he has with me.”
About 80,000 Somalis live in Minnesota, mostly in the Twin Cities metro region. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey has said the vast majority are U.S. citizens.
Most Somalis born outside the United States came as refugees from Somalia’s brutal, decades-long civil war, which triggered an exodus of more than 1 million people starting in 1991. The United States began issuing visas to Somali refugees in 1992.
Trump’s immigration crackdown has largely been met with open support or side-stepping of the issue by Republicans who control the Senate and House of Representatives.
U.S. Senator John Curtis, a Utah Republican, said on Sunday that ICE operations are leading to unnecessary fear in U.S. communities.
“I think that to the extent that ICE is not transparent, it brings this fear into a community, and we’ve got to get rid of that fear,” he told CNN.
Asked to comment on Trump’s disparaging remarks about Somalis, Curtis called for a more deliberate effort to make immigrants feel welcome and to make life better in the United States: “If more of us would do that, it would matter less what an individual said.”
(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Sergio Non and Edmund Klamann)
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