The recent targeting of the Somali community by leaders charged with earning the trust of the public is nothing short of misguided, dangerous and reprehensible.

This came to a head when President Donald Trump called Somali immigrants garbage and said they would cause the United States to go the wrong way.

Trump isn’t just talking for the sake of talking either. He declared that he will revoke temporary status from Somalis in Minnesota, which is home to the nation’s largest Somali population.

Trump and his allies are largely justifying their behavior by citing the Feeding Our Future fraud scandal, for which 61 individuals, many of Somali descent, have been convicted of stealing money meant for hungry children during the pandemic.

University of Minnesota political science professor August Nimtz said there should have been more voices from both outside of and inside the Somali community talking about the Feeding Our Future scandal, as avoiding talking about the scandal and its context allowed for it to be used to justify xenophobia.

“There was a tendency, I think, to sort of not talk about this, or to be afraid that if we talk about it, we would sound like we’re being racist or xenophobic and so on,” Nimtz said. “In my opinion, that was a mistake.”

University first-year student Ramla Hassan said labeling the entire Somali community as fraudsters has dangerous consequences, as she has heard of her family members recently facing harassment while going about their daily lives.

“People who did not bat an eye towards the Somali community now know them as garbage because the president says so, and I don’t think he’s even encountered more than 20 Somalis in his whole life,” Hassan said. “It’s just that they use some stuff that some individuals do to shape a whole community.”

Still, anti-Somali sentiments did not start with the Feeding Our Future scandal.

Nimtz said much of the hatred toward Somalis in the U.S. can be explained by racism and Islamophobia after 9/11, as well as the exploitation of economic frustrations after the 2008 recession by politicians who used the Somali community as scapegoats.

“The combination of both Muslim xenophobia and African xenophobia makes the Somali people a perfect target for the xenophobes, for when the time is needed for xenophobes to come out and vent their venom,” Nimtz said.

But even in trying to justify their institutional hatred, those pushing a warped image of the Somali community often manipulate the facts or straight-up lie to support their statements.

House Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), a Minnesotan lawmaker who bears the regrettable distinction of being my Congressman, exemplified this tactic on television when he made the very inaccurate claim that Somalis committed 80% of the crime in the Twin Cities.

However, Somalis are not the only ethnic group to have been targeted by the blatant xenophobia illustrated by Trump and his allies. 

Minnesota has a relatively large population of the Karen people, an ethnic group from Myanmar. In November, the Trump administration announced that it would revoke temporary protected status from around 4,000 people from Myanmar, referencing the embattled nation’s preparation to host elections as a reason for the change, despite the State Department warning against traveling there due to civil unrest and armed conflict.

Through his immigration policy, Trump is forcing thousands of people to return to their war-torn home country while limiting refugee entries to mostly white South Africans, who Trump has labeled genocide victims despite no evidence of a genocide.

It’s hard to explain this policy shift with anything but racist assimilation politics.

Nimtz said the U.S. has a long history of viewing various ethnic groups as not fitting in with society, even including immigrants from Eastern Europe or Ireland.

“For a long time, certain people, in theory, could not be assimilated into the American melting pot,” Nimtz said.

This prejudicial presumption not only blames innocent people for things they did not do but also seeks to dismiss the contributions of individual members of the unassimilatable group to our society.

My grandfather was a Latvian immigrant, fleeing the nation during the war and settling in the U.S. after his native country became part of the USSR. 

If the government had decided that my grandfather should have been blamed for everything done by people from Soviet nations, he could very well have been caught up in the Red Scare hysteria, preventing him from serving his adoptive country in the Vietnam War or as an airline pilot after his military career. 

First-year student Nasra Jama said the current political rhetoric around the Somali community reflects a discouraging ignorance in the role that so many Somalis play in Minnesota’s society.

“I think to make a generalized statement about a community, you have to not understand that community at all,” Jama said. “Especially calling them garbage.”

Dismissing a whole group of people who can become our next doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs is not only discriminatory but entirely counterproductive. So many of our nation’s greatest thinkers, creators and heroes have been immigrants or the children of immigrants, and we cannot afford to write off their potential to satisfy our own prejudice.

We cannot be the nation that kneecaps itself by arbitrarily hating entire swaths of people for the actions of individuals. We cannot let hatred triumph over justice and reason.

We are better than this.

At least, we should be better than this.