They take such joy in their cruelty.
On Tuesday, after the federal government announced it was suspending temporary protected status for thousands of Somali immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security tweeted a menacing portrait of President Donald Trump.
“I am the captain now,” it read. It was a reference to a scene in the movie “Captain Phillips,” where Somali pirates take over an American container ship.
Hilarious, right?
This is what this country is now. It has always been a place where cruelty and racism could flourish. But it’s been a long time since the bigotry was this open, and had the full weight of the federal government behind it.
“When I came here, it was beautiful,” said Abdi Yusuf, head of the Somali Development Center in Dorchester, an immigrant services organization he co-founded 30 years ago. “I fell in love with this country…I never had to fear anybody.”
Now, he said, Somali Americans “feel we are under attack by the most powerful office in the world, and people are scared.” Some of his clients, who come from many countries, see the videos of masked ICE agents brutalizing and kidnapping people in Minnesota and elsewhere and are afraid to leave their homes.
The president has particular disdain for Somalis, who have the two qualities he and his cultists most despise: They are Black, and they are Muslim.
“Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania in December. “But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
This is an administration run by and for white nationalists. Official government communications parrot fascist slogans, urging Real Americans to protect their “one heritage,” recruiting more ICE agents to take their country back, trucking in imagery where all of the heroes are white, and wiping others from the record, including in museums and classrooms.
The administration claims it has seized on Somali immigrants and launched a brutal invasion of Minnesota because dozens of Somali Americans there were involved in a scheme to defraud safety net services — crimes for which they are already being prosecuted and punished.
Meanwhile, this administration’s own operatic corruption is entirely out in the open. There’s nothing Somalis and others can do to avoid Trump’s wrath. Like so many other immigrants, they have followed all the rules, and submitted to extensive vetting, to get here. Most of the people being taken by wilding packs of ICE agents have no criminal histories.
This is about ridding the country of as many non-white people as possible, no matter what it costs us now, and in the decades to come. One in five workers in Massachusetts is foreign-born. A quarter of those who work in education and healthcare are immigrants. Here, as in other parts of the country, we desperately need them.
“This country is built by immigrants from all over the world,” Yusuf said. “We were always very proud of this. But nowadays it looks like the Brown and Black are not so welcome.”
So many immigrants buy into the stories America tells itself: That this is a beacon of freedom and opportunity, where hard work means a chance at a good life for them, and a better one for their children. A citizenship ceremony is the most American place on earth.
Yusuf Abdi, fled Somalia as a young man in 2004 after his father, an army general, was assassinated in front of his family by the group that became Al Shabaab. He came to the United States as a refugee, and became a citizen in 2014.
“I was very lucky to come to the United States,” Abdi said. A career service manager at the International Institute of New England,in Lowell, Abdi helps resettle other immigrants – he said he’s placed some 5,000 of them in jobs over the years. Along the way, he started a family, earned two graduate degrees, and finally was reunited with his mother and a brother who joined him here.
“Because of the help I got, I always think about what I can contribute back to my new country,” Abdi said.
His new country is fast becoming a place that is no longer worthy of him.
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