Trump officials reopen thousands of refugee claims in Minnesota

MINNESOTA - The Homeland Security Department announced on Jan 9 that it was reviewing thousands of refugee cases in Minnesota, subjecting immigrants who had been approved for status to new interviews and background checks amid an intense federal crackdown in the state.

Homeland Security officials said the initial focus of the effort would be on the roughly 5,600 refugees in the state who do not yet have green cards. It comes as the federal government has escalated its immigration enforcement operation in the state, deploying about 2,000 officers to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region.

“Minnesota is ground zero for the war on fraud,” the department said in a statement. “This operation in Minnesota demonstrates that the Trump administration will not stand idly by as the US immigration system is weaponised by those seeking to defraud the American people.”

The effort to reexamine claims began in mid-December, and any cases of fraud and other crimes are passed along to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the statement.

Tensions between federal and local officials in Minnesota have risen after the killing of Ms Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman who was shot by a federal immigration officer on Jan 7.

Although state and local officials have urged federal agents to leave Minneapolis, Trump administration officials have pledged to continue their operations.

Documents obtained by The New York Times on Jan 8 suggested that more than 100 federal agents and officers were being deployed to Minnesota from other cities.

Some organisations that provide assistance to refugees said the federal effort was an unusual attempt to scrutinise immigrants who had completed an extensive vetting process.

Mr Eskinder Negash, president and CEO of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, said he was “deeply concerned” about the effort and that he was not aware of the federal government having targeted a group of refugees in this manner before.

“Subjecting refugees to duplicative re-interviews undermines the integrity of that process and places an unnecessary burden on individuals who have already been granted lawful admission after years of scrutiny,” Mr Negash said in a statement. “This approach risks casting undue suspicion on refugees and their families simply because they entered through a lawful humanitarian pathway under a different administration.”

Other groups said the effort would fuel more fear and anxiety in Minnesota.

“It doesn’t really have a clear rationale, other than to take away people’s status and make it easier to remove those people,” said Ms Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota. “In a lot of ways, this is a redundancy for processes that already exist.”

The Trump administration has focused on Minnesota in recent weeks after revelations about a fraud scheme that siphoned money from social service programs in the Minneapolis area in recent years. More than 90 people, most of them of Somali origin, have been charged with felonies. The president has used xenophobic language to attack Somalis living in the United States.

Mr Trump also said in an interview with the Times that his administration was taking steps to strip some naturalised Americans of their citizenship, particularly those of Somali descent. Although he said his effort was not limited to the Somali community, he declined to specify other groups his administration was targeting.

Minnesota is home to the largest diaspora of Somalis in the world. Roughly 80,000 people of Somali ancestry live in the state, and the majority are US citizens or legal permanent residents. Somali refugees began arriving in the 1990s after the Somali government collapsed and the nation descended into civil war.

The announcement on Jan 9 builds on the Trump administration’s recent efforts to tighten legal pathways for migrants to enter or remain in the United States.

In December, federal officials said they would review approved applications filed by migrants from countries subject to the president’s travel ban who entered the United States since the start of the Biden administration. The effort, they said, was necessary to promote safety and ensure that proper screening was conducted.

Federal officials have also said they will review the more than 50,000 asylum applications that were approved by the Homeland Security Department during the Biden administration. NYTIMES