Introduction
Since the 2024 United States of America (USA) presidential elections, I have largely stopped following American news. It has become difficult to watch how each major policy decision harms non-white lives. My frustration extends to the opposition liberal Democratic Party, which rarely restores any sense of normalcy. Yet I must ask: has the USA ever truly been normal for non-white people? The liberal democratic party frequently adopts a passive stance regarding violations of minority rights in America. For instance, their response to Roe v. Wade.[1] They always seem to be waiting, doing nothing.
Still, one story has been impossible to ignore: the invented Somali ‘illegal alien’crisis in Minnesota. The American media frames it as a sudden emergency, a failure of border control, demanding immediate state action. From an African legal studies perspective, this spectacle is neither sudden nor new. It is the recycling of an old political device: constructing non-white mobility as inherently threatening and the use of the law to govern that fear.
Modern human rights discourse frames colonialism as a historical phenomenon and characterises contemporary refugee crises primarily as policy challenges. This view is fundamentally flawed. Colonialism extended beyond territorial conquest; it was a global project that imposed new legal regimes, educational structures, and racial reclassifications, dividing subjects into the ‘civilised’ and the ‘other.’[2] These divisions did not disappear after colonial independence. They evolved into borders, bureaucracies, and refugee regimes. When Somali communities in Minnesota describe raids, surveillance, and arbitrary evictions, they are not encountering a new phenomenon but familiar subjections of control reminiscent of colonial governance disguised in digital paperwork and national-security rhetoric.
The good refugee, the bad refugee, and the Somali problem.
Arendt’s critique of totalitarianism remains influential, yet is nonetheless shaped by colonial assumptions in her construction of the Blacks living in a dark continent, outside the realm of rights, political or civil recognition.[3] For Arendt, the lack of political humanity meant the loss of the ‘right to have rights’ – being fundamentally rightless. [4] Davis demonstrates how this logic persists in contemporary Australian media through the division of non-white refugees into ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ The good refugee is exceptional, inspiring, and useful – close enough to “Self” to be tolerated.[5] The bad refugee is criminal, disposable, and culturally alien. Even the praise for the good refugee reinforces this racial hierarchy by making humanity conditional.
In the United States, the Somali communities are caught as scapegoats amid the ongoing tension surrounding race, religion, and migration. These tensions were reflected in Trump’s campaign promises, which materialised as travel bans, surveillance, racist denaturalisation rhetoric, and the termination of protective statuses.[6] Minnesota, home to 84,000 people of Somali descent, many of whom are US citizens or legal residents, became a site for this battle. Reports of over 100 ICE agents deployed, lists targeting hundreds of Somalis for arbitrary evictions, families carrying passports to avoid detention, and the consequence of this battle: empty shops, disrupted schools, and monitored clinics.[7]
These measures show that the real target is not just illegality but Somali and non-white existence itself. The idea of the ‘illegal alien species’ legitimises a climate in which any Black or Muslim body is suspect. Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey warned that, “American citizens will be detained for no other reason than the fact that they look like they are Somali.”[8] This is not simply a technical matter or a case of xenophobia. It is a contemporary racial project that decides who belongs.
Rights as ‘value police’ … until the subject is non-white, Black, Muslim, African
Western liberal thought often imagines rights as individual entitlements that act as ‘effective trumps’ over state power.[9] Rights are thus positioned as ‘value police,’ preserving democracy’s moral self-image as principled, lawful, and constrained by ethical boundaries.[10] Yet the Somali problem reveals how fragile this image is. The rights of Somalians are systematically violated, yet these violations are often met with rhetorical affirmations of rights, as if the perpetrators are merely forgetful. In reality, perpetrators do not forget; rather, they actively redefine who is considered human and thus entitled to these rights. Once Somalians are reclassified as illegal aliens or as nonhuman, their rights no longer serve as protections but instead become obstacles, cited primarily in the repetitive assertions of liberal advocates.
Language, culture and the return of race
Power, as Foucault reminds us, operates through language, institutions, and daily practices.[11] Refugee regimes now employ media narratives, algorithms, and law to create and sustain a constant sense of crisis. We see this in UNESCO’s post-war rejection of biological racism, which nevertheless permitted race to reemerge under the guise of culture.[12] This signals what I call the ‘blacksmith’s reheated evolutions of othering’: old colonial stories retold as concerns of integration, values and national security.
The Somali panic fits this new story. Cultural differences are framed as a pathology requiring control. Surveillance becomes care; deportation becomes protection; bureaucracy becomes rational. This manufactured crisis is not a failure of law alone but an approach that romanticises the value of rights while allowing racialised outsiders to be governed as a problem.
[1] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973). This was an important Supreme Court decision where the Court said the Constitution protects the right to have an abortion before a fetus can survive outside the womb. The Democratic Party, even when it was in charge, did not codify the abortion rights set by Roe v. Wade for more than fifty years and depended on the courts and election results instead of taking strong action in Congress. After the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling, the Party turned the crisis into a campaign issue, avoiding admitting deeper problems in the system.
[2] M Mamdani ‘Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism’ (1996) Princeton University Press 16, 17.
[3] H Arendt ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ (1951) Harcourt Brace 186.
[4] Arendt (n 3) 187.
[5] RM Davis, ‘The “bad” and exceptionally “good”: constructing the African refugee’ (2020) Media International Australia 179(1) 114.
[6] Trump admin ends protected status for Somalis amid Minneapolis crackdown, Politico (13 Jan 2026) https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/13/trump-administration-tps-somalis-minnesota-00724391 (accessed 20 January 2026)
[7] See note 7. ICE stands for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency in charge of arresting and deporting people who are unlawfully residing in the United States.
[8] J Wald, Trump, ICE target Somalis in Minneapolis; city leaders respond FOX 9 Minneapolis-St. Paul (2 December 2025) https://www.fox9.com/news/trump-administration-targeting-twin-cities-somali-community (accessed 23 January 2026)
[9] F Hoffmann ‘On the Value of Rights’ in J von Bernstorff and P Dann (eds) The Battle for International Law (2023) Routledge 199.
[10] Ibid 200.
[11] M Foucault ‘Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison’ (1977) Pantheon Books 26, 27.
[12] UNESCO ‘Statement on Race’ (1950) para 6, 8.
