MINNEAPOLIS — Three weeks after the Trump administration launched “Operation Metro Surge,” vendors at Karmel Mall in south Minneapolis sat alone in empty storefronts on a recent afternoon, waiting for customers who were not coming. Businesses at the sprawling complex of more than 100 shops — a commercial and community anchor for the city’s Somali community — have lost foot traffic sharply since federal immigration enforcement intensified across the region, owners and workers said.
Karmel Mall serves as both a commercial hub and a community center for Minneapolis’s Somali population, reported to be the largest in the United States, making the economic damage there a gauge of the wider toll of the administration’s immigration operation on an established ethnic business district. Business owners say the fear is not limited to undocumented residents: U.S. citizens are also staying away.
“It’s been like this for three weeks now,” said Abdi Wahid, who works at his mom’s convenience store in the mall. “Everywhere it’s all been closed up, all the stores.”
Wahid said early afternoons once brought 15 to 20 customers to the family business. These days, it is difficult to get one. Wahid is a U.S. citizen, but said the fear has spread well past immigration status.
“I think that caused a lot of people to not even want to come,” he said, because they could be targeted “just because of their race.” He cited the killing of Renee Good and an ICE raid at Roosevelt High School in south Minneapolis as events that deepened the community’s reluctance to go out.
Businesses absorb mounting losses
The economic toll at Karmel Mall — which also houses a mosque, Quran classes, and residential units — reaches across vendors. Ibrahim Dahiye, who sells electronics, said his monthly revenue has fallen by $20,000 since the operation began. He is now pooling funds with others to make rent, and his employees are too frightened to come to work. He said he keeps his passport on him at all times.
“I don’t know what we can do,” Dahiye said. “We believe in Allah, but we can’t do anything.”
Upstairs, Bashir Garad runs Safari Travel & Accounting Services. He said he has lost nearly all of his customers since the operation began. Existing clients are canceling upcoming trips, he said, worried they will not be let back into the country. Nearly all of Garad’s clients are East African and U.S. citizens, he said, but they still hesitate to travel.
“They see a lot of unlawful things going on in the city,” Garad said. “They look at something bad, and then they think some bad things may happen to them.”
Garad challenged the scope of the administration’s approach. “If there’s a criminal, there’s a criminal. Regardless, there are ways to find the criminal, but to marginalize the community’s name, and a whole people, that is unlawful.”
Government response
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that law enforcement uses “reasonable suspicion” to make arrests under the Fourth Amendment.
“A person’s immigration status makes them a target for enforcement, not their skin color, race or ethnicity,” McLaughlin said.
Context: Trump’s statements on Somali community
President Donald Trump has made repeated public statements targeting the Somali community since December, calling them “garbage” and saying “they contribute nothing,” the Associated Press reported. The AP said Trump began targeting the community following government fraud cases in Minnesota in which a majority of defendants had Somali roots.
Business owners said the impact of Operation Metro Surge extends beyond the Somali community. Many immigrants across Minneapolis are afraid to go to work or leave their homes, they said — a pattern that has compounded the economic damage to a neighborhood that depends on foot traffic from across the region.