100 civilians dying in terrorist battles among a population of 20 million is not a basis for a national state of emergency
Attorney General Keith X. Ellison and 15 other state attorney generals filed an amicus in the Somali lawsuit against terminating their 35-year-old ‘Temporary Protected Status’ because “civil war has raged in Somalia for the ensuing thirty five years, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, child soldiers, extrajudicial killings, sexual and gender-based violence.”
While Somalia’s government has been fighting Al-Shabab, its own local Jihadist movement, the Somalia colonist population in America is a major source of funds for the Al Qaeda linked group, and there have been relatively few civilian casualties from the fighting with civilian deaths accounting for only 2% of the casualties in 2025 (and Islamic terrorist groups often misrepresent Jihadists as civilians, so the numbers are likely lower still) and on par with some of the deaths due to Islamic terrorism suffered by western countries and Israel in particularly bad years.
100 civilians dying in terrorist battles among a population of 20 million is not a basis for a national state of emergency or a finding that no Somali Muslim can live safely in Somalia.
The brief by, among others, Ellison, who had posted, “Happy Somali Independence Day’ cited State Department warnings about traveling to Somalia, “due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, health, kidnapping, piracy” and because “[v]iolent crime is common throughout Somalia, including kidnapping and murder.” But how is that really any different than Minneapolis?
The brief is a fragmented mess of occasionally revealing statistics that tell a very different story than the one they’re intended to tell, for example, “as of 2019, over 15 percent of all Somali immigrants in Minnesota worked in home health care”, but dodges the larger Somalia paradox.
The question is whether Somalia is a wonderful place whose flag we should be waving and independence we should be celebrating, or a dangerous hellhole no one should set foot in?