President Trump drew sharp backlash on Wednesday after posting a video of Somali American children celebrating kindergarten graduation at a K-8 school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Community leaders said the post turned a school moment into a political target and helped fuel anti-Somali and anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The video, which WCCO blurred to protect the children’s faces, carried a caption from another account saying, “Every girl is in a hijab... in kindergarten.” That line and the post around it quickly became the focus of a public warning from faith and community leaders who gathered Wednesday morning at Karmel Mall in Minneapolis to condemn what they called the public targeting of Somali students.
Imam Yusuf Abdulle said the country’s leadership was attacking children. “The highest level of our government is attacking children. Imagine that,” he said at the gathering. Minnesota’s chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the president put lives at risk by posting the image on a global platform, and Malika Dahir said the outrage was about more than one incident. “We are here not because of one incident, but a pattern,” she said.
Dahir pointed back to a recent stretch of hostility that already had the community on edge. She said leaders had stood at the same spot just a couple of months ago after a school bus was set on fire, adding that the pattern should trouble everyone. That earlier episode came after a federal raid of daycares and autism resource centers suspected of fraud in May, a sequence many Somali and Muslim families saw as part of a broader rise in threats.
The dispute did not stay on one side of the political divide. This week, Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher said a small number of Somali youths in gangs were responsible for over a dozen homicides in the metro. On Tuesday, Minneapolis City Council Vice President Jamal Osman called those remarks disappointing and said, “Somali youth deserve investment, dignity, opportunity and respect — not public officials using their platform to stereotype them.”
Abdisalam Adam drew the line even more plainly on Wednesday. “Lumping the Somali community together and naming everything Somali is a big problem that we need to call out,” he said. That warning underscored the sharpest fear in the room: that a post about children in a school uniform can collapse into a label that reaches far beyond the children in the video and onto an entire community.
What comes next is not a policy change or an official inquiry. It is whether the post keeps spreading, whether more leaders answer it, and whether the children and the school now have to live with the attention it brought them. For Somali American families in Minneapolis and St. Paul, that is already the point.
