Rumors don’t walk in “Little Somalia.”
They run.

By noon, every café along the block had heard it: T.R.U.M.P had signed a new order, and this time it wasn’t just talk shows and campaign rallies. People said it was real, aimed straight at Somalis with precarious status in Minnesota.

Shutters went down early.
Vịt nướng, sambusas, coffee still half-full on tables — abandoned.

Suitcases appeared by doors, some dusty from the last move, some bought in a panic that morning. Mothers folded clothes in silence. Fathers kept refreshing their phones, scrolling between news sites and WhatsApp chats full of screenshots and shaky voice notes:

“He’s sending people back.”“They already took someone’s cousin in Ohio.”

“Ilhan’s office is jammed. They’re saying wait. Wait for what?”

The phone at Ilhan Omar’s district office didn’t ring — it screamed. Staffers sat shoulder to shoulder, headsets pressed tight, as voices poured in:

“Will they take my mother?”“I’ve been here 25 years.”

“Do I send my kids to school tomorrow or keep them home?”

In this fictional moment, Omar stood in the doorway of her own office, one hand on the frame, listening to the chaos she could not hang up on. Every call was a version of the same question: “Are we safe?”

And she didn’t have an honest answer.

Cable news was already running with the ugliest possible headline:

“SOMALIS IN MINNESOTA JUST SURRENDERED – TRUMP STARTS SENDING THEM BACK.”

It wasn’t true — not in the way the chyron implied. Nobody had marched to the airport in a single line, waving white flags. Nobody “surrendered.”

What was real was something quieter, more devastating: the feeling that an entire community was being told, yet again, that they were temporary, negotiable, a policy note that could be edited at midnight.

Behind the scenes in D.C., anonymous officials framed it as “finally enforcing what was always meant to be temporary.” They spoke in phrases like “orderly returns,” “regional stabilization,” and “restoring the integrity of the system.”

On the street in Minneapolis, that translated to:

“Pack a bag. You might be next.”

At a small mosque near Cedar Avenue, the evening prayer crowd was bigger than usual. Men and women arrived not just to pray, but to ask each other the questions they were too afraid to ask out loud at home.

“Do you think they’ll go door to door?”“My son is a citizen. Will they take him too?”

“I worked for the city for 10 years. Does that matter?”

The imam, in this fictional telling, didn’t give them false certainty. He spoke instead about patience, dignity, and about not letting fear turn them against each other. But when he stepped off the minbar, he checked his phone like everyone else, waiting for any update that might make this nightmare less real.

On talk radio and social media, the word “cleanup” started to appear — not from officials, but from the loudest voices eager to spin the moment into a victory lap.

“It’s about time.”
“We’re finally cleaning up the mess.”

They said “cleanup.”
The people hearing them felt something closer to erasure.

Back in Washington, cameras were trained on Ilhan Omar as she stepped in front of a podium, eyes ringed with exhaustion. She didn’t shout. She didn’t cry. She spoke slowly, like every sentence was holding back a flood.

“These are our neighbors,” she said.
“They work in your schools, your hospitals, your streets.

You can disagree with the policy. You can argue about law.
But don’t you dare call families ‘a mess’ to be cleaned.”

Opposite her, surrogates for T.R.U.M.P went on air insisting this was about law and order, not cruelty. They talked about expired protections, broken systems, the need to “reset” expectations. Some genuinely believed it. Others sounded like they were reading from the same focus-tested script.

Out in Minnesota, none of that nuance mattered.

What mattered was that kids were asking their parents,

“Are we going back?”

And parents, for the first time in years, didn’t have the courage to lie and say,

“No. Never.”

In the end, this fictional story isn’t about a community that “surrendered.”

It’s about what happens when a country tells thousands of people for decades:

“You’re safe. For now.”

And then one rumor, one order, one headline is enough to remind them that “for now” was always a countdown.

Whether you cheer the policy or condemn it, the shock in “Little Somalia” isn’t theatrics.

It’s the sound of people realizing that the life they built in America can still be treated like luggage:
tagged, sorted, and sent back —

even after they started calling this place home.