Somali Immigrants Fled Climate Change. Now They’re Facing ICE.
In Somali culture, there is a famous adage: “Calaf waa labo cagood.” It translates to “Happiness is two feet,” and denotes deep-rooted traditions of movement and migration. Somalis have been caught in civil war and unrest for decades, and many have migrated to Kenya, Ethiopia, Europe, and the United States.
For months, Trump has denigrated Somalis, and Somalia. In December, he went on a racist tirade, calling Somalia “the worst country in the world,” where people “run around killing each other,” and calling Somali-born Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar “garbage.” The Trump administration then began targeting the Somali American community in Minnesota and Maine with Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The Department of Homeland Security has reopened thousands of refugee claims in Minnesota, and is about to end the decade-long Temporary Protected Status for Somalis, giving those living in the U.S. only a few months to leave or face deportation.
But what Trump—and the political discourse focused on conflict-driven migration out of Somalia—misses is the pervasive role of climate change in people’s decisions to move both in and out of Somalia. Persistent drought—made a hundred times more likely due to warming caused by fossil fuel emissions—is affecting Somali people’s decisions to either relocate internally or migrate across international borders.
Somalia’s contribution to climate change is almost nonexistent—estimates say it accounts for about 0.08 percent of global emissions. But the country faces devastating consequences of climate change, with average temperatures rising by 1.7 degrees Celsius (over three degrees Fahrenheit) since 1970. From 2020 to 2023, the East Africa region had five failed rainy seasons, an unprecedented drought and climatic episode not seen in 40 years, which led to 70 percent crop loss, three million livestock deaths, and the displacement of about 2.9 million people in Somalia, according to some estimates. Even today, Somalia is in the midst of a drought emergency; there has been no rain since last year, and hundreds of families have moved to find food and water in the Bari region of northern Somalia.
Climate scientists analyzed survey data from the U.N.’s refugee agency across Somalia’s 18 administrative regions from 2016 to 2019, and found that even small changes in temperature or rainfall can have measurable effects on displacement. A one-to-two-degree Celsius rise in the local monthly temperature leads to a tenfold increase in displacement, while a nearly four-inch reduction in monthly rainfall leads to a fourfold increase in the number displaced. People impacted by drought represented the largest number of displaced people within the country.
“We don’t see displacement from drought right away,” said Lisa Thalheimer, climate scientist at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis and lead author of the study. “When there are drought events, people tend to collaborate,” she told me. “They try to help each other out. It takes people a couple of months to leave one part of Somalia to go to another.”
Traditionally, Somali pastoralists had resilient ways to deal with changes in rainfall and drought patterns, where families migrated and moved on a regular basis, even crossing borders in the process. But the nature of climatic changes—and conflict—overwhelmed their traditional capacities, leading to more rural-urban migration within the country and in East Africa.
In 2024, Amnesty International interviewed people from central and southern Somalia in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, to study the effects of the four-year-long drought from 2020 to 2023. They found that rivers drying up between the Jubba and Shabelle areas led both agricultural and pastoralist communities to flee to overcrowded camps within Somalia, and then across the border to the Dadaab camp. People initially relied on their community for food and water and only decided to migrate when their social system was overstretched, prompting entire families or clans to abandon villages and move internally or across the border.
People who fled due to drought and floods were new arrivals in the Dadaab refugee camp, David Ngira, a researcher for Amnesty International who led the study, told me. Those who had fled conflict had been in the camp longer. While people displaced by conflict are protected by international law, those who move due to climate-driven drought are not considered refugees.
But narratives that characterize Somali migration as drought- or conflict-driven miss how interconnected and multifaceted the decision to move can be, migration scholars argue. Surveys can capture immediate triggers but cannot explain the structural context of people’s mobility. It’s well established that what makes drought a disaster or how it leads to famine is inherently political.
“Drought does not necessarily lead to famine and does not always lead to migration,” said Abdi Samatar, a Somali scholar and geographer at the University of Minnesota. Samatar—who is also a member of the Pan-African Parliament—argues Somalia’s current “political catastrophe” is driven partly by historical Cold War dynamics that produced civil war and state collapse. Somalis were unable to “put Humpty Dumpty back together in their country,” and in the absence of government support, “people have to do what they can for themselves,” Samatar added.
Journalists have documented perilous journeys young Somalis can take to travel by road through Ethiopia, Sudan, Libya—and then by boat across the Mediterranean to Europe. This migration is commonly known as going on tahriib, a journey into an unknown terrain. Tahriib used to describe people fleeing the civil war in the 1990s, but today it refers to young Somali men—and to a lesser extent women—migrating to Europe, facilitated by smugglers.
Social scientists say that diasporic ties lead people to migrate from East Africa to Europe or the U.S., where people construct social networks across borders. Somalis in refugee camps in Kenya often aspire to live in Minnesota in the U.S. Many moved to Minnesota after civil war erupted in the country in 1988. Fifty-eight percent of Somalis in Minnesota were born in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and of the foreign-born in Minnesota, almost 87 percent are naturalized citizens.
But the way politicians talk about Somali Americans ignores the role the U.S. played in creating this immigrant and refugee community—whether through exacerbating climate change or playing a role in the civil war. The U.S. is the top historical emitter of greenhouse gases. It was no bystander to the civil war in Somalia, and has had a long history of military engagements in the country until today.
None of this history seems to inform the current administration’s approach. Refugee admissions are the lowest they’ve ever been, with a special carve-out for white South Africans to claim refugee status. In late February, after reopening thousands of refugee claims in Minnesota, the White House said ICE agents would be empowered to detain legal refugees in the U.S. indefinitely for “aggressive rescreening.” After leaving a home destabilized in part by U.S. actions, many Somalis are now confronting fresh challenges in the country that was supposed to be offering them safe haven.