On June 25, 2026, at a Faith and Freedom Coalition town hall on Capitol Hill, the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House was asked about immigrants in his home state. Here is what he said, in full:

"I don't really care where you come from. But if you come to this great country, you have to understand you're coming here to be an American. We celebrate everyone's culture. We're happy with that. As long as you are an American. Celebrate your culture, I don't care. Italian, Polish, Somali. But they don't assimilate. And if they don't assimilate, then they should go the hell back to where they came from."

Tom Emmer is the House Majority Whip. He has represented Minnesota's 6th District since 2015. Minnesota is home to roughly 107,000 Somali residents — the largest Somali community in the United States.

He wasn't caught on a hot mic. He wasn't misquoted. And he told the room he had thought about the risk and decided he didn't care:

"I would argue that I never did care, but I'm done being careful, even the least bit careful."

That was about being called racist, or Islamophobic. He said the quiet part out loud: he knows what the words sound like, and he has decided to keep saying them.

"Go back where they came from" — to a community that is 95% American citizens

Start with the plain fact that makes the sentence collapse. 95% of Somalis living in Minnesota are U.S. citizens, according to FactCheck.org's review of the data. For the overwhelming majority of the people Emmer was talking about, "where they came from" is Minnesota.

Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia and represents Minneapolis, answered him directly: "I assimilated all the way to Congress and this idiot still tells me to go back where I came from."

Rep. Angie Craig called the remarks racist. Gov. Tim Walz condemned them. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called on Congress to formally rebuke him. Doug Chapin, the Democrat running against Emmer, said Emmer seemed more worried about being called racist than about being racist. Emmer's office did not respond to requests for comment.

The number underneath it is false

The June remark didn't come out of nowhere. It rests on a claim Emmer had been making for months — that Somali Minnesotans are responsible for most of the crime in the state's biggest metro area. And that claim is not true.

On Fox Business in early December 2025, Emmer said this:

"It's not that all Somalis are committing crimes, but 80% of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities Minnesota are being committed by Somalis."

The Minnesota Reformer checked it against the state's own numbers. Two public dashboards cover exactly this question:

• Minnesota's state crime dashboard, filtered to the seven-county metro: 37% of people arrested since 2021 were Black.
• The Hennepin County Attorney's Office dashboard: 57% of cases since 2018 involved a defendant identified as Black or African-American.

Here is why those numbers demolish the claim rather than support it. Police and prosecutors record race, not nationality. Somali Minnesotans are a portion of Minnesota's Black population — not all of it. So the widest possible ceiling for Emmer's figure is 37% of metro arrests, and the real number for Somalis specifically is some fraction of that.

Emmer said 80%. The outer limit is 37%, and Somalis are only part of it.

This is a habit, not a slip. Eight months after the 80% claim, Emmer went back on Fox Business and told viewers eggs cost 78 cents and milk was under $2 — when the federal government's own price data had eggs at $2.14 a dozen and milk at $4.32 a gallon. The pattern is identical: a confident round number, delivered on cable, that the public record contradicts.

Asked to defend his own constituents, he attacked them instead

Two weeks after the Fox Business appearance, Emmer got a chance to answer for it.

On December 2, 2025, President Trump used a Cabinet meeting to attack Somali immigrants. FactCheck.org recorded the remarks: "I hear they ripped off, Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions. Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88%. I don't want them in our country." In the same stretch of remarks he described taking Somalis into the country as taking in "garbage."

On December 16, reporter Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider caught Emmer in a hallway and asked the obvious question, reported by The New Republic: did he agree with the President that the roughly 5,000 Somali residents of St. Cloud — people in Emmer's own district, whom Emmer is paid to represent — are garbage?

Emmer didn't defend them. He said Trump "raise[d] an issue that is something that we've been trying to raise for almost three years." Pressed further, he offered a new figure: "90 percent of the crimes that have been charged are from the Somali community."

So in the space of two weeks the number moved from 80% to 90%, and neither version matches any public data. A member of Congress was handed a direct opportunity to say that his constituents are not garbage, and instead he inflated the smear.

Yes, there is real fraud. No, it isn't what he said.

This deserves to be said plainly, because the fraud is real and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty.

Minnesota was defrauded. That same FactCheck.org review found the Feeding Our Future case involved claims of roughly $240 million, with the Star Tribune reporting confirmed fraud closer to $152 million as of December 2025 — and that of 86 people charged across three separate schemes, 78 were of Somali descent. Those are prosecutions, with names and case numbers.

But look at what Emmer did with them. A set of charged fraud cases is not "80% of the crimes being committed in the Twin Cities." Fraud is one category of crime; the dashboards above cover all of it. Emmer took a real prosecution involving a real subset of people and stretched it into a statement about every assault, burglary and robbery in a metro of three million. That is not calling out fraud. That is using fraud as a license to talk about a whole nationality.

And the "billions of dollars, every year" figure Trump used, which Emmer went out of his way not to dispute? The fact-checkers asked the White House how it was calculated and got no answer at all.

Minnesota Republicans have been running this play all year

Emmer isn't operating alone, and the harm isn't hypothetical.

The fraud narrative that Trump repeated at that Cabinet meeting traces back in part to a viral YouTube video of Somali-run daycares in Minneapolis — a video that Minnesota's Republican House Speaker took credit for helping steer, and that state inspectors then contradicted: investigators visited nine of the ten centers and found children at nearly every one, with no fraud violations. After the video spread, Somali-run daycares reported strangers showing up demanding to see children, threatening phone calls, and a break-in.

In March 2026, Minnesota Rep. Pete Stauber went a step further and named a bill after a nationality — the "Stop Fraud by SOMALIA Act" — and wrote a terrorist group into a child care statute.

And by January 2026, Emmer had signed on to the Sharia-Free America Caucus, telling its founders that Sharia "is radical, oppressive, and must never be allowed to gain a foothold in America" — a caucus whose central Little Rock example, when we traced it, turned out to be five houses, two of them lived in by Christians.

What the job actually is

Tom Emmer is not a backbencher shouting into a microphone. He is the House Majority Whip — the man who counts and delivers Republican votes, which makes him one of the most powerful people in Washington. When he puts a number on national television, it travels. When he declines to say his own constituents aren't garbage, that travels too.

He is also supposed to represent the Somali Minnesotans of St. Cloud, whether they voted for him or not. That is the entire job description. Instead he stood in front of a friendly audience on Capitol Hill, said people who don't meet his standard of assimilation should "go the hell back," and volunteered that he is finished being careful about it.

Minnesotans deserve a Whip who checks his numbers before he repeats them, and who defends the people he represents when the President calls them garbage. On both counts, Emmer chose the other thing — and then told us he'd chosen it on purpose.

Source

CBS Minnesota, Rep. Tom Emmer says Somalis who "don't assimilate" should "go the hell back to where they came from" (June 25, 2026). Photo via Getty Images.