Dale Strong Immigration Racist Alabama

"A Big Win for Americans": Dale Strong Celebrates a Ruling the Judge Herself Said Would Cause Irreparable Harm

Somalia has been too dangerous to deport people to since 1991. A judge just cleared the way anyway — while writing that the people losing protection had proven they would be irreparably harmed. Alabama's congressman called it a win and asked for more handcuffs.

MAGA Report Cards · Aug 17, 2026

On Saturday morning, at the monthly meeting of the Madison County Republican Men's Club, Dale Strong was asked about a federal court ruling that cleared the way to deport Somali immigrants who have been living here legally.

He was delighted.

"I think it's a big win, not just for President Trump. I think it's a big win for Americans. You start looking at what these Somalis have done to this country. We're not going fast enough for most. I promise you, I hope that we see more handcuffs on those who have stolen from this country."

That's Alabama's 5th District congressman, on the record, to 1819 News.

Three things are worth knowing about the ruling he was celebrating, because he described none of them.

The judge who ruled for the administration said the people losing protection would be irreparably harmed

On Friday, August 14, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs lifted the stay that had been keeping the Trump administration from ending Temporary Protected Status for Somalia. That is the decision Strong called a big win.

Here is what Burroughs actually wrote, as The Hill reported:

"Plaintiffs have made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is withheld … and the balance of hardships and the public interest also favor Plaintiffs, given that the government has made no showing that maintaining TPS status for the duration of this litigation would impose an undue burden."

Read that again. The judge found that the people about to lose their status had proven they would be irreparably harmed. She found the public interest was on their side. She found the government had not even bothered to argue that letting them keep their status during the lawsuit would burden anyone.

She ruled against them anyway — because in June the Supreme Court decided 6-3, in a case carrying Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin's name, that courts have almost no power to review DHS decisions about Temporary Protected Status. Burroughs wrote that she was "bound … to view things through the Mullin prism."

And on the claim that Somalis were being singled out because of their race, she wrote this:

"Though Plaintiffs lay out a strong case for why the at-issue statements were racist … after Mullin, which included a constitutional race-discrimination claim, the Court cannot discern a path to concluding that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of this claim."

A strong case that the statements were racist. She just no longer had the power to act on it.

That is what Strong is calling a win for Americans: not a judge who found the policy was lawful and fair, but a judge who said her hands were tied.

We wrote about the earlier stage of this same case when Tennessee's Andy Ogles announced he would file articles of impeachment against Burroughs for issuing the stay in the first place. She has now ruled the way he wanted. The impeachment threat was never about the law.

Somalia has been too dangerous to send people back to since 1991

Temporary Protected Status is not a loophole. Congress created it so that people from countries torn apart by war or disaster would not be deported into the middle of it.

Somalia was first designated in 1991, at the start of a civil war that scattered a diaspora across the world. It was designated again by the Biden administration, which pointed to widespread and ongoing armed conflict. That is 35 years of every administration — Republican and Democratic — reaching the same conclusion: you cannot safely send people there.

Nothing about Somalia has improved. The State Department still has a "Do Not Travel" advisory for the country because of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care, as States Newsroom reported last week in its coverage of the parallel TPS fight over Haitians.

Roughly 700 people are affected by Friday's order, according to The Hill. 1819 News put the number living in the U.S. under Somali TPS at more than 2,400, with about 1,380 applications still pending.

To qualify for TPS, applicants go through a background check and pay application fees at every renewal cycle. These are the people who did the paperwork.

"What these Somalis have done to this country"

Strong did not say "some people committed fraud." He said "these Somalis." Then he went further:

"They're not stealing from the government. They're stealing from the American taxpayer, and I think that the price has got to be paid for what they've done. You've got more than 80,000 Somalians in one state, and I'll tell you this right here: they have cleaned that state out left and right."

The state is Minnesota. Here is what is actually there.

About 108,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, according to Census Bureau estimates compiled by the Minnesota Reformer. Roughly 5,000 of them are not U.S. citizens — about 9 percent. And that 5,000 includes green card holders and permanent residents. The number actually covered by Temporary Protected Status is, in the Reformer's words, "the couple hundred."

So Strong took a group of about 108,000 people, of whom roughly 103,000 are American citizens and a couple hundred hold TPS, and said they cleaned out the state.

Nearly two in five Somali Minnesotans were born in the United States. In 2001, more than 76 percent of Somalis in Minnesota were non-citizens. By 2023 that was 9 percent. These are American families.

The fraud is real. So is who prosecuted it.

There has been serious fraud in Minnesota's Medicaid programs, and people should go to prison for it. That is not in dispute, and this post is not going to pretend otherwise.

What Strong did was take that fraud and hang it on an ethnic group — and then accuse the officials who prosecuted it of covering it up:

"I believe that some of the Democratic officials in those states have allowed it to happen, and I think that they need to be investigated to find out if they were co-conspirators in this process."

He offered no evidence. He named no one.

Here is the public record. In December 2025, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison — a Democrat — announced the federal indictments himself, for fraud in the Housing Stabilization Services and autism-services programs. His office's Medicaid Fraud Control Unit interviewed witnesses, executed a search warrant, took part in investigations at multiple companies, and handed data analysis to federal law enforcement.

"Today's charges and guilty plea are an important step in combatting fraud and protecting our tax dollars," Ellison said.

The Democratic official Strong wants investigated as a possible co-conspirator is the one who stood at the podium and announced the charges.

That is the difference between accountability and a smear. Accountability names the person and shows the evidence. Strong gestured at "some of the Democratic officials" and asked for investigations into whoever that turns out to be.

What followed the last round of this rhetoric in Minnesota

This is not an abstract argument about tone.

The Hill noted that the plaintiffs in the Somali TPS case pointed to Trump's comments about Somali people specifically, made in the wake of the Minnesota fraud investigation — comments followed by widespread immigration raids in the state.

Minneapolis is where an ICE agent shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, an American citizen and a mother of three, as she tried to drive away in January 2026. It is where a Customs and Border Protection agent killed an ICU nurse who was filming and trying to help. Both were Americans. Neither had anything to do with Medicaid fraud.

"I hope that we see more handcuffs" is a sentence with consequences attached, and Strong's own district sends him to Washington to weigh them.

He is not the only one, and that is the point

Strong's remarks fit a pattern we keep documenting. Ohio's Michael Rulli went on Fox News to cheer the mass deportation of Haitians in his own state — after a court had found the policy was rooted in part in racial animus. And the Supreme Court decision that made all of this possible came with a dissent that laid out, quote by quote, the animus behind it.

Each time, the move is the same: a court removes a legal protection on narrow procedural grounds, a member of Congress calls it a victory, and the reasoning the judges actually wrote down goes unmentioned.

Strong sits on the House Appropriations Committee — the panel that writes the checks for the agencies carrying this out.

When he was handed a court ruling that said the people losing their protection would be irreparably harmed, that the public interest favored them, and that the case for calling the statements against them racist was strong, he read all of that and said: not fast enough.