Content warning: This story includes descriptions of racism and hate speech.
Fatuma Muhina was waiting for the bus with her 2-year-old twin boys in December when the woman approached her. Older and white, she was apparently enraged by the young mother’s presence in a quiet North Side neighborhood dominated by leafy Allegheny Commons Park.
Muhina is a 35-year-old Somali Bantu woman. She’s visibly Muslim in her colorful hijabs and baatis — loose-fitting and vibrantly printed cotton dresses worn by East African women. She lives in the neighborhood with her husband and nine children, having rebuilt her life after fleeing the Somali Civil War to a refugee camp in Kenya, then lawfully resettling here in 2004. She’s now a U.S. citizen and the president of United Somali Bantu of Greater Pittsburgh, which works to unify and uplift the local diasporic community.
At first, no bystanders intervened on Muhina’s behalf. “Everybody was so shocked by the stuff that was coming out of her mouth,” she said, describing how the woman said her people “look like certain animals” and “should go to the village where they belong.” The woman even invoked one of the ugliest chapters in American history by telling her, “If we go back in time, you would have been my slave.”
It was one of a few racist verbal attacks Muhina said she’s endured since President Donald Trump was elected to a second term. Each time she was going about her daily life, sometimes with her children by her side. “I’m sure they understood some of the words we were saying to each other,” Muhina said, referring to her toddler sons, who witnessed the woman verbally abusing their mother while she sat in the bus shelter, surrounded by gaping onlookers. But “they will never remember this, so that’s a good thing.”
The Trump campaign and administration’s rhetoric and policies targeting specific Black and brown diasporic groups in the U.S. have made Pittsburgh, and the entire country, a less welcoming place for refugees and immigrants, according to five local refugee leaders interviewed by Pittsburgh’s Public Source. All are from communities that have been singled out by the administration: Afghans, Haitians and Somalis. The threat of detention under a new U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiative, Operation PARRIS, now looms large over those groups and other refugees in the region. Some leaders have also seen an uptick in racist attacks and hate speech targeting their communities, which they believe was spurred by rhetoric from Trump and other federal officials.
“People listen to the influence,” said Aweys Mwaliya, 44, founder and president of the Somali Bantu Community Association of Pittsburgh, which advocates for the health and wellbeing of local Bantu people. Like Muhina, Mwaliya arrived as a refugee in 2004 before naturalizing. His organization started receiving explicitly racist voicemails and Facebook messages several months ago after Trump repeatedly used derogatory language to describe diasporic Somalis in Minnesota and their East African country of origin.
Could lawful refugees face deportation?
PARRIS aims to re-vet lawfully resettled refugees who haven’t yet become permanent residents — an unprecedented action in the near five-decade history of the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Groups who serve refugees said they’re watching for signs that the administration’s ultimate aim is deportation of those without green cards, which could be a death sentence for some, according to Human Rights Watch. To receive refugee status in the U.S., applicants must demonstrate a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of nationality and undergo a rigorous vetting process. Refugees must apply for a green card one year after arrival, though previous administrations generally didn’t penalize those who missed the deadline.
In an email to the White House, Public Source asked the administration to respond to the concerns, fears and encounters refugee leaders and allies shared with a reporter.
“For too long, nefarious fraudsters have gotten away with stealing from and exploiting the American people,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote without citing evidence. The administration “will no longer allow these sick criminals to rip off hardworking Americans,” she added, noting its efforts include “ongoing investigations and important actions” that “have already been fruitful.”
The administration has said that its immigration enforcement surge in Minnesota was a response to a yearslong problem of fraudulent billing to Medicaid for a range of social services, in which most of the prosecuted defendants are Somali Americans. But multiple studies show that immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens, and one found that aggressive immigration enforcement during Trump’s first term didn’t deliver on his pledge to reduce crime.
What refugees want to know
Resettlement agency staff and some refugee community leaders declined to connect a Public Source reporter with those who could be affected if the administration prevails in federal lawsuits challenging Operation PARRIS. They explained that doing so would contradict the safety advice they’re giving as part of an all-out effort to prepare these refugees for the possibility of detention or deportation.
But staff at Jewish Family and Community Services — one of four resettlement agencies in the region — agreed to provide interpreted questions that vulnerable refugees asked during a March 25 virtual “detention preparation” training. They asked these questions in different languages.
- “What should I do if I’m a single mother/father to ensure my kids are OK?” (Interpreted from the Spanish)
- “Do children under 18 need to carry their green cards all the time?” (Arabic)
- “If I need to be reinterviewed, will I learn that via letter, or only if I am stopped by ICE?” (Arabic)
- “If I am stopped by ICE, do I have to talk to them?” (Swahili)
- “What will happen if ICE detains me?” (Arabic)
- “What if I refuse to go with ICE? Will they hit or abuse me?” (Arabic)
- “If I want to apply for my green card/citizenship right now, are we able to do so since green cards are paused?” (Arabic)
- “If there are other updates, how will we learn about them?” (Arabic)
Asked if the administration intends to not only detain, but also deport refugees without green cards, Jackson wrote, “President Trump is right — aliens who come to our country, complain about how much they hate America, fail to contribute to our economy, rip off Americans and refuse to assimilate into our society should not be here.”
Public Source followed up on unanswered questions sent to DHS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) earlier this month for a previous story about PARRIS, and asked what’s in store for refugees without green cards who could be re-vetted under the policy — especially if their refugee status is revoked under that scrutiny. DHS didn’t respond and ICE spokesperson Jason Koontz wrote that the agency “cannot comment on pending litigation,” and did not substantively respond to a question about ICE’s compliance with court orders pausing enforcement of PARRIS.
PARRIS is being challenged in federal courts in Minnesota and Massachusetts. The operation was stalled in February by a Minnesota federal judge’s preliminary injunction, which the Trump administration is appealing to the largely Republican-appointed Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The administration was dealt another blow last week when a federal judge in Boston granted a motion to pause the policy while litigation continues. U.S. District Judge Richard Stearns wrote that the plaintiffs — six refugees and two advocacy groups — are likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that the policy would cause “irreparable harm.” The class proposed in the complaint includes more than 100,000 refugees without green cards in the U.S.
Refugees look over shoulders
Refugees — the most thoroughly screened people who travel to the U.S. — haven’t historically been targeted by immigration authorities. Now, according to community leaders, many feel they must look over their shoulder as they hear about refugees arrested in Minnesota under PARRIS and enforcement actions in their own communities. A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision gave federal agents legal cover to stop, question and detain those they deem suspicious based on race, language, accent and other attributes.
Local Afghans are on edge amid accounts of ICE stopping refugees from that country locally and releasing them only after they produce green cards, according to one leader of that community. That leader arrived with scores of others after Kabul fell to the Taliban in 2021. Many aided the U.S. mission in Afghanistan and feared they would be tortured or killed by the new authorities. The community leader resettled with his family and is now a permanent resident, but asked not to be named because he fears retaliation for speaking to a reporter.
And a 31-year-old Haitian woman was found dead at a South Side bus shelter earlier this month — days after ICE took her into custody and released her with an electronic ankle monitor. Her immigration status is unclear, though she lived in Charleroi, the Mon Valley town where a large Haitian community blossomed over the past decade as those eligible for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) found work at a local food processing plant.
DHS posted on X that ICE had no role in the death, writing that she died three days after the agency “encountered her. … ICE issued her an ICE ankle monitor and she was released from ICE custody on February 27. She was released with all of her belongings, including a fully charged phone, in sunny weather in the middle of Pittsburgh, where public transport is readily available.”
‘The city looks quieter’
A health care provider said self-deportation to countries other than their place of origin is becoming more common among Haitians in the Pittsburgh region. Born in Haiti and a naturalized U.S. citizen, the provider is well connected in the local Haitian community. Public Source isn’t identifying him at his request. “I don’t want to be targeted,” he said.
The Trump administration has aggressively moved to dismantle the TPS program, which offers humanitarian relief to those from certain countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disaster or other untenable conditions. Haitians were first granted TPS in 2010 following a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake near Port-au-Prince. TPS has been extended and redesignated multiple times by previous administrations due to ongoing political violence, food insecurity and other crises. It’s now in legal limbo while a lawsuit challenges the administration’s decision to terminate it. The Supreme Court will hear arguments about TPS for Haitians and Syrians in late April, but some in Pittsburgh’s Haitian community aren’t sticking around in hopes of a favorable ruling.
The provider said some fled to Brazil while others headed north to Canada. That country extended its temporary immigration measures for Haitians, who tend to feel comfortable there due to its large French-speaking population. The provider said he knew an experienced Haitian nurse with 35 years in the U.S. who worked in a West Virginia suburb, but had no path to citizenship and accepted Canada’s offer of a fast-track to permanent residency.
The administration’s immigration policies are “self-destructive,” said the provider, noting the nurse received her education and training in the U.S. This country “invested in her for years, but they don’t want her.”
Some who don’t have the option to relocate abroad are staying indoors to avoid ICE, the effects of which are rippling through neighborhoods and the local economy. “This city looks quieter and calmer and less lively since this whole thing started,” the Afghan community leader said, referring to the administration’s crackdown on refugees and immigrants.
An Afghan engineer said families used to gather for potlucks in parks and other public places, but are too afraid of ICE to do so now. “There is a big impact on community life,” said the engineer, who arrived nine years ago on a Special Immigrant Visa for Afghans employed by the U.S. government. He, too, requested anonymity due to concern about repercussions in the current political climate.
Families even negotiated the risk of attending iftar meals at their local mosque during Ramadan (which ended March 19), the engineer said. “Before we started planning for that, most of the people were saying, ‘Are you guys sure that ICE will not show up in the mosque?’”
The provider said young people are bearing the brunt of the “psychological trauma” inflicted by Trump administration policies, which is largely due to the possibility of family separation. “The kids are scared that one day they will come home [and their] parents won’t be there … so this is catastrophic for them,” he added. He knows of a 21-year-old Haitian woman who hasn’t left her house for three months because she’s afraid she’ll be deported. He noted her family “is scared she would become so depressed and hurt herself.”
But as refugee leaders detailed the fear and despair the administration’s policies have caused, they offered hope in their descriptions of how neighbors and community groups are supporting them. “We see a lot of nonprofit organizations, a lot of volunteers who welcome Afghans,” said the engineer, noting that “Americans have to maintain the trust between the communities and immigrants.”
Muhina, the Somali Bantu mother of nine, said a good samaritan — “a Black [American] gentleman” — eventually stepped in and diffused the situation at the bus stop. He diverted the older woman’s attention away from her and onto him.
“He took it from there,” she said.
Venuri Siriwardane is the health and mental health reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at venuri@publicsource.org or on Bluesky @venuri.bsky.social.
The Jewish Healthcare Foundation has contributed funding to Public Source’s health care reporting.
This story was fact-checked by Rich Lord.
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