The Somali Clans of Minnesota
An impediment to assimilation?
By Viktor Marsai on March 25, 2026
Thanks to fraud revelations and ICE Operation Metro Surge in Minnesota, the Somali community in the United States has come under extended media scrutiny and become the focal point of political debates. Most analyses concentrate on the relationship between American Somalis – and their supporters – and federal agencies, mostly ICE. These articles present the situation as a homogenous East African community facing deportation by immigration enforcement, and many websites and media reports emphasize the solidarity that allows the local community to stand up to the “federal aggressors”.
In fact, Somali communities in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and in the United States overall, are far from united. As in Somalia and other parts of the world with Somali diasporas, their communities are highly divided along actual or perceived kinship, descent, and lineage – the clan system.
Although some argue that the clan system does not really matter and/or it is more the result of political and social construction of colonizers than an indigenous part of Somali society, historical sources prove the opposite. For instance, I.M. Lewis’s classic A Modern History of the Somali examines how the insurgency led by the great Somali national hero Sayyid Moḥammad Abdallah Hassan was more a clan- and religion-based struggle for grazing lands and political power than an anti-colonial campaign. Furthermore, since the British government had practiced only very loose indirect rule in Somaliland for the couple of years preceding the insurgency, it is unlikely that they managed to orchestrate clannism within such a short period. The files of the Kenyan National Archives from the late 19th century British administration that ruled southern Somali-inhabited areas also demonstrate that clan competition, and sometimes clashes, were an integral part of Somali society before colonization.
https://cis.org/Marsai/Somali-Clans-Minnesota
