President Donald Trump’s pledge to terminate temporary legal protections for Somalis living in Minnesota is triggering fear in the state’s deeply-rooted immigrant community, along with doubts about whether the White House has the legal authority to enact the directive as described.

In a Truth Social post late Friday, Trump said he would “immediately” strip Somali residents in Minnesota of Temporary Protected Status, a legal safeguard against deportation for immigrants from certain countries.

The announcement drew immediate pushback from some state leaders and immigration experts, who characterized Trump’s declaration as a legally dubious effort to sow fear and suspicion toward Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the nation.

“There’s no legal mechanism that allows the president to terminate protected status for a particular community or state that he has beef with,” said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center.

“This is Trump doing what he always does: demagoguing immigrants without justification or evidence and using that demagoguery in an attempt to take away important life-saving protections,” she added.

The Trump administration has until mid-January to revoke the legal protection for Somalis nationally. But that move would affect only a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Somalis living in Minnesota. A report produced for Congress in August put the number of Somalis covered by TPS at just 705 nationwide.

“I am a citizen and so are (the) majority of Somalis in America,” Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Democrat from Somali, said in a social media post Friday. “Good luck celebrating a policy change that really doesn’t have much impact on the Somalis you love to hate.”

Still, advocates warned the move could inflame hate against a community at a time of rising Islamophobia.

“This is not just a bureaucratic change,” said Jaylani Hussein, president of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “It is a political attack on the Somali and Muslim community driven by Islamophobic and hateful rhetoric.”

In his social media post, Trump claimed, without offering evidence, that Somali gangs had targeted Minnesota residents and referred to the state as a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity.”

Federal prosecutors have in recent weeks brought charges against dozens of people in a social-services fraud scheme. Some of the defendants hail from Somalia. “Accountability is coming,” Minnesota Republican Rep. Tom Emmer wrote in response to that story.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat, has noted that Minnesota consistently ranks among the safest states in the country.

“It’s not surprising that the President has chosen to broadly target an entire community,” Walz said Friday. “This is what he does to change the subject.”

In response to Trump’s announcement, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison his office was “exploring all of our options,” adding that Trump “cannot terminate TPS for just one state or on a bigoted whim.”

“Somali folks came to Minnesota fleeing conflict, instability and famine, and they have become an integral part of our state, our culture and our community,” he added.

The protection has been extended 27 times for Somalians since 1991, with U.S. authorities determining that it was unsafe for people already in the United States to return there.

Somalia for decades has been regarded as one of the world’s most dangerous countries. People have been fleeing ever since leader Siad Barre was removed in 1991 by clan-based militias and civil war erupted.