“When I came to the United States, I became a legal human being.”

Suleiman Ahmed has worked as a certified medical translator in Minneapolis and St. Paul since 2018, two years after he arrived in Minnesota as a refugee. Born in Somalia, Ahmed was separated from his parents in 1991, when he was seven years old, during a bullet-ridden raid in that country’s civil war. He fled into the bush with other people escaping the violence, eventually making his way to a refugee camp in Kenya. He spent the next 25 years going from one African country to another, always undocumented.

Sitting in a Somali-owned cafe in St. Paul, Ahmed pointed to his Minnesota flag lapel pin. “I love Minnesota,” he said. “When I came to the United States, I became a legal human being. Before that, I wasn’t.” As proof, he pulled both his American passport card and enhanced driver’s license — which, unlike an ordinary license, can be used to demonstrate citizenship — from his wallet.

Ahmed translates for older Somalis who are in adult day care or nursing homes and need assistance communicating with their health care providers. It’s a job that also involves helping his clients navigate the cultural differences between Somalia and the United States. Before the ICE surge, Ahmed said he usually had between five and six cases a day. Starting in November 2025, that number dropped to zero and stayed that way until April, when they started slowly trickling back.

Besides the dire financial consequences for Ahmed and his family — he and his wife have five children and were able to escape being evicted because of mutual aid for their rent — he said this disruption in services was a catastrophe for his patients, who were no longer receiving healthcare for fear that leaving their home could land them in a detention center or get them deported.

“Even people who needed surgery cancelled,” he said. What he worries about most are the unmet mental health needs of his patients. “My biggest concern right now is our elderly people, who are really facing a lot of crisis,” he said. “They’re kind of shocked already by a new culture. They are already shocked and stressed.”

-Elizabeth Foy Larsen