On New Year’s Day, Hussien Noor Hussien was sitting in his cab in the taxi lane at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport when two unmarked vehicles pulled up behind and in front of him.
Surveillance video obtained by Seven Days shows several immigration agents approach his window, pull him from his van, handcuff his wrists behind his back and drive him away.
His cab was left behind, unmanned and empty, with no sign of where he’d gone.
Hussien, a 63-year-old from Somalia, has lived in Vermont for 13 years and runs his own company, Freedom Cab. After coming to the U.S. as a refugee in 2004, he eventually settled in Burlington with his wife and their five children, now ages 3 through 17, all of whom are U.S. citizens.
Hussien’s detention comes amid a heightened crackdown on Somali immigrants in Minnesota — and now in nearby Maine — following findings that some members of Minnesota’s Somali community defrauded the federal government out of hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency COVID-19 funding.
President Donald Trump has seized on these findings to condemn Somalis as a whole. He has sent thousands of federal immigration agents to Minneapolis, home to the largest Somali population in the U.S., where clashes between protesters and federal agents have repeatedly turned violent. Last Saturday, agents fatally shot 37-year-old Alex Pretti, the second U.S. citizen killed this month while protesting and documenting the immigration enforcement surge.
So far, there are no signs of a widespread crackdown targeting Vermont’s Somali population of about 500, most of whom live in Burlington and Winooski. But Hussien’s detention has reverberated through the tight-knit community and beyond, alarming his children’s teachers and neighbors who have known his family for years. And a social media post by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement appears to link his detention to the wider enforcement drive against Somalis.
The post, which was published by the official account of ICE’s Boston field office on January 2, includes a photo agents took of Hussien after detaining him. He is squinting into the sun, dressed in a black leather jacket, jeans and a gray beanie. His wrists are handcuffed to a chain around his waist.
Two agents in army green vests that read “POLICE” and “ERO” — the enforcement and removal operations branch of ICE — stand on either side of Hussien, facing away from the camera with their arms linked with his. The post touts the arrest of a “criminal alien from Somalia” and signs off by tagging the X account of 23-year-old right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley.
Shirley, an independent content creator, has been at the center of the government’s crackdown on Somalis in Minnesota. In December he published a video, which quickly went viral, alleging fraud at Somali-run childcare centers in Minneapolis.
The Trump administration already knew Shirley’s work: A few months earlier, he was invited to a roundtable discussion on antifa at the White House. His video caught the attention of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, who announced soon after that agents would investigate the fraud allegations and increase their presence in Minneapolis. Trump also announced a freeze on all federal childcare funding to Minnesota.
The government’s decision to tag Shirley in the post about Hussien’s arrest confounded Hussien’s close friend, Abdirisak Maalin, a Somali American and the executive director of United Immigrant & Refugee Communities of Vermont.
“He is not a government figure,” Maalin said of Shirley. “It’s not right. They are doing this just to hurt immigrant communities, not to take people down that are bad in the community.”
An ICE spokesperson turned down a request for comment.
Members of the persecuted Somali Bantu ethnic minority group and others began settling in Burlington in 2003, after more than a decade of civil war and persecution forced many to flee to refugee camps in Kenya and neighboring countries. Many have obtained permanent legal status or U.S. citizenship. But as Trump has escalated his attacks on Somalis, calling them “garbage” and restricting long-standing legal immigration pathways, members of Vermont’s Somali community have been affected.
In recent months, some have had their naturalization ceremonies — the final stage in the citizenship process — abruptly canceled.
Hawo Hassan, 27, said she applied four years ago to have her husband, a Somali refugee living in Kenya, join her in the U.S. The couple have two children together, the youngest born just two weeks ago. On Monday, they received news that his application was denied. The reason given was Trump’s presidential proclamation that bars entry to the U.S. for all Somali citizens.
“I was disappointed, because I thought everything was going to be approved,” Hassan, a U.S. citizen and Somali refugee, said. “I thought as long as you’re coming into the country legally, there’s nothing wrong.”
On the morning Hussien was detained, his wife, Runbila Aden, was working a shift at the airport as a cleaner. Airport security staff notified her that Hussien had been taken away by police and gave her the keys to his abandoned cab.
In a panic, Aden, 46, went searching for him. Local police had no information on his whereabouts. It wasn’t until that afternoon that she got a call from Hussien and learned he’d been taken by ICE. He is now detained at the Northwest State Correctional Facility in St. Albans.
This is the second time Hussien has been detained by ICE, Aden said.
Court records show he came to the U.S. as a refugee under the name of a relative, Abukar Hassan Abdule, and was accompanied by Abdule’s ex-wife and the couple’s children.
In 2011, Hussien became a naturalized citizen under that name while living in Maine. He later divorced his first wife and married Aden, with whom he now has five children.
In 2013, after moving to Burlington, he applied to legally change his name to his birth name, Hussien Noor Hussien. Investigators began looking into inconsistencies with his identity in 2017, when the children from his first marriage applied for passports and listed their father as the real Abdule, who lives in Kenya.
Two years later, Hussien was charged and then convicted in a trial in the U.S. District of Maine with three federal crimes: making a false statement on his passport application, impersonating another in his naturalization proceeding and illegally procuring naturalization.
His citizenship was revoked, downgrading his immigration status to permanent residency, or a green card. He was sentenced to two months in prison, and, when he was released in early 2020, ICE immediately took him into custody and began deportation proceedings against him.
A few months later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and Hussien and other prisoners were released on the condition that they regularly check in with immigration authorities as their cases wind through the immigration court system. For the past six years, he has met those conditions, Aden said. His next appointment in immigration court was scheduled for April 2027.
“We didn’t expect him to be detained, because he had a court hearing scheduled,” Aden said through an interpreter.
Hussien’s sudden detention has taken a mental toll on her and their children, Aden said. The children come home from school each day asking where their father is and when he’ll be home.
“When you have a family member detained by the government in a way that could be avoided or could wait because he already had a case, and then with what’s going on now in the country, it makes you feel insecure and afraid all the time,” she said.
Maalin, Hussien’s close family friend, said Hussien adopted his relative’s name in Somalia to avoid forced conscription by militia groups that were targeting young, able-bodied men.
Hussien filed a habeas corpus petition in federal court, asking a judge to review the legality of his detention. Supporters packed a courtroom for his initial appearance on January 12.
“It’s one thing to detain someone who’s a threat to the community,” Maalin said. “But it’s another thing to detain someone for the sake of detaining them. No one is above the law, no one wants anyone disobeying the law, but we want things done in a way that’s fair and just and not terrorizing the community.”
Before he moved to Burlington in 2021, Maalin lived in Lewiston, Maine, for 15 years. The city has a much larger Somali population, and over the past few weeks, he’s participated in Zoom calls and text-message groups with hundreds of members who are discussing the surge in ICE enforcement throughout the city.
“People are getting arrested left and right,” Maalin said.
That scale of enforcement hasn’t reached Burlington. But Maalin feels a new sense of urgency to organize in case it does.
Earlier this month, he joined hundreds of Vermonters in a march from Burlington City Hall to the federal courthouse on Elmwood Avenue, after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a U.S. citizen, during the crackdown in Minneapolis. He plans to return there with a group of supporters for Hussien’s next court hearing on February 4.
“We shouldn’t be quiet about this,” Maalin said. “I think some people are scared because they don’t want to be retaliated against. But being brave is not the absence of fear. You can be scared, but you can be brave at the same time.”
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