By Madison McVan | Reporter
Good morning, Reformers.
The Platner saga continues. The latest from our national bureau.
President Donald Trump is at the NATO summit in Turkey. Trump scolded European allies for not joining in his war against Iran, reiterated his desire to control Greenland and pledged more military assistance to Ukraine.
Sitting next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump described the war with an analogy, the New York Times reports: “You have two kids in a park and they don’t like each other and they start fighting, and sometimes you have to let ‘em fight, and see that it’s tough.”
The New York Times also reports that Trump said the U.S. would permit Ukraine to manufacture Patriot air defense systems, made by the American defense company Raytheon, fulfilling a longtime request from Zelensky.
And, some news out of Texas that will feel relevant to Minnesotans: An ICE agent shot and killed a man in Houston yesterday. The agency identified the victim as Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, whom officers said attempted to hit officers with his car while evading arrest. Video of the shooting has yet to emerge.
The news reminded me of Juan Carlos Rodriguez Romero, whose case I wrote about in May. ICE agents fired shots at him in his St. Paul apartment parking lot as he attempted to evade arrest. The U.S. Department of Justice later charged Rodriguez Romero with assaulting federal agents, saying he attempted to hit officers with his car. But the DOJ dropped the charges entirely in June for lack of evidence.
To the rest of the news:
Elder Chavez crossed the border as an unaccompanied minor in 2022. Now 18, he sits in Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Center facing deportation after a traffic violation. (Illustration by Emily Scherer for ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of the Chavez family, JMS2/Flickr, mikepick/Flickr, and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.)
By Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen
A first-of-its-kind analysis of Immigration and Customs Enforcement data by ProPublica found that unaccompanied minors living in the U.S. are being detained and removed at about three times the rate they were during the last time President Donald Trump was in office.
Among them is an 8-year old girl from Ecuador who was seeking asylum and Special Immigrant Juvenile Status. The girl’s mother had already won asylum in a separate case. But a New York judge ordered the girl to be deported anyway.
By Ryan Campbell
Minneapolis resident Ryan Campbell introduces Live Democracy, a tool he built to help citizens easily follow along with bills and policies that affect them — and see how their representatives are voting.
“None of this fixes democracy, and I would distrust anyone who told you a website could,” Campbell writes. “What this can do is shrink the absurd distance between caring about a decision and being able to do something about it.”
By Tim Henderson
A new appeals court ruling is another blow to the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy that threatens millions of immigrants with unlimited incarceration without bond if they ever crossed a border illegally.
A sharply divided 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 on July 2 that such immigrants must receive a bond hearing within 90 days. One of the two judges said 30 days would be a better time limit.
The 2025 policy has faced widespread rebellion among federal judges, even Trump appointees, with many of them freeing immigration prisoners and calling the policy unconstitutional. Other appeals courts have also struck it down in a conflict likely to be heard in October by the U.S. Supreme Court..
IN OTHER NEWS
Feds leave Minnesota to fend for itself on election security | Minnesota Star Tribune
Health insurance giants are fighting efforts to break them up | New York Times
The end of reading is here | The Atlantic
OH BY THE WAY
I’m back from a long weekend on the Texas gulf coast, where I enjoyed swimming in the brown, 86-degree waters; teaching my young cousins how to catch hermit crabs; and watching oil tankers navigate the narrow channels of the Corpus Christi Bay. I finished “Prodigal Summer” by Barbara Kingsolver — five stars! — and “Junky” by William Burroughs, a decidedly less beachy read.
Here’s a song from a Corpus Christi legend for your Tuesday. Have a great day!
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