By Michelle Griffith| Reporter
Good morning, Reformers.
Three people are dead and multiple others, including three police officers, are injured after a shooting in an apartment building in downtown Minneapolis yesterday. Among the dead is the suspected shooter, from unknown causes, according to city officials.
ProPublica reports that leaders at the Department of Justice in Washington quashed plans to bring civil rights charges against ICE agent Christian Castro, who allegedly shot Julio Sosa-Celis in the leg in January.
Federal prosecutors were preparing to charge Castro with making false statements and civil rights violations similar to the ones filed against Minneapolis police officers involved in the killing of George Floyd.
Matthew Evans, the assistant U.S. attorney in Minnesota in charge of the case, told lawyers for Sosa-Celis and other victims to prepare for Castro to be charged “only with False Statements,” according to an email reviewed by ProPublica.
“I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough,” he wrote.
Castro was the subject of a rare interstate extradition battle between Minnesota and Texas, as Texas Gov. Greg Abbott refused to sign paperwork facilitating Castro’s transfer to Minnesota. Castro was released from a Texas county jail last week.
Onto today’s Reformer.
Michele Tafoya speaks during the candidate forum for U.S. Senate at Farmfest in Morgan, Minn., on Aug. 5, 2026. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
By Max Nesterak
When Michele Tafoya said Americans could handle higher gas prices caused by the war in Iran with a “stiff upper lip” and “one less trip to Starbucks,” she likely wasn’t talking about herself.
The retired sportscaster and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate has assets worth between $10.7 million and $37.9 million, according to her financial disclosure, putting her near or in the top 1% of wealthiest Americans.
Congress is full of millionaires from both parties, though Tafoya, 61, is rich even by their standards. The median net worth in the U.S. Senate is about $4.4 million — or more than 70 times the Census-reported median U.S. household net worth — according to a NOTUS analysis of financial disclosures.
By Michelle Griffith
U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar and House Speaker Lisa Demuth, two candidates running for Minnesota governor in November, broadly agree that the state needs to build more homes to increase supply and slow rising costs.
In-back-to-back interviews with KARE 11 on Wednesday at the Minnesota State Fair, Klobuchar and Demuth said addressing rising rents and mortgages is a top concern and agreed that the state has too many regulations that are stymieing the construction of more homes.
Klobuchar said the red tape around construction was what was hurting housing supply, while Demuth took aim at labor policies like paid family leave implemented by the Democratic-Farmer-Labor trifecta a few years ago.
Both Klobuchar and Demuth were noncommittal about forcing local governments to allow more density by overriding local zoning control, a contentious issue at the Minnesota Legislature.
By Jacob Fischler
President Donald Trump’s executive order placing new restrictions on mail-in voting would assign state officials a Herculean task to reach compliance before the crucial midterm elections.
The order directed the U.S. Postal Service to strictly regulate the envelope design of mail-in ballots and to collect voter data from each state through an online portal, among other things.
But some state officials tasked with fitting their systems to the new regulations say it presents massive — if not impossible — challenges to reach compliance for the November midterms, when voters will decide whether to continue Republican control of the U.S. House and Senate.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon yesterday said Minnesotans should expect no changes if they choose to vote by mail in the November midterms.
IN OTHER NEWS
Trump’s newest order on birthright citizenship blocked in federal court | Reformer via States Newsroom
Gloria Steinem, personification of the women’s movement, dies at 92 | New York Times
OH BY THE WAY
I remember reading Gloria Steinem’s exposé, “A Bunny’s Tale,” in journalism school. Steinem worked undercover as a Playboy bunny at a club in New York, and her article revealed that women were frequently underpaid, objectified and harassed. The bunnies were also forced to do mandatory blood tests and gynecological exams, which Hugh Hefner stopped in his clubs after the exposé was published.
In school we also read another undercover exposé by journalist Nellie Bly, “Ten Days in a Madhouse.” Bly feigned insanity and became a New York City mental health patient in 1887. She exposed horrific conditions in an asylum on Blackwell’s Island, now called Roosevelt Island.
Undercover journalism is considered unethical among most American journalists nowadays.
The closest the Reformer has come to undercover reporting was when Max Nesterak worked two shifts at a University of Minnesota dining hall in 2022. His reporting showed that the U was paying gig workers more than full-time staff to fill dining hall jobs. Max signed up for the job through an app using his Reformer email, and no one asked him about his prior work experience or why he wanted to work there. He never misrepresented himself.
“I downloaded an app and in about 20 minutes became a cook earning more than the woman who trained me,” Max wrote.
Where else should the Reformer investigate?
Have a great Thursday.
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