By Max Nesterak | Deputy Editor
Good morning, Reformers.
Happy May Day. Today’s holiday commemorates the labor movements’ many struggles and successes and specifically the Haymarket massacre in Chicago in 1886 during a protest for a shorter work day. (Racket has a rundown of celebrations for May Day and Cinco de Mayo this weekend.)
I have a story today about a man who has worked six days a week as a cook for nearly three decades in the United States, raising a family including a son who became a Minneapolis police detective.
Then came Operation Metro Surge.
Roberto Hernandez, 62, has been in immigration detention since being arrested by ICE on Jan. 5. He was pulled over on his way to work, despite having no criminal record, no warrant for his arrest and no final order of removal. He had started the process of becoming a permanent resident with the sponsorship of his son.
“We aren’t criminals. No one that is detained here with me has committed a crime,” Hernandez told me in Spanish from a New Mexico detention facility. “I don’t know why they treat us like this.”
One of the most heartbreaking details of the story is that this isn’t the first time the Hernandez family has been separated because of their immigration status. Hernandez’s wife had to move back to Mexico for 14 years before being able to return as a permanent resident.
“I’m praying and I’m staying faithful to our God that He’ll get my dad out of this situation,” said Hernandez Jr., who is assigned to the Minneapolis Police Department’s gun investigations unit.
Read the story here.
Roberto Hernandez with one of his four grandchildren. The 62-year-old father of a Minneapolis police officer has been in immigration detention since Jan. 5, 2026. (Courtesy photo)
By Melissa Whitler
Warning signs about the Minneapolis Public Schools senior finance officer, Ibrahima Diop, had been accumulating for months: IRS penalties, a mysterious deficit in the district’s healthcare trust account, a blistering outside audit that referred to the department’s “pervasive fear and uncertainty,” two reprimands and a performance improvement plan.
Yet Diop remained in his job until Jan. 2, by which time he’d resigned to take a job in Milwaukee. He had been the district’s top financial official for nearly a decade.
We obtained public records — personnel records, investigative reports, invoices, emails, a police report and other documents — that paint a picture of a chaotic department, and a district slow to respond. Now, the district is facing a $50 million deficit, roughly 7% of its operating budget.
By Michelle Griffith
The Minnesota Senate on Thursday passed a zero-interest, $100 million forgivable loan program for businesses across the state that lost revenue this past winter because of the federal government’s immigration crackdown.
Swarming groups of federal agents racially profiling and arresting people in the streets caused many people to stay home from work and refrain from shopping. It’s unclear exactly how much money Minnesota businesses lost because of Operation Metro Surge, but the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul estimated in a court filing that the Twin Cities local economy lost $610 million.
By Chad Maschke
After the attack at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who was there, told Fox 9 that “We all have to do a better job of watching the rhetoric.”
Who is we?
Chad Maschke used AI to help analyze X posts by the entire Minnesota congressional delegation over the past year to see who was the most uncivil poster (he used Claude but verified the information himself.)
Of the 99 posts from the state’s 10 members of congress that included dehumanizing language and other fiery rhetoric, nearly three-fourths came from Emmer.
One of the most striking examples was in December, when Emmer reposted Brandon Gill, who called Somalis “unassimilable foreigners” who should be “denaturalized and deported.”
When Zohran Mamdani won election as mayor of New York City, Emmer wrote, “Pro-terrorist leftists are now the mainstream!”
IN OTHER NEWS
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