By Max Nesterak | Deputy Editor
Good morning, Reformers.
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The stage was literally set this morning for Trump to sign a bipartisan bill aimed at increasing affordable housing, when President Trump announced he won’t sign it. He wrote on TruthSocial the signing is canceled until Congress passes the SAVE America Act, which would require IDs to vote and eliminate voter registration by mail, among many other provisions that seek to encroach on states’ authority to conduct elections.
The political action committee backing Angie Craig’s bid for Senate announced today it filed a complaint against Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan with the Federal Election Commission. The complaint alleges the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, under Flanagan’s leadership, accepted an illegal contribution from a federal contractor. Who is the contractor? CoreCivic, one of the largest operators of ICE detention centers in the country.
The Craig camp has been trying to elevate this for weeks. Following the news that CoreCivic may reopen its idled prison in Appleton to become an immigration detention center, Craig posted on social media saying Flanagan took their money.
The idea here is to muddy the waters on the two weakest issues for Craig — immigration and corporate money. If Flanagan, who boasts that her campaign doesn’t take corporate PAC money, solicits donations from private ICE detention operators, how different are the two really? Yet there’s an obvious risk to Craig of drawing more attention to her weaknesses.
The Flanagan campaign has called the attacks disingenuous, saying she did not solicit the donation personally. One $25,000 contribution arrived early in Flanagan’s tenure in February 2024, which the campaign said was solicited by development staff before she took the helm. CoreCivic has given $135,000 to the DLGA since 2019. The DLGA launched a $2 million advertising campaign last month criticizing Craig on her vote in favor of the Laken Riley Act, which expanded immigration enforcement and was the first bill signed by Trump during his second term.
(Drone photo by Rob Levine/Minnesota Reformer)
By Claire Carlson
A proposal to expand a Morris-based dairy operation from roughly 8,000 cows to nearly 19,000 moved closer to construction this week with a key regulatory ruling. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency decided this week that Riverview Dairy does not need to complete an environmental review known as an Environmental Impact Statement to move forward with the expansion.
The decision was met with outcry from farmers, environmentalists and some Morris locals who worry a dairy of this size could put smaller dairy farms out of business and potentially pollute the nearby Pomme de Terre watershed.
“Consolidation is reshaping our dairy sector, and the trend has implications for land access, local economies and the next generation of farmers,” said Minnesota Farmers Union Vice President Anne Schwagerl in a statement.
By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, KFF Health News
Hundreds of thousands of children, most of them U.S. citizens, have been separated from a parent by the Trump administration’s deportation policies.
Their mothers and fathers have been deported or locked for months inside detention centers, often miles away from where their families live. Parents have been arrested while dropping kids off at school, inside their homes, and at immigration check-ins with their children present. With their parents gone, kids’ lives are plunged into fear and uncertainty.
As a result, a generation of children from immigrant families are exhibiting mental health problems that could affect them for years.
By Richard Hurst
The writer argues that we need to learn to live with people with whom we disagree, even passionately.
“Minnesota has long depended on a particular civic habit: People who disagree about fundamental questions nevertheless share public institutions. The state includes churches, mosques, synagogues, secular neighborhoods, immigrant communities, tribal nations, and one of the nation’s most visible LGBTQ populations.
Public life works not because these groups agree with one another about everything, but because they have learned, however imperfectly, to occupy the same civic space.”
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Mamdani-backed candidates triumph in NYC Democratic primaries | The City Reporter
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