A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who lived in the U.S. for decades, as the homebuilder drove his construction crew to a Houston job site.

His death set off protests in Texas' largest city and calls from Democrats and Salgado Araujo 's family for an independent investigation. The shooting on Tuesday in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood is at least the eighth death during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said federal officers were looking for someone they had targeted weeks before when they attempted to stop a vehicle driven by Salgado Araujo. In a statement, DHS said Salgado Araujo rammed an ICE vehicle and that a federal officer fired a weapon in self-defense.

Salgado Araujo’s family said he had nearly finished the long process of obtaining legal status in the U.S. after living in the country for 35 years, and that he knew what to do if approached by ICE officers. Ronaldo Salgado, his son, said his father may have been scared that the people in unmarked vehicles were coming to steal his work tools.

Here’s what we know about Salgado Araujo’s shooting:

The shooting happened on a Houston street

Few photos or video surrounding the shooting in Houston have emerged on social media, unlike other deaths involving federal immigration officers.

DHS said weeks before the shooting, agents investigating a tip saw two white vans at the address of a target. While heading to that address Tuesday, officers saw a white van and someone inside who resembled the person they were looking for, the department said in a statement.

DHS said an officer opened fire after Salgado Araujo ignored commands and attempted to ram the officer with his vehicle. The agency has not released any video or photos.

A video shot by bystander Juliet Martinez shows the aftermath of the shooting. A black vehicle is angled toward a white van, their doors wide open. A bleeding and handcuffed man groans loudly on the ground and his leg shakes. Other federal officers stand over at least three other handcuffed men.

ICE has not released the names of the other men detained, but Salgado Araujo’s family identified one as his brother. Families of the other two men said they were able to briefly talk to them Wednesday and they are being detained.

ICE said Thursday that the officers involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras. They have not said if agents were specifically targeting Salgado Araujo or whether the officers involved are on leave.

Salgado Araujo's family says he worked hard for the American dream

Salgado Araujo and his wife came to America after meeting in their teens in Mexico and deciding they wanted a better life for their future family, Ronaldo Salgado said.

The father of three built houses in the Houston suburbs, started his own business and established his own crew. He had no criminal record, his family said.

Ronaldo Salgado, the oldest son, became a teacher. He said one of his brothers is an engineer and the other is studying engineering in college.

His son said he was a quiet man who left for work at sunrise and loved to pet his dog and sit on his porch listening to music.

“That’s how I want the world to know my father. Not as someone who got shot and killed, but as a family man, a man who understood that good things come to those who put in hard work,” Salgado said.

At least 8 deaths so far in the immigration crackdown

Salgado Araujo was at least the eighth person to die during the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign. No immigration officers have been charged in the deaths and video footage in several previous shootings contradicts the accounts of federal officers.

The most well-known of the killings happened during the winter crackdown in Minnesota where U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed during protests.

Two other shooting deaths happened during traffic stops, including Ruben Ray Martinez, 23, who was killed in Texas in March 2025. His death was not disclosed for nearly a year.

Mexico wants criminal charges over deaths of its citizens

President Claudia Sheinbaum said it is time to escalate Mexico's complaints beyond diplomatic channels after the killing of Salgado Araujo.

“We are going to do everything in our power, because we cannot stand silent” in the face of the deaths of Mexicans “whose only crime is working honestly in the United States,” Sheinbaum said.

Mexico will request that criminal charges be filed in U.S. courts over the alleged killing of three Mexicans during ICE operations and the deaths of another 14 in ICE custody, Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco said Thursday during a presidential press conference.

The complaints, filed against whoever is found responsible for the deaths, will be submitted to state prosecutor offices and the U.S. Department of Justice.

DHS is investigating the shooting

Homeland Security said Tuesday that the department's Inspector General’s office was investigating the shooting.

Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare said Salgado Araujo’s family and the community deserve the truth. His office said Thursday that they are "pursuing investigative avenues available to us and will conduct a review of any information we collect within our reach.”

Houston Mayor John Whitmire said city police were not involved in any part of the chase or shooting and have no jurisdiction over federal officers.

Anyone who has ever shown a slight interest in politics might be watching their email inbox fill up with pleas for money. Political fundraising emails are out in full force with urgent appeals to shake loose small-dollar donations.

They go to people who perhaps signed up for updates from a political candidate, visited a campaign website or previously donated to a political cause.

The subject lines stand out:

"Please read before deleting."

"We really need your help"

"Trump said WHAT?!"

And it’s not just from candidates the email recipient has previously supported. A Minnesota voter might get hit up by campaigns in Texas, California or Florida.

Welcome to the world of political fundraising emails.

The emails are personalized. Sometimes pleading or desperate. Or from time-to-time they are shaming. They can be manipulative or look like a phishing attempt.

"We've reached out to you time and time again — will you PLEASE respond?"

"Action required: your voter profile needs immediate verification."

"Leadership chose YOU, Patriot. Don't let them down."

"IMPORTANT SOCIAL SECURITY ANNOUNCEMENT"

“They are a cost-effective way to reach out to voters, particularly small donors who might be inspired to contribute even small amounts to political campaigns,” said Costas Panagopoulos, a distinguished professor at Northeastern University who studies political campaigns.

“Small contributions, which is typically what's solicited using these email tactics, are becoming increasingly important for political campaigns and constitute a larger and growing share of political contributions,” he said.

Those donations are important for any campaign. But for one like Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, they’re essential. She stresses how she's refusing corporate-linked political action committee money for her Senate campaign.

“So it is folks who, you know, are donating $5, $10, $25,” Flanagan said. “And you know that means that once people contribute, they are absolutely invested in this campaign.”

Flanagan said she's had more than 75,000 donors to her campaign. Panagopoulos said the small donations are a measure of a campaign's reach.

“It's not just the total amount of money that campaigns are raising, but the total number of contributions that becomes a proxy for their level of support in the electorate,” he said.

Email fundraising brings about $360 million a year into political campaigns, said Eric Wilson, the executive director for The Center for Campaign Innovation. The organization helps conservative candidates better use technology in their campaigns. Wilson worked on several campaigns and was the digital director for Marco Rubio's 2016 presidential bid.

Campaigns build their own lists of potential donors and might also buy email lists from past campaigns or political list brokers. That's why donors find that once they give to one candidate, they're suddenly getting messages from others.

"The best indication of a future behavior is past behavior, and so if someone has donated in the past, they're very likely to donate again in the future,” Wilson said. “And so campaigns want to be sending emails to those people.”

Those lists and the labor for email fundraisers can add up. Wilson said that typically it will cost $38 to raise $100. To get the most out of those potential donors, campaigns will email often — in part to get through spam filters — and they'll use different strategies to get the recipient to click.

Erika Franklin Fowler, a professor of government at Wesleyan University and the director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which studies campaign advertising, said the tactics usually fall into two categories.

One is fear appeals.

“You know this is your last chance, or we really need this, or something bad will happen,” Fowler said.

Another is social desirability.

“Fear of being singled out, sort of that ‘Your neighbors are doing it; you haven't’ social pressure,” Fowler said.

Some go further, looking like a personalized email. Or warning you're in danger of getting behind on a bill.

While many might find getting these emails annoying, Wilson said there's not much evidence that it backfires.

“Campaigns and their operatives would not be sending them out if they weren't effective,” Wilson said.

With the midterms election still months out, the email barrage won't end anytime soon.

As they compete for the GOP nomination in an August primary, Minnesota's Republican governor candidates are promising to slash state spending. They’ve committed to hefty tax cuts, too.

With financial constraints and, for now, a closely divided Legislature, those budget-related ambitions could be easier said than done.

Not long after former healthcare executive Kendall Qualls locked down the Republican Party’s endorsement for governor, he pledged a massive tax cut if he wins the race.

“Under my administration, we’ll deliver a $9 billion fraud rebate,” Qualls said in a June campaign video, citing a former federal prosecutor’s figure about potential fraud over almost a decade. Criminal cases so far have not alleged that level of loss.

In explaining his plan, Qualls told MPR News that the tax cut would come in parts — rebates in each year of a two-year state budget. Qualls said he would pay for it by making vast spending cuts and seeking other cost savings.

“We're looking at a 12 percent budget decrease across the board, and you could manage that with little to no impact at all when you think about operating state budgets,” he said.

Minnesota’s current two-year budget is about $71 billion, with a potential deficit brewing because of a mismatch in revenue and spending.

Qualls isn’t alone in saying he’d cut state spending. Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth said she’d do it, too — and stresses she has already done it as part of negotiations in the narrowly split Legislature.

“When we set the budget going forward, we reduced state spending by $5 billion,” Demuth said at a recent campaign press conference at the Capitol. “We look forward to doing even more.”

Minnesota’s overall budget size did fall between the budget before she became speaker and the one after. Some of that resulted from the expiration of one-time spending made when DFL lawmakers had a sizable but mostly temporary surplus in the prior budget.

Demuth said there are other areas that could be pared back.

“The first way we will do that is ending fraud and cutting back and right-sizing the government,” Demuth said.

She contends that too many state employees have been added under Gov. Tim Walz’s administration.

“There's been an explosion of new FTEs and growth within government in a way that Minnesotans and their family budgets have not experienced, and we look forward to doing further reductions as appropriate,” she said.

Her campaign website says she’d deliver income tax cuts, exempt Social Security benefits from taxes and lower vehicle registration fees along the way.

MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell said he’s working on a budget proposal that would streamline state spending. In an interview, he said he would size up programs one-by-one and turn to the private sector for more help funding them.

Lindell also said he’d bring in a state department of government efficiency. He’s modeling it after the DOGE project put in place when President Donald Trump returned to the White House.

"I want to make sure the people that are entitled to it, that need the funds, that need the help, get the help, but it's the right help, and it gets to the root of the problem, rather than just enabling,” Lindell said. “Or a program that just doesn't end, and you don't help the person, you know, the people that need the help.”

He isn’t committing to a firm number in cuts. The former cocaine addict who has since worked in addiction recovery programs said some state programs might need more funding, not less.

“I'm not just going to be a politician that says, ‘I'm going to cut spending, so you're going to save on your taxes,’” Lindell said. “This is all it is like a huge business. You can't hurt someone over here to gain over here.”

Democrats say voters deserve specific details about what the GOP-set cut goals would mean.

The Alliance for a Better Minnesota, a Democratic-aligned group that has traditionally been a big player in races for governor, used the Qualls comments about across-the-board cuts as an opening to connect the GOP candidates to healthcare scaleback approved under Trump.

“What programs is Qualls planning to cut, and how will this affect our families?” asked Marissa Luna, the alliance’s executive director.

The campaign for Amy Klobuchar, a current U.S. senator and the likely DFL nominee for governor, pointed to her plans to make government “more effective, innovative and accountable.” She put out a plan in May to taken on fraud and perform a top-to-bottom audit of state programs to end those that are duplicative or ineffective. But, the campaign said in a written statement, that she would put money toward raising achievement in schools and easing costs of healthcare and housing.

Officials who helped craft previous state budgets say it’s easier to make campaign promises about spending cuts than it is to make them stick.

“It's hard work, and that's why being governor and leading agencies is tough stuff,” said Jim Schowalter, who served in state budget roles under Govs. Tim Pawlenty, Mark Dayton and Tim Walz. “The first idea may make some sense, and it may sound good, but then you start to understand that there's complications or impacts, or there's real people losing out on a decision.”

Tom Hanson, a former commissioner of Minnesota Management and Budget under Pawlenty, said budget cuts are challenging, especially when they’re not being made to fill a budget hole.

“It's pretty tough to find money to cut without directly impacting something that somebody gets,” Hanson said. “You're essentially showing that, well, instead of spending money on A, B and C, I'm going to spend it on D, E, and F. And you’ve got to make the case, and that isn't always easy.”

He said that boils down to making a successful pitch to state lawmakers — who would need to pass a budget — and to the public.

Hanson said there’s a new factor at play in budget debates this time around: fraud. And that might make it easier to pitch Minnesotans on potential cuts.

“Nobody likes to pay money into something that isn't being used properly,” Hanson said. “I think that's a dynamic that we have not seen in budgeting.”

MPR News correspondent Peter Cox contributed to this report.

Somali American and Muslim community members in Minnesota are raising concerns about safety and Islamophobia after President Donald Trump posted a video showing children at a St. Paul kindergarten graduation ceremony. It included several young girls wearing hijabs. And its caption was from an account called “End Wokeness.” It said, “Public school in St. Paul, Minnesota. Every girl is in a hijab… in kindergarten.”

Somali community leaders gathered for a press conference to condemn the post.

Imam Yusuf Abdulle, executive director of the Islamic Association of North America, joined MPR News guest host Catharine Richert to talk about the press conference and the impact the President’s rhetoric has on the Somali community.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

An audit of Minnesota’s voter registration system mostly validated steps taken to update records and verify eligibility, although the report does recommend ways to better maintain those records and verify their accuracy in a timely fashion.

The Office of the Legislative Auditor reviewed records from 2024 in reaching its conclusions. The resulting audit found wide compliance with identity verification steps — noting those were done correctly by counties in 99 percent of cases when done through automated procedures but at lower rates when done manually.

Auditors also said counties could do a better job of updating voter records, including for formerly incarcerated people who have voting rights restored.

“It is important that the voter status in each SVRS voter registration record is accurate to help ensure a fair and secure election system,” auditors wrote. “An incorrect voter status can impede someone from exercising their legal right to vote or allow someone to vote unchallenged when they should be required to present additional information.”

Election administration is in the spotlight as the midterm approaches and Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, repeatedly raise doubts about voting integrity.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said he appreciated the guidance offered in ensuring state and county partners are following prescribed steps.

“Minnesota is proud of its accurate, fair, secure, accessible and trusted election system,” Simon, a three-term Democrat, wrote in a response appended to the audit. “And this report reflects the complex administration work done at both the state and local levels to ensure compliance with both state and federal laws.”

Cory Kampf, president of the Minnesota Association of County Officers, said he agrees that “improvements can and should be made.” But Kampf said the local administrators believe that some of the perceived lapses could have been cases where determination work was done outside of the Statewide Voter Registration System or is difficult to carry out close to an election with many priorities to balance.

“Additional avenues to register, along with other new election laws, have placed new workload demands on county election offices,” Kampf wrote.

The audit did not address others involved in voter registration, including other state agencies and election judges who are part of the election-day registration process. Nor did the audit cover voter outreach efforts or election security.

The report was presented to a legislative committee Wednesday, during which Democrats praised the report, saying it shows the integrity of the state’s voting systems.

“I'll just be honest, I've never been in an audit before of most of our things that say over 99 percent, both accuracy and accessibility,” said Rep. Emma Greenman, DFL-Minneapolis.

But Republicans did not have such a rosy view, saying that any kind of lapses, even if it is a small percentage, could allow someone to cast a vote in a close election. They honed in on Election Day registrations.

“We should have a mechanism where we verify the identity prior to that ballot getting cast, so that we don't have to worry about trying to figure out we can't pull a ballot back, it's in the box,” said Sen. Cal Bahr, R-East Bethel.

Minnesota has nearly 3.8 million people registered to vote as of this January. That includes some 33,000 who are on a challenged status that requires them to answer questions before being permitted to vote.

The state and counties share responsibility to maintain the voter registration system, although counties deal more often with the records because they manage polling places and handle ballots on the day of elections.

The system is supposed to be updated when counties learn that a voter’s circumstances have changed — they move, they die, they are placed under a guardianship or they become ineligible due to incarceration for a felony conviction, for instance.

Auditors said the secretary of state’s office satisfied its requirements to pass along information from state agencies but counties didn’t always update their records as required by law. The report recommends that both election administration partners take steps to keep the records up to date.

The Legislature often follows the audits in crafting or revising laws. The Legislature next convenes in January.

President Trump said Wednesday he believes the current ceasefire with Iran is over after an exchange of attacks between the U.S. and Iran, the latest escalation straining the agreement to end the war.

"I think it's over. I don't want to deal with them anymore. They're scum," Trump told reporters in Ankara, where he is attending the NATO summit.

He called the Iranian leaders "vicious, violent people."

"If they had a nuclear weapon, they'd use it," he added.

Trump, however, did not rule out talks continuing to permanently end the war with Iran.

He said the top U.S. negotiators, Steve Witkoff and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, want to negotiate.

But, Trump added, "as far as I'm concerned, it's just a waste of time dealing with them. They're liars."

There was no immediate response from the Iranian government.

His comments came after the U.S. and Iran traded attacks again overnight Wednesday, the second such escalation since the two sides signed an interim deal in mid-June.

The strikes followed Tuesday's attacks on three commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. said it carried out strikes on Iranian targets in what it said was retaliation for the previous Iranian aggression. Iranian Revolutionary Guard said it responded to those strikes by launching missiles and drones against Kuwait and Bahrain, two Arab Gulf countries that host U.S. military bases.

Trump is in Ankara, Turkey, to attend the NATO summit, where he has continued to air grievances, lamenting that European countries don't contribute enough to their own defense spending, as Russia's war against Ukraine has dragged on.

He has also expressed frustration since the U.S. and Israel's war with Iran began that Europe hasn't been supportive enough of his agenda.

Earlier in the day, the president said he was "testing" allies on how they'd help with the war.

"Italy turned us down, and Germany turned us down, and France turned us down, and it's OK, but you know, why are we spending hundreds of billions of dollars and they're not there for us? We've always been there for them," Trump said.

The tension between Trump and NATO nations has also grown as the president continued on Tuesday to insist that the U.S. should have control of Greenland, a territory currently under Denmark.

Despite friction in the alliance, at the gathering Trump has discussed some issues important to him related to the U.S.-Israel-led war in Iran, such as increased defense spending and logistics around opening the Strait of Hormuz.

And as the two-day summit ends, Trump is expected to take questions during a Wednesday press conference.

The brief two-day gathering typically left little time for one-on-one meetings, but Trump was expected to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the sidelines of the gathering. Negotiating an end to the conflict between Russia and Ukraine has been an elusive goal for Trump, who has teased recently that the end of the war is "getting closer," without providing much further detail. He also said he recently spoke to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

On Tuesday, Trump met with the leader of the host nation, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whom he considers a friend. The two discussed the U.S. potentially selling F-35 fighter jets to Turkey — despite there being a congressional ban in place that prevents this.

"We have a very good relationship. … Why wouldn't we do that?" Trump said in his meeting with Erdogan.

Tina Kraja in Washington, D.C., contributed reporting to this story.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Nearly 75,000 people got approval to take paid family and medical leave under the state’s program in the first six months since it got off the ground.

Officials in the Department of Employment and Economic Development provided an update Tuesday about who had applied for the partial pay replacement to take time to bond with a new child, heal from a sickness or injury or care for a loved one.

They reported that 126,373 applications had been submitted, with an approval rate of nearly 60 percent so far. An application doesn’t automatically translate into granted leave. Some applications are still pending or the denials are subject to further consideration.

Almost half of the approved leave cases — 38,000 — were for family bonding. Medical leave requires applicants to include certification from a health provider and that category had a lower approval rate.

DEED Commissioner Matt Varilek said that despite some small hiccups, the rollout had gone off pretty well.

“We had predictions that we would be behind schedule in launching, we had predictions that we would be over budget in launching, we had predictions that the technology would not work properly,” Varilek said. “I'm happy to note that on those three measures: We came in under budget with implementation. We launched early. And the technology has operated smoothly.”

The program was funded through a one-time state payment of $668 million in 2023 and is topped off by payroll taxes collected from workers and employers. Leaders from the paid family leave office said there was an initial bump in applications early this year as parents applied for bonding leave.

Parents who welcomed children in 2025 were also eligible to apply within one year of that family expansion event — a birth or adoption.

But applications have since trended down, with between 3,000 and 4,000 applications for paid leave coming in each month.

“We've really leveled off,” said DEED deputy commissioner Evan Rowe. “By about the third week in January, we saw applications to new applicants declined by about a quarter, and now we're really starting to get into that more steady state of program operations as we go along.”

Rowe said the state would consult an actuarial analysis this month to determine whether the payroll tax rate for workers and employers would need to increase from the current level.

The officials noted that while the program allows people to take up to 12 weeks of paid leave — with a possible longer combination if someone takes medical and bonding or caring leave in a calendar year — the average times are lower.

Minnesotans who took time to bond with a child took 8.2 weeks on average, those taking medical leave took 6.5 weeks on average and those who took caring leave used 5.7 weeks on average.

Here’s an additional breakdown of where the program stands after six months:

• The department reports that it has processed 126,373 unique applications from 116,617 applicants. Of those, 74,687 were approved.

• Fifty percent of applications were for medical leave, 36 percent were for bonding leaving, 14 percent for caring leave and the remainder were for safety and military family leave.

• On average, people taking paid leave received $1,083 a week. With the maximum someone could make from the program capped at $1,423 a week. Pay is determined based on someone’s income, with those who make less receiving a larger percent of their typical pay.

• Fifty-eight percent of those who applied were under the age of 40 and 64 percent of applicants were women. Fifty-four percent of those who applied made less than $78,000 a year.

Two tankers were struck by projectiles Tuesday in the Strait of Hormuz, the British military said, in the latest attacks targeting vessels moving through the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf.

One of the tankers was traveling off the coast of Oman and caught fire, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center. Iranian state television said the liquefied natural gas tanker came under attack after ignoring warnings but did not directly claim the assault.

It was not immediately clear where the second tanker was when it was hit. The vessel was believed to have sustained structural damage, but no one was injured, the maritime agency said.

Tehran, which has repeatedly declared that only its approved route through the strait is safe, is suspected of attacking other ships that have used another route close to the Omani shore.

The U.S. is eager to press ahead with negotiations with Iran aimed at fully reopening the strait, rolling back Tehran’s disputed nuclear program and reaching a permanent end to the war launched Feb. 28. Previous attacks in the strait have sparked retaliatory strikes by the U.S. Iran then attacked Gulf Arab states.

In peacetime, a fifth of all traded oil and natural gas passed through the channel.

Meanwhile, talks between Iran and the U.S. appeared to be on hold until after the burial of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who was killed at the beginning of the war. Mourners at his funeral have called for the death of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Authorities flew Khamenei's body to the Shiite seminary city of Qom, where mourners honored him Tuesday.

Tanker struck in latest attack in strait

The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations center said the tanker was hit near Limah, Oman, in the strait. The UKMTO said the projectile hit the port side of the vessel as it tried to travel south out of the strait toward the Gulf of Oman.

The agency said there were no environmental effects from the strike and that authorities were investigating.

Iranian state TV, quoting anonymous sources, implied that Tehran carried out the assault on a tanker it said was carrying natural gas from Qatar. However, there was no official claim from the Islamic Republic for the attack.

Majed Al-Ansari, a spokesperson for the Qatari Foreign Ministry, said targeting the Qatari tanker, Al Rekayyat, in the strait was an “unacceptable attack” on international navigation and global energy security. He called it a “serious and explicit violation” of international law.

In a post on X, he said Qatar holds Iran “fully legally responsible” for the attack.

Iran’s joint military command warned last Thursday that all oil tankers moving through the strait must use its approved routes. It also said that interference by U.S. forces in the strait “will be met with a rapid and decisive reaction.”

But the Joint Maritime Information Center, a multinational body overseen by the U.S. Navy, told shippers Monday that the route around Oman “has been expanded and remains available for all traffic.”

Speaking Monday at the White House, Trump warned Iran that it would need to “make a deal, or we're going to finish the job.”

“I'd rather make a deal, because I don’t want to affect 91 million people,” Trump said. “We can knock down their bridges in one hour. We can knock out their energy supply.”

Iran and the United States agreed as part of an interim deal to allow ships to pass without paying charges for 60 days. But Tehran insisted it must control the routes of the vessels and later charge fees for passage, which would upend decades of practice in the waterway.

The U.S. and many Gulf Arab states say they will not agree to Iran charging for passage through the strait. An effort by Oman and a United Nations agency to launch a new route near Oman’s shore earlier sparked attacks across the Mideast.

The data firm Kpler reported that over last weekend at least 108 ships crossed through the strait using various routes.

Mourners gather in Qom for Khamenei's funeral

Iranian state television early Tuesday aired live images from a helicopter of hundreds of thousands of people walking toward Jamkaran Mosque, just south of Qom, for a funeral service for Khamenei. Shiites believe the mosque once hosted the Muhammad al-Mahdi, the 12th and last Shiite imam, who disappeared in the 9th century and will one day reappear to bring justice to the world.

Images of Khamenei and his son, Iran's new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, were displayed on banners and posters held by mourners. Mojtaba Khamenei has yet to make an appearance in the funeral ceremonies, which are unfolding over several days. He is believed to be in hiding after reportedly being wounded in the airstrike that killed his father.

At the height of the war, before an April ceasefire, Israel targeted top Iranian leaders, in at least one case likely using their public appearances to fix their position. It has also threatened to kill the younger Khamenei.

Authorities have shut down streets, airspace and daily life for the mourning, which began Saturday and will end Thursday as Khamenei is buried at the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, his birthplace. Khamenei was 86.

Grand jury subpoenas against top Minnesota political figures and their offices triggered a legal back-and-forth in private until a federal judge invalidated the expansive document demand last month and ordered sealed court records be made public.

At the direction of U.S. District Court Judge Patrick Schiltz, most of those court documents have been put out in the open in recent days.

They reveal how Justice Department officials based their probe on old training handbooks, public remarks and social media postings to suggest interference with a winter surge of federal immigration enforcement. Attorneys for the Minnesota leaders in turn argued the investigation was an abuse of the grand jury process and an attempt at political intimidation.

Who and what was subject to the subpoenas issued in January?

At the urging of federal lawyers, a grand jury granted the subpoenas in January that ordered several offices to turn over a broad range of documents.

Those subpoenaed were the offices of Gov. Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her and the governing boards of Hennepin and Ramsey counties.

The demand included records, manuals, communications and more about the federal immigration surge in Minnesota. The requests went back to Jan. 1, 2025 — well before thousands of agents were sent to Minnesota.

What did U.S. Department of Justice officials say led to their investigatory subpoenas?

The Justice Department lawyers contended there was “sufficient factual predicate” to show there was deliberate “obstruction, hindrance and interference with federal immigration enforcement.”

They contend there were both formal and informal policies they say required Minnesota local and state government employees to impede the operation. In the case of Hennepin County, the federal officials pointed to training manuals that encouraged “respectful stalling” in order to frustrate ICE access and goals.

Those types of actions, the lawyers said, provided a reasonable basis to investigate whether there was a coordinated campaign to resist federal law enforcement. Lawyers for Hennepin County pushed back on the contention and said the description of the training for staff “is inaccurate and, in any event, not indicative of a crime.”

The documents also cite press conferences and public statements by city leaders that they would protect residents from the surge of agents.

How did the Minnesota officials and their offices respond?

A team of lawyers assembled by the affected entities fought the federal claims as based on inference and innuendo. That effort to push back began in February.

In one previously sealed document, the lawyers for Walz raised concerns about the subpoenas intruding on independent state authority and said “the federal government fails to offer any evidence or explanation for a grand jury investigation of a sitting governor and his office.”

They went on to say “the public record establishes this subpoena is part of an effort to criminalize and publicize a political dispute between the president of the United States and the governor of Minnesota, and an improper attempt by the former to intimidate the latter into capitulating.”

Attorneys for the Minnesota officials said the investigation wasn’t being done in good faith and for that reason the judge should take the extraordinary step of releasing material that was filed under seal to show the public what had transpired.

How unusual is the release of grand jury-related documents that had previously been filed under seal?

Judge Schiltz agreed that the circumstances warranted the rare step of publicly releasing the information.

In his order last month, Schiltz wrote any connections between the information the government had sought and any crime “range from extremely weak to nonexistent.” The judge added that the evidence is overwhelming “that these subpoenas were not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce and retaliate.”

Justice Department lawyers sought to shield the materials.

In an April 14 filing, Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Flavio de Abreu urged the judge to adhere to the long practice of secrecy of grand jury proceedings. He wrote that it is vital to guard against chilling participation of witnesses concerned about retaliation or attempts to influence grand jurors.

“In this case, the government has repeatedly noted that the targets of the investigation remain unidentified,” Abreu told the court in a brief. “Publicizing this proceeding — and the government’s discussion of the investigation during the April 1 hearing — would notify any potential unidentified targets of the course, purpose and scope of the government’s investigation.”

Those subpoenaed alleged that federal government leaks put the matter into public view so it shouldn’t be afforded the secrecy protections it cast as vital.

“The circumstances indicate that an attorney for the government must have either shared secret grand jury information with the press (or another government official not entitled to see the information) or that a non-DOJ official was aware of the plans to issue subpoenas because they directed DOJ to do so,” lawyers for Ellison wrote in a March court filing urging the subpoenas be quashed and an investigation begin into possible grand jury breaches.

Did everything related to the subpoenas get made public?

Not yet. Some materials will remain sealed until at least July 15 or for even longer. That’s a deadline Schiltz set for the U.S. government lawyers to contest his order.

There are a few exhibits that weren’t made public.

Correction (July 7, 2026): This story has been updated to reflect the grand jury subpoenas for documents from Minnesota officials were issued in January, with the legal effort to push back beginning in February.

Federal agents with Homeland Security Investigations tried to track down Rochester resident David Streever last month and give him a warning notice alleging that he had potentially violated the law when he wrote a harsh email months earlier to the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Now a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression on Monday in federal court in Washington, D.C. argues Streever's January email was protected speech and the federal agents' and their superiors violated Streever's First Amendment rights.

NPR reported last week about HSI agents trying to contact Streever first at his home and later at a hotel over an email that Streever wrote to Todd Lyons, who stepped down as the acting director of ICE at the end of May.

FIRE's lawsuit says the First Amendment protects Americans' rights to speak out against police but says the "Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is actively threatening that freedom, tracking down and retaliating against speakers like Plaintiff David Streever because he exercised his fundamental right to criticize one of the highest-ranking law enforcement officers in the United States."

The suit goes on to say, "Our Constitution does not tolerate such a brazen abuse of authority."

Streever wrote to Lyons' government email address on Jan. 26 after federal immigration officers in Minneapolis fatally shot two U.S. citizen observers during the immigration enforcement surge there.

The three-paragraph note compared Lyons to a Nazi and predicted that Lyons would be tormented by his own conscience. It has the subject line, "What's next."

Five months later, on June 23, two HSI agents rang the doorbell of Streever's Rochester home and then left a document with Streever's wife for him to sign. It was labeled "WARNING NOTICE" and "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW," and described federal laws that make it a crime to threaten federal officials. The notice said ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility had identified an email to Lyons that may violate federal law and the office "is requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."

The bottom of the form reads, "Receipt of this Notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above."

Streever was taking his 7-year-old daughter on a vacation to a Finnish theme park when the agents visited his home. He and his daughter landed at New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport two days later and made their way to a nearby airport hotel to sleep.

That evening, Streever was told by the hotel front desk that a federal agent from the Department of Homeland Security had come to see him and had left a business card. His wife had not told the agents which hotel he would be staying at, raising questions about how Streever had been tracked to that location.

"Like many Americans, I was deeply upset after the shootings in Minnesota and I felt compelled to do something," Streever said in a statement. "Writing an email to the head of ICE seemed like the least I could do to express my sense of outrage. I never dreamed it would lead to a knock on my door by federal officers or descending on my hotel in the dark of night."

The lawsuit names three federal agents who tried to contact Streever as defendants along with Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin and ICE officials.

The suit argues the federal agents' actions have caused Streever to self-censor his views, and alleges they violated a First Amendment bar on the government threatening people over protected speech.

The lawsuit asks for the court to find that Streever's email was protected by the First Amendment, and to bar defendants "from taking any further actions, formal or informal, to coerce, threaten, retaliate against, or intimate repercussions directly or indirectly to Plaintiff Streever for his protected speech and petitioning activity."

The suit also asks the court to declare the warning notices federal agents are issuing people are "sufficient" to chill free expression protected by the First Amendment.

"ICE's issuance of formal "WARNING NOTICE" documents to critics who engage in protected speech—and its decision to have federal agents deliver those warnings in person—can have only one purpose: to systemically chill ICE's critics and coerce them into silence," the suit reads.

DHS responded with the same statement that it provided last week when NPR first asked about Streever's case. "ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on any ongoing investigations."

Adam Steinbaugh, senior attorney at FIRE, said in a statement the government's delayed response to Streever's January email undermines its investigation.

"If someone is really threatening a government official, you don't wait five months to act on it," Steinbaugh said in the statement. "The fact that authorities didn't respond immediately shows that David presented no threat. This pursuit is designed to intimidate lawful speech, pure and simple."

Poll worker given the same warning notice

The lawsuit mentions that the same day HSI agents visited Streever's home on June 23, they also confronted Paigelynne Gonyea, a Syracuse resident who was working at a polling place for the New York primary election that day, about an Instagram post.

While Gonyea was at Syracuse's Central Library working the polls, an HSI agent left her a voicemail that said the agents had just visited her former apartment and were calling "in reference to a post that we believe you made on Instagram where you doxxed an ICE agent back in January."

Doxxing typically refers to releasing sensitive information about a person online.

Gonyea called the agent back. She said the agents had wanted her to come outside the polling place to speak with them but she told NPR she did not trust them, and had told them to come talk to her inside the polling place when there was a lull in voters.

Local election officials later said the federal agents should not have gone inside, given that police are not supposed to enter polling places unless there is an emergency and a recently enacted New York law bars federal immigration officers from voting sites.

Video captured by fellow poll workers shows two agents with badges speaking with Gonyea inside the library and delivering a warning notice that said her Instagram account may have violated the law. Gonyea said the agents did not tell her which of her posts had prompted their visit but they had confirmed it was a post about Jonathan Ross, the ICE officer who fatally shot Renee Macklin Good in Minneapolis.

Gonyea denied to NPR and other news outlets that she had ever doxxed Ross and had said she thought the agents were referring to a post she made that identified Ross by name after the Minnesota Star Tribune had reported it, and called for Ross to be indicted. That post is still visible on her Instagram account.

But after NPR and other media outlets wrote about the encounter, DHS released a statement that said Gonyea "committed a federal crime by posting the address of an ICE law enforcement officer online." The statement continued, "Doxxing federal law enforcement officers is a federal crime that puts their lives and their families in serious danger…If you doxx our officers, we will investigate you, and you will be brought to justice."

DHS did not respond to requests from NPR to provide evidence that Gonyea had doxxed Ross. But the department did share with the Associated Press a redacted screenshot taken from a cell phone of a different Instagram post that looks like it was posted from Gonyea's account.

The post that was shown to AP is a photo of Ross with text that reads, "The killer's name is Jonathan Ross of" and the rest is redacted, presumably by DHS. The post does not currently appear on Gonyea's Instagram account. The screenshot shows it was taken six hours after the post went up but does not show a date.

Gonyea told NPR she had the opportunity to review the screenshot of the post but she did not believe she had posted it.

"Based on everything I know, I do not believe that I made that post, and I have no independent recollection of ever creating or publishing it," she told NPR in a text message.

"There is additional context that I believe is important, and I look forward to addressing those matters through the appropriate process rather than in the press," she wrote.

"What has not changed is my concern about the broader constitutional issues raised by my experience, including free speech, due process and government accountability."

Steinbaugh from FIRE told NPR last week that a social media post that shares a person's address alone is not a criminal offense.

"What the law criminalizes is publishing an address or sharing an address with the intent to convey a threat," Steinbaugh said. "So if you post an address and say, 'Hey, gang, at 5:00 tonight, we're going to all meet up here with our pitchforks and torches,' that puts you more in the ballpark of a threat."

He said some social media posts that publicized Ross's address were in the context of a broader public debate about whether federal immigration officers can wear masks and refuse to identify themselves "and essentially [act] almost as a secret police." He said for that reason, some posts that shared information about Ross were a form of protest.

"People might think that that is speech that people should not engage in, but it's still protected and it can't be criminalized," Steinbaugh said.

Gonyea and Streever are the first two people who have made public that they received warning notices from Homeland Security agents about their online communications.

Copyright 2026, NPR

This story was produced in partnership with Harvest Public Media, a collaboration of public media newsrooms in the Midwest and Great Plains. It reports on food systems, agriculture and rural issues.

By Abigail Bottar | Harvest Public Media

Shoppers using federal food benefits may soon have a new option at the grocery store: rotisserie chicken.

U.S. lawmakers are considering an amendment to the farm bill that would add hot rotisserie chicken to the list of eligible food items under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP.

The measure comfortably passed in the House earlier this spring, and it is now part of the proposed farm bill that is on its way to the Senate. A group of bipartisan senators have also introduced a similar bill in their chamber.

Currently, SNAP shoppers can’t purchase foods that are hot at the point of sale, like soup or pizza. They can only buy rotisserie chicken with their benefits once it’s cold.

Dan Shaul, CEO and president of the Midwest Retail and Grocery Alliance, said many stores would be happy to sell hot rotisserie chickens under SNAP to meet consumers’ needs. But, he said the industry doesn't want to expand federal benefits to other hot foods.

“We don't want to see SNAP used in fast food and restaurants like that,” Shaul said. “We want to make sure that the consumer gets the most for their SNAP dollar and for our tax dollars.”

In Minnesota, Robin Manthie, director of Neighborhood Services at Second Harvest Heartland, said the move would provide more options for SNAP participants.

“What we hear from families is they want to feed their kids something healthy and nutritious. And for me, rotisserie chicken meets both of those,” Manthie said.

Manthie said she’s not concerned about this rule reaching to other hot and prepared foods in the grocery store. She said SNAP participants are budget-conscious shoppers, and it’s important to note this measure doesn't change how much money people get.

“This is a change to what people can access, and they're still going to have to make smart decisions with the roughly $6 a day that a person in Minnesota who's on SNAP on average gets,” Manthie said. “That's a very low amount to feed yourself on, and so people are making smart decisions to stretch something like rotisserie chicken into multiple meals.”

What would this mean for retailers?

If the measure becomes law, Shaul said it will be the easiest rule updates stores will make this year, because it creates a national standard.

While there have been multiple changes and cuts to the program, retailers are already making changes to comply with new SNAP junk food restrictions. So far, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has approved SNAP restriction waivers in 23 states – including Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

For companies with stores in different states, there is an advantage with the rule being implemented nationally, said Gary Huddleston, a grocery industry consultant for the Texas Retailers Association.

“I would say that consistency across all retailers with a federally-sponsored program is certainly better economically for the grocer,” Huddleston said. “So everybody knows the same rules and the customer knows all the same rules.”

Nationally, USDA numbers show there are more than 42 million shoppers using SNAP and about 3.4 million of them live in Texas. Huddleston said rotisserie chickens are economical, nutritious and can easily feed a family, so the group is supportive of adding the prepared birds to SNAP.

Yet he doesn’t expect it will offer a big benefit to the stores that offer rotisserie chicken.

Grocers and retailers are facing higher input costs because of the impacts of climate change, geopolitical conflict and trade policy. Food prices increased 3.1 percent over the last year, according to the latest Consumer Prices Index.

“If the customer has X number of dollars in their SNAP account, they're going to use that throughout the store on eligible items,” Huddleston said. ”And if rotisserie chicken is one of those items, it's still the same amount total benefit on their card.”

An independent candidate for the U.S. Senate has been sentenced to three months in the Hennepin County workhouse over a tarantula-tossing incident a couple of years ago.

Marisa Simonetti, 32, of Edina, was convicted on one count of gross misdemeanor harassment and one count of misdemeanor domestic assault.

Simonetti’s sentence allows her to have work release. She will have to pay $1,078 in fines.

She was placed on probation for two years, and a one-year sentence in the workhouse was stayed.

The charges stem from an incident involving Simonetti and a woman renting out her basement.

The criminal complaint says the woman requested Simonetti bring in pest control to get rid of spiders in the basement. The complaint said on June 20, 2024 the woman had groceries delivered, which Simonetti intercepted and refused to give to the woman until police intervened.

According to the complaint: The woman told police Simonetti began banging pots and pans loudly upstairs and cut off the dwelling’s Wi-Fi. The woman later called police to say the door to the basement had been opened, and Simonetti began throwing things down the stairwell, including a live tarantula and the contents of a terrarium, along with nails, pins and tacks. Police say they found those items on the stairwell when they arrived.

The also complaint said Simonetti allegedly yelled “this is why you never f*&% with Marisa Simonetti.”

Simonetti is on Minnesota’s ballot as an independent candidate for the U.S. Senate.

In a statement issued Thursday, Simonetti said, “Many Minnesotans feel the system is unfair and that the law is weaponized to punch them down into compliance, and that legal tricks are used to rob them of their constitutional rights. I am staying in the Senate race and will not be bullied out of it.”

In 2024, she ran unsuccessfully for a seat on the Hennepin County Board. During that campaign, news broke about the tarantula incident and the Republican Party for the 3rd Congressional District revoked its endorsement of her candidacy.

She received almost 32 percent of the vote.

Online prediction markets are chock full of opportunities to wager on outcomes of lawsuits. One involving the prediction markets themselves isn’t among them — at least not yet.

A federal judge plans to decide soon if she’ll block a Minnesota law to effectively ban prediction markets. The sites and a federal regulatory body want an injunction to keep the law from taking effect in August.

On Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez heard arguments in the case brought by prediction markets sites Kalshi and Polymarket, as well as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

They combined to sue Minnesota over the law set to make it a felony to host or advertise the prediction markets. They’re arguing the federal government – not the states – are the ones permitted to regulate the sites. The law has gained national attention since it is the first in the country to prohibit the markets.

State lawmakers cited concerns about the sites skirting state restrictions on gambling and creating environments where people, especially young adults, can become easily addicted to the sites.

Attorneys representing Minnesota pushed back on the arguments about regulatory authority. They said while Congress gave the CFTC authority to regulate contract markets, many of the questions raised on the sites fall outside that threshold. They said the federal oversight authority doesn’t preempt states from enacting policies to protect the health and safety of their residents.

“The states are allowed and entitled under the Constitution to protect their people from public health and public welfare threats,” said Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Lindsey Middlecamp. “There is an ample record that reasonable minds can differ across the country on how they want to regulate gambling, but certainly the lawmakers of Minnesota were concerned that these constitute predatory gambling platforms.”

Attorneys representing the CFTC, Kalshi and Polymarket said all of the contracts that users consider on these prediction markets are different from bets or wagers that a person would make with a bookie or against the house at a casino.

Their attorneys told a judge that the law violates First Amendment rights to free speech because it deals with advertised messages. They said it could chill free speech of those who want to work with the sites to be sort of a fact checker in some of these questions — providing verification about whether or not something happened.

“It is going to chill our ability, our First Amendment right, to get that information if the potential provider runs the risk of being prosecuted for a felon,” said attorney Thomas Dupree, who was representing Polymarket.

During the hearing, Menendez noted that she’s very aware of more than a dozen cases on this subject around the country as other states have attempted to regulate the markets. But she also acknowledged that Minnesota's law is the first that could impact First Amendment issues, dealing with advertising the sites and the ability of Minnesotans to relay firsthand accounts of events to the sites.

Menendez expects to issue an order soon. She quipped that she hopes that her ultimate decision will not lead to wagers on one of the prediction markets, including when she’ll rule.

“I will not specify a day,” Menendez said, “and I hope that I will not be the subject of any prediction market contracts between now and when I get there.”

President Donald Trump visited North Dakota on Wednesday to see the newly built Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, a massive facility exploring the life of America’s 26th president, built in the rugged, lonely landscape where Roosevelt built his conservation values in the 1880s.

During a tour of the 96,000-square-foot library and in a speech afterward, Trump spoke admiringly of Roosevelt and compared himself favorably to the former president, who he described as the embodiment of the American spirit, praising his toughness as a leader and outdoorsman.

“He had a freakin’ wild life,” Trump told an audience at a Western-themed amphitheater. “He didn’t want to be quiet. He wanted to be great.”

The official opening of the library on Saturday coincides with July 4th celebrations honoring the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

Trump made the trip to see the $450 million project aboard his new Air Force One, a Boeing 747 given to the United States by Qatar. The visit was a boost for Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a former governor of North Dakota, while also bringing the nation's birthday festivities to a region synonymous with its westward expansion.

In his speech after the tour, Trump weaved between his own administration's work while returning to lessons drawn from Roosevelt's life, recounting stories of bravery during Roosevelt's time in the West and as president.

“He was something special," Trump said. “He was a really great man. He was a man the likes of which you may never see again.”

During the visit, Trump announced that his administration was giving $750,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the library’s first year.

Roosevelt was a New York native with a strong North Dakota connection

Roosevelt visited Dakota Territory in 1883 to hunt bison. On Valentine’s Day the next year, his mother and wife died hours apart in the same house in New York.

Devastated, Roosevelt came to Dakota where he ranched cattle and hunted big game in the West during visits mostly from 1884 to 1887.

He underwent deep personal growth from his experiences, including chasing boat thieves down a river, standing up to a bully in a bar and working alongside cowboys who ridiculed him for wearing eyeglasses.

Roosevelt, who served as president from 1901 to 1909, later said he never would have been president were it not for his experiences in North Dakota.

Near the library is Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Visitors can hike trails and drive a scenic route through the colorful, rugged Badlands where bison and wild horses roam.

Trump has often described an affinity with Roosevelt

Trump began his second term last year by trumpeting the construction of the Panama Canal during the Roosevelt administration.

Trump even said the U.S. might seek to take back the waterway from Panama to curb influence from China. That goal has been overshadowed by his suggestions that Washington might seize control of Greenland or that Canada could become America's 51st state.

Given a chance to talk with an artificial-intelligence version of Roosevelt at the library, Trump asked if the 26th president considered the Panama Canal his greatest achievement. A digital Roosevelt said he took pride in it while also listing achievements involving parks, medicine and his Square Deal.

In the run-up to staging a UFC fight on the White House lawn for his 80th birthday, Trump said he was aware of Roosevelt holding far lower-key boxing matches in the White House. Trump made no mention of Roosevelt having detached the retina of his left eye during one such sparring session.

The trip also underscores the president's esteem for Burgum, who has become a key face of and cheerleader for the president’s expansive renovation projects around Washington.

In 2019, Burgum championed the library to North Dakota's Republican-led legislature when he was governor, touting its tourism potential. The legislature approved a $50 million operations endowment, requiring library planners to raise $100 million in private donations, a goal met in 2020. Donations total about $354 million as of early 2026.

Donors include oil executive Harold Hamm, the Waltons of Walmart fame, Kenneth Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, a hedge fund, and Burgum himself.

The library will showcase Roosevelt's ideas and artifacts

Trump was the library’s first official visitor, according to the library’s executive director, Robbie Lauf.

All living presidents were invited to the grand opening of the library, which joins more than a dozen others across the country that examine the lives and legacies of U.S. presidents, from Ronald Reagan in California to Franklin D. Roosevelt in New York and Herbert Hoover in Iowa. The Obama Presidential Center recently opened in Chicago, bringing together four former presidents for the occasion.

Visitors will learn about Roosevelt's conservation ideas and his Rough Riders regiment of the Spanish-American War, but also his “horrific comments” about Native Americans and other issues “that have obviously aged poorly,” Lauf said.

Artifacts, many of them out of public view for decades, will tell Roosevelt's story. Visitors will see his Rough Riders uniform; the 1884 diary grieving his terrible loss; and the eyeglasses case, speech and shirt from the 1912 assassination attempt against him.

Organizers hope the library draws families and thousands of school children from the region, as well as some of the millions of motorists who travel to Yellowstone National Park and the Black Hills.

“It's a feature, not a bug, that we are in a county of 1,000 people and a town of 120,” Lauf said. “TR came here for that purpose.”

The Dakota Resource Council on Tuesday hosted several conservation leaders who criticized Burgum and Trump for policies they say contradict Roosevelt's conservation principles, such as cutting staff and budgets and prioritizing energy development on public lands.

Last year, Burgum signed an order prioritizing the openness and accessibility of parks to the public amid the workforce cuts. He has compared America's public lands and natural resources to “assets” that should be responsibly developed to exert “energy dominance.”

On Friday, Trump plans to visit South Dakota’s Mount Rushmore for Independence Day fireworks, as he did in 2020.

David Streever was on vacation in Finland with his 7-year-old daughter last week when he noticed his doorbell camera back home had captured some unusual footage. In recordings from hours earlier, he could see what looked like two law enforcement officers in blue jackets waiting on his front porch in Rochester, N.Y.

Streever, 45, didn't grow concerned about it until he learned more about their visit from his wife, the Rev. Hilary Streever, 43, who is an Episcopal priest. She encountered the pair late on the afternoon of June 23 when she was arriving home with the couple's 2-year-old son, still wearing her clergy collar.

The agents were from Homeland Security Investigations, part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and they were looking for David Streever. Hilary Streever told NPR the agents had said it was about "an email he may or may not have sent threatening Todd Lyons," the former acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"He wouldn't have sent that," she recalled telling the agents. She told them her husband was out of the country and would be home Friday.

The agents asked Hilary Streever to tell her husband to call them back and left a form for him to sign. It said "WARNING NOTICE" and "YOU MAY BE IN VIOLATION OF FEDERAL LAW" and described federal laws that make it a crime to threaten federal officials. Later, the Streevers would learn the same agents presented the same form to a Syracuse poll worker earlier that day, and accused her of threatening an ICE officer on her Instagram account. Civil liberties advocates have criticized the agency's recent use of these forms, calling them an intimidation tactic to silence critics.

When Hilary Streever relayed the agents' message to David, he was puzzled. "I've never made a threat against anyone. I'm not a violent person," he told NPR. He did remember a strongly worded note he had sent to Lyons' government email address in January right after federal immigration officers fatally shot two people in Minneapolis.

In the Jan. 26 email, Streever, a former journalist who now works in the tech industry, warned Lyons that his own conscience would torment him in the future for his actions and compared him to a Nazi official. It is the only email he sent to Lyons, Streever said.

"One powerless citizen yelled into the void with a stern email to the former director of this agency six months ago," Streever told NPR. "And now there's agents at his door."

HSI's focus on Streever is the most recent in a series of actions the Department of Homeland Security has taken against protesters and critics in the past year.

Just a couple hours after Streever landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on Thursday evening, a third Homeland Security Investigations special agent tracked him to the airport hotel he was staying at that night. The agent left a business card with the front desk, raising questions about whether Streever is under surveillance.

"This is clearly out of line," said Adam Steinbaugh, an attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which advocates for free speech, about the investigation into Streever.

The First Amendment protects the rights of Americans to voice their concerns to their government, Steinbaugh said. "The government doesn't have to listen to those, but it doesn't get to dispatch federal agents to your door and stalk you across the state of New York," he added.

DHS did not respond to questions about the case, including a request to confirm that the email that triggered the HSI agents to visit David Streever was the same Jan. 26 email reviewed by NPR. The department gave NPR a statement that said: "ICE investigates all credible threats towards its employees and officers, including threats to the ICE Director. As a matter of policy, we do not comment on any ongoing investigations."

Yelling into the void

Back in January, Streever said he was worried he was watching the country slip into fascism after seeing videos of federal officers fatally shooting observers Renée Macklin Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. He was particularly disturbed by administration officials' attempts to characterize both as domestic terrorists.

Streever felt he needed to register his moral outrage and condemn the violent acts.

"I want to be on the record," Streever recalled thinking. "I need to say something." Streever doubted Lyons himself would ever read his note but was hoping whoever did would "really think about right and wrong."

The email he sent had the subject line "What's next." Streever called Lyons a "monstrous human being" and predicted the ICE leader would "go down in history as America's Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher" — a reference to the Nazi official considered to be one of the architects of the Holocaust.

"The way you are protecting the obvious execution in Minnesota, even as we see the videos, will lead to your downfall. Even Trump will turn on you before the end, and you will be a sad, despised man who eats himself alive with shame at your own pathetic weakness.

"You will never know peace. You will seek to lose yourself, to escape the burden of knowing the truth about yourself. But wherever you go, you will find yourself. You will torment yourself until your last day on Earth," the email read.

Civil liberties advocates say Streever's email is not a threat.

"A threat is a serious expression of an intent to commit unlawful violence. That's not what this was at all. This is criticizing the director of ICE and appealing to his conscience and sharing [Streever's] own views," said Steinbaugh, who has talked with Streever about his case.

Streever's wife texted him a photo of the form the agents left for him.

It said that ICE's Office of Professional Responsibility "has identified an email sent to Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, which it has reason to believe may constitute a violation of Title 19 of the U.S. Code. Accordingly, OPR is requesting that you promptly remove and/or discontinue the aforementioned behavior."

Streever wondered what that language meant, given that it had been five months since he sent the email.

At the bottom of the form it said, "Receipt of this Notice will be taken into consideration, should you continue to be involved in any criminal activities described above."

For months, DHS and ICE have been waging a crackdown on alleged threats against their personnel and doxxing attempts. Federal agents have sent administrative subpoenas to email and social media platforms to find out the identities of people who have posted about ICE anonymously.

"This danger is not hypothetical," said a recent statement from DHS. "Our officers are experiencing coordinated campaigns of violence against them."

Last year, Homeland Security agents visited a Philadelphia man's house to question him about a critical email he sent to a DHS attorney about the decision to deport an Afghan man who feared the Taliban would kill him if he returned.

"It's starting to look like a pattern of knocking on people's doors to ask them questions about clearly constitutionally protected speech. And that is very troubling," said Nathan Freed Wessler, the deputy director of ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.

Civil liberties experts say Streever and the Syracuse poll worker are the first cases they are aware of that involved agents leaving a form to sign. Wessler said the forms "seem to be an escalation and a clear attempt to intimidate people."

Steinbaugh, the attorney with FIRE, posted on X asking for others to come forward if they received one of the forms.

"It is concerning to me that the government is coming up with a form to go to people and say, 'Your protected speech? We think it might be criminal. Knock it off,'" Steinbaugh said.

Tracked to his hotel

When Streever first learned about the HSI agents' visit from his wife last week, he tried not to think about it too much. He and his daughter were enjoying their visit to Moomin World, a Finnish theme park. He figured he would come home and call the agents back.

Once Streever and his daughter were on the plane home, he started to wonder if he would be stopped by federal officers when he showed his passport. But he and his daughter had no issues after landing at JFK International Airport a little after 7 p.m. on Thursday evening. They made their way to a nearby airport hotel to spend the night. He swiped his credit card as part of the hotel check-in a little after 8 p.m. and then he and his daughter went to sleep.

He was woken up sometime after 9 p.m. by the hotel room phone ringing. It was the front desk calling. A worried sounding voice on the other end told him that someone from Homeland Security had come looking for him.

"They said the investigator seemed to know I was there, left a card and said they should have me call him," Streever recalled. "I was really freaked out. How could this agent have found me?"

He looked at his phone and realized then that he had received two voicemail messages a few minutes before 9 p.m. from a New York number.

"Hi, this is Homeland Security Investigations looking for David Streever," a male voice said in a voicemail that was shared with NPR. A female voice left a similar message a minute earlier from the same number.

Streever read a news story on his phone that he had seen on social media earlier that day about a poll worker in Syracuse, Paigelynne Gonyea, who had been contacted by two HSI agents while she was working New York's primary election on June 23. The agents presented her with a form to sign that said her Instagram account may have violated the law.

Streever reached out to Gonyea on Facebook a little after 10 p.m. on Thursday and soon they were comparing notes. They determined the agents who had visited Streever's home in Rochester were the same pair who earlier that day had visited Gonyea at a Syracuse polling place.

Streever didn't sleep much that night. He said the hardest part was waking up his jet-lagged daughter so they could catch their train home and realizing he needed to prepare her in case federal agents confronted them.

"I can't imagine there is an age-appropriate, non-scary and non-terrifying way to tell a 7-year-old that these people might be looking for their dad," Streever said.

His daughter cried when he told her about the agents and she said she didn't want him to be killed.

"I haven't done anything wrong," he told her. "Be very calm. We're not going to panic."

On Friday morning, Streever stopped by the hotel's front desk and received an envelope with the business card of Trevor Pitts, the HSI agent who had visited the night before. The phone number on the card matched the number that had left the two voicemails on Streever's phone. When reached at that number, Pitts referred NPR to a New York ICE office for comment, though NPR did not receive a response.

It remains unclear how the agent tracked Streever to his airport hotel. He had not told the officers who checked his passport at the airport which hotel he was going to. Even his wife didn't know which hotel he had chosen.

Streever said he and his daughter took a roundabout route to catch a shuttle to the hotel and didn't see anyone else who could have been following them. HSI has access to a wide array of surveillance methods, and there are a number of potential ways the agent might have found Streever's location, including surveillance cameras, cell phone location data and credit card transactions, said Wessler of the ACLU.

The decision to put resources into tracking down Streever appears "more geared towards intimidation than actually any type of reasonable use of law enforcement resources," said Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"Is there abuse of surveillance technologies in this instance? I think that's a legitimate question, given that there's no other information here that suggests that this person is any kind of threat and warrants the attention of federal law enforcement officers," Scott added.

Wessler of the ACLU said too many details are unknown at this point to know whether surveillance of Streever may have violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against illegal searches. But he said it "sure looks like a serious issue under the First Amendment," since it is a violation to threaten people with prosecution and intimidate them over protected speech.

"We do have a lot of power"

Something shifted for Streever after he found out the HSI agent had tracked him to his hotel.

He no longer wanted to call the agents back as he had originally planned.

Nothing unusual happened on the trip home, and he used the train ride to connect with civil liberties advocates and the office of his representative in Congress, Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y. He wrestled at first with the decision of whether to share his story publicly and how it could affect his family and their safety.

While on the train, Streever's wife sent him a text about how the previous Sunday's gospel lesson kept coming into her mind.

"It's Jesus talking to his disciples and talking about the cost of discipleship… [that] it's not going to be peaceful," Hilary Streever told NPR. "You do have to tell the truth in public. And people won't like to hear it necessarily."

That helped the couple decide they should go public with what happened and continue to be critical of government actions they disagree with — despite the intimidating visits from federal agents.

Streever said one unexpected silver lining from this ordeal is that he no longer feels as powerless as he once did.

"If they hadn't come after me, I would have just been a guy whose sole act of defiance was writing a stern email to a faceless bureaucrat who was never going to read it," Streever said.

"But for them to come after me six months later for that one email, it makes me feel like we do have a lot of power. It makes me feel like they do care that we're speaking up."

Copyright 2026, NPR

Starting Wednesday, Minnesotans who scroll through social media sites were supposed to see new warning labels aimed at raising the potential risks of excessive use. But the pop-up labels didn’t appear and state officials aren’t enforcing it just yet.

Lawmakers passed a bill requiring the warning labels in 2025, citing concerns about how the sites and apps can cause mental health issues, especially among young users. They said the labels will be like warnings for tobacco products or alcohol.

As of early Wednesday morning, a check of multiple social media sites did not show any displaying the warning label. The Minnesota attorney general said Wednesday it was not yet enforcing the law as a challenge from a coalition of tech companies played out in court.

NetChoice, an industry group representing social media companies, sued over the labels. The lawsuit contends the sites shouldn’t be required to pass on state-issued messages to their users under the argument that the health warnings are “designed to block, burden, and browbeat” social media users. A federal judge didn’t take action to block the labels before the law took hold. A Colorado law similar to Minnesota’s was put on hold last year after a challenge from NetChoice.

Minnesota’s attorney general said it decided to wait to press for compliance.

"The social media warning label legislation is important, and the attorney general’s office is defending it vigorously by filing a motion to dismiss NetChoice’s lawsuit,” the office said in response to a query from MPR News. “The office agreed not to immediately enforce the law in order to give the court breathing room to rule on the motion to dismiss.”

The statement said if the lawsuit was dismissed, the attorney general would move to enforce the law.

Under the law, the companies that run the sites are supposed to provide a pop up message from the Minnesota Department of Health that offers contact information for the suicide and crisis lifeline. Users would need to acknowledge the warning label before moving on to photos, articles or posts.

What will these pop-ups look like?

The state department of health has approved a warning that reads, “THE STATE OF MINNESOTA REQUIRES THIS MESSAGE: Some studies have shown that too much social media use is linked to increased mental health symptoms, including anxiety and depression, as well as harm to diet, sleep, and body image. If you need help, call or text 988 or visit 988Lifeline.org.”

Barring court intervention, the messages will be displayed on social media sites and apps when users first click into them. They will have to acknowledge the pop-up to move forward.

Why are they starting now?

State legislators approved a law last year requiring the new messages. They waited a year for the enactment date so that the state could craft the warning and allow social media sites to implement them.

Former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called for the warning labels to be placed on the sites in 2024. He pointed to research indicating that prolonged social media use can lead to worse mental health outcomes, higher rates of eating disorders and body image issues among children and adolescents. Minnesota is the first state to pass legislation requiring them.

“I would imagine we'd get some challenges, but I got to tell you right now, the social media and the tech folks are not the No. 1 favorites of Americans,” Gov. Tim Walz said Tuesday. “I think they're going to have to try and reach out and meet us part way on this, protecting our children from some of the things we know can cause harm.”

What happens if sites don’t share them?

Failure to add the labels could be met with investigation and civil punishment.

Karen Clark, a trailblazing Minnesota state representative who was key in legalizing gay marriage and the first openly lesbian member of the Legislature, died on Tuesday. She was 80.

Clark, a DFLer, represented several neighborhoods in Minneapolis in the Minnesota House from 1981 to 2019.

She helped to ban LGBTQ+ discrimination from housing, employment and education in Minnesota in 2013. Under the Obama administration, she was honored as a “champion of change” for her work and served on former Gov. Rudy Perpich’s Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Minnesotans in 1990. Clark was born in Oklahoma and grew up on a sharecropping farm in Rock County.

In an MPR News documentary about the debate for marriage rights, Clark said “I was elected in 1980, the same day as Ronald Reagan. And that's where our similarities begin and end.”

She was the first Minnesota lawmaker to run as an openly LGBTQ+ candidate and win. Sen. Allan Spear came out after he had already been in office for two years. Clark said that “coming out” was the most important political act LGBTQ+ people could make.

“I had a lot of fun experiences and some difficult ones too. ‘People just understanding, oh my gosh, she’s a lesbian and she’s kind of a nice person and wow, what a surprise!’ It was like that kind of thing,” she said.

Sen. Scott Dibble met Clark through activist circles and served as her campaign manager.

“She had this extraordinary combination of of gentleness and fierce determination. She was indefatigable, determined, relentless. She really, really believed in standing up and being a strong voice for the people,” he said. “She really felt strongly that it was important for them to be a part of the work, and to be a part of coalition and a part of putting together solutions to the problems.”

Dibble and Clark served one term together. He said serving alongside his “hero and mentor” was “incredible.”

Rep. Dave Pinto sat by Clark during his first term and said above all, he will remember her kindness.

“She had such a calm, centered presence. She took such good care of me and others as well,” Pinto said. “She demanded that out of all of us, that we treat everyone with kindness.”

Even though she decided not to pursue another term in 2019, that doesn’t mean her advocacy stopped, Pinto said. He regularly saw her at the Capitol, and she showed him bills she was working on.

Clark was also an advocate for the Roof Depot urban farm project in south Minneapolis, and pushed for the closure of an iron foundry amid concerns about pollution in the city’s East Phillips neighborhood.

Her family posted about her death on social media, and a spokesperson for the House DFL confirmed her passing after a brief illness.

Details on memorial services have yet to be announced.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz said Tuesday that he’ll accept a council-approved pay raise after bypassing recommended salary bumps during his seven years in office. It will bring his pay to more than $16,600 per month for the remainder of his tenure.

The second-term DFLer, along with other constitutional officers, agency heads and judges will also see pay hikes under recommendations adopted by the state’s compensation council. Those will take effect because the Legislature didn’t get in the way of the raises.

The recommended bump will increase the governor's annual base pay from $174,775 to $200,000. For most of his time in office, Walz’s actual base pay has been $127,000 per year — about $10,580 per month — after he skipped prior raise offers.

However, earlier this year Walz did begin receiving the maximum allowed, although his office didn’t say when that shift occurred. Walz announced in January he wouldn’t go forward with a reelection campaign.

Walz said he didn’t get into public service to make money. But he wanted to accept the larger salary before a new governor takes office. His term will end early next year and a new governor will take office in early January.

“I didn't expect to get rich in public service, either as a teacher or soldier in this job. I thought it set an example by not doing that,” Walz said. “This year, I am going to take it on the way out the door to make sure that the next governor is at the appropriate level that the legislators set, that brings us in line again.”

Walz said he has felt “compensated fairly” during his two terms.

“But I want to make sure that it's keeping pace with inflation, so that people who go into these jobs aren't at a disadvantage, and we're ending up in a situation — in many cases, I saw this in Congress — where wealthy people can afford to have a house in their home, and in D.C., many of us couldn't, so we slept in our offices,” Walz said.

In their March report recommending the raises, compensation council members said the governor is responsible for overseeing 45,000 state employees and managing a $66 billion budget that spans two years. Prior to the proposed pay hike, the state ranked 30th for its governor’s salary.

Other constitutional officeholders are also in line to see pay increases beginning Wednesday:

• Attorney General Keith Ellison could receive $190,000 a year, up from $166,036 in 2025 — a roughly $2,000 per month raise. It’s unclear if Ellison will accept the raise.

• The secretary of state will see a raise of about $9,000 on an annualized basis. Secretary of State Steve Simon will receive $145,000 per year going forward. He is taking the higher pay.

• The salary for the lieutenant governor is due to increase from $101,123 to $105,038. Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan would have had that raise for part of the year as she vies for an open U.S. Senate seat. But a spokesperson said she won’t take the extra pay.

• Auditor Julie Blaha will get $137,358 per year, though her term is set to end in January. She currently makes $132,238. Blaha said she will accept the raise.

The U.S. Supreme Court has preserved birthright citizenship, leaving in place the constitutional principle that has granted citizenship to nearly everyone born in the United States for more than 150 years.

In a 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Barbara, the justices left in place the longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which states that virtually everyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents' immigration status.

The ruling preserves more than a legal doctrine for many Minnesotans. It protects a pathway that has shaped generations of immigrant families.

For Luis Argueta, communications director for Unidos Minnesota, birthright citizenship is deeply personal.

His parents fled El Salvador during the country's civil war and came to the United States to seek asylum.

They would eventually apply for Temporary Protected Status before becoming citizens years later.

Argueta was born in the United States, making him a citizen from birth.

His story is shared by hundreds of thousands of Minnesotans. According to the American Immigration Council, an estimated 280,000 Minnesota residents are U.S.-born citizens with at least one immigrant parent.

“As a son to Salvadorian parents who were raised through the 60s, 70s, and 80s, going into the civil war in El Salvador, they got to a point where they had to flee due to persecution in the late 80s,” Argueta said.

Growing up, Argueta said he recognized early that his citizenship offered opportunities his parents did not have.

“Because I was a citizen, I had access to health care, while my parents did not,” he said. “Even as a small child under the age of eight, I still was very aware that my access to even one of the most basic necessities like healthcare was vastly different than my parents.”

Today, Argueta is a homeowner, taxpayer, volunteer and, he jokes, “the snowplow captain” on his St. Paul block.

He says citizenship provided more than legal status.

“It's the ability to place roots in your community,” Argueta said. “I think that's the biggest difference.”

What is birthright citizenship?

Birthright citizenship comes from the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 after the Civil War. The amendment states that people born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are U.S. citizens.

The Supreme Court has long interpreted that language to apply to nearly everyone born in the country, with only narrow exceptions such as children of foreign diplomats.

University of Minnesota law professor Jill Hasday said the constitutional language is straightforward.

“This clause, just stated most clearly, says that virtually everyone born in the United States is a citizen at birth, a birthright citizenship, regardless of whether their parents are citizens or not.”

The challenge before the court argued that children born in the United States should not automatically receive citizenship if their parents are not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. The court declined to adopt that interpretation, preserving more than a century of constitutional precedent.

Hasday said changing that understanding could have dramatically altered American society.

“It creates a permanent underclass of people who could be here for generations. They can never access citizenship, and it really hampers their ability to integrate into society and the economy.”

For Argueta, the constitutional guarantee shaped nearly every part of his life.

“Honestly, I'm very blessed and very fortunate and thankful, and I think the 14th Amendment has made a big impact in my life,” he said.

Other immigration rulings could have more immediate consequences

While the birthright citizenship decision drew the most public attention, immigration advocates say two other Supreme Court rulings issued recently could have more immediate effects on immigrants already navigating the legal system.

Julia Decker, policy director at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, said one ruling affects people seeking asylum at the southern border, while another allows the Trump administration to move forward with ending Temporary Protected Status — or TPS — for certain groups, including many Haitians and Syrians.

Asylum ruling narrows access at the border

The asylum ruling centers on when someone is considered to have "arrived" in the United States.

Decker said that historically, migrants who presented themselves at the border and expressed fear of persecution could undergo a credible fear interview. If they established a credible fear, they were often allowed into the United States while their asylum cases proceeded through immigration court.

The Supreme Court's decision, she said, allows the federal government to deny that opportunity to people who have not physically entered the country.

“The core of the ruling is that people who are outside the border of the United States aren't allowed to seek asylum until they actually are inside the country, as opposed to standing at the border, like asking for asylum,” Decker said.

She said the decision effectively gives the administration legal authority to continue policies that turn asylum seekers away before they can begin the asylum process.

“This ruling enshrines that into law,” Decker said. “It gives the green light.”

Decker also noted that one of the dissents warned the ruling could create an unintended consequence by encouraging people to cross the border outside official ports of entry if they believe presenting themselves lawfully will simply result in being turned away.

The decision does not directly affect asylum seekers who are already in the United States waiting for their court hearings, she said.

However, she cautioned that it should be viewed as part of a much broader shift in immigration policy.

“I think from a 10,000-foot view, this decision is really part of a much larger dismantling of just the lawful immigration system,” Decker said. “The pathways are being taken away from people who are attempting to access the pathways that have been laid out for them.”

TPS ruling affects protections for thousands

Another Supreme Court ruling allows the administration to move forward with ending Temporary Protected Status for certain groups while legal challenges continue.

TPS allows people from countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters or other extraordinary conditions to temporarily live and work legally in the United States.

The case before the court specifically involved TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and several thousand Syrians.

Decker emphasized that the ruling does not eliminate the TPS program itself, which is designated country by country, but it does allow the administration to terminate protections for specific nationalities while litigation continues.

“The administration has been sort of systematically going through and attempting to end designations country by country,” she said.

The Supreme Court sent the case back to a lower court for additional proceedings, leaving open the possibility of further legal action. But for people directly affected, Decker said the practical consequences are immediate.

“People who have the Temporary Protected Status directly on the ground are potentially losing their protections, potentially subject to having to leave the country.”

Immigration advocates say court rulings have real-world effects

Decker said immigration cases often become discussions about legal terminology and court procedures, but she hopes people also consider those affected by the decisions.

“At the baseline, we are talking about people's lives, and we're talking about people and families, and your next-door neighbor,” she said.

She acknowledged that immigration law can seem overwhelmingly technical, with acronyms like TPS and complex court decisions dominating headlines.

“But there are people behind these designations,” she said. “People's lives are changed from one day to the next by these types of rulings.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

The justices relied on a long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, and more recent federal laws in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.

The Republican president's restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the U.S.

During arguments in April, both conservative and liberal justices questioned the order’s legality in a momentous case that was magnified by Trump’s unprecedented attendance in the courtroom.

The case framed another test of Trump’s assertions of executive power that defy long-standing precedent for a court with a conservative majority and a robust view of presidential power that has largely ruled in his favor. In the notable exceptions when the court has not, Trump has responded with starkly personal criticisms of the justices.

The justices ruled on Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions.

The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term, is part of his administration’s broad immigration crackdown.

Birthright citizenship was the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. The justices previously struck down global tariffs Trump had imposed under an emergency powers law that had never been used that way.

Trump reacted furiously to the late February tariffs decision, saying he was ashamed of the justices who ruled against him and calling them unpatriotic.

He also seemed to recognize the court was likely to rule against him on birthright citizenship, too, using his Truth Social platform to criticize “dumb judges and justices” and wealthy pregnant women from China and elsewhere who come to the U.S. to give birth so their newborns will have American citizenship.

Trump’s order would have upended widely held views that the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born in the U.S., excluding only the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.

The amendment was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship, though the Citizenship Clause is written more broadly. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” it reads.

In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down Trump's executive order as illegal. The decisions have invoked the high court’s 1898 ruling in Wong Kim Ark, which held that the U.S.-born child of Chinese nationals was a citizen.

The Trump administration argued that the common view of citizenship is wrong, asserting that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.

More than one-quarter of a million babies born in the U.S. each year would have been affected by the executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.

While Trump has largely focused on illegal immigration in his rhetoric and actions, the birthright citizenship restrictions also would have applied to people who are legally in the United States, including students and applicants for green cards, or permanent resident status.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld state laws barring transgender girls and women from playing on school athletic teams, in another setback for transgender people.

The court’s conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.

More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well.

Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.

Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore in Bridgeport, West Virginia, has been taking puberty-blocking medication, has publicly identified as a girl since age 8 and has been issued a West Virginia birth certificate recognizing her as female. She is the only transgender person who has sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia.

Pepper-Jackson has progressed from a back-of-the-pack cross-country runner in middle school to statewide champion in the shot put. She beat the second-place finisher by two feet in last month's West Virginia championship meet.

In the Idaho case, Lindsay Hecox sued over the state’s first-in-the-nation ban for the chance to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University in Idaho. She didn’t make either squad because “she was too slow,” her lawyer, Kathleen Hartnett, told the court during arguments in January, but she competed in club-level soccer and running.

Prominent women in sports have weighed in on both sides. Tennis champion Martina Navratilova, swimmers Summer Sanders and Donna de Varona and beach volleyball player Kerri Walsh Jennings are supporting the state bans. Soccer stars Megan Rapinoe and Becky Sauerbrunn and basketball players Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart back the transgender athletes.

In 2020, the Supreme Court ruled LGBTQ people are protected by a landmark federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination in the workplace, finding that “sex plays an unmistakable role” in employers’ decisions to punish transgender people for traits and behavior they otherwise tolerate.

But last year, the six conservative justices on the nine-member court declined to apply the same sort of analysis when they upheld state bans on gender-affirming care for transgender minors.

The states supporting the prohibitions on transgender athletes argued there is no reason to extend the ruling barring workplace discrimination to Title IX.

Idaho’s law, state Solicitor General Alan Hurst said, is “necessary for fair competition because, where sports are concerned, men and women are obviously not the same.”

Lawyers for Pepper-Jackson argued that such distinctions generally make sense but that their client has none of those advantages because of the unique circumstances of her early transition. In Hecox’s case, her lawyers wanted the court to dismiss the case because she had forsworn trying to play on women’s teams.

NCAA president Charlie Baker told Congress in 2024 that he was aware of only 10 transgender athletes out of more than half a million students on college teams. But despite the small numbers, the issue has taken on outsize importance.

Baker’s NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women’s sports after President Donald Trump, a Republican, signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to compete only on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8 percent, and 724,000 people ages 13 to 17, or 3.3 percent, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

The Minnesota Legislature passed dozens of laws this spring. Many go into effect July 1 — the start of the state’s fiscal year — including social media restrictions, money for infrastructure projects across the state and safety requirements for schools.

Here’s how some of those laws could affect you or your community:

Education

Anonymous threat reporting systems

A law that requires boards of school districts or charter schools to adopt anonymous threat reporting systems goes into effect this July. However, schools have until June 30, 2027 to adopt a policy to implement a system and until July 1, 2028 to actually implement the system.

Schools can either use the Department of Public Safety’s statewide system or implement their own systems. Systems must allow for 24-hour reporting of anonymous tips regarding “dangerous, violent, harmful, or potentially harmful activity that occurs, or is threatened on, school property or relates to an enrolled student or school personnel” using a mobile application, website and toll-free hotline.

Mandatory reporting of teachers

Police must notify the appropriate licensing board when a teacher is criminally charged with an offense that triggers automatic license denial. The crime of grooming is added to that list of offenses as well. This requirement is part of a larger law effective Aug. 1 that makes grooming a felony.

Grooming is defined as when a person 18 years or older “expresses to a child the desire or intent to engage in sexual conduct with that child” and “engages in a deliberate pattern of conduct to methodically develop a false trusting relationship with the child that is intended to strategically manipulate the child to engage in sexual conduct with the person at a future time, regardless of whether any sexual conduct occurs.”

Combatting ‘ghost students’ in higher ed

College administrators say “ghost students” are fraudsters, often overseas, who enroll in schools using fake or stolen identities to steal student benefits or financial aid. Effective July 1, the Legislature appropriated $3 million to help the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system implement identity verification systems.

Health and human services

Social media health warnings

A health and human services law passed in 2025 includes a provision that starting July 1, 2026, social media platforms have to display mental health warnings whenever a user accesses the platform.

The Minnesota Department of Health drafted a long list of warnings that social media companies could display to users, like: “Warning: The app may repeatedly show similar or upsetting content, which may negatively affect your mental health. Use tools (mute, unfollow, ‘not interested’) to change what you see. Support is available: Call/text 988 or visit 988Lifeline.org.”

A tech industry group filed a lawsuit to stop the law from going into effect. That lawsuit is still working its way through the courts.

Mental health grant program for young children

Lawmakers established an early childhood mental health grant program designed to identify and support the mental health needs of children under five years old. Advocates of the program say early intervention can help prevent children from experiencing long, expensive hospital stays or stints in juvenile detention later in life.

Financing for infrastructure upgrades

Bonding projects

The Legislature passed a $1.2 billion borrowing bill to fund infrastructure projects around the state, but most of that legislation went into effect already. Lawmakers also passed a $46.5 million projects bill paid for in cash. The cash bill is funded by money the government already has on hand. Several provisions go into effect July 1 that free up money for local projects across the state, including:

• $10 million for predesign and design of updates and improvements to Grand Casino Arena in St. Paul

• $6.1 million to design the renovation of the existing water treatment plant in Apple Valley to address PFAS in the city’s drinking water supply

• $1.3 million for Neighborhood HealthSource to construct a new clinic in north Minneapolis

• $500,000 for a renovation project at Haven for Heroes in Anoka

• $400,000 for the Organization of Liberians in Minnesota to renovate their Brooklyn Park facility

• $250,000 to build a regional shelter facility in Cambridge to provide comprehensive support services for families with children experiencing homelessness

County IT upgrades

Minnesota administers human services programs like Medicaid and SNAP at the county or tribal level, but the technology staff use to get those dollars in people's pockets dates back decades.

Effective July 1, the state is establishing a $90 million fund to modernize local information technology systems across the state. Included in the package is $15 million to improve fraud detection technology.

Public Safety

A large safety and security law includes appropriations for public and lawmaker safety for fiscal year 2027, which begins July 1. Some key provisions:

• $12 million for a new Minnesota Victims of Crime account for grants to crime victim service providers who provide services like emergency shelters and legal advocacy

• $6.97 million for courthouse security improvements, threat response monitoring, home security systems for judges and judicial staff and additional security staff.

• $905,000 for new non-fatal shooting clearance grants to expand a successful St. Paul program

• Additional funding for enhanced Capitol complex security measures, security for state officials and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s threat assessment and investigation team

• $2.12 million (split between fiscal years 2026 and 2026) for the Philando Castile Memorial Training Fund to conduct mandatory de-escalation and bias training for law enforcement

From different colored lunch tickets to growing up in subsidized housing or in a mobile home park, Minnesota candidates aren’t shy about sharing adversity they’ve weathered.

“When you talk about the middle class and working class in this country, I've lived it,” says Angie Craig, one of the Democratic U.S. Senate candidates.

Peggy Flanagan, another Democratic Senate candidate, describes how her mother “skipped meals so I could eat.”

Republican governor candidate Kendall Qualls talks about going “from poverty to prosperity” and calls his life a “case study” about resilience.

The hopefuls for several top offices are using speeches, ads and other opportunities to share their struggles from earlier chapters of their lives. It’s a way for them to draw an affinity with an electorate grappling with financial stress.

“Affordability and the economy are key issues for the midterm elections,” said Kathryn Pearson, a University of Minnesota political science professor. “In this particular cycle, with this particular economy and with affordability being such a big issue, I think it makes sense that we're seeing candidates really dig deep on their own backgrounds, their own struggles, their own experiences.”

Highlighting the backstories also gives them an in to discuss the parties they think are causing the price surges. For Democrats, it’s President Donald Trump and Republicans in Washington. For Republicans, it’s Democrats who have controlled the Minnesota governor’s office and much of government for an extended period.

Campaigns are always about making connections.

Presidential candidate Bill Clinton had a famous moment in the 1992 campaign when he told an audience member at one of his rallies that “I feel your pain.” That theme would become a touchstone for Clinton’s successful Democratic campaign to unseat Republican President George H.W. Bush in a year when economic anxiety was central to the race.

At a campaign rally in Minneapolis in early June, Craig told a crowd that she’d had to fight her whole life.

“We didn't always have access to health insurance, and there were times when we needed food assistance ourselves. So, this fight that we're in at this moment in time, it is personal,” Craig said.

She noted her mother who was single raised her in a mobile home park, with help from her grandmother.

Craig is far from alone in highlighting moments of hardship that came ahead of a career in journalism, corporate communications and eventually Congress, where she has served four terms.

Flanagan, the current lieutenant governor, has highlighted the importance of government programs that helped her family. She’s appeared in campaign ads outside the apartment building where her mother raised her using a housing voucher and the elementary school where she said she got a different colored lunch ticket to represent it being for a free or reduced-price meal.

“I'm thinking about how unlikely this moment would have seemed to me as a little girl who carried a big box of commodity cheese under her arm like a football home from the food shelf,” Flanagan told DFL delegates as she accepted the party’s endorsement last month.

Without those government programs, Flanagan said she wouldn’t have had the same path to professional success. And, she said, others are facing those hardships after Republicans in Congress placed new restrictions on food assistance and Medicaid.

“Folks are working multiple jobs and still can't get ahead,” Flanagan said. “It shouldn't be this hard, and it doesn't have to be this way.”

Similar messages have taken off among Republican candidates, too, who said they benefited from the American dream. But that’s become harder to realize in today’s landscape.

Qualls, a businessman who gained the Republican Party’s endorsement for governor, often describes his early years growing up in public housing projects in Harlem. His mother raised him with some help from public assistance funding. Later he moved to Oklahoma, to live in a mobile home park with his father.

“I got a public school education, I got enough education to be competitive in a Fortune 100 company,” Qualls said. “I want to make that story available to all Minnesotans, regardless of their backgrounds.”

Michele Tafoya, the retired sports broadcaster who is vying for U.S. Senate as a Republican, said her parents instilled in her lessons of grit.

“I was raised by parents who grew up in the Great Depression,” she said. “My mom and dad taught me that the only thing owed to you in this life is the opportunity to earn it.”

According to publicly available records, the four candidates are on stronger financial footing these days.

Financial disclosure forms show Tafoya and her spouse have assets including retirement funds, bank accounts and stocks valued at several millions of dollars.

Flanagan makes about $105,000 as lieutenant governor. According to a financial disclosure filed last year, she reported assets including bank accounts and retirement holdings between herself and her spouse valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

As a U.S. representative, Craig makes $174,000 a year. According to a financial disclosure form, she and her spouse had investments, retirement funds and bank account balances in the millions.

Qualls doesn’t have as recent of financial reporting available for public view. But according to forms he submitted for an unsuccessful congressional bid in 2020, he and his spouse had millions of dollars worth of retirement funds and rental property income.

Given that the candidates’ economic prospects have improved from where they started, Pearson said candidates need to be thoughtful about how they relate to voters who remain in a more-fragile position.

“As long as the candidates aren't pretending that they're still in that situation,” she said, “I think that they can authentically draw upon past struggles and present them to voters.”

MPR News reporters Peter Cox and Cait Kelley contributed to this story.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld a Mississippi law that allows election officials to count mail-in ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but received up to five days after it.

The ruling is a loss for the Republican Party, which brought the case, ahead of this year's midterm elections.

Eighteen states and territories, including Mississippi, have such mail ballot grace periods. Most of the states are Democratic-led, including California, Illinois and New York. A dozen additional states have grace periods for ballots returning from overseas, like from military members.

These grace periods have historically provided voters time to get their absentee ballots to officials in case there are any issues with the Postal Service — as well as any other unforeseen issues, such as weather events.

But Republicans have been fighting these grace periods in recent years — an effort led by President Trump.

Ahead of the 2024 election, the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign filed legal challenges — including one against Mississippi's law — alleging that these grace periods violate the Constitution. They argued that Congress sets the end of an election, not states.

At the time, many of the lawsuits were dismissed by judges across the country, but the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Republicans, setting up the Supreme Court case.

Trump also signed an executive order last year — which was quickly blocked by lower courts — that required that all votes be received by Election Day during federal elections.

Many state officials, particularly in Democratic-run states with universal mail-in ballot programs, raised concerns about such a requirement.

Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs said in a statement last year that more than 250,000 ballots that had been postmarked on time arrived after Election Day during the 2024 election.

"Had this rule been in effect," he said, "those voices would have been silenced, especially in rural areas where mail delivery can take longer."

This is a breaking news story and will be updated.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Americans have grown less proud of their country's history or the way its democracy works over the past decade, according to a new AP-NORC poll.

Americans’ pride in the U.S. on several key attributes has dropped since 2017 — including the nation's military and its political influence around the globe — according to the survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. This poll was conducted in April, as the United States and Iran fought over the Strait of Hormuz in a prolonged war that started with the U.S. and Israel launching strikes on Iran.

New Gallup polling also finds that only 53 percent of U.S. adults are “extremely” or “very” proud to be an American, the lowest reading in the trend dating back to 2001.

The findings point to a broad decline in patriotic sentiment over a tumultuous period that included most of President Donald Trump's first term, the COVID-19 pandemic and rising inflation that contributed to a backlash against President Joe Biden. That timeframe also covers Trump's return to the White House, where he's taken more aggressive actions on immigration and issues abroad.

Much of the falling positivity comes from Democrats, who have become increasingly disenchanted with the country since Trump's first term.

At the same time, most U.S. adults say that being an American is “extremely” or “very” important to their identity, highlighting an enduring connection, even as some become increasingly critical of the country's past or the government’s current actions.

American pride declines on the armed forces and democracy

Americans' pride in the way democracy works in the U.S. has declined 14 percentage points, falling from 42 percent in February 2017 to 28 percent now.

In addition, Americans' pride in their armed forces has dropped 19 percentage points since 2017, and pride in the U.S.’s history has declined 14 percentage points. In each case, the drop is largely driven by Democrats, with some movement among independents as well.

Karla Galdamez — a 48-year-old Democrat who used to teach U.S. history — believes America has regressed under the Trump administration. While the Californian is not proud of Trump, she is pleased with how far the U.S. has come in 250 years.

“It’s a country that really wanted to be different and really wanted to be better," she said. "Despite some of the very ugly history that we have of segregation and slavery ... if you look at the trajectory of the last 250 years, we’ve done nothing but get better and move toward a more egalitarian nation.”

Only 14 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of independents say they are “extremely" proud to be an American, according to Gallup's new poll, compared with 70 percent of Republicans.

The AP-NORC poll found that Republicans are especially likely to be proud of the nation's armed forces. About 9 in 10 Republicans say the military makes them “extremely” or “very” proud, compared with about 6 in 10 U.S. adults.

Samantha Fulks, a 40-year-old in San Antonio, Texas, says she’s proud to be an American and doesn't hide it. The Texas Republican showcases that pride with an American flag in her front yard — as well as Trump flags in the back yard — and she plans to wear red, white and blue on the Fourth of July. Fulks comes from a military family, and while she believes the country's involvement in Iran is unnecessary, she remains a proud supporter of the military.

“I still support our troops no matter what they do,” Fulks said.

Being an American matters more for personal identity among Republicans and older adults

Matt Stafford, a 39-year-old in Massachusetts, is proud of being an American, even if the U.S. political system frustrates him.

He has a bald eagle tattooed on his back to represent the United States, its freedoms and “all the things we’re supposed to stand for as a country.” But despite that national pride, he often finds himself frustrated by politicians on both sides. Stafford — a centrist who identifies as “politically homeless” — wants Democrats and Republicans to come together to look out for their constituents in middle America.

“I love America, but our biggest problem is how we’re pushing both sides — like the left and the right — to the extremes," he said.

For many Americans, their partisanship is often intertwined with their national identity. The poll finds that Republicans are much likelier than Democrats or independents to say being an American is “extremely” or “very” important to their personal identity.

Younger people are also much less likely than older people to say being an American is highly important to their personal identity. About three-quarters of Americans ages 60 and older say being an American is highly important to them, compared with only about one-third of U.S. adults under 30.

Race or ethnicity matters more to many Black Americans

The AP-NORC survey found that the vast majority of Black Americans — 73 percent — say their race or ethnicity is “extremely” or “very” important to how they see themselves, higher than the share that say that about being an American.

Vincent Harris, a 60-year-old in California, says his identity as a Black man rises above other attributes for him because of how Black men are treated in America.

“A lot of people are scared of Black men just because we are Black and we are male. And that's crazy,” Harris said. “People don't even take you for who you are as a person; they just look at your race.”

About half of Hispanic Americans say their race or ethnicity is highly important to them, compared with 22 percent of white Americans.

Black and Hispanic adults are also more likely than white adults to say their family’s ancestry or country of origin is highly important to their personal identity.

Harris, who identifies as a gay man, says being an American is “a wonderful thing” because of the freedoms that Americans have, despite the obstacles he's had to overcome.

“It’s great to be an American — regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or whatever. As long as you have that freedom of choice as an American, that’s a great thing," Harris said. "Right now, I wouldn’t live in any other country in the world. I’m here. I love it.”

The AP-NORC poll of 2,596 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.

Voting in Minnesota’s primary election began Friday as people whose minds were already made up turned in their ballots.

For campaigns, every vote they can secure early frees them up to focus on nudging other potential voters with traditional get-out-the-vote pushes.

There are multiple forms of early voting, and they all lead up to the Aug. 11 primary election that will determine the fall nominees in key races.

Starting 46 days before an election — that’s June 26 for the 2026 August primary — voters can vote absentee by mail or in-person, and they don’t need an excuse to do so.

Voters can request absentee ballots online or show up in-person to polling places to apply for an absentee ballot, and cast their ballot then and there. Those who vote by mail can even track their ballots online.

“You don’t have to just pop it in the mail, say a prayer, and hope it gets there,” Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon said at the Capitol on Thursday. “You can track it like an Amazon or a UPS package, and you can know precisely when it’s been received by your local election office.”

This year’s primary election features several high-profile contests for both Republicans and Democrats in statewide and down ballot races. Election officials anticipate higher-than-average turnout this year because of the array of competitive primaries.

Early voters report smooth first day voting process

Wendy Jedlicka and her wife, Joni Cromer, were two of the first Minneapolis voters to cast their ballots Friday at the city’s early voting center at the Minneapolis Elections and Voter Services building. They are regular early voters.

“It's just good to get it out of the way,” Cromer said.

“What we do is we have a nice breakfast, and then we come out and we vote,” Jedlicka said.

The first day of early voting in Minneapolis

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Jedlicka also highlighted the curbside voting at the early voting center that’s available to voters who have difficulty leaving their cars to vote. Jedlicka said they used that service in a past election after Cromer had back surgery.

“If you want a civilized experience, get out early, vote at your voting center, get friends to come with you, make it a breakfast thing, or lunch, or whatever time they're open,” Jedlicka said.

Campaigns come in hot on first early voting day

Campaigns were pushing Friday to get their backers to cast their votes as soon as possible. Major candidates, including Republican gubernatorial candidate House Speaker Lisa Demuth and Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and U.S. Rep. Angie Craig, held campaign events to get out the early vote.

Demuth and her running mate Ryan Wilson spoke at the State Capitol on Friday morning about their get-out-the-vote efforts before heading to other Minnesota cities to raise awareness about early voting.

Demuth is pushing through to the primary after failing to get the Republican Party endorsement at state convention in May. The endorsement went to Kendall Qualls, a former healthcare executive. Demuth said she will bypass debates ahead of the primary.

Demuth said she has participated in 16 joint forums with Republican candidates since entering the race for governor and would wait to go head-to-head with the top Democrat in the race. "I am looking forward to winning the primary and debating Amy Klobuchar," she said.

Craig told MPR News after speaking with voters Friday afternoon in Minneapolis that early voting was imperative no matter which candidate someone supports. Craig is running in a spirited DFL race for U.S. Senate.

“It's exciting to me that we're seeing people who've never participated in a primary before," Craig said. "You know, people think that their voice doesn't matter, but if you don't use your vote, you're allowing someone else to make that choice for you."

Craig’s opponent, Flanagan, showed up to both vote for herself and encourage others to get it done early.

“Part of it is once you cast this ballot, then you can focus on turning other folks out in this election,” she said. “It's just a good thing, and a good practice to get it done. Get it out of the way, right? You never know what might happen, and so we're just trying to encourage folks to get out and cast their ballot.”

Flanagan cast her vote at the Hennepin County Government Center.

She was joined by two first time voters, a newly naturalized American citizen and an 18-year-old who helped push for a state law to encourage young people to get involved in voting.

Tess Machalek, a senior at St. Louis Park High School, was excited to participate in an election for the first time.

“I pre-registered on my 16th birthday. It was like the biggest thing for me,” she said.

Machalek testified in front of the state Legislature three years ago to encourage a yes vote on a bill that would allow schools to provide access to pre-registration for 16 and 17 year olds.

“They're already in the system, and then on the day they turn 18, become automatically eligible to vote,” Machalek said. “And so they are able to get right into the swing of things, get right into voting.”

Voters can register to vote, request an absentee ballot and find a polling location on the Minnesota Secretary of State’s website.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.

There is new, temporary leadership at a prominent Minnesota business advocacy group after the sudden departure of the prior top executive.

The Minnesota Business Partnership named Erika Nelson and Abby Loesch as interim co-CEOs after the resignation of Kurt Zellers.

Zellers had run the organization since September 2023. He has a background in Republican politics, having served a stint as Minnesota House speaker and an unsuccessful run for governor in 2014.

The group didn't provide a reason for his departure, saying only that he “is no longer with the organization.” He didn’t return a message about his status.

“Our focus remains on advancing our mission and ensuring continuity for our partners, stakeholders and the communities we serve,” said Sarah Barten, the partnership’s communications director.

The partnership represents senior executives at Minnesota's largest companies. It has a team of lobbyists at the Capitol. They have traditionally advocated for lower taxes, less regulation and improvements to state education policy, among other topics.

A search process has begun to find a new chief executive.

The job is a prime spot often occupied by ex-lawmakers or those with government experience. The organization holds annual dinners that attract Capitol movers and shakers.

Nelson has been chief of staff at the partnership and is a former top staff member to U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic candidate for governor. Loesch was in charge of the group’s education and workforce policy efforts and has deep experience in Republican politics.

It’s just one of the big shifts ahead for the Minnesota business community.

Doug Loon announced in May he would retire as president and CEO of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce at the end of this year. He had led the 6,300-member group since 2015. No successor has been named and a search process is in progress.

Meanwhile, the Minneapolis and St. Paul chambers of commerce have been exploring a possible merger since 2025.

Gov. Tim Walz this week filed 16 records requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act seeking internal documents from the Trump administration that might reveal evidence of retribution by the federal government against Minnesota.

FOIA experts, though, know that actually getting documents from the feds can be a frustrating experience.

While the law requires the federal government to respond within roughly one month, officials can drag out requests longer due to certain exemptions, said Jane Kirtley director of the Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics and Law at the University of Minnesota.

Walz asked for documents using terms such as “reckoning,” “retribution,” “punish” and other words that suggest actions by the Trump administration, including the winter surge of federal immigration agents, were driven by a political motive against Walz and Minnesota.

“The use of these keywords, which is a great way to get records, can also be used as a justification to say that the request is too broad,” Kirtley told MPR News. “It could be months before there's any kind of definitive response from the federal government.”

Minnesotans could file requests into the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, but the government could also turn those down for “national security, for privacy, for ongoing investigations,” she added.

If Walz does get documents showing a clear pattern of political retribution, then separate litigation can begin, Kirtley said. “He needs the evidence. This is the first step to getting that,”

Listen to the full conversation by clicking the player above. Find more information on FOIA requests here.

The Minneapolis City Council voted 9-2 on Thursday with one abstaining to repeal the longstanding ban on adult bathhouses and businesses where people can have sex in the city. The vote comes after work from advocates, city staff and council members who say the ban is rooted in homophobia.

The final step to repeal the ban is a signature from Mayor Jacob Frey, who previously told MPR News he supports the repeal.

Adult bathhouses are community spaces that were historically frequented by gay men in the 1970s and ‘80s where people could engage in sexual activity or relax after going out to bars. They were banned in Minneapolis in 1988 during the AIDS epidemic.

Council members LaTrisha Vetaw, Linea Palmisano and Michael Rainville joined the six co-authors in voting to repeal the ban. Council member Jamison Whiting, who previously voiced his support for repealing the ban, was absent and council member Jamal Osman abstained.

Council member Jason Chavez, the only out LGBTQ+ member of the council, was a co-author for the pair of ordinances to repeal the ban and worked with the Safer Sex Spaces Coalition, an organization dedicated to overturning the ban.

He spoke ahead of the vote, mentioning former council member Brian Coyle, a gay man who voted for the ban in 1988.

“Today is the first step and it will not be the last. And it is an important one,” he said. “I believe if Brian Coyle was here with us today, with everything we know about public health, he would be standing with us proudly and me on this council so I would not feel alone taking this vote.”

Council members emphasized that the vote doesn’t mean that bathhouses will become legal and ready to open immediately. Instead, it is the beginning of a long and technical process that sets the city up for a pathway to consider permitting bathhouses and other sex venues in the future.

Issue draws debate in council meeting

Council member Elizabeth Shaffer, who represents the Loring Park neighborhood where the annual Twin Cities Pride festival will take place this weekend, said she voted to keep the ban because she does not think it is a priority for the city and she talked to constituents who were against it.

Specifically, she shared a story of a resident who worked for former Sen. Allan Spear, the first out LGBTQ+ senator in Minnesota.

“My constituent has spent decades in this fight. He shared with me that many gay men in his own network either oppose the return of bathhouses or have real questions about whether this is the right path for a variety of reasons,” she said.

Council member Robin Wonsley urged fellow members to not “hyper-sexualize” adult bathhouses and said while it is important to listen to constituents, she doesn’t want to ignore those in the chambers telling her things need to change.

“I think it’s so important to not use this trope of hyper-sexualizing our communities. That put a very repressive, ignorant and fear-based policy in our legal code in the first place,” she said. “If you can go and enjoy a drag show at Gay 90s, you should also be able to stand up for the policies that makes those spaces possible.”

A small group of less than a dozen cheered when the council voted in favor of the repeal.

Patrick Scully, a local artist and activist, was in attendance for the vote. Scully said he remembers what Minneapolis was like before the ban and the homophobia he said followed.

“I’m frustrated and angry that it took this long, but it just speaks to the sex negative, homo-hating world that we live in,” he said. “I'm glad that we won today, and I look forward to the momentum of this moving forward and getting these gay-negative laws off the books.”

How Minneapolis came to repeal the ban

The work for the repeal has been on and off for several years.

A few years ago, while working as a policy aide for the Minneapolis City Council, Claire Kingstad got an email from Phil Duran, the former legal director for OutFront Minnesota. People at the time were talking about Embrace North, a sauna in Linden Hills facing problems in part because of a different zoning code restricting saunas and bathhouses to downtown Minneapolis, and Duran wondered if Kingstad knew about his previous work attempting to repeal the bathhouse ban.

Duran and Karri Joe Plowman, the founder of Twin Cities Leather, worked together in 2017 to try to repeal the ban. Their work never came to an official vote. Plowman said while some people knew sex was happening in social group settings, they didn’t want to talk about it.

“That’s what I was saying in 2017, we deserve to be safe in a commercial space. And the city has a responsibility to make sure that space is safe. They do not have a responsibility to tell us what we can do in that space,” Plowman told MPR News in March.

Kingstad and Ben Carrier, another policy aide, created the Safer Sex Spaces Coalition. The two worked together in 2023 to amend the code, changing language that reflected advancements in treatment and prevention to HIV and removing language that advocates called stigmatizing to same-sex couples.

All 13 council members voted in favor of the new language. Kingstad and Carrier also both worked closely with sex workers in the city who were in favor of the repeal.

For this most recent effort, the council ended up pursuing two separate ordinances to remove the ban and move building standards for sex venues under the same rules that govern strip clubs.

Kingstad said she is proud of the community and city leaders for working together and that their effort shows that real change can happen at the municipal level by organizing.

“I understand that this is a complex issue, and it seemingly came out of nowhere, but for something that should have been revisited decades ago, there was never a right time. Now is the time. We did it. We put the work in,” she said.

“This is a testament to the the spirit of our city and our culture of organizing around the issues we care about and making progress as people.”

Dylan Boyer, the development director at the Aliveness Project, said it was hard for him not to feel emotional during the vote.

“I think suddenly the impact that this has had on people that I work with, my friends, the greater queer community at large — it all hit me in that moment realizing that this got passed,” he said. “We just made history in Minneapolis.”

Repeal opens door for city to consider permitting bathhouses

Minneapolis had three adult bathhouses at its peak, and in 1979 police raided Locker Room Baths which later became known as the largest adult bathhouse raid in U.S. history. Locker Room was renamed 315 Health Club and closed just one day before the ban passed in 1988.

Chavez said that if Frey signs the repeal, then he will start the long process of working with staff to begin the zoning, planning and regulations component of a framework for an adult bathhouse in Minneapolis.

Any proposed ordinances to establish a framework for licensing adult bathhouses would again go in front of the council for feedback, public hearings and votes.

San Francisco in 2021 overturned its AIDS-crisis-era ban on sex in private rooms inside businesses, and in 2022 created “adult sex venue” zoning legislation. Some cities that never banned them to begin with, including nearby Chicago, already have bathhouses.

Public attitude toward bathhouses has evolved as HIV and AIDS prevention and treatment has improved. The medication PrEP, when taken consistently, reduces the chance of contracting HIV by about 99 percent. According to KFF, the number of new HIV infections declined by about 76 percent between 1984 and 2022.

In 2018, the city of Minneapolis signed on to be a fast track city and take on initiatives to end HIV. It follows the 90-90-90 goal, meaning 90 percent of people living with HIV are aware of their status, 90 percent of people diagnosed are on antiretroviral therapy and 90 percent of people on medication achieve viral suppression.

The year to hit the goal is 2030 and Boyer said he isn’t sure the city will reach that goal. But, he thinks the bathhouse repeal could be part of the solution.

“These are big goals, it is going to take bold change, bold and radical change,” Boyer said. “[Bathhouses are] one of those spaces that we can really connect with folks that are on the outskirts of that care, and not knowing their status and not knowing what prevention looks like for them. This is a population that we’re able to tap into, that we are not currently able to reach.”

Next week, the United States marks a unique milestone: the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

For some Americans, the semiquincentennial is a moment to celebrate the nation’s achievements and ideals. For others, it is an opportunity to reflect on the gaps between those ideals and the realities of American history. For many, it is both.

MPR News host Angela Davis and her guests talk about what the anniversary means for the U.S.

Guests:

• Sarah Holtman is a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota.

• Gideon Mailer is a professor of early American history at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Subscribe to the MPR News with Angela Davis podcast on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify or RSS.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.