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      in US Politics

      Minnesota’s Boundary Waters are pristine. Trump’s ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ could pollute them forever

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      The story is co-published with Public Domain, an investigative newsroom that covers public lands, wildlife and government
      A little-known provision of Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would open thousands of acres of public lands at the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness to a foreign-owned mining company.The move amounts to a giveaway “in perpetuity” to a company that has lobbied in Washington for years, environmental campaigners say, potentially opening up one of the US’s most famous wilderness areas to water-pollution risks.Earlier this month, conservationists cheered when Congress withdrew from the reconciliation bill several provisions that would have sold off hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land in Nevada and Utah. Those provisions had sparked fury among public land advocates and staunch opposition even from some Republicans, including the representative Ryan Zinke of Montana, who vowed to oppose the bill if the land sell-off provisions were retained.Despite that fury, a lesser-known public lands giveaway remained in the reconciliation bill. If approved as currently written, the provision could lease in perpetuity land near Minnesota’s Boundary Waters wilderness, an enormous complex of pristine lakes and untrammeled forests, to Twin Metals Minnesota, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining giant Antofagasta PLC.Becky Rom, the national chair of Save the Boundary Waters, a campaign to protect the wilderness area from mining, described the provision as “a giveaway of critical and sensitive federal public land forever to a single mining company”.“It is a giveaway,” Rom added. “This is forever.”An ‘irreplaceable’ wilderness areaFirst set aside by Congress in 1964, the 1.1m-acre Boundary Waters canoe area wilderness, as it is officially known, is the only large-scale protected sub-boreal forest in the lower 48 states. Each year, about 150,000 visitors come to partake in the all-American tradition of canoe travel and enjoy a pristine landscape where wolves, moose, loons, bears and bald eagles thrive. Those who come to explore it help contribute to Minnesota’s $13.5bn outdoor recreation economy. According to the US Forest Service, the landscape contains “healthy forests with extremely high water quality”. It is “irreplaceable”.But the Boundary Waters also sit atop mineral-rich lands. Antofagasta has for years sought to develop a copper and nickel mine on public land near the wilderness, amid the headwaters that feed its famous lakes. The company and its American subsidiary, Twin Metals Minnesota, came close to success during the first Trump administration, which overturned an Obama-era denial and renewed mining leases for the project.The Biden administration, recognizing the threat the proposed mine posed to the environment, subsequently rescinded those discretionary leases, arguing that they were legally deficient. The Biden administration also issued an order that prohibited mining for 20 years in the portion of the Superior national forest where Antofagasta wants to extract copper and nickel. Twin Metals Minnesota, which declined to comment for this story, filed litigation to fight the Biden policies in court. That lawsuit is ongoing.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, the companies went to Capitol Hill in their quest to build their mine, which they say will directly employ more than 750 people and could revitalize “the entire region”. In the last three years alone, Antofagasta and Twin Metals have poured more than $1.6m into lobbying efforts in Washington DC, according to OpenSecrets.Among the lobbying shops they retained is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the powerful firm that was the longtime home of David Bernhardt, interior secretary during Trump’s first term. Brownstein’s employees and its political action committee, in turn, were together among the top 10 donors last election cycle to the campaign committee of representative Bruce Westerman of Arkansas, the powerful chair of the House natural resources committee.Last month, that lobbying apparently bore fruit. Westerman’s committee unveiled its portion of the president’s reconciliation bill and it contained a major win for Antofagasta and Twin Metals.The bill, which passed the House and is now being considered by the Senate, includes provisions that rescind the Biden administration’s 20-year mining prohibition in the Superior national forest and grants Twin Metals 20-year mining leases to pursue its copper-nickel project on nearly 6,000 acres (2,500 hectares) of public land near the Boundary Waters. It also grants Twin Metals rights in perpetuity to lease renewals and it prohibits judicial review of the leases, meaning that citizens cannot sue to challenge them. Only one party retains rights to judicial review per the legislation: Twin Metals. If the federal government fails to comply with the reconciliation bill, Twin Metals can sue to enforce it.“The reconciliation bill compels the issuance of four leases forever,” said Rom. “To get there it expressly overrides four federal laws, it expressly overrides BLM regulations, so all of those rules that apply to everybody else in the world, the laws, the regulations, for Antofagasta they don’t apply.”“There is a heavy hand in here,” she added. “The heavy hand of Antofagasta.”Pollution fears and pushbackNeither Antofagasta nor Westerman’s office responded to requests for comment. Twin Metals has said its mine will provide a supply of strategic minerals that are important to national security and the emerging green energy economy.For conservationists like Rom – who grew up helping her father run an outfitting business in the Boundary Waters wilderness and has since spent decades working to protect the wilderness area – the major threat from Twin Metals’ proposed mine is water pollution. That threat was described in a 2016 letter by the US Forest Service, when it initially denied its consent to the Twin Metals mine leases during the waning days of the Obama administration. There is “inherent potential risk that development of a regionally-untested copper-nickel sulfide ore mine within the same watershed as the BWCAW might cause serious and irreplaceable harm to this unique, iconic, and irreplaceable wilderness area”.The agency’s letter particularly drew attention to the risk of acid mine drainage, a potent form of water pollution that is a well-known risk of the sort of sulfide-ore mining that Twin Metals and Antofagasta wish to undertake. Any drainage from the “mine workings and mining wastes are likely to be highly acidic”, the agency said of the Twin Metals mine. Any failure to contain such waste could have “potentially severe consequences for the BWCAW” and could “cover a very broad region”.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenTwin Metals Minnesota has denied that acid mine drainage will be a potential threat, calling it a “nonissue”.As the reconciliation bill moves through the Senate, conservationists as well as their allies in Congress are hoping it will be stripped out of the bill before it lands on Trump’s desk. They argue, among other things, that the bill’s Twin Metals provision may run afoul of Senate rules governing the reconciliation process, which disallows the body from including “extraneous provisions” in budget bills.Among the opponents of the Twin Metals provision is Minnesota’s junior senator, Tina Smith, though the state’s congressional delegation is split on the issue.“Senator Smith strongly opposes the reckless Republican provision in the US House-passed Big Beautiful Bill that would give a foreign conglomerate full permission to build a copper-nickel sulfide mine right on the doorstep of the Boundary Waters watershed,” wrote a spokesperson for Smith in a statement to Public Domain. “By including this language in their massive budget bill, Republicans in Congress have made it clear they don’t care about the science or the data, which shows unequivocally that this type of mining poses an unacceptable risk and stands to irreversibly pollute this pristine wilderness.” More

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      in Elections

      12 States Sue Trump Over His Tariffs

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      A dozen states, most of them led by Democrats, sued President Trump over his tariffs on Wednesday, arguing that he has no power to “arbitrarily impose tariffs as he has done here.”Contending that only Congress has the power to legislate tariffs, the states are asking the court to block the Trump administration from enforcing what they said were unlawful tariffs.“These edicts reflect a national trade policy that now hinges on the president’s whims rather than the sound exercise of his lawful authority,” said the lawsuit, filed by the states’ attorneys general in the U.S. Court of International Trade.The states, including New York, Illinois and Oregon, are the latest parties to take the Trump administration to court over the tariffs. Their case comes after California filed its own lawsuit last week, in which Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state attorney general accused the administration of escalating a trade war that has caused “immediate and irreparable harm” to that state’s economy.Officials and businesses from Oregon, the lead plaintiff in the suit filed Wednesday, have also expressed concerns about the vulnerability of the state’s trade-dependent economy, as well as its sportswear industry, as a result of the tariffs.“When a president pushes an unlawful policy that drives up prices at the grocery store and spikes utility bills, we don’t have the luxury of standing by,” said Dan Rayfield, Oregon’s attorney general, in a statement. “These tariffs hit every corner of our lives — from the checkout line to the doctor’s office — and we have a responsibility to push back.”Asked about the latest lawsuit, Kush Desai, a White House spokesman, called it a “witch hunt” by Democrats against Mr. Trump. “The Trump administration remains committed to using its full legal authority to confront the distinct national emergencies our country is currently facing,” he said, “both the scourge of illegal migration and fentanyl flows across our border and the exploding annual U.S. goods trade deficit.”The other states in the suit are Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Vermont. All of the states have Democratic attorneys general, though Nevada and Vermont have Republican governors.Mr. Trump’s tariffs have shocked and upended the global trade industry. He set a 145 percent tariff on goods from China, 25 percent on Canada, and 10 percent on almost all imports from most other countries.The moves have drawn legal challenges from other entities as well, including two members of the Blackfeet Nation, who filed a federal lawsuit in Montana over the tariffs on Canada, saying they violated tribal treaty rights. Legal groups like the Liberty Justice Center and the New Civil Liberties Alliance have also sued. “I’m happy that Oregon and the other states are joining us in this fight,” said Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University, who is working on the Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit. More

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      in US Politics

      Indonesian student detained by Ice after US secretly revokes his visa

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      An Indonesian father of an infant with special needs, who was detained by federal agents at his hospital workplace in Minnesota after his student visa was secretly revoked, will remain in custody after an immigration judge ruled Thursday that his case can proceed.Judge Sarah Mazzie denied a motion to dismiss the case against Aditya Wahyu Harsono on humanitarian grounds, according to his attorney. Harsono, 33, was arrested four days after his visa was revoked without notice. He is scheduled for another hearing on 1 May.“His wife has been in a state of shock and exhaustion,” Sarah Gad, Harsono’s lawyer, said. “The Department of Homeland Security has weaponized the immigration system to serve just an entirely different purpose, which is to instill fear.”Harsono, a supply-chain manager at a hospital in Marshall, Minnesota, who is married to a US citizen, was surprised by authorities in his workplace basement on 27 March. Gad said that Harsono was detained without clear explanation and interrogated for hours.Harsono’s wife, Peyton, called Gad in a panic after she received a call from human resources at the hospital. Two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, dressed in plain clothes, had shown up and instructed the staff to stage a fake meeting in the basement so they could apprehend him, according to Gad.Hospital staff were distraught but felt forced to comply.“He unsuspectedly walks in, smiling, and then they just pull out their handcuffs and forcibly detain him, pushing against the wall, start frisking him, and stripping all of his belongings,” Gad said.View image in fullscreenThe Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Guardian.Harsono was brought to the Kandiyohi County Jail, where he is still detained, according to the Ice detainee locator.He told the Ice agents that his F-1 student visa was valid through June 2026, and that he had a pending green-card application based on his marriage to a citizen, but that he had been issued a notice to appear in court stating that he had overstayed his visa.His attorney said that as of 28 March, the day after his arrest, his F-1 visa was still active. Gad said the government revoked it without any notice to him, and then claimed he had overstayed.The revocation was backdated to 23 March and allegedly based on his 2022 misdemeanor conviction for graffitiing a semi-truck trailer. Gad said that this is not a deportable offense under the Immigration and Nationality Act. He had traveled internationally and returned multiple times to Indonesia since the conviction without incident.The day before Harsono’s bond hearing, DHS disclosed their evidence against him. Besides stating that his visa had been revoked for the misdemeanor graffiti conviction, for which he paid $100 in restitution, they also mentioned an arrest from 2021 during a protest over the murder of George Floyd. That charge was dismissed.Harsono is Muslim and frequently posts on social media in support of humanitarian relief for Gaza. He also runs a small non-profit, which sells art and merchandise, with proceeds going to organizations aiding Gaza.His wife and eight-month-old daughter, who has special needs, are distraught by his arrest, Gad said. After the judge granted Harsono a $5,000 bond on 10 April, the Minnesota Freedom Fund had been en route to pay it. But DHS immediately filed a notice to appeal the bond decision, which triggered an automatic stay, meaning Harsono had to remain in custody. Gad said this type of move is rare, usually only seen when a judge grants bond to someone charged with violent or serious crimes.“You never involve stays of an immigration judge’s bond order for a minor conviction when somebody’s on their way to becoming a green-card holder,” she said.Gad is preparing to file a federal petition and a temporary restraining order against DHS.In an appeal for help on GoFundMe, Harsono’s wife explained that her husband had been fired from his job while in detention and now the family is “in danger of losing our apartment” and they “no longer have health insurance”.The Minnesota Nurses Association condemned the hospital worker’s arrest and restated its position that “nurses should not and will not serve any role in immigration enforcement” and its hope that “all hospital employees will also reject a role in assisting Ice”.Harsono’s case comes amid a wave of reports of student visas being revoked under the Trump administration’s new executive policy. The actions by the federal government to terminate students’ legal status have left hundreds of scholars at risk of detention and deportation.At least 901 students at 128 colleges and universities have had their visas revoked or their legal statuses terminated since mid-March, according to an Associated Press review of university statements and correspondence with school officials.In some high-profile cases, including the detention of the former Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration has argued it should be allowed to deport noncitizens over involvement in pro-Palestinian activism it casts as antisemitic. But in the vast majority of visa revocations, colleges say there is no indication that affected students had a role in protests. More

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      in US Politics

      US small business owner says China tariffs endanger her company: ‘I could lose my home’

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      Beth Benike knew the tariffs were coming.The Minnesota veteran invented a placemat with bungee cords that hold toys or utensils, keeping them off the floor when babies toss them. It’s one of several products she created for Busy Baby, a company she runs with her brother. They are manufactured in China.She expected and budgeted for about 20-30% tariffs this year. When the first round of tariffs came in at 10%, it was manageable. Then the rate on China crept up, then up again, to 54%. That was her “oh, shit moment”, but she thought she could weather it, she told the Guardian.It didn’t stop there, though. It climbed up to 104%. She filmed a video of herself “mid-meltdown” over the extreme tariff, posting it on her social media.Busy Baby is one of many US small businesses having to reckon with monumental tariffs that could shutter their livelihoods. Donald Trump’s escalating trade war with China now includes a 125% tariff on Chinese products coming into the US. These businesses were given little more than a week to confront a budget-busting tax on their goods.View image in fullscreen“After today’s announcement, and the impending 104% tariff, I am abandoning my products in China. I am leaving them there because I simply cannot afford to ship them here,” Benike told her followers on Monday, before Trump hiked the tariff on Chinese goods up even further on Wednesday.“At some point, hopefully in the near future, China will realize that the days of ripping off the U.S.A., and other Countries, is no longer sustainable or acceptable,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Wednesday as he paused tariffs on other countries.Benike already paid about $160,000 to manufacture her products in China, and would have to pay more than that to bring them to the US. So for now, she’s trying to figure out other options: she could try to sell them overseas, or send them to another country to repackage them.“I’m terrified for my business, and I’m terrified for all the other small businesses in the United States right now, because we don’t know what to do, and we’re invested in our businesses. I could lose my home, and I don’t understand it, and I don’t know what to do,” she said in the video.After Trump’s latest increase, Benike said she was looking into sending the paid-for products to Australia, where she has friends, to have them repackaged, then importing them from there during the 90-day pause because it is at least a way to get the products she already paid for to the US.Her business has grown since she founded it in 2017, and accolades have come with it. She was named Minnesota’s small businessperson of the year by the US Small Business Administration this year. She finally got into big retailers – Target and Walmart – with small test runs. Those contracts, though, were signed before the tariffs. Walmart told her it wanted to keep and expand its offerings from Busy Baby, she said, but she had a “hard conversation” with the buyer this week to let them know she cannot add a third product to their roster because of the high tariffs.View image in fullscreen“It has completely stifled my growth in big box retail, which has been our main goal for three years– to grow into that space,” she said. “Because as a teeny, tiny business, that’s a huge achievement, huge for our brand. And now it’s halted.”The other option, the one Trump wants, is a pipe dream: manufacturing her products in the US. Benike would prefer to manufacture here, too. But a mountain of logistics, near impossibilities, stand in her way.Food-grade silicone, which she uses for her products, is not available domestically. When she looked into the cost of importing the material when she first started, it was more expensive than importing a finished product, and the prices have gone up since then. Manufacturing facilities in the US with the compression mold machines she needed require much larger runs than she can commit to. The minimum requirements for factories here was 20,000 – in China, she could do a couple thousand at a time.Making the molds for her products takes about two months. They also are made in China – many American manufacturers send American steel to China to makemolds because they’re better at it there, she said. The molds alone would cost up to $75,000 in the US. If she found a factory and the capital needed to get it all going, it would still take a minimum of four months until she had products ready to sell, she estimated.“It’s financially impossible for me to manufacture here. But even if I had an angel that just dropped a million dollars in my lap, it doesn’t make sense as a business model for how much we would have to charge for the product and charge the consumer,” she said. “It doesn’t make any sense. So I wish I understood the big picture, or how they expect us to pivot in this tiny window of time. I don’t understand, I just don’t understand this.”She said she has about two or three months’ worth of product on hand now, giving her a few months until she could theoretically go out of business if she doesn’t figure something else out. If people buy up what she has left, that at least gives her some cashflow to buy her some time to make new plans.On Tuesday, she got a call from the Small Business Administration, she said. Someone there saw her video, so she’s sending them information on her products and the machines at the factory she uses now. The agency is going to try to find a factory in the US that could make her products, but she’s not holding her breath.View image in fullscreenShe decided to post her video and speak out about the way the tariffs are affecting small businesses because she has a community of supporters and other entrepreneurs who can help and commiserate, including some who know her from her appearance on Shark Tank.Two years ago, during a different tough spot for her business, she had suicidal thoughts. The weight of being a CEO was heavy. She thought, if she was gone, at least her family would have life insurance to live on. She got help then and learned coping strategies.The thought of life insurance surfaced again this week. She caught it quickly, reminding herself that “this is a trick my brain is playing on me right now, because it doesn’t see a way out”. She wants other entrepreneurs to know they aren’t alone as they face these tariffs. She’s heard from some, who have messaged her privately to say they are feeling the same pain, but can’t speak out because it’s a business risk.Some of the comments on her video and on local news websites that have written about her predicament have not been kind. Some have said, you voted for this, or you deserve this if you voted for Trump. She did not vote for Trump, she said, but she does not know why her political beliefs matter.“No one deserves this. No one. Regardless of who they voted for,” she said. “Trump said he was going to do tariffs. We knew that. Yes, we knew tariffs were coming. I would have never in a million years guessed it would be like this.”She has more than 15 patents for the products she’s created for the “accidental business” she came up with after her son was born. She learned how to start a business, develop products, set up an e-commerce store. Now, digging her way out from huge tariffs is one more thing to learn.“We’ve got a great product, and it is a great product for babies. Babies exist all over our world, all over the planet, babies everywhere. I can’t fail,” she said. “This is my children’s livelihood. It’s my home.” More

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      in US Politics

      Minnesota officials seek answers after Ice detains graduate student

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      Officials in Minnesota were seeking answers in the case of a University of Minnesota graduate student who was being detained by US immigration authorities for unknown reasons.University leadership said Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detained the student on Thursday at an off-campus residence. Officials said the school was not given advance notice about the detention and did not share information with federal authorities. The student’s name and nationality have not been released.As the case remained largely a mystery, state and local leaders called on federal authorities to explain their actions.“My office and I are doing all we can to get information about this concerning case,” the Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar said in a post on the social media site X. “We’re in contact with the University and understand they had no prior warning or information that led to this detainment.”She said that international students are “a major part of the fabric of life in the school and our community”.View image in fullscreenThe detained student was enrolled in business school at the university’s Twin Cities campus. University officials said the school was providing the student with legal aid and other support services.What prompted the detention is still unknown. Ice officials have not responded to an Associated Press email requesting comment.The Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, said on X that he was in touch with the US Department of Homeland Security.“The University of Minnesota is an international destination for education and research,” Walz wrote. “We have any number of students studying here with visas, and we need answers.”The Minneapolis mayor, Jacob Frey, also called the case “deeply troubling”.“Educational environments must be places where all students can focus on learning and growing without fear,” he wrote on X.Officials promised to release more information about the case once they had updates.US immigration authorities have been targeting people with ties to American colleges and universities as President Donald Trump seeks to crackdown on immigrants. Most of the detainees have shown support for Palestinian causes.The Trump administration has cited a seldom-invoked statute authorizing the secretary of state to revoke visas of noncitizens who could be considered a threat to foreign policy interests. More than half a dozen people are known to have been taken into custody or deported in recent weeks.In Minneapolis, the university’s graduate labor union organized a protest on Saturday outside the US citizenship and immigration services office downtown, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. Dozens of people joined the rally to stand in solidarity with international students facing uncertain futures under the new Trump administration.“International students are huge assets to the University of Minnesota,” Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota said in a Facebook post. “They move thousands of miles away from their families and support systems to learn from the best and the brightest. I can’t imagine how terrified they are after learning ICE has detained one of their classmates.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Trump derangement syndrome’ and the Goldwater rule for psychiatrists | Letter

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      A bill was recently introduced to the Minnesota legislature to categorise “Trump derangement syndrome” as a mental illness. The proposed bill defines the syndrome as characterised by “verbal expressions of intense hostility toward” Donald Trump and “overt acts of aggression and violence against anyone supporting [Trump] or anything that symbolises [Trump].”Such a bill obviously infringes on our constitutional right to freely criticise our elected leaders and can serve as a stepping stone towards labelling and punishing political opponents under the guise of utilising a variety of compulsory psychiatric interventions. However, this bill is reminiscent of anti-Trump mental health professionals who have opined that President Trump poses a great danger because of a severe personality disorder.Clearly, a psychiatric diagnosis can only be made by mental health professionals who are licensed to do so, and only after having examined a patient. It poses great danger to our society both when legislators use their political power to impose a psychiatric label on their political opponents and when mental health professionals misapply their expertise to give a psychiatric label to those whom they fear.In the 1960s, many psychiatrists opined on the mental health of the Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. As a result of that controversy, in 1973 the American Psychiatric Association developed the “Goldwater rule”, which applies to public figures. It states that it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a proper authorisation for such a statement.This rule is still in effect, though much too often broken. Perhaps we need to develop a comparable national rule prohibiting political personnel, both elected and appointed, from creating psychiatric diagnoses as a tool against their political opponents.Leon Hoffman Psychiatrist, New York City, US More

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      in US Politics

      ‘They chose the billionaire’: Tim Walz returns to Minnesota as part of redemption tour

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      Tim Walz is trying to regroup to help Democrats fight the Trump administration, but he’s still trying to figure out why he and his party lost in November.“I knew it was my job to try and pick off those other swing states, and we didn’t,” he said about the 2024 election. “I come back home to lick my wounds and say, goddamn, at least we won here.”Walz was speaking on Saturday in Rochester, Minnesota – in the district he once represented in Congress, as part of his soul-searching tour around the country after the Democrats’ bruising 2024 defeat.Walz’s tour is part brand redemption, part Democratic catharsis, part rally. He hasn’t ruled out a 2028 run for president, though neither have most 2028 hopefuls.“I thought it was a flex that I was the poorest person and the only public school teacher to ever run for vice-president of the United States,” Walz told a crowd of roughly 1,500 people that filled an auditorium and spilled into an overflow room on a Saturday morning. “They chose the billionaire. We gotta do better.”Many in the crowd remembered when Walz represented them in Congress, and asked him how he would fight against the dismantling of the Department of Education, defend the rights of trans people and build a bigger tent for Democrats.Walz’s town hall was one of many large Democratic events in recent days, proving there’s growing energy for a forceful resistance to the US president. Much bigger crowds have turned up to see Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on a “stop oligarchy” tour. People have also filled town halls around the country to tell their elected officials how they’re affected by government cuts and policy changes. But where the energy goes remains to be seen.It’s clear Walz still captures the attention of a rightwing outrage machine. He chided Fox News and other pundits during an appearance on Gavin Newsom’s podcast, saying they made fun of him for drinking from a straw and don’t think he’s masculine enough, but he could “kick their ass”. Fox host Jesse Watters then railed against the clip and detailed things men shouldn’t do, like eat soup in public.Trump called Walz a “loser” on Friday. “He lost an election. He played a part. You know, usually a vice-president doesn’t play a part … I think he was so bad that he hurt her.”At a prior rally in Wisconsin, Walz mocked Tesla, saying he watches the falling stock to get a “little boost” each day, leading to condemnation on the right. “Sometimes when I need a little boost, I look at the @JDVance portrait in the White House and thank the Lord,” Musk wrote on Twitter/X.At the Saturday town hall, Walz took aim at Musk. “This guy bugs me in a way that’s probably unhealthy,” he said.“They’re all butthurt about the Tesla thing, but they don’t care about the disrespect they have shown to employees at the Minneapolis VA who care for our veterans, and they fire them. They don’t care,” Walz said.Walz held the rally in a region of Minnesota where the congressman, Brad Finstad, is one of many Republicans who haven’t held in-person town halls. Republicans who have hosted events in recent weeks have experienced heated pushback. Signs outside the venue, John Marshall high school, showed Finstad’s face in black and white and said “Missing Congressman”. Finstad told the Rochester Post-Bulletin he wouldn’t commit to hosting an in-person event, but had held tele-town halls.“I find it funny because Governor Walz, in the seven years of being governor, has not held one town hall, and now he’s claiming to be the king of town hall,” Finstad said. “This is a Democrat-hosted political comeback for Governor Walz. Well, let him scream at the bully pulpit.”During the rally, Walz said Finstad should take notice. “If you’re a sitting member of Congress in the biggest city in your district, and you see 1,300 people on a nice Saturday coming out here, it catches your attention, trust me,” he said.Thinking about the path forward for Democrats, Walz acknowledges he doesn’t have a solid answer, but said Democrats need to do better at articulating their values and the ways their policies would improve people’s lives. He likes the idea of a “shadow cabinet”, borrowing a UK tradition where opposition parties have their own versions of cabinet members to speak out against the ones in power.He also said Democrats shouldn’t let Republicans capture the narrative on issues like trans rights.“To be honest with you, there’s a lot of people who are squishy about this and are willing to say, look, it’s a pretty small number of people,” Walz said. “That’s a dangerous road to go down, because pretty soon you’re part of the group that’s a pretty small number of people.”He sees the Trump administration as an “existential threat” that will chip away at programs such as social security, but wonders how Democrats aren’t able to message these popular, middle-class issues against oligarchs. “How did this happen?” he pondered.Once Democrats get back in office, it’s time to shore up the programs they want to protect, he said.“Donald Trump is on his revenge and retribution tour,” he said. “Well, I said I’ll be on one, too. I’m going to bring revenge just raining down on their heads with their neighbors getting healthcare. They’re gonna rue the day when we got re-elected because our kids with special needs are going to get the care that they need.” More

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      in US Politics

      Democrats’ US tour gathers support in fight against Trump: ‘Get angry, man’

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      A Minnesota veteran who found work at the Veterans Benefits Administration after suffering two traumatic brain injuries on overseas deployments stood in front of hundreds of people and five Democratic state attorneys general on Thursday night and recalled the moment she learned she lost her job.“All I was given was a Post-it note,” Joy Marver said, inspiring gasps and boos from a raucous crowd. “The Post-it note contained just the HR email address and my supervisor’s phone number. This came from an external source. Doge terminated me. No one in my chain of command knew I was being terminated. No one knew. It took two weeks to get my termination email sent to me.”The firing was so demoralizing she said she considered driving her truck off a bridge but instead went into the VA for crisis care.“Don’t fuck with a veteran,” she concluded.The story was one of many shared by former federal workers and others impacted by the Trump administration’s policies during a town hall in St Paul, Minnesota, on Thursday, part of a national tour that has offered an avenue for grievances against Donald Trump’s first two months, but also a way to gather evidence for ongoing lawsuits, totaling about 10 so far, that Democratic attorneys general have filed against the Trump administration.“Everybody’s putting in double duty. But the point is, we’re absolutely up to it. We got four and a half years of gas in our tanks, and we’re here to fight for the American people all the way through,” Ellison told reporters before the event began.The community impact hearings, as they’re calling them, kicked off in Arizona earlier this month and will continue in Oregon, Colorado, Vermont and New York, the attorneys general said. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, Kris Mayes of Arizona, Letitia James of New York, Matthew Platkin of New Jersey and Kwame Raoul of Illinois attended the event in Minnesota on Thursday, where the crowd filled a high school auditorium and spilled into an overflow room.Attendees were given the opportunity to take the mic and share their stories.Another veteran who worked at the Veterans Benefit Administration was fired via email by Elon Musk’s so-called “department of government efficiency”, she said. She was part of the probationary employee purge, and her supervisors didn’t know she was let go. She recalled that her boss’ response to her firing was: “WTF”.A probationary employee at an unnamed federal agency said she was also let go. She interviewed and did background checks for 11 months to secure her federal role. “Now we are forced to put our plans of starting a family, of owning a home on hold indefinitely, and I feel that this disruption of this dream will be felt for the rest of our lives,” she said.A former employee of 18F, the federal government’s digital services agency, said they were laid off in the middle of the night on a weekend. “I’m grieving. We didn’t deserve this,” they said. A former USAID worker said she watched as Doge moved through the agency, accessing files and threatening employees if they spoke up, before she was fired.After several probationary employees shared their stories, Arizona’s Mayes cut in to ask whether the Trump administration or their agencies had reached out to rehire them. The Democratic attorneys general secured a win in a lawsuit over these firings, and a judge ruled they needed to be reinstated. If that wasn’t happening, Mayes said, they needed to know.“We can bring a motion to enforce,” Ellison explained. “We can bring, perhaps, a motion for contempt. There’s a lot of things. But if we don’t know that, we certainly can’t do anything.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBefore the town hall began, the attorneys general said that they had secured temporary restraining orders halting or reversing Trump administration directives in nearly all of their cases so far. In several instances, they have had to file additional actions to get the administration to comply with the orders. In a case that ended a “pause” on federal grants, for example, the pause was ended – but some programs still were not restarted. James said they had to file a motion to enforce to get those programs running again.Trans people shared how the Trump administration’s disdain for their community was affecting them. A young trans athlete was kicked off her softball team, her mom shared. A trans veteran was worried about her access to life-saving healthcare. Doctors who treat trans youth said their patients are on edge.Immigrants and people from mixed-status families talked about the specter of deportation and how the threat loomed over their day to day. One woman said her mother’s partner was deported, as was her husband’s uncle. She worries daily whether her mom is next. “The Trump administration has impacted me deeply during these past two months alone, but more than ever, we have to come together organized because I’ll be damned if they keep hurting my family,” she said.Suzanne Kelly, the CEO of the Minnesota Council of Churches, said her organization, which helps resettle refugees, is losing $4m in federal funds that would go directly to their clients, an amount that can’t be replaced with local dollars. She has had to lay off 26 employees, most of whom are refugees or asylees themselves. Refugees they were expecting to help are now stranded overseas in refugee camps, she said. People already here will lose rental aid and other assistance.“Whatever your faith tradition, please pray with us for those individuals, and pray with us for this country. We’re better than this,” Kelly said.After two hours of testimony a Minnesota activist stood up and shared their vision of the way forward: “The first step of that call to action is just to get fucking angry, man.” More