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Will the Texas Supreme Court Legalize Child Abuse?
New Republic • Feb 5, 2026

Will the Texas Supreme Court Legalize Child Abuse?

A case now before the Supreme Court of Texas may become the first real test of the state’s newly minted “parental rights amendment,” and the stakes could not be higher. The state constitutional amendment, approved by Texas voters in November 2025, declares that parents have the “inherent right to exercise care, custody, and control” over their children and to make decisions about their upbringing. Any state action that “interferes” with those rights is subject to the equivalent of strict scrutiny—the highest level of constitutional protection.On its face, the language sounds familiar and even benign. Few Americans object to the idea that parents, not the government, should ordinarily make decisions about their children. But constitutional language does not exist in a vacuum, and this case forces a confrontation with what the “parental rights” movement is actually seeking to protect and whom it leaves exposed.The dispute before the court arises from allegations that are not remotely ambiguous or cultural in nature. According to the record, the conduct at issue includes food deprivation, beatings with a belt, forced wall sits that lasted hours, and prolonged kneeling on grains of rice—forms of punishment that most people would recognize as physical and emotional abuse. The question now being seriously entertained is whether the Texas Constitution requires courts to presume such treatment is protected parental decision-making unless the state can meet the nearly insurmountable burden of strict scrutiny.That this argument is being advanced at all is chilling. That it is being supported by prominent right-wing advocacy organizations, including the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the Family Freedom Project, should force a reckoning with what the contemporary “parental rights” movement actually is.The amendment itself did not emerge from concerns about extreme discipline or state overreach in abuse cases. Its public justification was far more ideological. Supporters framed it as a response to schools “undermining” parents, particularly by acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people or by offering inclusive curricula. In that context, “parental rights” functioned as a euphemism—not merely the right to raise one’s child but the right to control what any child is allowed to know, see, or understand about the world.It’s a framing that comes riddled with contradictions. Even as Texas voters were told the amendment would keep the government out of family life, the state was aggressively inserting itself into families whose children needed gender-affirming care, going so far as to label supportive parents as child abusers and to threaten investigations and removals. Parental autonomy, it turned out, was conditional. It applied only when parents’ decisions are aligned with conservative ideology.The case now before the Supreme Court of Texas exposes that conditionality in even starker terms. Here, “parental rights” are not being invoked to resist bureaucratic micromanagement or defend reasonable differences in child-rearing. They are being invoked to shield conduct that would trigger intervention if committed by a teacher, foster parent, or childcare worker. The theory is not that abuse did not occur, but that the Constitution requires the state to tolerate it.The rhetoric of parental rights collapses into a claim of unilateral power rather than responsibility. Traditionally, both law and social norms have treated parental authority as bounded by a child’s basic rights to safety and dignity. Parents are entrusted with enormous discretion precisely because they are presumed to act in their children’s best interests. When that presumption breaks down and harm becomes clear, the state intervenes—not to punish ideology but to protect a vulnerable child.The “parental rights” framework advanced in this case seeks to invert that logic. It asks courts to treat children not as rights-bearing individuals but as constitutional property interests over which parents exercise near-total control. Under this view, the barrier the state must overcome to stop it is incredibly high: Even actions that most would consider abuse are protected as expressions of parents’ authority and ideological preferences.This is not a neutral application of constitutional principles. It is a selective expansion of rights that entrenches hierarchy while disclaiming accountability. The same movement that insists parents must have an absolute veto over school library books or pronouns has shown no hesitation in overriding parental judgment when families seek reproductive health care or gender-affirming treatment for their children. “Parental rights” disappear and reappear depending on whose autonomy is at stake.What makes this case particularly alarming is its potential to constitutionalize that asymmetry. If the Supreme Court of Texas embraces the argument that extreme corporal punishment and deprivation fall within the protected core of parental decision-making, it will not merely be deciding one family’s fate. It will be signaling that a child’s right to bodily integrity is subordinate to a parent’s ideological claim of authority, even in the face of clear harm.Supporters of the amendment may insist this is a slippery-slope concern, that courts will still be able to intervene in the worst cases. But strict scrutiny is not a minor procedural hurdle. It requires the state to prove not only that it has a compelling interest—protecting children from abuse—but that its intervention is narrowly tailored and the least restrictive means available. Applied rigidly, that standard risks turning child protection into a constitutional afterthought.More fundamentally, the case reveals the true endgame of the modern parental rights movement. It is not about freedom from government overreach in any consistent or principled sense. It is about securing a constitutional trump card—one that allows certain parents to enforce obedience, suppress identity, and inflict harm without meaningful oversight, while the state is compelled to look away.A society that treats children as mere extensions of parental will, rather than as people with rights of their own, abandons one of the most basic functions of law: protecting those who cannot protect themselves. If “parental rights” can be stretched to cover child abuse, then the phrase no longer names a safeguard for families. It names a license—and a warning.

How Federal Cuts to SNAP Are Already Roiling State Governments
New Republic • Feb 5, 2026

How Federal Cuts to SNAP Are Already Roiling State Governments

Just as the beginning of a new year is a time for families to figure out their finances, the same is true for state legislatures. In the coming months, the majority of states will be penning their budgets for the upcoming fiscal year. As they tally costs, legislators will need to account for looming changes to a key federal nutrition program that push more of the financial burden onto their books.In July, Congress approved a law making a series of dramatic cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, which helps roughly 42 million Americans buy groceries. Along with adding new work requirements, the measure will also increase the amount that states spend on both administrative costs and SNAP benefits themselves. This could result in states shifting money from other public programs to fund SNAP—or choosing to limit either SNAP benefit amounts or eligibility overall to keep costs down.“It’s very likely some states are thinking about whether or not they can keep this, if they can participate in SNAP, so that has huge implications for people experiencing poverty,” said Lelaine Bigelow, director of the Georgetown Law School Center on Poverty and Inequality. “Other programs are probably going to feel pinches, and it’s probably not going to be easy shifts.”Beginning in October, states will be responsible for 75 percent of administrative costs of SNAP, a dramatic increase from the current 50 percent; the federal government will be responsible for the remaining 25 percent. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has estimated that this provision would mean a reduction in federal funding for administrative costs by nearly $25 billion over the next decade.As early as the fall of 2027, states will also be responsible for a portion of the cost of SNAP benefits, depending on their error rates—that is, the share of overpayments and underpayments of SNAP benefits. If an eligible household either receives too much or not enough in benefits for a given month, those payments are in error.According to recent research by the Georgetown Law School Center on Poverty and Inequality, these new changes will result in states spending an average of two to three times more on SNAP in their budgets, with a median increase of 202 percent. In 15 states, the share of the state budget will increase by more than 300 percent.If their error rate is above 6 percent in fiscal year 2025 or 2026, states may begin paying a portion of SNAP costs beginning in fiscal year 2028. If that state’s error rate is above 10 percent, they will be on the hook for 15 percent of benefit costs. In recent years, state governments have faced struggles ranging from the extraordinary—such as managing benefits during the Covid-19 pandemic—to the quotidian, like shoring up outdated enrollment systems or understaffing issues. Surmounting these challenges may have helped to lower their error rates over that same period of time; for example, the state with the highest error rate in the nation, Alaska, dramatically cut that number between fiscal years 2023 and 2024. But cutting those rates below 10 percent may prove to be a monumental task, particularly given that a greater share of administrative costs will now be on states.“For states that have incredibly higher error rates, they’re not going to lower those error rates in one year,” said Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center. “States have been coming down [by] 1 percent or 2 percent, but none of them are going to be able to come down 15 percent, 10 percent overnight.”The error rate for 2025 will be finalized this June—meaning that legislators need to start thinking about how their states will be affected now. Some states with higher error rates may be able to delay implementation of the cost-sharing provision until fiscal year 2029 or 2030, but even so, those calculations will be based on error rates from 2025, 2026, and 2027.In Florida, where close to three million residents received SNAP benefits last year, the state will be paying an additional $51 million in fiscal year 2027 to cover administrative costs. If its error rate remains above 10 percent, Florida will have the largest increase in the share of its budget dedicated to SNAP costs of any state, with a spike of 768 percent, according to the Georgetown Law Center on Poverty and Inequality.Holly Bullard, the chief strategy and development officer at the Florida Policy Institute, is more worried about how the state will cover a portion of the cost of benefits. Florida’s SNAP error rate was greater than 15 percent in 2024, and an official with the Florida Department of Children and Families estimated last week that its error rate for fiscal year 2025 would be around 13 percent, with the goal of lowering it even further this year.Although Florida is expected to have a surplus in fiscal year 2027, state budget estimators believe there will be a deficit in the two subsequent fiscal years, which could make sourcing SNAP funds an even more dire issue. Bullard raised a hypothetical scenario where Florida’s error rate remained high enough in the coming years that the state would be responsible for 15 percent of benefits when the cost-sharing provision goes into effect. Even if state lawmakers scrounged up half of the roughly $1 billion needed to cover the increase in costs, it would not be sufficient to provide full coverage, Bullard said.“Either you reduce the amount of people on SNAP, or you cut everybody’s SNAP in half, or you do some sort of both where everyone’s amount is reduced, and you push off a certain amount of people,” she said. She worries that state lawmakers do not realize the severity of the situation. Although recently introduced legislation would ask the Department of Children and Families to develop strategies for reducing error rates, Governor Ron DeSantis will be out of office next year, meaning that his administration’s potential plans might not be able to come to fruition.“I don’t think [state lawmakers] are treating this as the four-alarm fire that it is,” said Bullard. “It is an overwhelming risk that everyone needs to take very seriously and not just take someone’s word for it, especially an administration who’s not going to be there when this actually comes home to roost.”Even if they have a relatively low error rate, states would still bear a portion of the burden. With an error rate between 6 and 8 percent, they will be responsible for 5 percent of benefit costs; with an error rate between 8 and 10 percent, those costs would increase to 10 percent of benefits. In fiscal year 2024, fewer than 10 states had an error rate of less than 6 percent. Even the states that are eligible for delayed implementation may struggle to get their error rates below 6 percent in a timely manner. Experts say that error rates are not necessarily an indication of misuse of benefits but rather a result of outdated systems and administrative issues. “Higher error rates usually signal lack of technology, training, and staffing. It’s not about integrity. It’s not about fraud,” said Melissa Wolf, the vice chair of the American Association of SNAP Directors, in a January congressional briefing.The looming threat of cost-sharing has received bipartisan pushback. In a January letter to congressional leaders, a coalition of organizations representing state, county, and city leaders, including the National Governors Association, asked for legislation to delay the administrative and benefits cost-sharing until fiscal year 2030. The coalition also asked that SNAP data from the government shutdown last fall be excluded from the calculation of payment error rates, as the distribution of benefits in November was marked by chaos and delays.States are already beginning to consider how to bolster SNAP funding. In Alabama, the state Department of Human Resources is requesting an additional $35 million to help cover additional administrative costs. The Oregon Department of Human Services has asked state lawmakers for an additional $54 million to cover the increased administrative costs, as well as an additional $39 million to improve the state’s error rate; if the error rate doesn’t improve, the agency would need an extra $450 million in the 2027–2029 budget cycle to cover SNAP benefits.In West Virginia, where one in six residents rely on SNAP, the Republican governor has asked state legislators to increase program spending by $13.5 million in 2027. State officials in Florida—which would see an increase of $1 billion in SNAP costs should its error rate stay the same—have requested an additional $15 million to modernize its eligibility system.SNAP is administered at a county level in 10 states, including California and New York; the states that delegate administration responsibilities to counties provide services to more than 30 percent of all SNAP recipients. In nine out of 10 of these states, the increase in administrative costs for SNAP will be partially or entirely covered by county governments. Plata-Nino noted that “all counties are not created equal”; in lower-income counties, there may be insufficient funds to shoulder any additional burden.Rachel Sabella, director of No Kid Hungry New York, an anti-hunger advocacy organization, noted that county officials in her state were already scrambling to implement new work requirements established by the law, and now need to begin accounting for a dramatic increase in the cost of administrating the program. The New York comptroller has estimated that shifting 25 percent more of administrative costs to the state would cost roughly $266 million; in addition to funding a portion of benefits, this could amount to up to $2.2 billion in new SNAP costs per year.“This is not a magic check that someone can write and fill it in—$2 billion is a major impact,” said Sabella. “We know the state agency and the counties are also looking at their error rates and what’s going to be needed, but there’s also so much being thrown at these agencies at one time. There’s a lot they need to do to protect individuals in the state.”Plata-Nino said that entire communities would be affected by a loss in SNAP dollars, as states may scramble to shift other funding to cover program benefits. She noted that large portions of state budgets are dedicated to health care and public education, which could in turn face cuts.“At a local level, that means that your local cities and municipalities are going to get less resources. So whether or not you’re on SNAP, you’re going to notice that it may take longer for a pothole to be filled or that your kids’ school didn’t get extra teachers or extra support,” said Plata-Nino.The changes also come amid changes to Medicaid imposed by the law, with state lawmakers feeling pressure to fund new requirements. In the near term, this means increased administrative costs for the public insurance program and long-term stress as states lose key funding sources for financing Medicaid. If states choose to cut eligibility or benefits for SNAP and Medicaid, that could leave their poorest residents with fewer options for obtaining food and health care.By forcing states to make difficult decisions on what initiatives to fully fund, Bigelow said the Trump administration is threatening the efficacy of anti-poverty efforts as a whole.“If you look at what’s going on with how the federal government is dictating some of these cost shifts to states, it seems to me to be a big coordinated attack on public programs,” said Bigelow.

The People of Minneapolis Will Simply Not Let the ICE Thugs Prevail
New Republic • Feb 5, 2026

The People of Minneapolis Will Simply Not Let the ICE Thugs Prevail

The blood pooled in the snowbank, seeping into the thick sheet of ice below. On this corner, at 34th Street and Portland Avenue in Minneapolis, this was a reminder, visual and visceral, of Renee Good’s death by gunshots fired in daylight, for all to see, by ICE agent Jonathan Ross. Federal officials had moved her lifeless body here after Ross fired multiple shots into her as she drove away from him, and first responders did their best to revive her.Looking at the bloody snowbank half a day after she died, I was struck by what wasn’t there. No investigators collecting evidence. No attempt to hide the blood—the snowbank was too deep, and the ice too thick. At most crime scenes, the blood gets erased quickly, with a pressure washer. Not this one. It would linger into the night of her killing, telling the story of her fatal encounter with ICE while protesting their marauding presence in her South Minneapolis neighborhood.As a journalist, I thought mostly of how to tell this story. But as a Minnesota kid, this story just hit me in a much more personal way than other tragedies. I thought of how close this was to the George Floyd murder scene, just five years prior. Of how close it was to Lyndale Elementary, a mile west of here on 34th Street, where my mother taught the same immigrants who now are being targeted and chased out. Of the impossible burden carried by this city, scene to one civic nightmare after another in recent times. I thought of the line from Hamilton about the woebegone citizens of this besieged city: They were “outgunned, outmanned, outnumbered, outplanned.” The occupying forces of the federal government, armed with assault rifles and tear gas canisters, seemed overwhelming. There were 3,000 of them, and as Good’s partner, Becca, said in describing the mismatch, they had guns and the people had whistles. They had little duty to obey laws, and seemingly carte blanche to use their weapons however they felt like. It seemed inevitable that this city would fall, whatever that meant, and be forced to surrender. Except that the people of Minneapolis, and Minnesota more broadly, didn’t buy the story of their inevitable capitulation. It’s as if they waved reassuringly with their chopper mittens and declared to the nation and world in their native language: “Oh, geez, wouldya calm down already? We got this.”They have shown the world how to fight back successfully, using an iron resolve, a superior information operation, and winter grit, without resorting to the violence being used against them. It’s taken all hands: Nearly 30,000 Minnesotans trained as “constitutional observers,” essentially a rapid-response citizens’ force against perceived abuses. Tens of thousands of others have taken to the streets to monitor and film federal officials, or delivered groceries to neighbors too scared to leave their homes, or accompanied vulnerable neighbors from the parking lot to schools or church.As dusk approached on the day Good was shot, two Puerto Rican men stood on a front lawn near Good’s memorial as police retreated after reopening the street. Angry protesters lobbed snowballs at them and cheered. “You don’t fuck with Minneapolis,” one of the men shouted, waving his finger in the winter air. “Will you never learn?!”Trump administration figures have echoed this sentiment, in their own way.“In one city we have this outrage and this powder keg happening,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in an interview on Fox News. “And it’s not right. And it doesn’t happen anywhere else.”Surely, Blanche meant this as an insult. Just as surely, the people of Minneapolis took it as the highest compliment. I went to grade school, high school, and college in Minnesota, but I haven’t lived there in nearly 25 years. Going back to cover the federal incursion, I was struck by how everyone seems to know everyone. “You find out how much of a small town this is,” my college friend Mark said. He was the first of many old acquaintances I renewed. Mark took his usual midday run the day after Good’s killing, which ended in a most unusual way.The Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building is not far off his route, so he stopped over to check the protest.Soon, full of anger and outrage over Good’s killing, he approached a line of about 30 Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. He insulted each one, pouring out a new set of f-bombs as he looked each in the eyes.After running out of things to say, Mark spit in the general direction of the agents. Soon, a phalanx of them piled onto him, and off to the pokey he went. In eight hours of detainment, his legs were shackled as he was held in a cell marked with a Post-it note: “U.S. Citizen.” He was never asked to provide identification, apparently put in the safe confines of the citizens’ wing because of his skin color (white). Repeatedly, men with guns demanded to know which agency was in charge of him, and what charges he was facing.“I’m like, ‘How the hell should I know?’” he said. He was eventually unshackled, with a watch and other personal items returned. Still in his blue running tights and Seoul Marathon 2008 T-shirt, he ran home, and hasn’t heard from anyone since.“It was just an unorganized fucking mess,” Mark tells me.Later that day, I was at a vigil led by leaders from local Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths. They stood together at the site of Good’s killing and demanded justice. Specifically, they called for the arrest of Ross, the ICE agent who killed Good, and immediate departure of ICE from the city. I almost couldn’t believe my eyes when the Catholic representative, Father Dale Korogi, took the mic. Father Korogi was a priest at St. Rose of Lima Catholic Church, about 10 miles from the Good killing site, in my grade school years. He was beloved by us as someone who always made time for his parishioners, young and old. He and my mother coordinated the altar boys’ program, which included my brothers and me. It had been probably 37 years since our last meeting, yet there we were.Korogi grew up on the North Side of Minneapolis and graduated a year ahead of Prince at Minneapolis Central High School. He’s 68 and currently serves as pastor at Ascension, a large parish on the North Side.   Korogi told me he doesn’t generally get publicly involved in civil rights matters. But this time is different. His parish is more than half Mexican American. Before the ICE surge started in December, he’d normally welcome about 400 Spanish-speaking parishioners at Sunday masses. That number has since shrunk to 30 or 40. Numerous parish families have had someone detained or deported, with little ability to track them, or contact them, once they’re gone. ICE vehicles have circled near the parish parking lot near Mass times.“There’s certainly something about this particular moment that has cut me to the core,” he told me. “Each and every person who is being detained, and certainly being deported, an entire family is undone. The human cost of this has cost me. I feel it deeply and personally.”With federal agents still on the prowl, Ascension has shifted into a much more involved mutual aid operation. Last Saturday, volunteers delivered a week’s worth of groceries to 300 households. That’s double the number they served just two weeks earlier. And they have ample volunteers to grow.“People across the ideological spectrum, from religious conservatives to religious liberals to people who have no religion whatsoever are responding to this call,” Korogi says. “People are recognizing what an affront to just simple human dignity this has been for so many people.”He does proceed with caution, wary of reports that federal agents are tailing such food trains in the Twin Cities. The story of Operation Metro Surge often plays out at multiple locations at the same time: a court hearing, a press conference, a planned protest, an unplanned ICE raid. It’s nonstop, it’s adrenalized, it’s around the clock. Covering it can get dangerous, and is always unpredictable. Weekends have been busier than weekdays. There are few metro areas left in the United States with a media landscape that wouldn’t get buried by it. The Twin Cities, fortunately, is one of them. The region’s highly educated, relatively wealthy population has kept consuming and supporting media, from legacy outlets to start-up nonprofits, at levels not seen in decades in many other cities. The biggest fish, The Minnesota Star Tribune, ranks seventh in the nation for newspaper circulation, despite the Twin Cities being just the sixteenth-largest metro area by population. And it’s not the only daily—my hometown St. Paul Pioneer Press still operates, although in a significantly depleted form from its heyday. The “Strib,” by contrast, hasn’t hemorrhaged jobs and institutional knowledge, at least to the same degree as other regional papers. Its coverage of this story stands out for being all-encompassing: multiple staffers at all breaking news, quick-turn investigations that debunk government spin, video analysis that verifies and illuminates the endless reels of footage provided by staffers and by citizens with smartphones. The Strib has 50 journalists working the story daily out of 200 total in the newsroom, says Kathleen Hennessey, the somewhat new editor and senior vice president who grew up in St. Paul and previously was a deputy politics editor at The New York Times.“This story is stretching across beats, to business, food, culture, and even high school sports,” she says. “It’s touching the whole newsroom.” National outlets, especially the Times, have also committed major on-the-ground resources to the story. An unusually strong network of smaller outlets throughout Minnesota has contributed, as well. And finally, of course, there is the army of citizens out there, all collecting video evidence.Add it all up, and the feds have cameras and coverage on everything they do, from the detainment of a 5-year-old Latino boy to the Hmong grandfather being led away on a frigid day in shorts, to the closeup of the prone protester getting sprayed point-blank in the face by orange tear gas. A judge can castigate ICE, as Patrick J. Schlitz, chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, did recently, calling the agency out for violating more court orders in a month than many agencies have in their entire history. But those words don’t resonate in the way that photos and videos that document misdeeds do. I’m astonished by how global this story is. I regularly get notes of concern from friends in Sweden and Ireland, where my placid, picturesque little home state often leads newscasts looking like a war zone. Exchange students in our Milwaukee community have been warned by their parents to steer clear of Minneapolis. The mayor of Milan has moved to ban ICE from the upcoming Winter Olympics. It’s all so bonkers. But none of it has done anything but boost enthusiasm and participation by the regular people who have powered the pushback from the start. Two Fridays ago, the sun rose in the Twin Cities to temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. In those conditions, you can throw a bucket of boiling water into the air and see it turn instantly to snow. If you leave a soda pop can out, you can watch it explode in minutes. Exposed skin will be frostbitten in 10 minutes. Tens of thousands of Minnesotans woke up to those conditions and decided it would be a great day to spend hours outside protesting ICE. My sister and nephew were two of them. Between them, Patty and Ben counted 37 different articles of clothing on their persons. Office Space introduced us to 37 pieces of flair. In Minnesota, it’s 37 pieces of layers. They joined all the others, looking like mummies. The sight of so many people enduring Siberian conditions, day after day—whether delivering vital goods to scared neighbors, monitoring federal agents with smartphones, or marching in the streets—serves as a reminder. Nobody can out-suffer Minnesotans. Winter brings pain, day after day. The state’s sports teams offer not respite but more agony. Minnesota dominates the rankings of the longest title drought among metro cities with men’s teams in all four major American sports (the Twins were the last of the four teams to win it all, back in 1991; Minnesota’s women’s teams, the Lynx and the Frost, have had better success than the guys).Buttressing that toughness and tenacity is a bedrock belief in the multicultural society that’s been created in the Twin Cities. Father Korogi talks of how white the Minneapolis he grew up in was. For most of its history, Minnesota has been among the whitest states, peopled by the descendants of Scandinavian, German, and Irish immigrants. It remains very white, although far more diverse than it was. “Minneapolis, at a certain point, has, I think, been so hungry for some diversity, or a broader kind of cultural experience,” Korogi says. I was fortunate to know that changing Minnesota through my parents. They taught in the public schools, which meant they worked with whatever kids showed up from the community. For my dad, that meant teaching the early Hmong arrivals in the 1980s, the kids by day and the adults learning English at night, at St. Paul Central High. For my mom, it meant teaching Somali immigrants at Lyndale Elementary in the early 2000s. We heard endless stories of immigrant grit and tenacity, and of a community willing to do the work and provide the social infrastructure to support the new arrivals. When I was there most recently, I couldn’t believe how transformed Minneapolis and St. Paul have become in the quarter-century since I left—immigrant business corridors that stretch for blocks and blocks, Hmong and Somali and Latino families living among white and Black families in city and suburban neighborhoods. I wasn’t looking for immigrant success stories, but they kept presenting themselves. Some of them are conspicuous—St. Paul just elected its first Hmong mayor, Kaohly Her; a St. Paul native, Suni Lee, won an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics at the Tokyo Games; Ilhan Omar, a Somali American, represents Minneapolis in Congress.Less heralded were the people whose paths crossed with mine. My cab driver from Ethiopia told me about his four adult children who grew up in Minneapolis and now operate a business together in Oregon. They bought him the $130,000 Cadillac SUV cab we were in. A restaurant owner on University Avenue in St. Paul told me about the Thai coffee recipe her mom perfected in a refugee camp and now bottles and distributes at the family restaurant and at Twin Cities grocery stores. Two young Somali American men told me about their start-up media production company, Moon Media, and wanted to have me on their podcast.Then there was the young Somali American man I met at the Good shooting scene. He was on a particularly treacherous stretch of ice as we walked along. I offered him space on my lane, which was better cleared. He was wearing a full-length cloak and running shoes.“No thanks,” he said. “I’m from Minnesota. I’ve walked on ice before.”The state’s ongoing investigation of corruption within the Somali American community shows that not all is well in the integration game. Federal prosecutors uncovered a widespread misuse of public funds, resulting in charges against 98 people, nearly all of them Somalians. Those prosecutors have since resigned in protest of the Department of Justice’s handling of the Renee Good shooting, severely undercutting what was a winning political issue for the GOP. The Somali fraud scandal, while deeply concerning, doesn’t negate the larger story that seems to trend toward a society that’s remained comparatively wealthy as its demographic makeup shifted.  Those gains have largely been erased in recent months, at least visually. Father Korogi talks about driving around his hometown these days to a changed landscape. Immigrants and anyone with black or brown skin simply won’t risk going out in the community, knowing the many reports of U.S. citizens, including off-duty police officers, getting roughed up simply for being nonwhite.“I don’t see any Latino people,” Korogi says. “It’s really, really white, and it’s kind of the Minneapolis I grew up in. There’s something just kind of creepy about it.”It’s a stark reminder of how much life and the very complexion of the Twin Cities has changed, at least for now. But the events of the past months, when citizens of this town became accidental heroes in a shockingly violent episode in American history, suggest this won’t be reality forever. Attempts to permanently undo the last half-century of societal change are destined to fail because the people who live here just won’t allow it.  One lesson from living through four seasons every year: All things are temporary. Seasons change. Circumstances, and governments, change. The frozen lakes thaw out and turn liquid again, and the sidewalks don’t stay glaciers forever. Every winter becomes part of lore. Someday, over a campfire, they’ll tell the story of the winter of ’26. We’ve had some rough winters, but that one, they’ll say, that one sure was a doozy.

Meet the Mastermind Behind Trump’s Definition of “Woman”
Mother Jones • Feb 5, 2026

Meet the Mastermind Behind Trump’s Definition of “Woman”

“Big moves on Day 1,” White House senior policy strategist May Mailman crowed on X the morning of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, linking to a news article about a forthcoming executive order. Even amid the barrage of actions during the first hours of the Trump 2.0 presidency, the order—“Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and […]

Trump Reveals Hint of Panic on ICE as Prison Camps Anger MAGA Country
New Republic • Feb 5, 2026

Trump Reveals Hint of Panic on ICE as Prison Camps Anger MAGA Country

Donald Trump just claimed in an off-the-cuff interview moment that the events in Minnesota suggest that Immigration and Customs Enforcement needs to use a “softer touch.” He also went out of his way to say he’s called the governor and Minneapolis’s mayor, meaning he wants to create the impression that he’s been working constructively with them. While all this is just spin, it reveals genuine fear that these events have put him in a politically weak position and that he needs to appear to be recalibrating. Indeed, this comes as Trump’s plans for vast migrant prison camps are hitting angry opposition in unlikely places: in a deep red, partly rural county in Virginia; among Republican officials in other states; and even in Mississippi, where a GOP senator has come out against a planned camp there. We talked to Brian Beutler, who’s been arguing on his excellent Off Message Substack that Dems need to take charge of debates like these. We dig into the epic citizen backlash to Trump’s ICE raids, why the prison camps present a big opportunity for Democrats, and why they must abandon the idea that Trump’s 2024 win showed a big cultural shift against immigrants. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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