NONPROFITS

Roz Tsai

The Wilder Foundation, St. Paul, announced the appointment of Roz Tsai as chief human resources officer, effective Jan. 19. Tsai succeeds vice president of human resources Jennie Hawkins, who has served Wilder for 38 years. Tsai most recently served as vice president of talent, learning, and organizational effectiveness at Thrivent, Minneapolis.

ARCHITECTURE/ENGINEERING

MSR Design, a Minneapolis architecture firm, announced the elevation of Jeffery Davis and Kate Michaud to firm principals. Michaud is director of project delivery and Davis leads the firm’s Utah office.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Piper Sandler Cos., a Minneapolis-based national investment bank, announced the addition of Dan Wolf as a managing director in the health care investment banking group. Wolf returns to Piper Sandler where he began his career as a health care investment banking analyst. Prior to rejoining the firm, he served as chief financial officer at Theradaptive.

GOVERNMENT

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon announced the appointment of Justin Erickson as deputy secretary of state for operations. Erickson served as general counsel for the office since May 2024 and previously was deputy general counsel. Deputy General Counsel Lauren Bethke will succeed Erickson in the role of general counsel.

HEALTH CARE

Mayo Clinic, Rochester, announced it has appointed Todd Manion chair of revenue cycle for the health system. Manion succeeds Sharon Kelley; he previously served as chair of coding, revenue integrity, outpatient clinical documentation improvement and provider education at Mayo. He joined Mayo Clinic in 2021 after spending more than 12 years as a managing director at Deloitte & Touche.

HONORS

Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota, St. Paul, announced five honorees statewide who received its 2025 President’s Leadership Excellence Award: Chrissy Elton, area director of LSS Meals; Heidi Leach, senior director of business technology; Linda Meaux-Stewart, program coordinator at Portland House; Tameka Miller, program director for Metro Youth Housing Services, and Amy Tudor, program director for Housing Services.

LAW

Maslon, Minneapolis, announced it is celebrating its 80th anniversary in 2026. … Faegre Drinker, Minneapolis, announced that Erika Campbell has joined the firm’s private client group. Campbell previously clerked for the Honorable Gerald Schroeder of the Idaho Supreme Court. … Fredrikson, Minneapolis, announced that Chief Operating Officer Ann Rainhart has been named to the O Shaped 2026 O List, honoring individuals who embody the 5 Os mindset, a list of professional principals meant to guide the legal profession.

MANUFACTURING

Smyth Cos., an Eagan-based provider of product packaging label printing and services for business, announced the appointment of Steve Wirrig as chief executive officer. Wirrig most recently served as CEO of NovaVision and also was CEO of Rohrer Corp. and served in various leadership positions at Coveris, KubeTech, Rexam and Textron.

MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY

Patterson Cos. Inc., a Mendota Heights-based national supplier of medial equipment to veterinary and dental practices, announced the appointment of Patrik Eriksson as Patterson Dental’s North American president. Eriksson most recently served as CEO at Vimian Group. … Kindeva, a Woodbury-based developer of drug-delivery combination devices, announced that President David Stevens has assumed the role of CEO. He succeeds Milton Boyer, who will continue to serve as an independent member of the board of directors.

SERVICES

Viking Electric, a Minneapolis-based electrical products distributor and services provider for business, announced the hire of Susan McDougall as vice president of human resources. She previously served in similar roles at Tennant Co., Deluxe Corp. and the University of St. Thomas.

SPONSORSHIPS

The Minnesota Timberwolves and Lynx professional basketball teams announced a multiyear partnership with Wings Credit Union, Apple Valley, as the official credit union of both teams.

TECHNOLOGY

FORTÉ, formerly AVI Systems, an Eden Prairie-based provider of audio-visual systems for businesses and schools, announced the following promotions: Zach Valigura to senior vice president of delivery; Kendra Apelt, vice president of digital solutions, and Chris Clark, vice president of accounting. … Jamf, a Minneapolis-based provider of Apple-based software to enterprises, announced the appointment of David Helfer as chief revenue officer. Helfer most recently served as chief customer and revenue officer at Mimecast. He succeeds Liz Benz, Jamf’s current chief sales officer.

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CORTINA D’AMPEZZO, Italy — Lindsey Vonn was preparing to fly back to her home country on Sunday after her terrifying head-over-heels crash in the Olympic downhill, the U.S. Ski Team’s chief told the Associated Press.

Sophie Goldschmidt, president and CEO of the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, said the team’s medical staff has been coordinating Vonn’s recovery since the crash and subsequent helicopter evacuation at the Milan Cortina Games and would try to accompany her home. Vonn has had multiple surgeries in Italy to repair a complex tibia fracture in her left leg.

“We’re working through all of that at the moment,” Goldschmidt said. “We’ve got a great team around helping her, and she’ll go back to the U.S. for further surgeries.”

Spectators tuning in to see Vonn attempt to win a medal at age 41 with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee and a partial titanium replacement in her right knee were stunned when she clipped a gate 13 seconds into her run, resulting in a spinning, airborne crash that sent her careening down the Dolomite mountain.

“The impact, the silence, everyone was just in shock. And you could tell it was a really nasty injury,” said Goldschmidt, who was there. “There’s a lot of danger in doing all sorts of Alpine sports, but it gives more of an appreciation for how superhuman these athletes are.

“I mean, putting your body on the line, going at those speeds, the physicality. Sometimes actually on the broadcast it’s really hard to get that across,” Goldschmidt added. “Danger sometimes brings fans in and is pretty captivating. We obviously hope we won’t have injuries like that, but it is unfortunately part and parcel of our sports.”

Vonn herself said she has no regrets.

“When I think back on my crash, I didn’t stand in the starting gate unaware of the potential consequences,” Vonn said in an Instagram post late Saturday. “I knew what I was doing. I chose to take a risk. Every skier in that starting gate took the same risk. Because even if you are the strongest person in the world, the mountain always holds the cards.

“But just because I was ready, that didn’t guarantee me anything. Nothing in life is guaranteed. That’s the gamble of chasing your dreams, you might fall. But if you don’t try you’ll never know,” Vonn added.

Goldschmidt visited Vonn at the hospital twice and said, “She’s not in pain. She’s in a stable condition.

“She took an aggressive line and was all in, and it was inches off what could have ended up a very different way,” Goldschmidt said. “But what she’s done for our sports and the sport in general, her being a role model, has gone to a whole new level. You learn often more about people during these tough moments than when they’re winning.”

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Wa Chi Minh Vang spent nine years in jail in Vietnam, where he ran afoul of government operatives for preaching Christianity within the country’s tight-knit Hmong community. His father, he said, died in jail, but Wa Chi Minh Vang never stopped advocating for greater religious freedom through his “Hmong United for Justice” YouTube channel, which he ran for years from Minnesota in an attempt to rally fellow refugees to the cause.

After seven years in a refugee camp in Thailand, his sister Thi Dua Vang, her husband and five other members of their family were finally able to join him in St. Paul in December 2023, when eight Hmong-Vietnamese families arrived together in the Twin Cities. The area’s Hmong-Vietnamese Christian community had suddenly nearly doubled in size.

Thi Dua Vang kisses her one-year-old granddaughter, Pang Chia, as she and her husband, A Pao Giang, speak with journalists at an undisclosed location on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

“We’re very, very small,” said Wa Chi Minh Vang, sitting with his sister, her husband and their granddaughter, who remain in hiding together in Minnesota following Thi Dua Vang’s two-week detention last month by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “We’re just 20 families.”

Wa Chi Minh Vang talks about his sister, Thi Dua Vang, with journalists at an undisclosed location on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Thi Dua Vang’s life changed on the morning of Jan. 8, and not for the better. At 7:40 a.m., federal agents knocked on the door of her St. Paul rental home. Thi Dua Vang, a grocery worker, had put in late hours the night before and was still in bed, but her 11-year-old son opened the door.

“Do you know this guy?” they asked him, showing him a name. “Oh, that’s my mom!” her son replied.

“Where’s your mom?” they pressed.

“My mom’s still sleeping,” he said.

Within minutes, the federal agents had roused Thi Dua Vang from bed. Two years after relocating to Minnesota, praying for a better life, the 49-year-old’s next ordeal began. She and her husband are in the U.S. legally and in the process of acquiring green cards.

In the month since, her experience has underscored the scope of both Operation Metro Surge and Operation PARRIS, two federal efforts that claim to focus on detaining “the worst of the worst” while re-interviewing lawful refugees whose permanent residency applications are still in the pipeline. Critics, from civil rights advocates to federal judges, have pointed to detentions like Vang’s as they question why the federal government’s tactics have aggressively detained unwitting, everyday workers who have no criminal history and face no criminal charges.

In a written statement, a media office for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said of Thi Dua Vang: “This individual was in the United States without legal status and was arrested by ICE. They have been released on bond and will have their day in court.”

A two-week ordeal

Meanwhile, in Thi Dua Vang’s St. Paul home, the federal agents explained they needed to check paperwork related to her application for a permanent residency credential known as a green card.

After spending two weeks in federal detention, Thi Dua Vang, right, tearfully embraces her husband, A Pao Giang, outside a federal facility in Houston, Texas on Jan. 21, 2026. (Courtesy of Wa Chi Minh Vang)

The agents collected all of the papers she showed them, including her personal I.D. and her Social Security card, in a bag. Then they quickly collected her and transported her to the Bishop Henry Whipple Building, a federal office building at Fort Snelling that has doubled as a detention facility during Operation Metro Surge, the Department of Homeland Security’s weeks-long immigration enforcement action.

The next day, she was boarded onto a plane to El Paso, Texas, where she was held for about a week in a chilly, prison-like setting, surrounded by other women, most of them Spanish-speakers. Unable to speak English or Spanish, Thi Dua Vang said she was at a loss to communicate with others around her. On Jan. 12, she was boarded onto yet another plane, where she was the only woman among a large group of Latin men.

From her best understanding of the situation, she recalled, she thought she was headed back to Vietnam alone.

“She has no criminal history,” said Wa Chi Minh Vang, at a loss to understand why the government would attempt to deport her, while translating questions from a reporter to her and her husband during a recent interview. “She has no criminal anything. She works in a grocery store and comes home. She’s been here just two years.”

The airplane taxied out toward the runway, and then taxied back, she said. Her name was called. She was taken off the plane and placed back in detention, with little understanding of why. Within three days, she was transported to another federal facility, this one in Houston, Texas, where she shared another chilly detention cell with 20 other women, most of them Spanish speakers.

During her two weeks in detention, food consisted of a light soup for breakfast, a potato for lunch and another for dinner. She was never offered the opportunity to go outside for fresh air, to stretch her legs or see the sun.

A court appearance on Jan. 20 resulted in an offer: she could get out of detention on a $3,500 bond. Her family, through an attorney, agreed to pay the sum, though it was unclear why she would be considered a flight risk or on what charges she was being held on. Wa Chi Minh Vang and her husband drove for the better part of two days, spending the night in Oklahoma City. At 3 p.m. on Jan. 21, they received an email indicating Thi Dua Vang would be freed within three hours.

Even driving as fast as they could without getting pulled over, they were still at least seven hours away.

Thi Dua Vang with her and husband Apao Yang talk to a reporter at an undisclosed location on Tuesday, Feb. 10, 2026. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Released, and then hounded

Released from the federal detention facility in Houston near 8 p.m. with her cell phone but no documents, Thi Dua Vang made a plaintive call to her family. She had nowhere to go but to linger outside the federal buildings, which would not allow her to stay in the lobby.

“Are you guys coming?” she asked. “They released me outside.”

Her husband and brother were still almost four hours away, they said. They asked her to use her phone to take pictures of her whereabouts so they could use the surroundings as landmarks to find her. At 11 p.m., the three were tearfully reunited, having overcome just the first two-week hurdle in what’s become an ongoing immigration nightmare.

Once back in Minnesota, Thi Dua Vang found she had lost her job at the grocery store as someone had already taken her place. She checked in with ICE officials, who told her to make annual visits to their office from now on. Her husband and brother brought her to Driver and Vehicle Services to see about replacing her missing I.D. and other documents confiscated but never returned by ICE.

Then, at 11 a.m. on Jan. 27, came another knock on her door. It was federal agents — again. This time, she knew not to open up for them. They returned on the afternoon of Jan. 31, but again walked away empty-handed, though it did not appear they walked far. Relatives spotted two large Black vehicles parked on either side of her home until 2 a.m. the next morning.

Since then, she’s gone into hiding with her husband, praying that ICE will finally leave her alone.

“She’s very, very scared,” Wa Chi Minh Vang said. Her husband is equally apprehensive but also optimistic. America is supposed to be the land of the free, he said. For two years, for his family, it had been.

“He’s scared of driving,” Wa Chi Minh Vang said. “He says, ‘We’re not angry. We suffered persecution in Vietnam and went to Thailand, and we came to this country. We trust God. We don’t have the power to do anything, but we trust God.’”

As of Wednesday afternoon, an online fundraiser on GoFundMe.com — tinyurl.com/ThiDuaFund — had raised more than $30,000 for Thi Dua Vang’s family from more than 770 donations.

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Bernie Sanders and Ron DeSantis don’t agree on much, but the data-center boom is a rare exception. Vermont’s Democratic Socialist senator and Florida’s right-wing governor want to slam the brakes on the hundreds of resource-intensive new facilities springing up across the country to power the artificial intelligence industry. And both point to profits, not the public good, as the real factor motivating the boom.

In many ways, the convergence was inevitable. Public wariness about the data-center industry is growing, and politicians could no longer ignore the outcry. Public skepticism of AI is also ubiquitous. Merriam-Webster chose slop as its 2025 word of the year because, at the same time AI is enabling telemedicine and driving cars, it’s also spreading fake news, nonconsensual nudified images and synthetic propaganda.

So when two politicians representing two ideological extremes start sounding alike, maybe it’s time to listen.

In December, DeSantis convened a roundtable discussion to highlight the growing threat of AI.

“What we don’t want to do is be subsidizing or put a thumb on the scale for technologies that are going to supplant the human experience,” he said.

He called for an “Artificial Intelligence Bill of Rights” to safeguard data privacy, parental controls and consumer protections. And he backed legislation that requires data centers to pay the full cost of their energy and water use and allows local communities to stop data-center construction that doesn’t mesh with their growth plans. “You should not have to pay one dime more in utility costs, water, power, any of this stuff, because these are some of the most wealthy companies in the history of humanity,” he argued.

DeSantis had convened the roundtable just days after the Trump administration issued an executive order seeking to limit state-level AI regulations, warning that “a patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes” could hinder US competitiveness with China. But DeSantis challenged Trump’s justification for the data center expansion, arguing that the tech industry is motivated to accelerate AI growth — with its “fake songs and fake videos” — because it is driven primarily by profits. “Their goal is not to beat China,” he said.

DeSantis’ comments were remarkably similar to those made by Sanders just weeks before. Sanders had released a report that raised questions about the industry’s impact on American jobs, the economy and young people. It concluded: “Technology can and should improve the lives of working people. But it will not happen if decisions are made in boardrooms by billionaires who only care about short-term profits.”

Sanders has also joined environmentalists and called for Congress to pass a moratorium on building new data centers. “I think you’ve got to slow this process down,” he said.

Both are right. The bipartisan distrust of this industry gives politicians a rare leverage point to push back against the Trump-aligned tech bros and start asking some serious questions about the AI arms race. What is the goal? How much generative AI is necessary? Does America really need AI-generated slop? And isn’t it time to put some quality controls on these resource-consuming giants?

For years, the nation’s tech companies have quietly gone about signing nondisclosure agreements and lobbying elected officials to build data centers to power their AI technology with little regard for the cost and impact on the public. But when the nonstop low-frequency hums from the buildings started to annoy people in neighboring residential communities, when electric bills started to rise for homeowners and small businesses, and when local water resources started to strain from the cooling demands of the massive computers, public protests got louder. Politicians started getting voted out of office. And the industry started to wise up.

“To say data centers are unpopular right now is probably an understatement, to say the least,” Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, told a Florida legislative committee in December.

Diorio represents tech giants like Meta, Alphabet and Amazon Web Services, and is making the rounds to statehouses across the country as lawmakers file bills to impose new rules on the companies.

Arizona, Georgia, Maryland and Michigan legislators are considering bills to repeal data-center tax incentives. Georgia, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Wisconsin and Arizona are advancing bills to prohibit data centers from entering into nondisclosure agreements that hide details of the development plans from the public. Eleven states are considering legislation to require utility regulators to develop a new rate class so that data centers foot the bill for their power needs. And lawmakers in Georgia, Oklahoma, Vermont and Virginia have proposed moratoriums on new data-center construction.

But politicians don’t move as fast as tech companies, and in many ways, the industry is already several steps ahead of them. At hearings before Florida legislators, data-center developers testified that many companies are bypassing their water challenges by moving to cooling systems that use closed-loop water technology to reduce massive water consumption.

But because demand isn’t slowing for the build-out of centers that use 500 megawatts or more of energy a day — enough to power a mid-sized city — getting sufficient energy supplied in a timely manner, regardless of the environmental implications, is now the industry priority, according to a report last month from industry-focused Data Center Frontier.

Plans are emerging in Florida, for example, to build self-sufficient energy centers using turbines that burn greenhouse gas-emitting natural gas. Developers said the industry is also working on developing small modular nuclear reactions to power data centers. (NPR reported recently that the Trump administration has secretly rewritten environmental, safety and security rules to allow for development of the experimental reactors.)

The energy appetite is insatiable. According to BloombergNEF, data centers’ energy demand will triple in a decade — from 34.7 gigawatts in 2024 to 106 gigawatts by 2035. That’s the equivalent of powering more than 80 million homes.

In many ways, states created this monster. Lured by the economic development potential of the tech industry, state and local governments for years have offered tax breaks to the industry without managing the impact they would have on their energy grid, especially during peak demand.

For his part, DeSantis has hardly been consistent on this issue. Last June, he signed a major tax-relief bill that extended the deadline to apply for Florida’s tax credit for data centers from 2027 to 2037. Even as he says he wants to slow data center development in his state, he’s giving the industry a tax break to encourage it. It’s classic hypocrisy.

Perhaps DeSantis now sees the error of his ways. A version of his bill giving local communities control of their data center fate is moving through the Florida legislature — although it inexplicably gives data centers a one-year exemption from public records requirements. Hopefully, other state and local officials will also listen to the public outcry, put the brakes on data centers, and take a more measured path forward. “They ignored you,” is now an easy campaign slogan. Even AI could write it.

Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades.

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