By SARA CLINE and JACK BROOK

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A panel of three federal appellate judges has ruled that a Louisiana law requiring the Ten Commandments to be posted in each of the state’s public school classrooms is unconstitutional.

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The ruling on Friday marked a major win for civil liberties groups who say the mandate violates the separation of church and state, and that the poster-sized displays would isolate students — especially those who are not Christian.

The mandate has been touted by Republicans, including President Donald Trump, and marks one of the latest pushes by conservatives to incorporate religion into classrooms. Backers of the law argue the Ten Commandments belong in classrooms because they are historical and part of the foundation of U.S. law.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ order stems from a lawsuit filed last year by parents of Louisiana school children from various religious backgrounds, who said the law violates First Amendment language guaranteeing religious liberty and forbidding government establishment of religion.

The mandate was signed into law last June by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry.

The court’s ruling backs an order issued last fall by U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, who declared the mandate unconstitutional and ordered state education officials not to take steps to enforce it and to notify all local school boards in the state of his decision.

Law experts have long said they expect the Louisiana case to make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, testing the conservative court on the issue of religion and government.

In 1980, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a similar Kentucky law violated the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says Congress can “make no law respecting an establishment of religion.” The high court found that the law had no secular purpose but served a plainly religious purpose.

In 2005, the Supreme Court held that such displays in a pair of Kentucky courthouses violated the Constitution. At the same time, the court upheld a Ten Commandments marker on the grounds of the Texas state Capitol in Austin.

A Minnesota lobbyist accused of sending text messages threatening to shoot people at the state Capitol now faces a felony charge.

Jonathan Michael Bohn of Woodbury. (Courtesy of the Carver County Sheriff’s Office)

Jonathan Michael Bohn, 41, of Woodbury, has been charged with threats of violence after allegedly sending a string of “threatening and disparaging” messages to an acquaintance, the Carver County Attorney’s Office announced Friday.

Bohn, a lobbyist with the Inter Faculty Organization, a union that represents faculty at Minnesota state universities, said he had bought “500 bullets” and was “excited to have my gun at the capitol and blow somebody’s (expletive) face off,” prosecutors allege.

The alleged threats did not mention any specific state lawmaker.

A person received the messages while at a restaurant in Waconia on Wednesday, according to the criminal complaint, which leaves the alleged victim unnamed for privacy reasons.

They came after a “falling out with the victim over political differences,” the Carver County Attorney’s Office said in a news release on the charges.

After learning of the alleged threats, law enforcement obtained a search warrant for Bohn’s Woodbury home and found an unloaded firearm in a locked case in his garage, according to the complaint. Police questioned took him into custody.

Bohn remained in the Carver County Jail in Chaska Friday afternoon. At his bail hearing Friday, Judge Eric Braaten set Bohn’s bond at $1 million, ordered no contact with the alleged victim and ordered him to stay at least half a mile away from the Minnesota Capitol.

In a statement, the Inter Faculty Organization said it had placed Bohn on administrative leave.

“The Inter Faculty Organization (IFO) condemns political violence and threats of violence in any form,” union president Jenna Chernega said in a statement. “Such acts are unacceptable and stand in direct opposition to the values that guide our work: civil discourse, mutual respect, and advocacy rooted in integrity.”

Rep. Jim Nash, a Waconia Republican, reported the threatening text to law enforcement on Wednesday.

Nash notified the House sergeant at arms, State Patrol and Carver County Sheriff’s Office of a “personal text message to a constituent that was threatening in nature,” the Minnesota House GOP Caucus said in a news release.

“The threat was not aimed at any particular lawmaker but the message did include a threat of violence at the Capitol,” House Republicans said. The news release didn’t identify the suspect but said authorities questioned and arrested the person on Wednesday.

Republicans said the House sergeant at arms is not aware of any further threats to the Legislature or its staff.

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Bohn’s arrest comes less than a week after a shooting spree that took the lives of former House Speaker Melissa Hortman, DFL-Brooklyn Park, and her husband, Mark, and injured Sen. John Hoffman, DFL-Champlin, and his wife, Yvette.

The alleged gunman visited the homes of two additional lawmakers that same night and had notebooks naming dozens more targets, federal prosecutors said this week.

Lawmakers’ home addresses have already been removed from the Minnesota Legislature’s website, and the Capitol saw a larger security presence than usual this week.

Elected officials have again called for new security measures at the state Capitol, such as entry checkpoints with metal detectors and X-ray machines.

The Queens assemblymember has pulled in more out-of-state donations than Cuomo and Lander combined, signaling a national appetite for his brand of progressive politics.

Zohran Mamdani at a campaign rally at Terminal 5 on June 15. (Facebook/ZohranKMamdani)

Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani’s appeal seems to be spreading beyond the boundaries of the five boroughs, as the democratic socialist from Queens leads in the number of non-resident donations to his campaign. 

When it comes to out-of-state contributions, the progressive assemblymember and mayoral hopeful has soared past his competition by a ratio of four-to-one, according to a City Limits analysis of publicly available campaign finance data. 

Of the three Democrats leading the polls in the primary race for mayor, Mamdani received 4,494 out-of-state contributions. Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo follows with 1,030 such donations and sitting Comptroller Brad Lander isn’t far behind at 933, as of June 9, the last day for which data are available. 

Cuomo still leads in general fundraising, having brought in about $4 million in campaign contributions. Lander has received almost $1.8 million, and Mamdani trails him at $1.7 million. 

Mamdani has attracted significant attention since announcing his run for office last October. His proposals for bold policies aimed at affordability—freezing the rent, city-owned grocery stores, free buses—and adept use of social media have helped him stand out in a crowded primary.

Once thought to be a long shot candidate, some recent polls have shown Mamdani closing the gap between himself and the expected frontrunner, Cuomo. His high number of out-of-state donors is indicative of a public enthusiasm that more conventional politicians like Cuomo and Lander struggle to muster, said Sandeep Kaushik, a political consultant and moderate Democrat in Seattle. 

Even though they wouldn’t be constituents, these donors see Mamdani as a standard bearer for a larger, more national movement. Kaushik pointed to the candidate’s social media savvy, as well as recent endorsements by other progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, as potential drivers of non-local donations. 

“You just start creating all this national buzz, and that buzz translates into dollars,” Kaushik said.   “Mamdani is young and charismatic and a person of color who is speaking in broad thematic terms about very easy-to-understand issues, that may not actually be particularly viable or practical or attainable, but speak to the aspirations of left-progressive voters.”  

City Limits reached out to several out-of-state donors who said they felt Mamdani offered a genuinely new kind of politics. 

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Katherine Cochrane, 34, works as a wine purveyor in Washington state, and donated $25 to Mamdani’s campaign. She remembered being impressed by the assemblymember’s hunger strike in support of striking taxi cab drivers during her time living in New York. 

“Instead of just doing politics, he was actually just doing the job,” she said. 

Cochrane, who left New York City for Washington due to the city’s rising cost of living, thinks Mamdani is the only candidate who could make New York affordable enough for her to return. 

“I haven’t felt like there has been someone to turn things around in a while,” Cochrane said. 

Christopher Welbourne, 31, is a custodian in Alaska who donated $25 to Mamdani’s campaign. Unlike Cochrane, Welbourne has no relationship with New York. He said he contributed because he feels this mayoral race affects national politics more than any other local election in the country.

“[C]ontributing to a mayoral run there has larger potential impacts to me as a U.S. citizen than if I were to try offering support to a mayoral candidate in a smaller city,” Welbourne said in an email. 

Dr. Babur Lateef, 53, is an ophthalmologist in Virginia who donated $100 to Mamdani’s campaign. Lateef doesn’t believe Mamdani will accomplish even half of his campaign promises. But he thinks that’s still better than the status quo.

“Will he get free transit? No. Will he have free buses? No freaking way! It’s not gonna happen. Nobody gets it,” said Lateef. “But can you have some sort of stabilization on rent? That all makes sense.” 

While Mamdani may be winning in out-of-state donations, that’s no guarantee of wider victory. When Andrew Yang ran for mayor in 2021, he received about 17,000 out-of-state donations to his campaign, around 13,000 more than Mamdani, and more than any other candidate in the race that year. Yang still lost that election.  

And though Mamdani leads in the number of out-of-state donors, Cuomo leads him in the total dollar amount of funds raised. The former governor has collected nearly $660,000 from non-New Yorkers, as of June 9. This is nearly three times the amount as Mamdani. And the average amount given by out-of-staters to Cuomo is more than 10 times larger than what’s given to Mamdani—about $640 on average compared to around $50.

But for some of his supporters, Mamdani doesn’t need to win the election to find success. What’s important to them is that they’ve been offered an alternative to mainstream politics. 

Oliver Turiano, 25, is a musician in New Jersey. He donated $15 to Mamdani’s campaign. He hopes that whether Mamdani wins or not, his effort will show the Democratic Party how to run a campaign that inspires people. 

“A win for Zohran, or even a close race, which I think it will be, is a blueprint for the Democratic Party. Look: run economic populist, run young,” said Turiano.

To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

The post Mamdani Outpaces Rivals in Out-of-State Donors appeared first on City Limits.

By ALANNA DURKIN RICHER

WASHINGTON (AP) — A close ally of fugitive Jalisco New Generation boss known as “El Mencho” for years orchestrated a prolific drug trafficking operation, using a semi-submersible and other methods to avoid detection, and provided weapons to one of Mexico’s most powerful cartels, prosecutors say.

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On Friday, José González Valencia, was sentenced in Washington’s federal court to 30 years in a U.S. prison following his 2017 arrest at a beach resort in Brazil while vacationing with his family under a fake name.

González Valencia, 49, known as “Chepa,” along with his two brothers, led a group called “Los Cuinis” that financed the drug trafficking operations of Jalisco New Generation, or CJNG — the violent cartel recently designated a foreign terrorist organization by the Trump administration. His brother-in-law is CJNG leader Nemesio Rubén “El Mencho” Oseguera Cervantes, whom for years has been sought by the U.S. government.

Meanwhile, El Mencho’s son-in-law, Cristian Fernando Gutiérrez Ochoa, appeared in the same courtroom earlier Friday to plead guilty in a separate case to a money laundering conspiracy charge. Gutierrez Ochoa was arrested toward the end of the Biden administration last year in California, where authorities have said he was living under a bogus name after faking his own death and fleeing Mexico.

Together, the prosecutions reflect the U.S. government’s efforts to weaken the brutal Jalisco New Generation cartel that’s responsible for importing staggering amounts of cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl into the U.S. — and track down its elusive leader. The Trump administration has sought to turn up the pressure on CJNG and other cartels with the foreign terrorist organization designation, which gives authorities new tools to prosecute those associated with cartels.

“You can’t totally prosecute your way out of the cartel problem, but you can make an actual impact by letting people know that we’re going to be enforcing this and showing that Mexico is being cooperative with us and then ultimately trying to get high level targets to sort of set the organization back,” Matthew Galeotti, who lead the Justice Department’s criminal division, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

FILE – The letters “CJNG” for the group’s formal name, Jalisco New Generation Cartel, covers the facade of an abandoned home in El Limoncito, in the Michoacan state of Mexico, Oct. 30, 2021. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo, File)

Trump’s Justice Department has declared dismantling CJNG and other cartels a top priority, and Galetotti said the U.S. in recent months has seen increased cooperation from Mexican officials. In February, Mexico sent 29 cartel figures — including drug lord Rafael Caro Quintero, who was behind the killing of a U.S. DEA agent in 1985 — to the U.S. for prosecution.

The Trump administration has already charged a handful of defendants with terrorism offenses since designating CJNG and seven other Latin American crime organizations as foreign terrorist organizations in February. Galeotti said several additional indictments related to CJNG and other cartels remain under seal.

“We are taking a division-wide approach to this,” Galeotti said. “We’ve got money laundering prosecutors who are not just focused on the cartels themselves … but also on financial facilitators. So when we’re taking this broad approach … that’s why I think we’ve had some of the really significant cases that we’ve had, and we’ve seen a very significant pipeline.”

González Valencia pleaded guilty to international cocaine trafficking in 2022. Authorities say he went into hiding in Bolivia in 2015 after leading “Los Cuinis” alongside his brothers for more than a decade. He was arrested in 2017 under the first Trump administration after traveling to Brazil, and was later extradited to the U.S.

“Los Cuinis” used “air, land, sea, and under-the-sea methods” to smuggle drugs bound for the U.S., prosecutors say. In one instance, authorities say González Valencia invested in a shipment of 4,000 kilograms of cocaine that was packed in a semi-submersible vessel to travel from Colombia to Guatemala. Other methods employed by “Los Cuinis” include hiding drugs in frozen shark carcasses, prosecutors say. He’s also accused of directing the killing of a rival.

He appeared in court wearing an orange jumpsuit and listened to the hearing through an interpreter over headphones. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell sealed part of the hearing, keeping the press and public out of the courtroom while lawyers argued over the sentence. It was not clear why the judge determined it had to be sealed. González Valencia’s lawyer declined to comment after the hearing.

In the other case, Gutiérrez Ochoa was wanted in Mexico on allegations that he kidnapped two Mexican Navy members in 2021 in the hopes of securing the release of “El Mencho’s” wife after she had been arrested by Mexican authorities, prosecutors have said. Authorities have said he faked his own death and fled to the U.S. to avoid Mexican authorities, and “El Mencho” told associates that he killed Gutiérrez Ochoa for lying.

“El Mencho’s” son, Rubén Oseguera — known as “El Menchito” — was sentenced to March to life in prison after his conviction in Washington’s federal court of conspiring to distribute cocaine and methamphetamine for U.S. importation and using a firearm in a drug conspiracy.