DULUTH — Researchers studying blue-green algae blooms in the Duluth-Superior Harbor have pinpointed the cyanobacteria species responsible for the bloom’s toxins in what the Minnesota Sea Grant, which supported the research, called a “breakthrough discovery.”

By sequencing DNA from a bloom near Barker’s Island in Superior last fall, researchers were able to link the toxins to Microcystis aeruginosa, a cyanobacterial species. Knowing this, they hope to better understand, detect and predict when a bloom might occur, or even trace the blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria, to a source higher up the St. Louis River Estuary.

This species of cyanobacteria can create toxins that are harmful to humans and animals, and “chokes out” other species in a water ecosystem, said Abby Smason, a water resources science graduate student at the University of Minnesota Duluth and member of the research team.

“This is the first time we’ve kind of been able to make that one-to-one connection of: There’s this genome for this species, and it’s in the harbor, and it’s in this spot where there was a bloom, and it also has this gene that it would need to make toxins,” Smason, who collected the sample, told the News Tribune.

It’s the same species that regularly forms harmful algae blooms in Lake Erie, even prompting the city of Toledo, Ohio, in 2014 to order residents not to use their water for nearly three days after algae entered the water system’s intake.

“This organism does have the potential of wreaking some havoc,” said Cody Sheik, associate professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Large Lakes Observatory, who led the research team with Chris Filstrup, an applied limnologist at the University of Minnesota’s Natural Resources Research Institute.

Sheik said the area near Barker’s Island, which includes a public swimming beach, has become “kind of a hot spot for blooms every year,” but it’s been hard to quantify — the blooms come and go quickly.

“It does seem like they are becoming more prevalent, and maybe even a little bit more intense,” Sheik said. “It seems like it’s going to be a growing problem that we’re going to have to deal with here for the next however many years.”

However, anything found in the harbor, so far, has been below Minnesota and U.S. drinking water standards, he said.

Sheik said that at high enough concentrations, the toxins can kill pet dogs within hours and can affect a person’s liver or get into their lungs. Concentrations of what has been found now might cause some swimmers’ itch, he said.

Since the first confirmed blue-green algae bloom on Lake Superior in 2012 — after a massive rainstorm across the region loaded the lake with nutrients from runoff — several additional blooms have been observed. But they have so far been caused by other strains of cyanobacteria, not the Microcystis aeruginosa identified as the source of toxins in the Duluth-Superior Harbor.

But the harbor ultimately flows into Lake Superior. And with climate change causing warmer waters, less ice cover and additional, heavier rain events that wash nutrients cyanobacteria feed on into the lake, researchers are keeping a close eye on the lake.

“Conditions aren’t ideal for many of these strains to really propagate at high frequency, but as the lake continues to change, are conditions going to be better and better for these organisms where they can start outcompeting other things within the lake itself and making these toxic blooms?” Filstrup said.

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Back in the harbor and the St. Louis River Estuary, the researchers hope to pursue additional testing and monitoring, potentially allowing them to predict when conditions are right for blooms.

And knowing the exact species producing these toxins could help them find where in the estuary they are developing.

“If we figure that out, then we might be able to start thinking about ways of remediating,” Sheik said.

By MORGAN LEE

EL PASO, Texas (AP) — U.S. troops have begun directly detaining immigrants accused of trespassing on a recently designated national defense zone along the southern U.S. border, in an escalation of the military’s enforcement role, authorities said Wednesday

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U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Chad Campbell described in detail the first detentions by troops last week of three immigrants accused of trespassing in a national defense area near Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

Those migrants were quickly turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection and are now among more than 1,400 migrants to have been charged with illegally entering militarized areas along that border, under a new border enforcement strategy from President Donald Trump’s administration.

Troops are prohibited from conducting civilian law enforcement on U.S. soil under the Posse Comitatus Act. But an exception known as the military purpose doctrine allows it in some instances.

Authorities “noticed three individuals crossing the protective barrier into the United States,” Campbell said. “A Department of Defense response went to interdict those three individuals, told them to sit down. … In a matter of three minutes, border patrol agents came in to apprehend. So that three minutes is that temporary detention” by the military.

Trump has designated two national military defense areas along the southern U.S. border for New Mexico and a 60-mile stretch of western Texas, from El Paso to Fort Hancock, while transferring much of the land from the Interior Department to oversight by the Department of Defense for three years.

The Trump administration plans eventually to add more militarized zones along the border, a military spokesman said Wednesday at a news conference in El Paso.

“We have been very clear that there will be additional National Defense Areas across the southern border,” said Geoffrey Carmichael, a spokesperson for an enforcement task force at the southern border. “I won’t speculate to where those are going to be.”

Proponents of the militarized zones, including federal prosecutors, say the approach augments traditional efforts by Customs and Border Protection and other law enforcement agencies to secure the border.

“These partnerships and consequences exist so that we can promote the most humane border environment we’ve ever had,” El Paso sector Border Patrol Chief Agent Walter Slosar said. “We are dissuading people from entering the smuggling cycle … to make sure that smugglers cannot take advantage of individuals who are trying to come into the United States.”

Defense attorneys — and judges in some instances — are pushing back against the novel application of national security charges against immigrants who enter through those militarized zones — and carry a potential sentence of 18 months in prison on top of a possible six-month sentence for illegal entry.

A judge in New Mexico has dismissed more than 100 national security charges against immigrants, finding little evidence that immigrants knew about the national defense areas. Those migrants still confronted charges of illegal entry to the U.S.

In Texas, a Peruvian woman who crossed the U.S. border illegally was acquitted of unauthorized access to a newly designated militarized zone in the first trial under the Trump administration’s efforts.

U.S. Attorney Justin Simmons, who oversees western Texas, vowed to press forward with more military trespassing charges.

“We’re gonna keep going forward on these NDA charges,” Simmons said. “We are gonna still bring them, we may win on them, we may not. … At the end of the day, you are not going to be allowed to stay in this country if you enter this country illegally.”

Greater military engagement at the border takes place at the same time dozens of mayors from across the Los Angeles region banded together Wednesday to demand that the Trump administration stop the stepped-up immigration raids that have spread fear across their cities and sparked protests across the U.S.

Trump has authorized the deployment of an additional 2,000 National Guard members to respond to immigration protests in LA. That directive brings the total number of Guard put on federal orders for the protests to more than 4,100. The Pentagon had already deployed about 700 Marines to the protests to the city.

Laura Jean Fero, a former dean of nursing at St. Catherine University, did not apologize at her Wednesday sentencing for swindling from the St. Paul school through bogus contracts with a health care consultant she was dating.

Fero, 55, told Ramsey County District Judge DeAnne Hilgers she has remorse for “introducing a very manipulative person” to the university and said she was a “victim of that situation, as well.” She said she lost everything, including her home and profession of 30 years. “And I’m not saying I’m not taking accountability for introducing a person like that … that’s on me.”

Laura Jean Fero (Courtesy of the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office)

Fero was charged last year with embezzling $400,000 from St. Kate’s, but reached an agreement with the prosecution and pleaded guilty to one count of theft by swindle.

Hilgers sentenced Fero to three years of probation, which was the maximum allowed under the plea deal. The judge followed the deal’s other terms — ordering Fero to pay $25,000 in restitution to St. Catherine and giving her a stay of imposition, which means the felony conviction will be considered a misdemeanor if she successfully completes probation.

Five other felony theft by swindle charges were dismissed at sentencing, which was attended by several of the school’s administrators and staff.

Kara Koschmann, the associate dean of nursing at St. Kate’s, read a victim impact statement on behalf of the university, saying Fero’s thievery “is a grievous breach of trust” that will have a “deep and lasting impact.”

“This was not a one-time theft driven by desperation or need,” Koschmann said. “She engaged in a calculated act of deception that targeted the good faith of St. Kate’s, its students, faculty, staff, alumni, donors and the entire university community.”

Hilgers said she recognized the plea agreement was reached after “a lot of work and effort” between the attorneys and the university, adding, “What happens here today does not fix the harm that’s been caused, and the work to fix that harm is going to last far longer than your probation.”

Boyfriend was acquitted

Fero was St. Catherine’s dean of nursing from June 2019 through Aug. 28, 2023, when she left the St. Paul private college to take a job as dean of nursing and chief academic nurse at AdventHealth University in Orlando. She’s no longer employed by the university.

St. Catherine officials discovered missing funds after Fero left for the Florida job. The university conducted an internal investigation, and reported its findings to St. Paul police in late November 2023. Fero was arrested on May 8, 2024, at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport after arriving on a flight from Orlando, and charged two days later.

At Fero’s April 8 plea hearing, which she appeared via remote, she admitted she entered into contracts with Juan Ramon Bruce, 57, a Shakopee health care consultant, beginning in August 2020, and that she didn’t follow the university’s process of seeking requests for proposals beforehand.

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Fero also admitted she didn’t disclose to school leadership that she was involved in a romantic relationship with Bruce, whom she met in 2020 on a dating website.

For the count in which she pleaded guilty, Fero affirmed a statement by Assistant Ramsey County Attorney Tom Madison that Bruce was not “producing appropriate or expected work for the size of the contract.”

Bruce was charged with the same six counts three days after Fero. A jury in July deliberated less than four hours before acquitting him of all charges. His attorney, Debra Hilstrom, told the Pioneer Press after the verdict, “We said from the very beginning that Mr. Bruce did the work that he was hired to do.”

They met on Elitesingles.com

A police review of financial records showed Bruce’s company, JB & Associates LLC, received six payments from St. Catherine, totaling $412,644, between August 2020 and August 2023. The contracted work included outreach, marketing and market and cost analysis for continuing education development and delivery for the Catholic liberal arts school in St. Paul’s Highland Park area.

The charges against Fero say she sent an email to Bruce in October 2020 where she referenced meeting him on a dating website. Several emails she sent one day in July 2022 mentioned how they have traveled together to many places over the previous two years and how “she loves him deeply.”

The charges say a review of Fero’s university credit card showed she racked up $26,191 in expenses — airfare, rental cars, hotels and airport parking — for trips with Bruce to Miami, Atlanta and Phoenix in 2021, Cancun in 2022 and Orlando in 2023.

The investigation found additional emails indicating that Fero helped Bruce with some of the reports he was providing to the university to receive his contract funds, the charges say.

In an interview with police, Fero initially said she met Bruce from a “cold call” to St. Catherine about medical supplies and that they were not in a relationship prior to the university contracting with him. Fero later said she had met him on the dating website Elitesingles.com and that she believed the relationship did not constitute a conflict of interest.

Fero admitted to police to “editing” documents that Bruce submitted to St. Catherine, the charges say.

‘Deplorable’

In the university’s statement, Koschmann said a dean of nursing “holds ultimate responsibility” for ensuring that the nursing programs comply with federal, state and accreditation regulations, including those related to licensure, clinical practice and educational standards.

“To do so, a dean must exhibit the utmost integrity, accountability and ethical leadership,” she said. “To act deliberately counter to the values they expect from students, faculty and staff within the School of Nursing is deplorable.”

The money Fero stole “came from one of the university’s most generous donors” and was supposed to support student clinical and educational opportunities, and new program growth to boost enrollment.

Koschmann said Fero’s actions continue to have negative consequences on the university’s chances of securing state funding to support its programs and initiatives.

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As a part of applying for Minnesota state grants, Koschmann said, the university is asked if there have been any instances of misuse or fraud in the past three years.

“Because of Dr. Fero’s criminal conduct, we now have to answer yes, which automatically deducts five points from our application scores,” Koschmann said.

Fero told the court that through her financial, personal and spiritual loss, she has turned to weekly therapy and “really diving deep into that as to why I could be strong in one area of my life and very weak in another.”

“Luckily, I was able to persist through it and start healing,” she said. “So I look forward to continuing that journey in the future.”