The St. Thomas women’s basketball team earned its second straight win on Wednesday, beating Oral Roberts 71-66 at Lee & Penny Anderson Arena in St. Paul

Alyssa Sand had 15 points and 15 rebounds to lead the Tommies (12-13, 5-6 Summit). Mikayla Werner had 14 points, while Jada Hood added 13 points, a team-high seven assists and six rebounds. Autumn McCall finished with nine points and 10 rebounds for St. Thomas.

The Tommies took control by outscoring Oral Roberts 21-9 in the third quarter, before holding on as the Eagles (12-12, 5-6) pushed in the fourth.

St. Thomas had lost four of five before winning the past two games, including a 60-56 win at Denver on Saturday. The Tommies host Omaha on Saturday at 1 p.m.

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Born in 1950, Readus Fletcher experienced his share of racial discrimination as a young man, but he also saw the dismantling of Jim Crow laws that kept Black families from white schools, southern lunch counters, voting booths and the front of the bus.

He witnessed the Civil Rights era up close, and was proud to see his own father, a World War II veteran, recognized as the first Black man licensed to drive a streetcar through the streets of Minnesota’s capital city following desegregation of certain federal jobs by U.S. President Harry Truman. Riding with his dad at the helm remains one of his most treasured memories.

Wherever there was race-based segregation and cruelty, there also was a commitment to progress, from civil rights advocates on the ground to champions for equality in the halls of state, local and federal government.

Today, at the age of 76, for the first time, Fletcher isn’t feeling so optimistic. He said he never expected a societal step backward into the use of excessive force and intimidation against peaceful protesters, warrantless-detentions and state-driven character assassinations that have characterized Operation Metro Surge, the federal immigration action under President Donald Trump.

“I was really taken aback by where we’re at today, where you have this violent suppression of expressions of concern for people who need it,” said Fletcher, a retired City Hall employee and one of the subjects of a recent documentary about elders of St. Paul’s historically-Black Rondo community. “It’s against average Americans. That’s significantly different than the Civil Rights campaigns or the women’s rights campaigns.”

‘I feels like we’re back in 1950’

The same sentiment is shared by a number of Black leaders in the Twin Cities. On the one hand, descendants of chattel slavery are natural born citizens, which would make the mission of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Operation Metro Surge seemingly irrelevant to their day-to-day well-being. But many of St. Paul’s Black leaders see things differently.

Advocates who remember similar tactics used against them and their peers during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s say they’re witnessing a resurgence of state-sanctioned racial hostility that has never really gone away but now plays out large, even more widespread, in front of cameras, backed by near-military force. For families who have lost loved ones following past police encounters or dispute the official record of events in crime reports, there’s deja vu writ large in the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to paint witnesses and victims of heavy-handed ICE actions as perpetrators.

“We’re missing whole human beings out of our lives, and it’s not a joke, and it’s not a game,” said Toshira Garraway Allen, founder of Families Supporting Families, during a January press conference following the killing of Renee Good by a federal agent in Minneapolis. “It’s not a game to watch people lie and twist up a story on your loved one. It’s not a game for people to call your loved one a terrorist after they get their life stolen.”

For some Black-led organizations, the current atmosphere in the Twin Cities harkens back to their origin stories.

“It feels like we’re back in 1950,” said Benny Roberts, executive director of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in St. Paul, which opened to serve Black residents in 1929. “It feels like we’re back in 1920. It feels like we’re back in the 1800s. … This is where we were founded.”

“Unless you’re Black or indigenous, you are an immigrant in America,” Roberts added. “Nobody is safe in these conditions.”

Black Ministerial Alliance speaks

On Feb. 2, more than 20 members of the African American Leadership Council and the St. Paul Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a coalition of more than 10 churches, stood side by side in a room at the Hallie Q. Brown Center to pray together and deliver remarks condemning the weekslong mobilization of federal agents throughout the state.

In no uncertain terms, they called for ICE to back out of Minnesota.

The Rev. Melvin Miller. (John Autey / Pioneer Press)

Melvin Miller, president of the Black Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance and senior pastor of the Progressive Baptist Church on St. Paul’s East Side, called out “the blatant violation of our Constitutional right to peacefully protest” and “the intimidation of civilians with firearms, and the tragic deaths and senseless deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. … We condemn the racial profiling of Black and brown communities that’s going on, and the unjust detention of individuals … without a cause.”

Miller further condemned the targeting of sensitive locations like schools, hospitals and courthouses.

“We’re appalled at the malicious mischaracterization of immigrants as the worst of the worst, disregarding the fact that the majority — the vast majority — are law-abiding citizens and contributing residents of our community,” he said.

In an interview later, he said Black leaders are not calling for open borders or turning a blind eye to the complexities of immigration enforcement. President Barack Obama, he noted, deported a record number of immigrants across his two terms in office, but not with militarized force.

“It’s the methodology,” Miller said. “We want people to be treated as human beings.”

‘A sense of lawlessness’

Miller’s own parents moved from Jackson, Miss. north to Richmond, Va. in the late 1960s, part of the “Great Migration” of Black southerners seeking greater opportunity and freedom from Jim Crow restrictions. On paper, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments had ended slavery, guaranteed the rights of citizenship and due process, and protected voting rights for Black Americans, but the reality on the ground in the deep south was far different, with segregation and disenfranchisement backed by lynchings, voter intimidation and selective, race-based legal enforcement.

“This has an eerie resemblance to what they came out of — a sense of lawlessness, where the laws are on the books but they’re not honored, where the administration can do what it wants,” Miller said. “It all begins with a mischaracterization of our neighbor as the ‘worst of the worst.’ That’s how it was for us — ‘Blacks are inferior, they’re lazy’ — that led to the imprisonment of our people.”

In St. Paul, groups of Black Americans, African immigrants, Latinos and Southeast Asians have sometimes butted heads in school yards or political races, and at other times found common ground to advocate together for rights and opportunities. Proximity — sharing public housing, a street, a school, a workplace — can lead to tensions and alliances, Miller acknowledged.

On the East Side, he’s seen schools where attendance has dropped by 20% or more during Operation Metro Surge, with families too scared to leave their homes to buy groceries, which has an economic impact that transcends race. More members of his congregation have stepped up to help with food shelf collection or volunteered to tutor students than have grumbled about not wanting to support immigrants.

“We have a little bit of that — ‘this is not our fight’ — but for the most part, there’s a deep sense of solidarity,” Miller said. “If they’re willing to shoot white people, what do you think they’ll do with Black people?”

Great Replacement Theory

In the minds of many Black leaders, demographic changes loom large as a backdrop to the current political climate.

Fletcher, in an interview, said many of the same sentiments used against immigrants in the current climate have been used against Black Americans over the years. In some white circles, there’s a palpable fear of the “browning of the voter pool” and demographic shifts — namely, fewer white births — that are leading to proportionally fewer white Americans against an uptick in Black and brown residents.

“That is critical for some,” Fletcher said. “The voting pool’s demographics are going to change, and many believe that will change the status quo in the near future. The voting majority may become brown, and how could the current majority deal with that? One way is to limit the brown children and future generations of voters. Deportation is a tool.”

Some racial antagonists have gone so far as to argue that the replacement of white voters by Black and brown voters — or by Muslims and Jews — is being orchestrated by a secret elite. Once a conspiracy theory, the “Great Replacement Theory” gained steam following the 2011 writings of French author Renaud Camus, who objected to an influx of Muslim immigrants in France.

Along a similar vein, the chant “Jews will not replace us” became a rallying cry during the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

In the U.S., the theory has taken on partisan overtones, with fears that growing numbers of Black and brown residents — including legal and illegal immigrants — will bolster the ranks of Democrats over Republicans, even though Trump actually enjoyed an uptick in support in the 2024 election from communities of color.

Whatever party they actually align with, “immigrants, and the children of immigrants, who are citizens or will become citizens will become tomorrow’s eligible voters,” Fletcher said.

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For any party, that could, in theory, be less cause for alarm than for courtship and cooperation of growing members of the electorate. But fear, he noted, too often wins out. For Fletcher, a guiding principle rooted in both Black history and his religious faith remains his ethical North Star. “At the end of the day,” he said, “we are our brother’s keeper.”

Talia McWright contributed to this report.

Even if the administration has temporarily backed off threats to invoke the Insurrection Act to quell protests in Minnesota, the idea will come up again. That’s partly because the power — which would allow the president to use active-duty troops to conduct domestic law enforcement — is dangerously vulnerable to abuse.

What’s known as the Insurrection Act is actually a set of statutes enacted by Congress between 1792 and 1871. Under certain conditions, they allow the president to circumvent the Posse Comitatus Act’s injunction against using the military for civilian law enforcement — say, if asked by a state for help in suppressing unrest, or if the White House deems that any insurrection or violence is preventing the exercise of federal laws. In the continental U.S., the act was invoked most recently in 1992, to restore order during the Los Angeles riots, and before that to enforce desegregation and civil-rights laws in the 1960s.

Examples are so rare largely because presidents — or their cabinet members — have shown restraint. The triggers for the law’s employment are remarkably broad and vague; they could theoretically allow the White House to call up the 82nd Airborne Division if two individuals were impeding its deportation campaign. Nothing in the act requires that it be treated as a last resort. It has no provisions for congressional or judicial review. While a 1964 Justice Department memo does narrow its focus, the current administration could simply revise that guidance.

Stronger guardrails would be in everyone’s interests. The military isn’t trained for these kinds of missions. (In one incident in 1992, when cops responding to a domestic violence incident asked Marines for “cover,” the troops responded by riddling the home with more than 200 bullets.) Even those inclined to agree with the administration’s description of protesters as “insurrectionists” should worry about lowering the bar for a future president to exploit such sprawling powers.

Former officials from both parties have been calling for reform for years. While Congress can debate specific language, the broad principles are clear. The triggers for invoking the act should be narrowed so that it’s clearly a tool of last resort, and updated to replace archaic and unclear terms. The president should consult with state officials first and explain the decision to Congress. Any deployment should be strictly time-limited; extensions should require congressional authorization.

Bills have been introduced to reform the act as recently as last summer. While achieving a veto-proof majority is unlikely under current conditions, Congress has shown itself willing to clarify other antiquated laws in the recent past. An open debate could usefully expose these issues to public scrutiny and remind the administration how controversial and counterproductive deploying the military would be.

No one is likely to welcome reform more than the troops themselves, the vast majority of whom have no interest in fighting partisan battles and being distracted from the mission of defending the U.S. against external enemies. If Congress wants to prioritize U.S. security, it will shield them from that possibility.

— The Bloomberg Opinion Editorial Board

“What happens to a nation when its citizens largely stop having children and, when they do, eschew marriage?” asks the Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank. The size of its 164-page report “Saving America by Saving the Family” is outdone only by the 60-by-30-foot banner draped across the outside of its building. Quoting the late Charlie Kirk, it reads: “Get married. Have children. Build a legacy.”

Let me start by saying that I’m heartened by the right’s recent attention to family policy. I really am.

I started writing about paid parental leave and child care more than a decade ago while at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. At the time it was the kind of thing that got you labeled as a RINO or relegated to the policy fringes while the big boys worked on tax and reg policy. Family policy has always deserved a seat at the adult table. It’s good to see the GOP is pulling up some chairs.

And we need some new thinking in this area. It’s not like progressives have had a family policy feast going. They have struggled to pass federal reforms and to present the issues in ways that reach traditionally minded Americans. And some of the proposals they have enacted have had wide-ranging unintended consequences; for example, achievement gaps that have grown for 4-year-olds — not closed — following New York City’s introduction of a universal preschool program.

But addressing the problems families face will require more and different approaches than what’s on offer in the Heritage report. Or on offer from the GOP more broadly, for that matter.

The report highlights enormous challenges facing families, but the rhetoric and policies don’t ladder up to solutions.

The report starts by noting that “the Founding Fathers were, quite literally, fathers” with an average of six children each, which is about as relevant to raising children in 2026 as the Founders’ wooden teeth.

From there, the report zigzags from porn to IVF to stay-at-home parenting to apprenticeships. Housing, child care, student loans; you name it, it’s in there. This breadth speaks to one of the many tensions inherent in family policy: Family policy can theoretically encompass the entirety of domestic policy. But by biting off so much, the report makes specific challenges harder to solve.

Another tension: Unsurprisingly for the architects of Project 2025, the Heritage report lays much of the blame for American families’ troubles on government overreach. There are select cases to be made here, in particular around reducing marriage penalties in the social safety net and tax structures, which are well-documented, or local zoning requirements that drive up housing costs. But much ink is spilled on the War on Poverty and how its programs rewarded unmarried, nonworking parents. Many of those issues were addressed by GOP-led welfare reforms in the 1990s.

In the 21st century, there’s a stronger case to be made that the government hasn’t done enough to protect kids and families. Where is the federal law with age limits on social media? How is it that one in four women return to work within two weeks of giving birth, without paid leave? Why are public schools failing to deliver upward academic achievement? The government has struggled to even cover these basics, even though there are tried-and-true state-level policies that could be used as models, from social media age limits and classroom bans, to public paid parental leave programs, to a focus on early literacy in schools.

Instead, Heritage turns to untested, government-engineered social and cultural change.

One of the biggest line items in the report — NEST accounts — would encourage marriage by depositing $2,500 into an account that could be accessed only if the person marries before age 30. Otherwise, that money is locked up until retirement. I’m not sure this one is thought through. For one, I doubt it moves the marriage needle much — as Heritage itself notes, young people don’t value marriage as much as young people once did. And if it does move the needle, do we really want to encourage 18-year-olds to marry someone who might not be right for them to get a cash bonus? And what about people over 30 who would love to get married, but just haven’t met their person? Is it fair to make them wait until retirement for their cash infusion?

There’s also the tension of offering a cash bonus for marriage when married people are already likely to have higher income levels and more upward mobility. Should government support primarily reward the people already on the right track, while excluding people who’ve fallen on hard times? That’s a tough one politically. It’s also a tough one for pro-lifers. The vast majority of women seeking an abortion are unmarried mothers, many of whom say they can’t afford another child. To them, these policies wag a finger and turn away.

Still another divide: The report feels torn between supporting mothers who work and supporting mothers who stay home. “Work is one of the main ways that people create value. It can also connect them and give them meaning and fulfillment. Work provides people with financial stability,” the report reads. But few ideas are offered for improving the lives of working mothers. For example, the report underscores how important parental care is in the early months and years of a child’s life. But its only solution is to “encourage” companies to provide paid leave. It offers no incentive for them to do so. If parental care is so important — and I agree that it is, especially for the youngest children — then I would expect to see a stronger plan for creating a generous paid parental leave policy.

I’m assuming it wasn’t included so as to not “favor” working parents over their stay-at-home peers. But in doing so, it fails to deliver what could be significant gains for most families. It also does nothing to address the negative tax treatment that dual-earner families already face relative to families with a stay-at-home parent.

Another half-baked idea: the report proposes that stay-at-home parents be able to access the same child-care subsidies as working parents. But the plan would partly draw from the Child Care and Development Fund, which is so chronically underfunded that fewer than 1 in 10 eligible low-income working families can use it. We shouldn’t expand a program that is already so overstretched. A better idea would be to adjust the Child Tax Credit so that families could choose to have the money frontloaded to the early years of a child’s life — for child-care costs or supplementing a sole breadwinner’s salary — without impacting the financial integrity of the program, taking resources away from low-income families, or increasing government spending.

Yes, families need more support for many of the reasons that the Heritage report highlights. It’s good that conservatives are talking about these things, which is a big shift in just the last decade. But the Heritage report identifies (and arguably would create) more problems than it solves.

Abby McCloskey is a columnist, podcast host, and consultant. She directed domestic policy on two presidential campaigns and was director of economic policy at the American Enterprise Institute.