I am a Democrat who is appalled at the ICE activities associated with “Metro Surge.” This operation is clearly political theater with the intent of punishing and antagonizing a blue urban area and state. If the Trump Administration really wanted to round up many undocumented immigrants, they would prioritize Texas and Florida, who have far more of these individuals than Minnesota. If this really were about cleaning up social services-related corruption, they would have sent accountants and other white-collar investigators, not masked and poorly trained thugs.
Donald Trump and his lieutenants wish to provoke violent responses which he can throw as red meat to his supporters. For the most part, Minnesotans have admirably denied him this type of reaction. However, Trump got what he wanted when violence recently broke out at a Minneapolis hotel where ICE agents were staying. As reported in the Jan. 27 edition of the Pioneer Press, protesters attempted to enter this hotel, clashing with a Minneapolis police officer and federal personnel and causing significant property damage during the overall incident. This sort of activity is performative and counterproductive. It is probably gratifying to the participants but only gives Trump what he wants.
Another story in the Jan. 27 edition of the Pioneer Press covered the primary individuals who entered a church service at Cities Church on Summit Avenue in St. Paul to protest ICE activities; this church was targeted because the acting Minnesota field office manager of ICE works as a pastor for the church. While not nearly as problematic as the violence shown at the hotel referenced above, this also is an example of performative actions which are counterproductive, in my opinion. Yes, the actions got the participants significant media coverage, but it provided more red meat for the MAGA base without achieving corresponding gains for the anti-ICE cause. Peaceful protest for a just cause is a noble activity, but to take it inside an active house of worship is inappropriate.
Peter Langworthy, St. Paul
We all care
I appreciated Richard Powell’s letter to the editor (“Compassion to go around”) in this past Sunday’s newspaper.
Specifically, his comments about compassion. Liberal Democrats have not cornered the market on compassion and empathy. I would like to think and believe that everyone, no matter their political views, are horrified, dismayed and sickened by the recent tragedies unfolding in Minneapolis. Compassion, empathy and concern for immigrants, all people, really, is not limited to members of one political party. We ALL care. Border control is necessary for our country to give safety to all Americans, immigrants included.
Lois Isaacson, Lakeland
Punishing local businesses
It seems rather ironic that people protesting the presence of ICE chose to punish businesses and restaurants by putting social pressure on them to close and to encourage boycotts of businesses that remain open. I believe that this is rather counterproductive in that the economic impact will be felt on local economies and the state of Minnesota and not on the federal government. It may make the people protesting feel better but the feds might be relishing that Minnesota seems to be shooting itself in the foot and that that protest will do little to influence the federal government.
Bill Filler, South Saint Paul
‘Asinine conclusions’
Our own Minnesota representative Tom Emmer said local and state leaders had “empowered criminals” and would not jump to “asinine conclusions” over the killing of Alex Pretti. I have a question for Rep. Emmer: When it comes to asinine conclusions what do you think of Greg Bovino’s assertion that Pretti was a domestic terrorist? Or Kristi Noem saying, “he brandished a gun and attacked agents”? Or Steven Miller stating “a would-be assassin tried to massacre law enforcement agents”? Can Mr. Emmer please define what he means by “asinine conclusions”?
Steve Larson, Minneapolis
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With tensions high over federal immigration enforcement, some state and local officials are pushing back against attempts by President Donald Trump’s administration to house thousands of detained immigrants in their communities in converted warehouses, privately run facilities and county jails.
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Federal officials have been scouting cities and counties across the U.S. for places to hold immigrants as they roll out a massive $45 billion expansion of detention facilities financed by Trump’s recent tax-cutting law.
The fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during immigration enforcement actions in Minnesota have amplified an already intense spotlight on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, increasing scrutiny of its plans for new detention sites.
A proposed ICE facility just north of Richmond, Virginia, drew hundreds of people last week to a tense public hearing of the Hanover County Board of Supervisors.
“You want what’s happening in Minnesota to go down in our own backyard? Build that detention center here, and that’s exactly what will happen,” resident Kimberly Matthews told county officials.
As a prospective ICE detention site became public, elected officials in Kansas City, Missouri, scrambled to pass an ordinance aimed at blocking it. And mayors in Oklahoma City and Salt Lake City — after raising concerns about building permits — announced last week that property owners won’t be selling or leasing their facilities for immigration detention.
Meanwhile, legislatures in several Democratic-led states pressed forward with bills aimed at blocking or discouraging ICE facilities. A New Mexico measure targets local government agreements to detain immigrants for ICE. A novel California proposal seeks to nudge companies running ICE facilities out of the state by imposing a 50% tax on their proceeds.
Melissa Kane, a self-described worried mother, joins protestors clad in red cloaks inspired by the dystopian novel and TV series, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as they protest outside a warehouse federal officials are touring to consider repurposing for an ICE detention facility, in Kansas City, Mo., Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Heather Hollingsworth)
An ICE agent stands outside a warehouse as federal officials tour the facility to consider repurposing it as an ICE detention facility, Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Kansas City, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
Barricades block a drive outside a warehouse as federal officials tour the facility to consider repurposing it as an ICE detention facility Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Belton, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
California Democratic lawmakers announce a bill to tax companies profiting from immigration detention facilities at a news conference in the state Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., on Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Sophie Austin)
A man takes photos of a warehouse as federal officials tour the facility to consider repurposing it as an ICE detention facility Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026, in Belton, Mo. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)
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Melissa Kane, a self-described worried mother, joins protestors clad in red cloaks inspired by the dystopian novel and TV series, “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as they protest outside a warehouse federal officials are touring to consider repurposing for an ICE detention facility, in Kansas City, Mo., Thursday, Jan. 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Heather Hollingsworth)
More than 70,000 immigrants were being detained by ICE as of late December, up from 40,000 when Trump took office, according to federal data.
In a little over a year, the number of detention facilities used by ICE nearly doubled to 212 sites spread across 47 states and territories. Most of that growth came through existing contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service or deals to use empty beds at county jails.
Trump’s administration now is taking steps to open more large-scale facilities. In January, ICE paid $102 million for a warehouse in Washington County, Maryland, $84 million for one in Berks County, Pennsylvania, and more than $70 million for one in Surprise, Arizona. It also solicited public comment on a proposed warehouse purchase in a flood plain in Chester, New York.
Federal immigration officials have toured large warehouses elsewhere, without releasing many details about the efforts.
“They will be very well structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” ICE said in a statement, adding: “It should not come as news that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively working to expand detention space.”
Detention site foes face legal limitations
State and local governments can decline to lease detention space to ICE, but they generally cannot prohibit businesses and private landowners from using their property for federal immigrant detention centers, said Danielle Jefferis, an associate law professor at the University of Nebraska who focuses on immigration and civil litigation.
In 2023, a federal court invalidated a California law barring private immigrant detention facilities for infringing on federal powers. A federal appeals court panel cited similar grounds in July while striking down a New Jersey law that forbade agreements to operate immigrant detention facilities.
After ICE officials recently toured a warehouse in Orlando, Florida, as a prospective site, local officials looked into ways to regulate or prevent it. But City Attorney Mayanne Downs advised them in a letter that “ICE is immune from any local regulation that interferes in any way with its federal mandate.”
Officials in Hanover County also asked their attorney to evaluate legal options after the Department of Homeland Security sent a letter confirming its intent to purchase a private property for use as an ICE processing facility. The building sits near retail businesses, hotels, restaurants and several neighborhoods.
Although some residents voiced concerns that an ICE facility could strain the county’s resources, there’s little the county can do to oppose it, said Board of Supervisors Chair Sean Davis.
“The federal government is generally exempt from our zoning regulations,” Davis said.
Kansas City tries to block new ICE detention site
Despite court rulings elsewhere, the City Council in Kansas City voted in January to impose a five-year moratorium on non-city-run detention facilities. The vote came on the same day ICE officials toured a nearly 1-million-square-foot (92,903-square-meter) warehouse as a prospective site.
Manny Abarca, a county lawmaker, said he initially was threatened with trespassing when he showed up but was eventually allowed inside the facility, where a deputy ICE field office director told him they were scouting for a 7,500-bed site.
Abarca is trying to fortify Kansas City’s resistance by proposing a countywide moratorium on permits, zoning changes and development plans for detention facilities not run by the county or a city.
“When federal power is putting communities on edge, local government has a responsibility to act where we have authority,” he said.
Kansas City is looking to follow a similar path as Leavenworth, Kansas, which has argued that private prison firm CoreCivic must have an operating permit to reopen a shuttered prison as an ICE detention facility.
As other ICE proposals have surfaced, officials in Social Circle, Georgia, El Paso, Texas, and Roxbury Township, New Jersey, all have raised concerns about a lack of water and sewer capacity to transform warehouses into detention sites.
Nationally, it remains to be seen whether local governments can effectively deter ICE facilities through building permits and regulations.
“We’re currently in a moment where it is being tested,” Jefferis said. “So there is no clear answer as to how the courts are going to come down.”
New Mexico targets existing ICE facilities
The Democratic-led New Mexico House on Friday passed legislation banning state and local government contracts for ICE detention facilities, sending it to the Senate. Similar bills are pending in Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island.
The Otero County Processing Center, 25 miles (40 kilometers) from downtown El Paso, Texas, is one of three privately run ICE facilities that could be affected by the New Mexico legislation. The facility includes four immigration courtrooms and space for more than 1,000 detainees. The county financed its construction in 2007 with the intent to use it as a revenue source, and plans to pay off the remaining $16.5 million debt by 2028.
Otero County Attorney Roy Nichols said the county is prepared to sue the Legislature under a state law that prevents impairment of outstanding revenue bonds.
Republicans warned of job losses and economic fallout if the legislation forces immigrant detention centers to close.
But Democratic state Rep. Sarah Silva, who voted for the ban, and said her constituents in a heavily Hispanic area view the ICE facility as a burden.
“Our state can’t be complicit in the violations that ICE has been doing in places like Minneapolis,” Silva said. “To me that was beyond the tipping point.”
Let’s begin with a definition, by example, of dysfunctional governing: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) under Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the United States Health and Human Services Secretary.
In 2000, the World Health Organization determined that according to its criteria, the United States had eliminated measles. But 2025 saw sustained outbreaks, notably in Texas, Utah, Arizona, and South Carolina, to the extent that “elimination status” is in jeopardy. The logical fix is to raise vaccination rates to ensure collective herd immunity. But this is not the CDC plan.
As GovFacts.org notes, RFK, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) initiative “represents a fundamental shift from collective herd immunity toward what they call ‘medical freedom,’ ‘individual decision-making,’ and ‘radical transparency’ about vaccine safety and ingredients.” Of course, those are morally lofty concepts. If they are linked coherently to people’s dependencies, they can be useful tools for addressing a wide range of social issues. The problem here, however, is that deadly viruses are not the least bit affrighted by righteous rhetoric. The lesson is clear: Take care that the glamour of idealism does not entice away from the sight of real pain and suffering that needs alleviation.
This lesson is hard to heed for the conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court. They have favored President Trump on 80 percent of his emergency appeals, many of which reflect unjust indifference toward the needs of the disadvantaged. And in Trump v. Slaughter, they are leaning toward allowing the president to fire a Federal Trade Commissioner without cause. That ruling would reverse a 1935 judgment in Humphrey’s Executor that Congress may create agencies relatively independent of the president’s control. As Justice Elena Kagan has explained, the thinking in Humphrey’s was that “in certain spheres of government, a group of knowledgeable people from both parties—none of whom a President could remove without cause—would make decisions likely to advance the long-term public good.”
Knowledge, the kind acquired through effort, is a precious resource—especially gains in understanding that make the world safer and fairer. We take it for granted at our great peril. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which serves to protect the public from deceptive or unfair business practices, is structured to respect the dialectical nature of learning. Its five commissioners are appointed by the president for seven-year terms. No more than three may be from a single political party, and the president may remove a member only “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” The institution blends distinctive strands of governing policy, including acknowledgment of the president’s executive authority (to appoint and terminate for cause), Congress’s duty to legislate responsibly, the importance of input from both parties, and the need for compromise by experts.
This syncretic approach to addressing people’s needs is in stark contrast to the organizing principle animating conservative decision-making today, namely unitary executive theory, which asserts that the president should have total control over the executive branch. Morally speaking, the theory has an obvious, serious flaw, which has not received sufficient attention: It assumes an ideal president—a virtuous, intellectually curious executive humble enough to appreciate guidance from knowledgeable specialists. But even if paragons of perspicacity were plentiful, the assumption is excessively risky, as the founders well knew, because of the great damage that an all-powerful executive can do, as evidenced by the appointment of RFK, Jr. as HHS secretary.
RFK, Jr. has floated the notion that autism is caused by environmental toxins that have been put “into our air or medicines or food,” but to date extensive research has not found such a causal link. Lacking sufficient facts to support his conclusions, RFK, Jr. cannot argue, but merely pontificate. Granted, he probably truly believes that there is no objective perspective, that all that matters is winning the propaganda war. However, sincerity of cynicism does not excuse the self-deception that upholding the right to self-assertion for its own sake has anything to do with responsible governing. Real idealism seeks not to dominate but to enhance the lives of the underprivileged. This reads like remedial morality, I know, but I feel compelled to state the obvious because RFK, Jr. is indicative of a declension in quality of leadership so serious that even children are not safe from the damaging effects of placing idealization of self (“Viva me!”) above concern for the community.
The Trump administration and the Supreme Court embody an immature social character whose deficiencies in the senses of history, tragedy, and responsibility give rise to several political and intellectual moves that result in a dysfunctional government. First, latch on to the surface logic of idealism, of certainty in an abstract good such as freedom. Then assume that the executive possesses sufficient acuity and fortitude to concretize freedom through addressing individuals’ material and emotional needs—for example, through family-friendly policies—so that they can become freer to pursue growth. Finally, turn a blind eye to massive historical and contemporary evidence that invalidates that assumption, such as accounts of the myriad ways in which the vulnerable suffer needlessly at the hands of authoritarian bureaucracies—for example, in China, Russia, and, increasingly, America—that regard the individual as expendable because leaders are too small-minded to see, in William Blake’s words, “a world in a grain of sand.”
When Marian Gaborik left Minnesota in the summer of 2009, the Wild’s first draft pick had spent eight NHL seasons becoming the franchise’s career goals leader with 219. The way Kirill Kaprizov is scoring lately, that record might not make it to the Olympic break.
With two more goals on Monday, including the overtime winner versus Montreal, Kaprizov’s career mark stands at 217 with one more game on Wednesday night in Nashville before he gets a three-week break.
Kaprizov #97 of the Minnesota Wild skates with the puck against the New Jersey Devils in the first period at Grand Casino Arena on Monday, Jan. 12, 2026 in St Paul. (Brad Rempel/Getty Images)
Gaborik needed 502 games for the Wild to set the goals record. As of Monday’s final horn, Kaprizov has played 376 games for Minnesota — and scored seven goals in the Wild’s past six games. He leads the team with 32.
While eight current Wild players and two more from the team’s minor league organization head to the Olympics, Kaprizov will get some time to rest and recover. Russia is barred from participation in the Games because of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. For his Minnesota teammates who would likely have played against Kaprizov in Milan, going to Italy is bittersweet.
“Kind of thankful he’s not in the tournament, because that’s obviously scary the way he’s playing,” joked Brock Faber, who will play defense for Team USA. “No, it stinks for him. And, you know, it’s all just part of it, ups and downs. Great players find a way to get out of ruts, and a rut for him is a lot different from other players in this league. He’s playing fantastic, and it’s fun to watch.”
What passes for a “rut” by Kaprizov standards began just before Christmas, when he went through a 16-game stretch with just three goals. He posted 15 assists in that span, so there were few complaining about his production.
Reflecting on that relatively dry spell, Wild coach John Hynes recalled several nights where Kaprizov likely deserved multiple goals but the puck was not going in the net for him. The workaholic star, who is widely known to spend an extra 30 minutes or more after practice shooting and tipping pucks, kept doing what he does, and the results are seen on the scoresheet now.
“He continued to play the right way, he continued to compete,” Hynes said. “I like the fact that he’s shooting the puck now. He’s driving on offense. He’s scoring in different ways. And I think that’s, when you have that type of talent and the competitor that he is, that’s what you want to be, to be a deadly threat.”
As part of the Wild’s 25th anniversary celebration in the fall, Gaborik and other stars from the early days of the franchise came back to Minnesota, and Kaprizov got to meet the Slovakian star whose record he is close to eclipsing.
“I talk with him. It was fun because I remember when I was a kid I watched, I saw how he played for the national team and other teams,” Kaprizov said, admitting he was too young to have first-hand memories of Gaborik’s time in Minnesota. “I don’t remember actually (very) good, but I saw highlights. I think he was fast and nice shot, I think. Because he have so good shot, like quick wrist, and pretty fast. Good skater.”
Asked about his forthcoming Olympic break, Kaprizov said it will be a chance to get healthier for the team’s March push to the playoffs.
“I hope (to) come back, take break and feel better. I don’t know how many games left before playoffs, 20-something, right? Yeah, be ready for playoffs,” Kaprizov said.
Asked if getting a break during a hot streak is good or bad, Kaprizov said, “I don’t know. We’ll see. You never know it’s better or it’s not better. Sometimes when it’s going, you just want to play every night, every second night. Just keep playing. But we’ll see.”
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