By Shalina Chatlani, Stateline.org

As part of its deportation efforts, the Trump administration has ordered states to hand over personal data from voter rolls, driver’s license records and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps.

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At the same time, the administration is trying to consolidate the bits of personal data held across federal agencies, creating a single trove of information on people who live in the United States.

Many left-leaning states and cities are trying to protect their residents’ personal information amid the immigration crackdown. But a growing number of conservative lawmakers also want to curb the use of surveillance technologies, such as automated license plate readers, that can be used to identify and track people.

Conservative-led states such as Arkansas, Idaho and Montana enacted laws last year designed to protect the personal data collected through license plate readers and other means. They joined at least five left-leaning states — Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Washington — that specifically blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from accessing their driver’s license records.

In addition, Democratic-led cities in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, Texas and Washington last year terminated their contracts with Flock Safety, the largest provider of license plate readers in the U.S.

The Trump administration’s goal is to create a “surveillance dragnet across the country,” said William Owen, communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger privacy laws.

“We’re entering an increasingly dystopian era of high-tech surveillance,” Owen said. Intelligence sharing between various levels of government, he said, has “allowed ICE to sidestep sanctuary laws and co-opt local police databases and surveillance tools, including license plate readers, facial recognition and other technologies.”

A new Montana law bars government entities from accessing electronic communications and related material without a warrant. Republican state Sen. Daniel Emrich, the law’s author, said “the most important thing that our entire justice system is based on is the principle against unlawful search and seizure” — the right enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

“It’s tough to find individuals who are constitutionally grounded and understand the necessity of keeping the Fourth Amendment rights intact at all times for all reasons — with minimal or zero exceptions,” Emrich said in an interview.

ICE did not respond to Stateline’s requests for comment.

Automated license plate readers

Recently, cities and states have grown particularly concerned over the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which are high-speed camera and computer systems that capture license plate information on vehicles that drive by. These readers sit on top of police cars and streetlights or can be hidden within construction barrels and utility poles.

Some cameras collect data that gets stored in databases for years, raising concerns among privacy advocates. One report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive think tank at New York University, found the data can be susceptible to hacking. Different agencies have varying policies on how long they keep the data, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a law enforcement advocacy group.

Supporters of the technology, including many in law enforcement, say the technology is a powerful tool for tracking down criminal suspects.

Flock Safety says it has cameras in more than 5,000 communities and is connected to more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies across 49 states. The company claims its cameras conduct more than 20 billion license plate reads a month. It collects the data and gives it to police departments, which use the information to locate people.

Holly Beilin, a spokesperson for Flock Safety, told Stateline that while there are local police agencies that may be working with ICE, the company does not have a contractual relationship with the agency. Beilin also said that many liberal and even sanctuary cities continue to sign contracts with Flock Safety. She noted that the cameras have been used to solve some high-profile crimes, including identifying and leading police to the man who committed the Brown University shooting and killed an MIT professor at the end of last year.

“Agencies and cities are very much able to use this technology in a way that complies with their values. So they do not have to share data out of state,” Beilin said.

Pushback over data’s use

But critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say that Flock Safety’s cameras are not only “giving even the smallest-town police chief access to an enormously powerful driver-surveillance tool,” but also that the data is being used by ICE. One news outlet, 404 Media, obtained records of these searches and found many were being carried out by local officers on behalf of ICE.

Last spring, the Denver City Council unanimously voted to terminate its contract with Flock Safety, but Democratic Mayor Mike Johnston unilaterally extended the contract in October, arguing that the technology was a useful crime-fighting tool.

The ACLU of Colorado has vehemently opposed the cameras, saying last August that audit logs from the Denver Police Department show more than 1,400 searches had been conducted for ICE since June 2024.

“The conversation has really gotten bigger because of the federal landscape and the focus, not only on immigrants and the functionality of ICE right now, but also on the side of really trying to reduce and or eliminate protections in regards to access to reproductive care and gender affirming care,” Anaya Robinson, public policy director at the ACLU of Colorado.

“When we erode rights and access for a particular community, it’s just a matter of time before that erosion starts to touch other communities.”

Jimmy Monto, a Democratic city councilor in Syracuse, New York, led the charge to eliminate Flock Safety’s contract in his city.

“Syracuse has a very large immigrant population, a very large new American population, refugees that have resettled and been resettled here. So it’s a very sensitive issue,” Monto said, adding that license plate readers allow anyone reviewing the data to determine someone’s immigration status without a warrant.

“When we sign a contract with someone who is collecting data on the citizens who live in a city, we have to be hyper-focused on exactly what they are doing while we’re also giving police departments the tools that they need to also solve homicides, right?” Monto said.

“Certainly, if license plate readers are helpful in that way, I think the scope is right. But we have to make sure that that’s what we’re using it for, and that the companies that we are contracting with are acting in good faith.”

Emrich, the Montana lawmaker, said everyone should be concerned about protecting constitutional privacy rights, regardless of their political views.

“If the government is obtaining data in violation of constitutional rights, they could be violating a whole slew of individuals’ constitutional rights in pursuit of the individuals who may or may not be protected under those same constitutional rights,” he said.

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

©2026 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Edward Lotterman

Ancient Greek sages argued that, “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad!”

The disclosure last week that the Trump administration’s Justice Department is initiating a criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell bears out the wisdom of that ancient adage.

When this action was initiated, and exactly by whom, is not clear. Powell disclosed it with a stinging online rebuke last Sunday. When queried, Trump responded with a jaw-dropping, “I don’t know anything about it.”

So we’re expected to believe that a U.S. presidential administration would initiate a history-making action, counter to the advice of virtually all economists, and one very capable of touching off a worldwide financial market crisis, without the boss even knowing about it? What about, “the buck stops here”?

Simply put, Trump is lying. Because if he’s not, and he really doesn’t know anything about it, it reveals a level of disorganization and dysfunction within the administration that dwarfs anything Powell might be investigated for — which seems related to his testimony to Congress about the costs of renovations to the Fed headquarters.

But everyone knows, even if they don’t admit it, that it’s really about control. It’s not even really about interest rates, which Trump says he wants lowered. It’s about the fact that the president wants to control the Fed, and Powell is standing in the way. Oh, and the law is too, by the way, but when has that bothered Trump?

What is clear is that while the Greek thinkers were right, the wise preacher in the Old Testament who said, “There is nothing new under the sun,” is flat wrong. For a century, scholars have followed a useful distinction made by Chicago economist Frank Knight, who said that when there is a future situation in which we do not know what will happen, it will involve either risk or uncertainty.

“Risk” is a situation in which we don’t know what will happen, but there is actuarial or statistical information that gives us a basis for estimating the probability of different outcomes. No one knows if or when a tornado will splinter our condo or if someone will come across the centerline and smash into our SUV. But we do know that the probability of a tornado is greater in Minnesota than in California, and that the probability of a car crash depends to some extent on how often and where we drive. Nearly anyone can buy insurance against these outcomes.

Financially, farmers and financiers can buy derivative contracts like futures or credit default swaps that insure against the risk of commodity price fluctuations or loans defaulting. So modern economies have many tools to manage risk.

“Uncertainty” comes when we do not know the future and there is no data on which to estimate probabilities of good or bad events happening. We could not predict the assassination of an archduke and his wife touching off a world war. Or that operator miscalculations in handling a poorly designed nuclear reactor would expose tens of thousands of people to radiation. Will an asteroid land in the Bermuda Triangle or the one formed by London, Paris and Berlin? Will a virus like Ebola or Marburg jump to humans and spread out exponentially?

One cannot insure against such uncertainty. However, within resources available, countries can build disaster and health response capabilities to mitigate physical and biological catastrophes.

Trump has pioneered something new under the sun, a national government composed of minions that seems hell-bent on creating chaos.

Within one weekend our president announced that he, personally, will run Venezuela, a country twice the land area of Ukraine and nearly the same population. He truculently reiterated that we will forcibly take Greenland from one of our closest allies, possibly ending NATO. He threatened military action against Iran and a blockade of any petroleum sales to Cuba. In his spare time, his administration hinted at changes to voting procedures for the 2026 election to be held this fall.

And then, somewhere along the line, someone in Trump’s orbit decided to possibly upend a monetary policy system that, on balance, has greatly benefited our nation since 1935 — ostensibly without even telling him (?). What the hell?

Common sense should have told everyone from Trump on down to his attorney general to Bill Pulte, the third-tier head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (who may have been the instigator) to just wait it out. Powell’s term as chair expires on May 23, when Powell, like all but one of his predecessors, might have just resigned from the board altogether. But Powell’s term as governor runs until Jan. 31, 2028. Don’t be surprised if he now flips Trump the bird by staying on the board, as a matter of principle, denying the president an open slot to increase his flunky minority.

How does this all really play out? Well, if Powell indeed is indicted, convicted, or otherwise removed for any malfeasance the inquiry may find, many pundits this week have waved the bloody shirt of hyperinflation — that a Trump-appointed chair would immediately lower interest rates, opening the monetary sluice gates releasing a torrent of new dollars. That is not likely and reflects fundamental misunderstandings of how the Fed works. A Fed chair has much less power than even many well-informed people realize. They are more than just the first among equals, but they are not dictators. When it comes time for a Federal Open-Market Committee vote on monetary policy, there are 11 other votes. The five district bank presidents are entirely outside of government and safe from any political threats.

But the larger, longer-term and probably irreversible danger would be an erosion of the United States as the financial center of the world, and the role of the U.S. dollar as the world’s undisputed reserve currency. In this regard, Trump and his minions seem oblivious to the havoc they could create. Either that, or these are the intended outcomes, which is more cynical and more malevolent than I even give these people credit for.

Writing in the 1920s, a decade of despair, frustration and loss of faith in institutions even worse than our current malaise, poet T.S. Eliot wrote: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper,” fittingly from a poem titled, “The Hollow Men.”

Trump’s actions today, and the actions of others leading up to today, are how U.S. financial and economic dominance in world affairs will end. It won’t be from sudden hyperinflation or an apocalyptic crash. Rather it will be from 50 years of slow complacency over rising federal deficits, failure to prudently regulate financial markets, and now an administration seeming bent on destroying global trust, not only in our markets and our dollar, but in our willingness to work cooperatively with other nations to achieve and maintain political and economic stability. Political courage is needed, especially from the cowardly, groveling Congress.

Hollow men indeed.

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St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

Since this past September, Saturn’s been the best planet to enjoy through even a small telescope, even though its ring system still appears nearly on edge from our vantage on Earth currently. There’s a new sheriff in the night sky though, Saturn’s big brother Jupiter, the king of the planets, on the rise in the eastern heavens along with Orion and the rest of the great winter constellations. Jupiter is by far the largest planet in our solar system, 88,000 miles in diameter. Jupiter’s so enormous that if it were hollow about 1,000 Earths would fit inside it.

Without a doubt, Jupiter’s the brightest “star” in the night sky right now. Jupiter’s especially bright now because Earth and Jupiter are the closest they’ll get to each other this year, about 395 million miles. That’s because Earth and Jupiter are in an alignment astronomers call opposition. Earth is nearly in a direct line between the sun and Jupiter. something astronomers call opposition. This is a great time for Jupiter gazing, not only because the great planet is close to us but also because it’s available all night long. Just like a full moon, Jupiter rises at sunset and sets at sunrise. And there’s more great news! Jupiter will dominate the night sky well into this coming spring.

Jupiter, like Saturn, is a wonderful telescope target, even if you have a small scope. It’s basically a tremendously large ball of mostly hydrogen and helium gas, over 300 times more massive than Earth. In fact, Jupiter is twice as massive as all of the other planets combined. Like the rest of the gas giants in the outer solar system, it doesn’t have a solid surface but is thought to have a rocky core about 10 to 15 times the mass of the Earth. Because of its colossal mass, Jupiter has a very strong gravitational field, so strong that even if the planet had a surface to stand on, you wouldn’t be standing there long. The gravity of Jupiter would break you down to a pile of flesh and broken bones very quickly.

Jupiter’s gravity also causes the giant planet to produce energy. Jupiter’s interior gases are constantly being gravitationally compressed, which produces heat that oozes out of the planet. In fact, Jupiter produces over one and a half times the energy that it receives from the sun, mostly as infrared radiation. That heat drives the atmospheric winds hundreds of miles an hour.

Jupiter’s atmosphere is made up of complex bands of wind-driven clouds mainly made up of methane, ammonia, and other gases. The different colors are the result of gases being at different temperatures and densities, as well as ultraviolet radiation from the sun. There are also several storms on Jupiter like the “Great Red Spot”, a storm that’s been raging for over 300 years! It’s been shrinking very gradually over the years but is still larger than the diameter of our Earth.

Through even a small telescope, you can see at least some of these cloud bands, especially two darker ones on either side of Jupiter’s equator. If your scope is larger, you might even see the famous Red Spot but we only see it about half the time since Jupiter rotates on its axis just like the Earth but much faster, taking only just under ten hours to make one rotation. So, about every five hours, the Great Red Spot is facing our way. The absolute best time to spot it though is when it’s on the meridian, near the middle of Jupiter’s giant disk. Even then, it can be really tricky because, honestly, it’s not all that red. Most of the time it’s somewhere between light pink and salmon colored.  Apps like Sky Guide can help you keep up with the Red Spot’s position and when it’s due to be on the meridian.

Jupiter also has dozens and dozens of orbiting moons, four of which can easily be seen using just about any telescope or even a cheap pair of binoculars. There are four larger moons, called the “Galilean” moons, in honor of their discoverer way back in the early 1600s. These look like little “stars” that circle the planet in periods of two to seventeen days. These moons are another story all by themselves, and I’ll have that next week in Skywatch.

Mike Lynch is an amateur astronomer and retired broadcast meteorologist for WCCO Radio in Minneapolis/St. Paul. He is the author of “Stars: a Month by Month Tour of the Constellations,” published by Adventure Publications and available at bookstores and adventurepublications.net. Mike is available for private star parties. You can contact him at mikewlynch@comcast.net.

Mike Lynch astronomy-stargazing programs

Friday, Jan. 23, 6:30-8 p.m., Lake Elmo Park Reserve, Lake Elmo. For information and reservations, call 651-430-8370 or visit www.co.washington.mn.us/index.aspx?NID=532

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Vong Bidania’s earliest childhood memory, faded now like an old color photo, is of an orange bus pulling out of a refugee camp in Thailand.

“I was so young, I’m not sure if this is real or something I made up in my head. But I knew it was sad, everybody crying, holding their hands out the bus windows. It’s daytime in my memory, but I know we left at night,” Bidania said in a conversation from her home in a Twin Cities suburb.

(Courtesy of the author)

That bus and those goodbyes are in Bidania’s new book “A Year Without Home” (Nancy Paulsen Books, $18.99), her first middle-grade novel and her first in verse. It has already earned starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist and School Library Journal for beautiful prose and a gripping story.

The narrator is 11-year-old Gao Sheng, the author’s older sister, and Bidania uses the real names of her other siblings in the book: brother Yia and sisters May la, Good Xai and Round Moon (the baby who is Bidania). They all grew up in St. Paul.

We meet the Thao kids first in the Hmong village of Pa Kao in the highlands of Laos, where they live in a big, multi-generational house. They and their cousins roll down their hill for fun, eat fruit from the peach trees and play with Ao Ka, their precious dog. It’s a happy life, even though they sometimes have to flee into the jungle to be safe from bombing during the Vietnam war.

Gao Sheng is sometimes annoyed because as the oldest daughter she is responsible for cutting vegetables, looking after her siblings and young cousins and always acting like a proper Hmong girl — quiet and obedient and never asking questions she longs to ask.

“My name, Gao Sheng,/is a classic name,/a name meant for girls/who are elegant, graceful, charming-/all embarrassing things I am not!”

Gao Sheng loves her brother, but she also resents the freedom he has as the only son who will someday be head of the family. Later in the story, in a heartbreaking scene, she realizes how much her little brother means to her.

As the novel begins in May, 1975, everyone in the the village knows the Communists are coming and they will hunt down men like the Thao children’s father, who was a captain in the Noble Lao Army. They leave in a hurry, missing the plane that was evacuating those who helped the American military. Gao Sheng’s dad and his brothers travel through the jungle, while her mother, aunts and 11 children head for the river in taxis. Reunited with the men, the family crosses the Mekong in canoes to refugee camps in Thailand on a dark and rainy night.

“The canoe wobbles/shakes from side to side./I grab my seat/to keep steady,/try to listen for my relatives/boarding the other canoes/around us,/but all I hear/is the sound/of/my own/frightened breath.”

At the two camps where they live for months, the family sometimes sleeps on hard tabletops because there aren’t enough beds for the ever-growing refugee population. They live with strangers, whole families crowded into small rooms as they wait for permission to immigrate to other countries. In one camp Gao Sheng breaks a cultural norm by helping her father and uncles with a big project, amazing her relatives with her physical and mental strength.

When the family finally gets permission to leave, their first home in the U.S. is the town of Sparta, Wis., where they are sponsored by a church.

Hmong refugees began to arrive in Minnesota 51 years ago, so there are a growing number of books about their experiences. Some authors don’t spend much time discussing life in the camps and that’s what is unusual about Bidania’s novel; it’s all about the family’s life before their escape and their time in the hot, dusty camps where the refugees made their lives as normal as possible while living in a facility with guards. The men play soccer and women and girls shop at an open air market outside the gates on Sunday mornings before the guards arrive. Gao Sheng enjoys going to school. After residents are given food allotments, the Thao family is able to eat their mom’s good cooking instead of the thin soup served in the cafeteria.

“I hope young readers will see history with a more fully dimensional picture, learning what it’s like to be ripped away from everything you’ve known,” Bidania says of her book, in which Gao Sheng can take only a packet of peach tree seeds when her family flees, hoping to grow her favorite fruit in a new home she knows nothing about.

Minnesotan V.T. Bidania launches her first middle-school novel, “A Year Without Home,” Jan 24, 2026 at Red Balloon Bookshop in St. Paul. (Courtesy of the author)

Bidania has been a writer since she was 5 and wrote a story about a frog, with crayon illustrations. She loved books so much she spent most of her free time reading at the family’s home on Holly Avenue. After earning a journalism degree from St. Catherine University and an MFA in creative writing from the New School in New York, Bidania worked in children’s publishing until she and her husband, Win, moved back to Minnesota to be closer to family. They have two sons in college.

If Bidania’s name sounds familiar to readers of children’s lit, it’s because she is the author of the Astrid and Apollo books featuring twins who live in St. Paul, the first children’s books series with Hmong-American characters.

Bidania was drawn to middle-grade books because she finds the writing “gorgeous,” and although she has no formal poetry training the format intrigued her.

“I wanted to write a book that packed as much punch as the ones I read like ‘Unsettled’ (by poet Reem Faruqi), with lots of white space,” she says.

In “A Year Without Home” the dancing type takes its cue from the mood of the poem it illustrates. Sometimes it’s one word going straight down or slanting sentences forming a paragraph. There might be only a few lines on a page. In our visual world this is a fun way to keep readers 10 and older interested.

An undated black and white courtesy photo of the Thao siblings in Sparta, Wis., their first home in America. Back row, from left: May la, Yia, Gao Sheng. Front from left: Round Moon and Good Xai. (Courtesy of the Thao Family)

Bidania spent a lot of time researching her book, which takes place in the confusing and frightening time between the end of the Vietnam War and the beginning of Communist takeover. To be historically accurate, she interviewed relatives and others who lived through it and read whatever government documents she could find about a war that was conducted so much in secret. She also traveled to Laos in 2024 to look for the house on the hill depicted in the book, but she didn’t find it. It was the rainy season, roads were impassable, and anyway the house had been swallowed by jungle.

Although the book doesn’t name the Thao siblings’ parents, they are real-life heroes. Their late father, Nao Vu Thao, always kept his family safe during their journey to America. Working with Catholic Charities, he helped hundreds of immigrants from many countries resettle in Minnesota and was widely respected in the Hmong community and in St. Paul. HIs wife, Sia Thao, organized the family’s escape from their village, keeping her sisters-in-law and the children together and courageously handling being questioned by police who were looking for her husband.

“A Year Without Home” ends in May 1976, with the family living in Sparta, Wis., where they were sponsored by a church. Bidania deliberately concluded the story there, without taking her characters to St. Paul where they eventually settled.

“We faced racism on a regular basis in St. Paul but I didn’t want to write trauma porn, rehashing that in the book,” she explains. “People like to hear about our suffering. It’s like ‘Oh, you poor people.’ Hmong people did face many challenges during and after the war but I wanted to write about a side of us some people don’t know — our homes, families, communities — a human story. I wanted to educate young readers about the history of the Hmong that is not taught in schools. I want them to know that their peers are experiencing wars right now all over the world. They should be aware of this and have some empathy for what today’s refugees are going through.”

Bidania will launch her book at 4 p.m. Saturday at Red Balloon Bookshop, 891 Grand Ave., St. Paul, in conversation with Payal Doshi, author of the middle-grade fantasy “Rea and the Blood of the Nectar,” and a four-book series of chapter books, “Magic Gems,” coming out later this year. Free, but reservations are encouraged. For more information, visit redballoonbookshop.com.

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