madi mcvan

@madisonmcvan.bsky.social

2121 Followers 374 Following

reporter @ minnesota reformer. covering the trump admin's impact on minnesotans. posting about sports sometimes too. texan in st. paul. eng/esp

a man in a black crewneck holds a toddler with pigtails in front of five large white men in Texas football gear
a black cat sleeps in a pile of sheets in an otherwise empty bedroom
Do you want to get rid of Minnesota’s income tax? I would love to get rid of Minnesota’s income tax. Other one would be the sales tax. You either can do one or the other. But you’d probably have to raise the internet (sales) tax, which would be your MyPillow and your Amazons of the world to balance that. But that’s something I’m looking at. You’ve got all the money we save looking at these programs and streamlining and making it better — there’s billions of dollars. I have a big plan to bring tourism to bring other people back to Minnesota. It’s just going to be amazing, and by doing that, you either lower income tax or eliminate it, or the sales tax. I don’t think you can do both, so it’s one or the other.
how is this different from past encampment closures? Functionally, it isn’t. We closed encampments in 2025 and 2024. In each case, we provided similar advance notice to residents, coordinated with our partners, and worked to connect those living there with shelter and/or treatment resources.
U.S. Supreme Court ruling does not trump anti-discrimination protections under Minnesota law [St. Paul, MN] Today, in response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., the Minnesota Department of Human Rights released a statement from Commissioner Rebecca Lucero: “In 1993, state legislators made Minnesota the first state to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. Today’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling does not erase rights guaranteed under Minnesota law for transgender and gender expansive students. “Minnesota has long believed that government should not be in the business of embedding discrimination into the law. The Department of Human Rights is committed to enforcing state civil rights laws so Minnesotans can live free from discrimination.”
Although we should celebrate Schiltz’s ruling, let’s remember that Walz, Frey and the other elected officials benefit from effective lawyers and have resources to fight back. But consider the 15 people the DOJ indicted recently for conspiracy to impede or injure a federal agent. I can’t speak to their guilt or innocence, but as my colleague Madison McVan noted, prosecutors have dropped multiple similar cases for lack of evidence and prosecutorial misconduct. All over the country, dissent and political opposition are being criminalized, often with terrible consequences for the regular people opposing the Trump administration, which is using blatantly unconstitutional tactics in its campaign to destroy any resistance. Will the judiciary protect them?
In early May, after The Times began reporting this article, Ms. Russini responded to a reporter’s request for an interview via text message. She cited the “intense scrutiny and personal attacks” she had faced, saying, “This has had a significant impact on my life, both professionally and personally.” At the end of the message, referring to herself as a “former journalist,” Ms. Russini asked the reporter not to quote from the text. The interaction demonstrated a different approach to journalism from the way that it is conducted in traditional newsrooms. When the reporter told her that this article would include portions of her text message because no agreement had been made for them to engage in an off-the-record correspondence, Ms. Russini objected and then emailed Mr. Perpich, the publisher of The Athletic, as well as two senior editors at The Times to reiterate her wish that her comments not be included.
She was mostly satisfied with her final legislative session, which ended with a two-year budget and no government shutdown despite Republicans’ shared control of the House, thereby saving jobs and stability for government workers and the people who rely on them. She had also preserved key accomplishments from the Democrats’ 2023-24 trifecta, including a paid leave program that would give new parents a chance to bond with their babies and other Minnesotans the ability to care for their sick loved ones. The deal was not without cost, however: Hortman had to cast the deciding vote to end public health insurance for undocumented immigrants. It was not an easy vote, and she shed rare public tears when discussing it at a press conference. She was willing to do it, however, because like all great legislative leaders, she’d fall on the grenade for her members, and because she knew that the Trump administration would probably come at the program with knives out anyway. (As we now know all too well, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security came to Minnesota with guns, and left with American blood on their hands.)
Vance Boelter, the man accused of killing Melissa and Mark Hortman and shooting John and Yvette Hoffman one year ago, is appearing in court this morning to plead guilty to the attacks. My colleague Max Nesterak is in the courtroom. The guilty plea saves all of us, but especially the Hortman children, Colin and Sophie Hortman, from a painful trial, during which Boelter might reiterate baseless conspiracy theories he’s expressed in media interviews rationalizing his behavior, Reformer editor J. Patrick Coolican writes. Boelter will not face the death penalty, accepting two consecutive life terms plus 40 years.
a list of headlines about a Cuban man charged with assaulting ICE officers
I spent a lot of time learning about WWII and its aftermath. During my time in Munich, I took a train to Dachau to visit the concentration camp — the first and longest-running of the Nazi regime. As American soldiers approached the camp in April of 1945, they came across a freight train, more than 30 cars long, stopped in the middle of the village. Inside, they discovered thousands of corpses in an advanced state of decomposition. Horrified that this atrocity had been committed in plain sight of the villagers, without any intervention, the American soldiers forced local farmers to dig mass graves and bury the bodies. The path from the Dachau train station to the concentration camp is lined with informational markers. I don’t have much to say about the parallels between Germany’s descent into fascism and our own that hasn’t already been written about by people smarter than I. (I’ll point you to the work of M. Gessen, for starters.) And I’m still chewing on questions, far from arriving at answers. How will we remember — publicly — the crimes committed by our government, decades from now? How and when might the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti be able to seek justice? Is it possible for us, Americans, to rewrite our foundational laws to correct the fatal flaws that the Trump administration has exposed? Who would the public trust to lead a justice and reconciliation process? Your speculation is as good as mine.
Six Aldi bags filled with paper.
A woman holds a giant stack of paper
A Black Liberian man in a residential neighborhood. looks at the camera in a blue checkered suit jacket and white shirt.
A Venezuelan woman holds her 2-year-old boy on her hip. A 4-year-old biy rubs his eye, and a 10-year-old girl sits on a bench behind them, holding two backpacks.
Allen Altendorf Anderson, P. E. Backer Bennett Bliss Davis Dippel Dotseth Engen Fogelman Franson Gander Gillman Gordon Harder Hudson Jacob Johnson, W. Joy Knudsen Lawrence McDonald Mekeland Murphy Olson Roach Rymer Schultz Van Binsbergen West Wiener
a line graph depicts the top 10 counties where remittinces originate. the US is a the top, sending more than $100 billion in outflows in 2024. Next is saudi arabia at 46.6 billion, then switzerland at 40 billion
Our goal with this policy is to clearly state our organizational ethos around generative AI use, which is, concisely: We’re open to our staff experimenting with tools that use AI for behind-the-scenes work like transcriptions, data analysis and other pre-writing tasks, but we do not permit the publication of any stories, commentaries, images or videos that have been generated by AI.
For the first time in more than 100 years, evidence of cougars reproducing in Minnesota was documented in video captured by the University of Minnesota’s Voyageurs Wolf Project (youtu.be/7EL1FRB11DU). The videos, shared with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources by the project researchers, show a female cougar with three large kittens.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
A woman in scrubs and Crocs confronts federal immigration agents after they broke down her door with a battering ram. Two of the agents are carrying large rifles, which are pointed in the air.
a bar graph displays the number of people arrested during operation metro surge by country of origin in descending order. ecuador 1041, mexico 875, guatemala 289, honduras 223, venezuela 221. after that are nicaraugua, el salvador, laos, somalia and columbia
a line graph displays the rolling 7-day average of ICE arrests in minnesota, texas, wisconsin, illinois and oregon. the arrests in texas are around three times higher than minneosta's peak in january.
a line graph shows ICE arrests escalating in december 2025 before peaking in january at more than 100 per day. by early march, daily arrests dropped to single digits
House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, is one of the leading contenders for the Republican nomination for Minnesota governor. During a Reformer interview, she said she knows “a number of stories” related to Operation Metro Surge that have turned out to be based on hearsay. “I’m happy to talk through issues if it’s actually produced, but … I’m aware of a number of stories that someone has said, ‘Well, this situation is happening.’ And so when then asked for them to get the name or the details, they’ve come back to other people and said, ‘I don’t know,’” Demuth said. “There’s nothing to actually prove it.” “I’m not saying that it did or didn’t exist. I think we all have to be based on fact rather than the rhetoric that surrounds this particular issue,” she added.
The bill creates a menu of policy options for cities to choose from that would further boost housing density and supply, like eliminating minimum parking requirements; permitting affordable, workforce and senior housing developments to be larger than generally allowed; subsidizing city fees for homes valued at less than $500,000; or allowing even more multifamily construction in commercial and residential areas. Larger cities must adopt more of those policies than smaller cities, and can count the policies they have already adopted. Other areas of the bill do apply across-the-board — like allowing accessory dwelling units, or ADUs, on every residential lot in the state. ADUs are secondary living spaces on a lot, often called a mother-in-law suite, carriage house or backyard cottage.
The prayer camp at Coldwater Spring. A few dozen people are gather around a fire in the distance.
Among the bills Democratic-Farmer-Labor legislators are proposing is the Minnesota Constitutional Remedies Act, which would allow Minnesotans to sue federal agents in state court if their constitutional rights are violated. The Trump administration has said that federal agents have “absolute immunity” if they are conducting immigration enforcement. For much of American history, people have had the ability to sue federal agents, but the U.S. Supreme Court has rolled back that precedent. The high court has suggested that only Congress can authorize lawsuits seeking money from federal officials. Some legal scholars believe state legislatures, too, can authorize lawsuits against federal officials for violating the Constitution. The Illinois Legislature last year passed such a law, and the Trump administration promptly sued, arguing the Constitution’s supremacy clause limits states from enacting policies that conflict with federal law. The Minnesota Democrats’ Constitutional Remedies Act will likely also face steep legal challenges. This is why some Republicans say the Democrats’ efforts to rein in ICE are meritless. “Ultimately, it will be federal jurisdiction, and our action here will have little impact on that,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson on Thursday, arguing that Democrats’ efforts won’t live up to legal muster. Then he changed the subject: “At the same time, Minnesotans are struggling with affordability in the state.”
At the table, there was also Patty O’Keefe, who was observing and documenting ICE when she was arrested and detained at the Whipple Federal Building for eight hours before being released without charges. There was Samuel Cardozo, a co-owner of Mercado Central, the Minneapolis Latino business hub that has seen its revenue fall off a cliff as families stay home. There was Peg Nelson, who teaches in Columbia Heights, where several children — including Liam Conejo Ramos, whose plight became a national rallying cry — have been arrested by ICE and sent to a detention center in Texas. There were child care providers, Democratic state lawmakers, union members and rideshare drivers. Juan Leon, whose tow truck company has been returning detainees’ cars to their families for free, got a call about a car left behind after an ICE arrest, and tracked down an address to return it to. When he arrived, he saw groceries left on the stoop of a fourplex, the milk frozen solid. He knocked on the doors inside, announcing in Spanish that he was looking for the owners of the vehicle. No one answered.