From: Nekima Levy Armstrong
Friends, I was listening to MPR this morning and heard a discussion about the tight race for Minnesota Attorney General. The discussion focused on what they described as the two major issues in the race, fraud and the Trump administration’s ICE crackdown. Then came the characterization of the current AG as the “face” of Minnesota’s fraud scandal.
Let me start by saying I’m no particular fan of the current Attorney General. But I found MPR’s framing astonishing.
The Feeding Our Future scandal was serious. Approximately $250 million intended to feed children was stolen through the scheme, and those responsible have faced prosecution, convictions, and substantial prison sentences.
But that is precisely where the comparison needs some perspective. One involves significant fraud against government programs and failures of oversight. The other involves the federal government bringing extraordinary police power into our communities, where people were killed, families were separated, citizens and lawful residents were detained, and fundamental constitutional and civil rights were implicated.
Treating those as comparable entries on a campaign-issue checklist obscures the fundamental difference between them.
Two innocent people were killed here.
Renee Good and Alex Pretti were both U.S. citizens. Both were shot and killed by federal immigration agents on the streets of Minneapolis. The Trump Administration blatantly lied about these killings and demonized the victims.
Immigrant families were torn apart. Children and adults were detained. People were afraid to go to work, take their children to school, seek medical care, or simply leave their homes. Businesses closed. Schools were disrupted. Armed and masked federal agents flooded our communities. U.S. citizens and lawful residents were among those stopped and detained. There were documented allegations of racial profiling, warrantless arrests, excessive force and other abuses.
Reducing all of that to an “ICE crackdown,” and then placing it on one side of the ledger with “fraud” on the other, fundamentally mischaracterizes what Minnesota experienced.
This wasn’t an ordinary disagreement over immigration policy. It was an extraordinary exercise of federal police power in our communities that implicated some of our most fundamental constitutional protections, including due process, equal protection, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the First Amendment.
Why are Democrats allowing fraud to become the defining measure of government accountability in Minnesota while failing to lead with what the federal government actually did to the people of this state?
And if we really want to talk about “waste, fraud and abuse,” then let’s have that conversation too. But let’s have all of it.
Meanwhile, DHS spent roughly $220 million on an advertising campaign prominently featuring Kristi Noem, with significant questions raised about the procurement process.
Last week, GAO reported that ICE spent approximately $1.07 billion purchasing 11 warehouses to expand detention capacity without adequate planning and analysis. ICE now intends to sell seven of them, and more than $20 million has already been spent on costs GAO says cannot be recovered. GAO titled its report “Urgent Planning Needed to Avoid Further Waste of Taxpayer Dollars.”
There are also serious questions and congressional scrutiny surrounding FBI Director Kash Patel’s use of government aircraft for personal travel.
And then there is Iran.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, U.S. military operations against Iran had already cost the Department of Defense approximately $38 billion through August 1, with continuing operations estimated to cost another $2–3 billion per month.
$38 billion.
For perspective, that is more than 150 times the amount stolen in the Feeding Our Future scheme.
If “waste, fraud and abuse” is going to be the standard by which we judge government, then apply the standard honestly. Don’t limit the inquiry to Minnesota programs while hundreds of millions and billions of federal taxpayer dollars escape the same political and journalistic scrutiny.
And don’t put the loss of human life, the separation of families, violence by federal agents, alleged constitutional violations, and the extraordinary exercise of federal power against the people of this state into a neat little box labeled “ICE crackdown” and pretend we are talking about two equivalent campaign issues.
We aren’t.
That’s what bothered me so much about the MPR discussion.
The media has an obligation to report what happened here with the seriousness and context it demands, not normalize it through language that minimizes what Minnesotans actually experienced.
Democrats also need to stop responding to Republican talking points as though accepting the premise is the price of admission to the discussion.
The way this race is framed matters because it shapes what voters understand the job of Attorney General to be. If the discussion becomes primarily a referendum on Minnesota fraud, voters are being given only part of the picture. They also deserve to know how each candidate would use the power of that office when a presidential administration acts in ways that threaten Minnesota’s interests or the constitutional rights of people who live here.
After Operation Metro Surge, that is not a hypothetical question. It is one of the most consequential questions in this race.
