Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
ICE Is Watching You
We all know that ICE is well-funded—its budget jumped from $8 billion to $28 billion in 2025—but what exactly are they spending it on? Overreaching Big Brother tech, of course.
There’s Clearview AI’s facial recognition software. It uses data scraped from sites like YouTube, Facebook, and Venmo. Mobile Fortify is a phone app agents use to scan faces and fingerprints in the field. ELITE, an app developed by Palantir, has been described as Google Maps for ICE, helping agents locate areas where they are more likely to find people to arrest. “Agents are reportedly picking people to deport from our country the same way you'd choose a nearby coffee shop,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) tells Joseph Cox at 404 Media.
While ICE is unlikely to confirm anything, experts suspect that Minnesota has become a testing ground for some of these tools, which are becoming more common. “The technologies are being deployed, or appear to be deployed, in a much more aggressive way than we have seen in the past,” ACLU lawyer Nathan Freed Wessler tells Sheera Frenkel and Aaron Krolik for the New York Times. “The conglomeration of all these technologies together is giving the government unprecedented abilities.”
The PTA Moms Are Pissed
“Public schools are on the front lines of everything ill facing society—and that’s no different now," writes Beth Hawkins in a piece for The 74 about how PTA moms (along with parents who belong to other Twin Cities school support groups) are organizing relief efforts in the Twin Cities.
In ordinary times, it's these moms who would lead drives to fill teachers' supply wishlists or otherwise fundraise for things not in the school's budget. In less ordinary times—for example, an ongoing paramilitary invasion that sics the U.S. government on its own citizens—these moms find themselves stepping up to support students and their families who are struggling.
"[T]here are dozens of GoFundMe campaigns, organized by parents who, in the last three weeks, have tapped their networks to organize patrols to keep children safe as they move from home to school and back, to deliver diapers and formula and, as Feb. 1 draws near, to crowdsource rent money," Hawkins writes.
MAGA Lawmakers Loudly Mocked at CNN Town Hall
CNN hosted a town hall Wednesday screamingly billed as "STATE OF EMERGENCY: CONFRONTING THE CRISIS IN MINNESOTA." We were reminded of this when Brian Evans, the press secretary for Minnesota AG Keith Ellison, tweeted: "I wonder why Elliott [Engen] hasn't posted any clips from his big CNN town hall appearance?” Rep. Engen was joined by two fellow Republican state lawmakers, Rep. Nolan West and Sen. Michael Holmstrom. It… didn’t go well for the trio of MAGA dunces!
At one point, a straight-faced Holmstrom talks about the “olive branch” President Trump has extended to Minnesota, spurring gales of laughter from attendees. “lol what a blithering idiot,” reads the top-voted YouTube comment. Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Ellison also spoke at the town hall; their remarks presumably weren’t loudly mocked by the audience. (Here's a full recap from the Strib's Deena Winter.)
Wanna Buy This Renovated Grain Elevator?
Let's end today's Flyover with a shred of whimsy. Have you ever wanted to live inside a grain silo? Probably not. But this weird property might just sway you. Located in Sabin, Minnesota, just 14 miles southwest of Moorhead, it's got four bedrooms, a climbing wall, and a spiral playground slide, and it kinda looks like what would happen if a hipster tried to design a McDonald's. It can be yours for $325,000.
