Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
Let's Check in With the Worst-Managed U.S. Attorney's Office in the Nation
We all know by now that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Minnesota is, to use a legal term, totally fucked. The office is flooded with habeas claims from improperly detained Minnesotans swept up in Operation Metro Surge, and there has been an exodus of attorneys leaving the office in protest of its misplaced priorities. What could go wrong?
How about dropping drug charges against a habitual criminal defendant? As Ryan J. Foley of P News reports, 12-time convicted felon Cory Allen McKay, “with a three-decade record of violent crime that includes strangling a pregnant woman and firing a shotgun under a person’s chin,” faced 25 years in prison for meth trafficking. But when the prosecutor assigned to his case retired, the feds dropped the charges.
“This was completely surprising to me,” McKay’s lawyer, Jean Brandl, tells the AP. She didn’t learn the charges had been dropped till after he was released, and still hasn’t spoken to her client. “I can guarantee you he’s happy about it.”
You might call McKay among “the worst of the worst.” Oh, well, they’ll get him next time, I guess.
These people are total clowns.
Relax! The Hotels Are Getting Their Liquor Licenses!
Given the dramatic responses this past week from the local business community and its media cheerleaders, you’d think the Minneapolis City Council had begun expropriating property in the name of the proletariat.
“Leave it to the Minneapolis City Council’s progressive majority to turn a federal invasion of the city into a cudgel against businesses that didn’t join the resistance,” hyperventilates Eric Roper at the Star Tribune. Does Roper use the word “performative”? Oh, you know he does.
What actually happened? There was a slight delay in approving the liquor licenses for two hotels that had allegedly housed ICE agents: the Depot Renaissance Hotel and the Canopy by Hilton Hotel.
In an attempt to do something/anything to make DHS thugs’ stay have consequences for someone/anyone, some council members floated the idea of seeing whether they could deny liquor licenses to companies that had housed the agents who crashed our local economy.
This brief holdup, however, could have had DIRE CONSEQUENCES for Minneapolis in... uh, ways.
“Hotel workers are understandably anxious and fearful about ICE agents being stationed in their workplace,” Roper admits. But! “Hotels have found themselves in a tough spot during the immigration surge.” Yes, it really has been a difficult time for… hotels.
No worries, though—the council renewed the hotels’ liquor licenses Thursday by an 8-5 vote. Minneapolis has been saved.
Incidentally, my brother and his family had a nice stay at the Depot when they came to visit a couple years ago. Great location. No way in hell they’d ever stay there again after this.
Isle Is Now Officially My Least Favorite City in Minnesota
We regret to inform you that the giant walleye statue in Isle, Minnesota, is complicit in a federal ethnic cleansing campaign. Or, rather, the entire 800-person Lake Mille Lacs city of Isle is: As Jenny Berg reports for the Star Tribune, Isle became the only city in Minnesota to ink a loyalty agreement with ICE.
“We are grateful to be included in the mission of ICE, and will do everything we can to assist them or any other law enforcement agency," says Mayor Ernie Frie, whose town is 99% U.S.-born. “It sounds great, but there’s really no point,” gun shop employee Ryan Schik tells the Strib.
Well, there’s kind of a point: In exchange, Isle gets $100,000+ in blood money supplies (our phrasing) from the DHS. Though Isle is the only city to collaborate with the feds, eight Minnesota counties have joined in signing 287(g) agreements.
How to Help: Keep MN Housed
So many Minnesotans have stepped up to protect and support their neighbors this winter, but Ashley Fairbanks—who doesn’t even live here anymore—has really gone above and beyond. If you’ve donated to ICE-impacted Minnesotans, it’s highly likely you used information from Fairbanks’ Stand With Minnesota webpage to do so.
Fairbanks has now created a new page on her site, Keep MN Housed, which allows you to do just that. You can “adopt a family’s rent” (as Racket did recently) or contribute to a rent relief fund where your donation will be matched up to $50,000 by local nonprofits.
