Welcome back to The Flyover, your daily digest of important, overlooked, and/or interesting Minnesota news stories.
The Delta to Dilley Connection
It's not exactly the stuff of winning ad campaigns: Video obtained by MN50501 activist Nick Benson confirms that Delta Air Lines flew Liam Conejo Ramos—the five-year-old Columbia Heights boy whose cruel capture broke hearts around the world—and his father to a Texas detention center in January.
Benson, who's been tracking ICE flights out of MSP, obtained the video via a public records request after Delta declined to confirm whether it had flown Conejo Ramos to San Antonio.
Independent journalist Gillian Brockell broke the news on Monday, adding that a Delta spokesperson declined to say how frequently it's helping ICE. But Benson tells Brockell he's willing to bet a lot of captured migrant children and their families are being flown by Delta, which operates the only nonstop flights between Minneapolis and San Antonio (the nearest major city to the Dilley detention center).
“It’s appalling that an airline that has built a brand on integrity, multiculturism, and high standards has complied with this type of enforcement,” Emilia Gonzales Avalos, executive director of Unidos MN, tells Brockell, calling the confirmation that Delta was helping ICE a betrayal. “I think they’re going to lose a lot of business in the Latino community.”
Local "Dirtbag Lawyer" Featured in Mother Jones
We can say that, because he said it about himself!
On the morning Renee Good was killed, I spent a good deal of time shoulder-to-shoulder with Dan Suitor—a Racket contributor, prolific poster, and my neighbor—who shared with me the video of Good's killing he would eventually post, making him the first to get those devastating images out there.
Suitor is also a lawyer. Technically, he's a self-described “nobody lawyer” and “dipshit with a seven-year-old laptop and a bad attitude,” as reporter Isabela Dias notes in the preamble to this piece Suitor contributed to Mother Jones. But Suitor has spent the last several months using his law background to help Minnesota immigrants who've been been detained by ICE. Lack of immigration law experience be damned; he's among the lawyers filing habeas corpus petitions "in a massive legal counteroffensive to the Trump administration’s aggressive mass detention and deportation practices," Dias writes.
Here's some of what Suitor has to say:
I’m a really small-time guy. Doing 20 cases in the last month was a lot. I can do these pretty quickly, and with every single one, I get better. But there are enough cases in Minnesota to keep me busy. I don’t think I’m a special talent in any way. I grew up like a New England Protestant. I believe that you toil and then you die. And you dig a ditch every day of your life. And at the end of your life, there’s the ditch. That’s how I treat this work. It’s gotten me to this point where I can help people, and that’s enough for me.
As you can maybe tell, it's very worth a read.
Fake St. Paul Band "Dies" in Fake Plane Crash
If you're confused by this Gillyweeds situation, you're not the only one. As Ross Raihala reports for the Pioneer Press, on Monday morning, the Facebook page for the St. Paul bluegrass band shared a post that all six of its members had been killed in a plane crash.
"The problem?" Raihala writes. "The Gillyweeds don’t exist."
The whole thing is pretty convoluted, but local music fan Kyle Matteson (@solace on social media) was among the first to climb down into the twangy rabbit hole. He found no evidence of a Monday plane crash, but did recognize the name Todd Pitman on the Gillyweeds' Bandcamp profile. He reached out to Pitman, an old acquaintance, who told him the band was “a node in an indeed quite elaborate immersive story/ARG/treasure hunt.”
Pitman also runs a company called TC Treasure, which develops ARGs, or alternate reality games. (This is all new to me, too.) The Gillyweeds appear to be part of a "five-part mystery hunt" ARG called “The Heartland Saga," and Raihala notes that on the (since-deleted) Facebook page, there was a disclaimer in the about section: “The Gillyweeds were a fictional, satirical band created for storytelling and entertainment purposes … no real musicians were harmed as a result (of) their untimely passing.” They were apparently created using AI for the online treasure hunt.
Uh, yeah... so there you... have it?
Extra! Extra! BORG Takes Over Chicago!
Very rarely are we in the Twin Cities ahead of the curve on a dining or drinking trend, whether it's açaí bowls or savory cocktails. Things typically take a while to matriculate out here, where surely some of us townies are still jazzed on hot honey; if you see it in New York, you'll see it in Minneapolis or St. Paul 12 to 16 months later.
But boy, were we ever ahead of the curve on BORGs.
After this weekend's St. Patrick’s Day celebration in Chicago, the streets were "lined with empty jugs," prompting the Chicago Tribune to ask, "What is a BORG?"
Oh, my sweet summer children. If you had only been reading Racket nearly a full three years ago, you would know that a BORG or "Black Out Rage Gallon" was 2023's hottest drink on college campuses, thanks in part to its simple and adaptable recipe: empty plastic gallon jug, filled halfway with water, with a fifth of vodka and a flavoring like Liquid I.V. or MiO. Dogged reporter Noah Mitchell embarked on a BORG journey for us; though I had forgotten that his maiden voyage was also on St. Patrick's Day...
I created my first BORG using tap water, half a liter of Stolichnaya vodka, and Market Pantry water flavoring. I was headed to a St. Patrick’s Day party last month, so I chose the lemon-lime variety in hopes of turning my BORG green. After emptying the entire thing into the gallon jug, my BORG had only turned piss-yellow. Close enough.
Beautiful. Revisit Mitchell's high-octane BORG tour below, and a hat tip to Melody Hoffmann at Southwest Voices for letting us know about the Chicago Tribune's story. We love being the people you think of when you think of gallon jugs full of hard liquor.
