SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
racism
‘This is Incitement’: Minnesotans Reject Trump's Call to 'Fight Back’ Against Somali Americans
Trump raged against Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, whom he described as an "incompetent thief who doesn't want to get involved," and seemed to suggest that if ordinary Minnesotans took matters into their own hands, they'd have the blessing of the federal government.
"The Somalians [sic] should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing," Trump said. "They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back, Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue."
It's hardly the first time Trump has slurred Somali immigrants. He's previously referred to them as "garbage," "very low-IQ people," and "pirates," and said they should all be deported from the country.
But Trump’s comments on Thursday went a step further than that, leaving community members on edge about the possibility that they could instigate violent attacks by his supporters.
“President Trump is placing a target on the backs of Somali Americans," said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Minnesota, in a statement. "His words are not simply political rhetoric. They are a dangerous invitation to hatred and potentially violence."
"Minnesota has led the nation in attacks on mosques, including fire-bombings," he said. "We know firsthand what happens when hateful rhetoric turns into violence.”
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House on October 7, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Faisa Ahmed, a Somali American political organizer and senior adviser to the reelection campaign of Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, said unease ran deep in her home city of Minneapolis on Thursday night.
"Every Somali I know is walking through our own neighborhoods scared tonight," she said.
"The president just told Minnesotans to 'fight back' against Somalis by name," she added. "This is incitement, and everyone should call it that."
Though most of them are US citizens, Somalis were aggressively targeted when thousands of immigration agents descended on Minnesota during Trump's Operation Metro Surge earlier this year.
US Border Patrol agents detain an unidentified man of Somali descent in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on January 8, 2026. (Photo by Octavio Jones/AFP via Getty Images)
In numerous cases, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents were documented engaging in explicit racial profiling directed at Somali citizens—as well as other immigrants—many of whom were detained arbitrarily and attacked with physical violence.
Ellison, who has sued the administration for civil rights violations and pushed for agents to be investigated under state law, said he would not let this happen again.
"We've seen what Trump's government coming to the 'rescue' looks like," he wrote on social media Thursday. "It ended with two Minnesotans shot dead by federal agents, racial profiling, assaults, and the violation of our rights."
"Never again. If Trump tries, I'll drag him back to court," he said. "Somali Minnesotans are our neighbors. They are part of Minnesota. And the Minnesota I know and love is so much better than this bigotry."
Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, along with Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, announced a lawsuit against the Trump administration's deployment of ICE agents to the Twin Cities during a press conference at Minneapolis City Hall on Monday, January 12, 2026. (Photo by Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune via Getty Images)
With less than a month to go before the midterm elections, Minnesota Republicans have sought to harness bigotry against Somalis to rally support.
Democratic candidate Doug Chapin, who is trying to unseat Republican House Majority Whip Tom Emmer in Minnesota's 6th district, put it plainly during an event on Thursday night.
"I'll call it what it is," Chapin said. "The president is trying to foment a race war here in Minnesota."
But as the violent rhetoric has ramped back up, so have expressions of solidarity from community members who have called it out as a cynical political tactic.
"This is KGB-style fear-mongering before an election. Trump’s terrified he’s going to lose the House and Senate and get impeached," said Mike Norton, the former vice chair of the Democratic Farmer-Labor Party in Minneapolis.
"I love my Somali friends and neighbors. They make Minnesota a better place," Norton said. "If Trump tries to come for them, he needs to come through all of us."
Rural Residents Can Learn From the Factor-Farm Rollout to Resist Data Centers
Organizing still won real things, to be sure, from North Carolina’s CAFO moratorium in 1997 to Chris Jones’s clean-water campaign for agriculture secretary in Iowa today. When it comes to CAFOs, the lessons came late, but in the age of artificial intelligence, those same lessons can give rural communities a leg up.
While CAFOs crept into rural America, data centers are arriving as a land rush. This speed is both terrifying and an advantage. Texas alone has some 248 proposed data center projects, even though 56% of Texans tell pollsters they do not want one nearby, which means that, unlike the CAFO era, rural communities are asking questions before the statutes are locked in. And rural people need their voices to be heard. According to Pew Research Center, of the more than 1,500 data centers proposed or under development, 67% are in rural communities.
Everything CAFO country learned, it learned too late, after the wells were ruined, after the smell lowered adjacent property values and health outcomes, after the statutes were written.
The ultimate question will be: Do rural residents have the power to say no?
The answer is playing out across the country. In November 2025, 800 people filled a board meeting to oppose a billion-dollar Meta-linked project in Howell Township, Michigan, and the developer withdrew. In February, the city council of San Marcos, Texas, rejected a $1.5 billion campus after nearly nine hours of public comment, then became the first Texas city to ban data centers through its zoning code. Fort Worth, Texas, is drafting data center zoning rules of its own.
Nationally, the poorest census tracts resist data center projects at five times the rate of the richest. Projects that meet resistance are cancelled at several times the rate of those that do not. One tracker counts tens of billions of dollars in blocked or delayed projects.
Opposition to data center projects is one of the few issues that many Americans agree on. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that only 14% of respondents would support a data center being built in their community. On July 18, organizers held 142 protests across 42 states in the first nationwide protest against data centers and artificial intelligence.
Data center hyperscalers are copying the CAFO playbook as best they can. West Virginia has stripped its counties and towns of the power to regulate data centers; similarly, the state’s right-to-farm law prohibits local governments from bringing civil or criminal action against an agricultural operation as long as it meets state and federal laws, permits, and regulations. When Hill County, Texas, passed the state’s first county moratorium in May, a developer sued for $100 million and the county rescinded within a week, because Texas counties can zone against neither a data center nor a feedlot. Hood County pulled its own moratorium after state Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R-7) asked whether counties even hold that power; the same senator calls the San Marcos ban illegal.
Right-wing organizations like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), behind the pro-CAFO model legislation of right-to-farm laws since the 1990s, likewise appear intent on denying local control in the data center buildout. At its annual meeting in July, ALEC considered a model legislative framework that would undercut local bans and moratoriums and give data centers the “clear authority to secure power… subject only to objective safety and interconnection standards,” as the Center for Media and Democracy reported. The meeting featured speakers from Google and Nvidia, along with a Meta sponsorship.
The outburst of anti-data center sentiment ahead of the midterms has forced political leaders to reckon with the issue of local control. This is where data centers and CAFOs diverge. In June, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who once hailed Texas as “the epicenter of AI development,” called for a ban on AI data centers in rural neighborhoods and a cut to their billion-dollar-a-year tax exemption after facing rare bipartisan pressure. Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a law to preserve local control over data centers. Michigan’s candidates for governor are split over the server halls sprouting between Lansing and Detroit. Illinois recently reversed course on its data center policy, reeling in the subsidies it had rolled out in 2019. And in July, New York became the first state in the nation to enact a one-year moratorium.
So, who hasn’t been able to say no? We pulled the locations of CAFOs and data centers in North Carolina and Texas, where the data is easily available, and—yes—got Claude to plot it for us against demographic and county boundaries.
In North Carolina the answer is pretty clear. The state’s 2,482 permitted animal operations cluster in the Black Belt coastal plain where the epidemiologist Steve Wing found hog lagoons a generation ago. Weighted by the number of permits each county holds, those counties are 46% people of color, against 34% across North Carolina’s hundred counties as a whole. Duplin County alone holds over 500 permits and 2.2 million allowable hogs in a county where almost half the population of 49,000 are people of color.
Data centers are the inverse of CAFOs. The state’s data centers sit in counties whiter than the state average, in the Piedmont towns that lost their historic furniture and textile businesses as well as in wealthy Wake and Mecklenburg counties (respectively home to large cities Raleigh and Charlotte). Two of the state’s suspended projects are in adjacent Edgecombe County and Pitt County, where residents informed their resistance based on their history fighting CAFOs.
In 1995, residents of predominantly Black Kingsboro, in Edgecombe County, successfully blocked a major meatpacker from building a 300-acre slaughterhouse in their backyard through efforts to rezone land. When a $19 billion, 400-acre data center came knocking three decades later, residents opposed it en masse. The developer Energy Storage Solutions withdrew its proposal in July and by August, Edgecombe County enacted a two-year moratorium.
In Texas the pattern is a little more complex. Rural Texas tends to be whiter than a state average balanced by majority-Hispanic cities. Yet the feedlot Panhandle is majority-Hispanic meatpacking country, with counties like Deaf Smith and Castro where the workforce lives beside the feedyards it staffs. The rural counties now hosting data centers likewise run less white than rural Texas as a whole.
Other outlier cases in the US: The world’s densest data center cluster is outside Washington, DC, in Loudoun County, Virginia, among the wealthiest counties in America, while xAI’s Colossus runs beside Boxtown, a majority-Black neighborhood in Memphis.
The patterning and the possibilities for asking questions about data centers are very different. CAFOs were put next to the disempowered by history. In most of the counties with proposed data centers, there’s no local billionaire hyperscaler whose family has been on the land for generations to champion the project, with the historical ability to make people of color, in particular, suffer the consequences in the ways that CAFOs had.
In contrast, data centers are being aimed by site selectors in a hurry, looking for cheap land and water, cheap power and thin resistance. But they don’t have their local defenders and hands on the levers of power in the ways that CAFOs do.
At this intersection of race and class is the oldest American proxy for who can, and who can’t, say no.
Here are the questions that constituents should ask their local governments about new data center projects:
1. About Water
Does the permit say the cooling loop is closed, with maximum gallons per day, public metering, and penalties? We have yet to find a binding closed-loop commitment in any permit. Who owns the aquifer data, and who pays for the test wells?
2. About Power
Electric cooperatives, unique to rural America, have long been a way for farmers and rural people to claw back some power over their destiny. These cooperatives were established with a “duty to serve” the areas that investor-owned utilities refused to serve because the load factors were low. By pooling their demand, cooperatives could connect their members to a grid and lower their prices.
In the age of artificial intelligence, public utilities—rural electric cooperatives included—face a dilemma. The more a cooperative buys from its wholesale supplier, the greater its load factor and therefore the lower the cooperative’s average cost of power. When a data center project fields new requests for power, it can be life changing. Having a client with a reliable 24-7 demand for electricity means a predictable increase in the co-op’s load factor. All that new volume could, in principle, make every member’s bill cheaper and bring new system upgrades. It’s tempting to shut up and take the deal.
But as with any gift horse, every farmer knows to check the teeth. Data centers often have greater access to capital than their would-be electric cooperative providers, and their rise as buyers means a shift in the balance of bargaining power in the marketplace. Will attitudes toward universal service obligations remain in place? Will consumer protection policies evolve? And which regulator should be responsible for developing and overseeing new industry guardrails?
Who pays for the substation and the lines? Port Washington, Wisconsin found itself on the hook for a $90 million substation it did not need. Is there a curtailment agreement cutting the data center first in a grid emergency, as Texas now requires of loads over 75 megawatts? Are residential rates fenced off in a separate rate class? And for rural electric cooperative members: Does the all-requirements wholesale contract cap the solar and wind members may build, and would a giant new load deepen that dependence? Why do big loads get lower per kilowatt prices as they increase their usage while conservation earns nothing? Will data centers inherit the same pricing structure?
3. About Money
What does each abatement cost per permanent job, when a hyperscale facility employs a few dozen people? Will advance payments be required to pay for infrastructure upgrades? Will they accept provisions for interruptible power during times of peak demand to prevent rolling blackouts? Are there clawbacks? Is there a decommissioning bond for the day the hardware is scrap, as we now demand of wind farms?
4. About Democracy
Did any utility or government official sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)? Can our county or township legally say no, and if not, which law took the power and who voted for it?
Everything CAFO country learned, it learned too late, after the wells were ruined, after the smell lowered adjacent property values and health outcomes, after the statutes were written. Data centers are arriving early enough that the questions can still be asked in time, even as the hyperscalers find friends in Washington DC, and in statehouses around the country, who’ll say yes to them so that local communities won’t be able to say no.
If we want to stop Amazon, Meta, and OpenAI riding roughshod over our communities and land, it will be because average people, urban and rural alike, will have joined forces to stop the trillionaire class from building their wealth off our backs.
John Roberts Is the Biggest Con Man in US Politics
The biggest yarn Roberts told during his hearing concerned his views on the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (VRA), a cornerstone of American democracy, which the Supreme Court gutted this past April in a redistricting case from the state of Louisiana (Louisiana v. Callais).
As is his prerogative as chief justice, Roberts assigned the task of drafting the Callais majority opinion to fellow conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who responded with a 6 to 3 ruling that held that, henceforth, Section 2 of the landmark legislation would require VRA plaintiffs to meet the nearly impossible burden of proving that redistricting maps challenged as “racial gerrymanders” were created with discriminatory intent rather than for permissible political purposes. The opinion allowed Louisiana to eliminate one majority Black congressional district. It also effectively negated legislation passed in 1982 that had amended Section 2 to permit the Justice Department and private citizens to challenge election laws that have the effect of diluting minority voting power without proving intent.
The court’s accelerating lurch to the right under his stewardship has done permanent damage to the institution, and sparked renewed calls for radical reforms.
Flash back to 2005 and it is apparent that, at best, Roberts misled the judiciary committee. In response to a question from Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy about the VRA’s constitutionality, Roberts replied, “[T]he existing Voting Rights Act—the constitutionality has been upheld. And I don’t have any issue with that.”
In fact, Roberts had plenty of issues with the VRA. As a young lawyer serving as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith in the Reagan administration, Roberts authored upward of 25 memos opposing the 1982 legislation. In them, Roberts urged the administration to defeat any proposed changes to the VRA and to keep the “intent test” established by a 1980 Supreme Court decision (City of Mobile v. Bolden) that required VRA plaintiffs to prove officials explicitly intended to discriminate against minority voters. Adopting the effects test over the intent test, Roberts argued, would create “a quota system [akin to affirmative action] for electoral politics by creating a right to proportional racial representation on elected governmental bodies.”
In another exchange at his confirmation hearing, this time with Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold, Roberts sought to explain away his memos as just part of the job he had been assigned at the time rather than a reflection of his personal views, saying, “I was a 26-year-old staff lawyer. It was my first job as a lawyer after my clerkships [with Second Circuit Judge Fred Friendly and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist]. I was not shaping administration policy. The administration policy was shaped by the Attorney General... It was the policy of President Reagan. It was to extend the Voting Rights Act without change.”
Despite young Roberts’s warnings, the 1982 amendments were passed by Congress with overwhelming bipartisan support by a vote of 389 to 24 in the House and 85 to 8 in the Senate. President Ronald Reagan quickly reversed course and signed the amendments into law on June 29, 1982. In 2006, Congress extended the VRA for another 25 years with even greater bipartisan support, by a vote of 390 to 33 in the House and 98 to 0 in the Senate.
Once installed as the nation’s 17th chief justice, it didn’t take Roberts long to show his true colors, declaring in a 2007 majority opinion on busing in public schools (Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District Number One) that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
Two years later, in an otherwise obscure case (Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District Number One v. Holder) involving the elected board of a municipal water district in Texas, he turned his attention to Sections 4 and 5 of the VRA, which required state and local jurisdictions, mostly in the South, with histories of egregious voter discrimination, to obtain advance federal approval—known as “preclearance”—before making changes to their election procedures. Although his opinion left the sections intact, Roberts warned that unless Congress updated the formula to determine which jurisdictions should be subject to the preclearance process, the Supreme Court might stop the process altogether.
In 2013, he made good on that threat. Writing for a 5 to 4 majority in Shelby County v. Holder, he invalidated the preclearance formula and effectively put an end to the process, reasoning that racism in American elections was a thing of the past and there was no longer any justification for singling out Southern states for remedial measures. Shelby led swiftly to an upsurge in restrictive voter ID laws, voting-roll purges, and limitations on mail-in balloting in Republican-led states across the country, especially in the South.
Although Roberts also declared in Shelby that Section 2 of the VRA “is permanent, [and] applies nationwide,” he returned to the attack with his 2019 majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause, holding that “political gerrymandering” claims cannot be brought in federal courts because they present nonjusticiable “political questions.” Political gerrymandering has a long history in the United States, Roberts noted, dating back to the salamander-shaped voting districts created by Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry in 1812 to give an advantage to his Democratic-Republican Party. “The Constitution,” Roberts argued in Rucho, “supplies no objective measure for assessing whether a districting map treats a political party fairly” and thus provides no basis for proportional political representation. Lacking objective standards to work with, he concluded, the federal courts had no business entering the redistricting wars.
Rucho, in turn, set the stage for Callais in 2026, which put an end to claims of racial gerrymandering, the last bastion of relief from discrimination available under the VRA. Callais gave red states permission to redesign their electoral maps to eliminate “majority-minority districts” (where a minority group comprises a majority of the population) that had been created to boost the electoral power of Black and Latine voters, who tend to lean Democratic. Election law predicts that as a result of Callais, as many as 19 seats in Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana could be eliminated, starting with the November midterms, potentially returning the bulk of the former states of the Confederacy to virtual one-party rule.
As The Nation’s justice correspondent Elie Mystal put it in a mournful post-Callais column, “The ruling effectively ends the VRA, and with it the all too brief era of multiracial democracy in America.” And as Ari Berman added in a piece for Mother Jones, Callais may have been written by Alito, but it “represents the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts... [who] has been trying to kill the Voting Rights Act for more than 40 years.”
The severe negative reaction to Callais forced Roberts to do damage control. Addressing a judicial conference in Hershey, Pennsylvania, in early May, he said: “I think at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, [that] we’re saying we think this is what things should be as opposed to this is what the law provides... I think they view us as truly political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do. I would say that’s the main difficulty... We’re not simply part of the political process.”
The problem for Roberts is that his shtick just isn’t working anymore. Any lingering pretense of impartiality ended with his stunning majority opinion in 2024’s Trump v. United States, which offered the president near-complete immunity from criminal prosecution for his official acts. In addition to shielding Trump from legal accountability, the immunity ruling embraced the Reagan-era “unitary executive theory,” which posits that all executive power is concentrated in the person of the president, as a settled principle of constitutional law.
The unitary theory was on full display again in late-June opinions this term on immigration and independent agencies. In Trump v. Slaughter, another 6 to 3 majority opinion written by Roberts involving the firing of a Federal Trade Commissioner, the court overturned a federal law that bars the president from firing members of the independent agencies created by Congress without just cause. In the process, Roberts overruled a precedent decision that had stood since 1935 (Humphrey’s Executor v. United States), which had upheld the contested statute.
In rulings on the immigration cases, both written by Alito and resolved 6 to 3 along party lines, the court upheld the administration’s termination of temporary protected status (TPS) for an estimated 350,000 Haitian and 6,000 Syrian nationals who were allowed to come to the United States to avoid persecution (Mullin v. Doe), and authorized the administration to revive Trump’s first-term policy denying asylum-seekers the right to enter the country before reaching the US-Mexico border (Mullin v. Al Otro Lado).
The immigration decisions sparked uncommonly vitriolic dissents from the court’s three liberal Justices, exposing deepening fissures on the bench. In the asylum case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the majority, writing: “The consequences of today’s decision are predictable. More people will die. More people will attempt to cross the border illegally, and some will make it while others will not.” In the TPS case, Justice Elena Kagan all but accused the majority of enabling Trump’s racism, citing the president’s public statements accusing Haitian refugees of “eating” cats and dogs, “poisoning the blood,” and saying they come from a “shithole country” and “probably have AIDS.”
The court’s racial bias was also evident in its “shadow docket,” the term given to emergency appeals that come before the court outside of its standard “merits” docket and are typically resolved rapidly without full briefing and on an interim basis while litigation proceeds in lower courts. In one particularly egregious ruling (Noem v. Perdomo), the Court permitted immigration agents to detain suspected undocumented immigrants on the basis of race, ethnicity, language, location, and occupation, green-lighting unbridled racial profiling.
The shadow docket also included an emergency order permitting Alabama to reinstate a congressional map that eliminates a Black-majority district that the court had invalidated under the VRA just three years ago.
Even in the handful of major decisions the Trump administration lost this term, the cases were narrowly framed. In Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, with Roberts writing for a 6 to 3 majority, the court invalidated Trump’s worldwide “liberation day” tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but left the door open for more targeted duties under different statutes. Similarly, in Trump v. Cook, with Roberts writing for a 5 to 4 majority, the court temporarily barred Trump from firing a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors while her lower-court challenges continue.
Continuing the trend, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett writing for a 5 to 4 majority in Watson v. Republican National Committee, the court held that existing federal election laws do not prevent Mississippi, and by extension other states, from counting absentee ballots postmarked by election day but received up to five days thereafter. Barrett, however, very carefully noted that her opinion did “not consider the scope of Congress’ authority to regulate federal elections” through legislation, possibly a covert nod to the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act that Trump has insisted Congress pass, which would outlaw nearly all mail-in voting.
The same is true for the court’s much-anticipated decision in Trump v. Barbara, on Trump’s Executive Order declaring an end to birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment for the children of undocumented people. In years past, the court would have unanimously rejected Trump’s gambit. Instead, in a 5 to 4 opinion written by Roberts and joined by Barrett, the order was barely rebuffed for violating the text and history of the amendment.
Roberts may have gained a small measure of redemption with his Barbara opinion, but the court’s accelerating lurch to the right under his stewardship has done permanent damage to the institution, and sparked renewed calls for radical reforms, including the imposition of term limits for the justices and, most far-reaching of all, for an expansion of the bench to as many as 13 members.
To accomplish any significant reforms, however, will require Democrats to stiffen their spines and to take back both houses of Congress later this year and the presidency in 2028. In the meantime, we can take heart that the long con Roberts started in 2005 has been exposed for all to see. And we can heed the call of New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie to remind ourselves that Roberts and his GOP confederates do not own the future of the Constitution. We do.
Most Popular