Rolling Stone reports:

The federal government is retreating from Minneapolis, Minnesota. White House border czar Tom Homan announced on Thursday that the Trump administration will end the immigration enforcement surge it launched in January after a right-wing YouTuber highlighted allegations of fraud at Minneapolis-based child care centers.

Leaders in Minnesota were sober in their response. Speaking to reporters after Homan’s announcement on Thursday, Gov. Tim Walz cataloged the damage. “This surge of untrained, aggressive federal agents are going to leave Minnesota — and I guess they’ll go wherever they’re going to go — but the fact of the matter is, they left us with deep damage, generational trauma,” Walz said. “They left us with economic ruin. In some cases, they left us with many unanswered questions: Where are our children? Where, and what is the process of the investigations into those that were responsible for the deaths of Renee [Good] and Alex [Pretti]?”

Walz was referring to a number of Minnesota students whose schools have lost contact with them over the last month — some of whom were later spotted by other students inside a Texas detention facility — and to the investigations of shooting deaths of both Good and Pretti at the hands of federal agents. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Thursday that federal law enforcement continues to stonewall state and local investigations into the two Americans’ deaths. “We haven’t had any cooperation up until now, which is very unusual,” said Ellison, testifying before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

To begin to address the fallout from the federal government’s offensive on Minnesota, Walz announced a $10 million emergency relief package in the form of forgivable loans to small businesses that sustained losses during the period. Walz said the proposal was just a “small piece” of a larger effort to aid the state’s recovery, adding, “The federal government needs to pay for what they broke here. … The costs that were borne by the people of this state — the federal government needs to be responsible. You don’t get to break things and then just leave.” [Continue reading…]