Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and four of his Democratic colleagues heard from Minnesotans who have been adversely impacted by President Donald Trump’s effort to reshape the federal government and U.S. policy.
Before a two-hour session at North Senior High School in North St. Paul on Thursday evening, Ellison said Trump’s avalanche of executive orders “clearly violate the law.”
Judges across the country have agreed, issuing temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions on more than 45 lawsuits brought against Trump’s effort to lay off thousands of federal workers, freeze billions of dollars in federal funds, and eradicate policies on comiate change and diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Many of those lawsuits were filed by the 23 Democratic attorneys general who banded together.
“We’re all working pretty hard here, we’re all putting in double duty,” Ellison said.
Ellison was joined by Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin.
The Democratic attorneys general held their first listening session in Phoenix, Arizona, on March 5 and plan to travel across the nation, holding similar sessions in other “blue states” to try to put a human face on the impact of Trump’s actions.
“We’re not the face of the resistance,” Mayes said. “We are doing what we can to uphold the rule of law.”
Mayes also called Trump’s actions an unconstitutional “coup.”
But at the high school’s packed auditorium, the focus was on dozens of Minnesotans, which included fired federal workers, immigrants, parents of transgender children and people who worked for nonprofits who help provide health care, housing and the resettlement of refugees who have lost federal funding.
Maricruz Lozano Rios, a leader with Unidos MN, said her mother’s partner was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at a BP gas station when he was on his way to work early one morning and was subsequently deported. That forced her unemployed mother to sell their house and “everything she had.”
“I’ll be damned if they keep hurting my family,” she said.
Suzanne Kelly, the CEO of the Minnesota Council of Churches, said the nonprofit’s refugee resettlement program had lost $4 million in federal grants and could not make up the shortfall in funding.
So, she had to tell the newly arrived refugees the council has been forced to to stop paying for their rent and groceries in the next month or two.
“Everything that we’ve done for them will come to an end,” Kelly said.
Kelly also said she had to lay off 26 employees, many of them refugees themselves, and leave hundreds of others the Council of Churches had hoped to resettle in Minnesota in refugee camps overseas.
Hundreds attended the hearing. Many, if not most of those at the event, were Democratic activists and it often had the ebullient energy of a rally.
But there was also frustration. More than 200 people tuned in on a YouTube livestream of the hearing, and several in the chat said they had hoped for more information about what they could do and “the next steps” for the party.
“This feels like a microcosm of the Democratic Party,” one commenter posted. “Lots of sympathy. Lots of concern. No action.”
Ellison said the attorneys general “would keep on litigating” and gave out the phone number to his office, urging attendees to keep organizing and marching.
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-New York, were also taking their own show on the road, with a more combative message.
At an event in Las Vegas the progressive lawmakers held on Thursday, Ocasio Cortez told a crowd, “We need a Democratic Party that fights harder for us today.”
She said that some of their local members of Congress stood up for them last week by opposing a GOP bill that kept the federal government from shuttering while cutting spending on some domestic programs. But she said other lawmakers “caved.”
Nine Senate Democrats followed Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s lead in voting for the legislation. But only one House Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voted for the bill.
“Support brawlers who can fight — because those are the ones who can actually win against Republicans,” Ocasio Cortez said.
Ana Radelat
Ana Radelat is MinnPost’s Washington, D.C. correspondent. You can reach her at aradelat@minnpost.com or follow her on Twitter at @radelat.
The post Keith Ellison, fellow Democratic attorneys general, hold a listening session in St. Paul in a campaign against Trump policies appeared first on MinnPost.
