DULUTH — The University of Minnesota Duluth received a visit from University President Rebecca Cunningham last week, just days before the start of the spring semester.

Cunningham’s Northland visit included meetings with several local legislators, as well as stops at some of the system’s regional facilities.

The trip was capped off with a forum hosted at UMD on Friday. Cunningham and UMD Chancellor Charles T. Nies met with college community members and discussed the university’s new strategic roadmap, outlining upcoming initiatives and opportunities at UMD and across the university system.

“We have these five wonderful campuses that serve different students with different interests in different study and learning environments,” said Cunningham in a sit down with the News Tribune, “and we’re working together in really just new and exciting ways.”

Back in October, the university unveiled its new strategic plan, Elevating Extraordinary 2030, which outlines its goals and mission over the next five years. Building on the last strategic plan, which concluded in 2025, the university’s next phase will be guided by five main areas of focus: preparing and engaging students, innovative learning, serving communities, advancing research and investing in the local workforce.

“The strategic roadmap … really gives us the framework and the structure to say we’re doing this, not only because we know it’s good for our students,” said Nies, who co-chaired the development committee for the new plan, “but it’s also helping to advance the mission and the programming for the University of Minnesota, across all campuses.”

How each of the five main university campuses puts the elements of the strategic plan into action will likely look a little different at each school, Nies said, but having a set of system-wide goals will also create more opportunities for campus partnerships and shared resources.

One of the overall facets of the strategic plan focuses on serving the community through the development of health care and health research, which has led to “exciting” investments in the university’s medical programs, Cunningham said.

Earlier this year, the UMN’s Medical School Duluth Campus expanded to a four-year program, opening new opportunities for students looking to focus their education in areas such as rural health, family medicine and Native American health.

The UMN School of Dentistry, which trains more than 70% of Minnesota’s practicing dentists, is also planned to undergo changes, Cunningham, said as the university looks to restructure and renovate the school.

However, the university’s top priority right now is reaching an agreement on continued funding and support for the state’s largest medical school.

In November, the University of Minnesota rejected a proposed deal between Fairview Health Services and University of Minnesota Physicians, the clinical practice for the school’s faculty. While the $1 billion deal would have provided funding and support to the medical school for the next 10 years, the university objected to the proposal, claiming a lack of involvement in negotiations and that the university’s control over the medical school would be greatly reduced under the new plan.

Contributed / University of Minnesota Duluth

All parties have since returned to the negotiating table, with the help of a Minnesota Attorney General-appointed mediator.

“We’re in mediation right now, and I expect that we’ll come to a solution that works for all three parties here,” Cunningham said. “The university remains very committed to rural health care, and once that gets sorted, we can continue to look to other plans and phases. … There’s lots of opportunities for next conversations and next partnerships, but my first job of business is to sort out our partnership with Fairview.”

Among those “next conversations” are discussions about the proposed medical center in downtown Duluth, a project that has been under discussion since 2022.

The idea to expand current health care services and training options in Duluth through a new academic health center has received

continued support

from the city since it was first proposed. While Essentia Health and Aspirus St. Luke’s have

offered locations

for the potential medical school campus, Cunningham says the plan still requires some more thought.

“The university is still interested in exploring that opportunity, and it remains in our five-year plan that we worked with the regents on last June,” Cunningham added. “We plan to continue to explore the opportunities … for what the right opportunity is for medical education here, and how we could expand that.”

Expanding medical education efforts go hand in hand with local initiatives, like

the Duluth Promise,

Nies said. Focused on creating career pathways in fields with high workforce demands, Duluth Promise is a coalition of local schools and industry groups, including UMD, Duluth Public Schools and the Duluth Area Chamber of Commerce.

The initiative launched last year and has since narrowed its focus to health care careers.

“It fits in rather nicely with some of the overall focuses of our strategic plan,” Nies said. “We’re creating a pathway from kindergarten to med school right here in Duluth. … We’ve got a lot of strong partnerships here, and we’re going to really lean into that strength as we move forward. There’s a lot of great things ahead.”

Officials in Minnesota are suing the federal government in an attempt to stop the deployment of thousands of immigration agents to Minnesota, the state’s top prosecutor said Monday.

“We allege that the obvious targeting of Minnesota for our diversity, for our democracy and our differences of opinion with the federal government is a violation of the Constitution and of federal law,” Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said at a news conference.

Calling the deployment a federal “invasion of the Twin Cities,” he said: “This has to stop.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Minnesota, includes the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul as plaintiffs and names officials with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Customs and Border Protection as defendants.

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin accused Ellison of “prioritizing politics over public safety” and said he and other “sanctuary politicians” were the reason the department had to surge immigration agents to the state.

“President Trump’s job is to protect the American people and enforce the law — no matter who your mayor, governor, or state attorney general is,” she said.

“This pathetic stunt only proves that Democrats will put illegal criminals over hardworking Americans every time,” a White House spokeswoman said in a separate statement.

Speaking at Monday’s news conference, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey cited the number of police officers in his city — 600 — and called the deployment of thousands of federal immigration officers “wildly disproportionate.”

“At times, there are as many as 50 agents arresting one person,” he said, adding: “We’re feeling the impact here in Minneapolis. Schools have closed. People are afraid to go to work, shop or seek medical care. 911 calls are up. Police resources are indeed stretched thin.”

St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her, whose family fled Laos for the United States when she was 3, told reporters that she’s carrying her passport and ID with her at all times.

“I don’t know when I’m going to be detained,” she said.

The complaint was filed one day after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said that hundreds more federal officers are heading to the state amid protests over the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent.

Noem said that the federal operation in the state is now focused not just on targeting alleged violations of immigration law but on tackling ICE-related protests.

Noem has described Good, a prize-winning poet, as a terrorist who “weaponized” her vehicle against the ICE officer who fatally shot her in self-defense. Local and state officials have disputed that claim, saying that Good, 37, was only trying to leave the scene and calling federal officials’ characterization “propaganda.”

Good was in the driver’s seat of an SUV in a residential part of Minneapolis on Jan. 7 when she was killed. Video obtained by NBC News that appears to have been recorded by Jonathan Ross, the officer who shot Good, captured Good and her wife talking to the officer in the moments before he opened fire.

Video from eyewitnesses shows officers telling Good to get out of her car before she begins driving away. Multiple gunshots can be heard and the SUV slams into a parked vehicle.

Officials in Minnesota have criticized federal authorities for barring the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from participating in the investigation examining Good’s death. Asked about the move last week, Noem accused state investigators of allowing people to harass and incite violence against federal officers.

The Trump administration began ramping up immigration-related arrests in Minnesota in December, after conservative commentators focused on a years-old scandal in which federal prosecutors uncovered a sprawling fraud scheme in the Somali community.

Last week, more than 2,000 officers and agents from ICE and Homeland Security Investigations were deployed to the city after a right wing influencer accused several Somali-run day cares of fraud. The allegations were investigated by state officials who said they found no evidence to back up the claims.

Illinois also sued the Trump administration Monday, alleging in a federal lawsuit that immigration agents deployed in the city are using “unlawful and dangerous tactics.”

“We have watched in horror as unchecked federal agents have aggressively assaulted and terrorized our communities and neighborhoods in Illinois, undermining Constitutional rights and threatening public safety,” Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement.

In a statement, a White House spokeswoman said the suit “reads like a far left manifesto” that seeks to “smear law enforcement officers and incite violence against them. Democrat politicians must stop siding with criminal illegal aliens over American law enforcement.”

To get a case to trial, state prosecutors may have to show federal immunity doesn’t apply.

Many in Minnesota and across the country were outraged by the killing of Renee Nicole Good by a federal immigration agent in a Minneapolis neighborhood, and called for the agent to face charges. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, who oversees the city’s police department, said the Trump administration’s characterization of the shooting as self-defense is “spin.”

But even if Minnesota prosecutors conclude the shooting was a crime, can they charge a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent for something he did on the job? No, according to Vice President JD Vance, who asserted that the agent has “absolute immunity” from criminal charges.

The reality isn’t so simple. Minnesota state prosecutors may, in fact, be able to prosecute the federal immigration agent who shot and killed a Minneapolis woman, though the pathway forward would come with special challenges.

State officials announced Jan. 9 that they are collecting evidence surrounding Good’s Jan. 7 death, a signal they may consider bringing charges. The move comes after President Donald Trump and other White House officials suggested the shooting was justified, and state authorities said the FBI pulled out of a joint investigation.

Though the U.S. Department of Justice hasn’t announced whether it will bring charges, the hasty statements by White House officials opposing charges make a federal prosecution seem highly unlikely, especially at a time when the lines between the DOJ and White House are increasingly blurred.

“When you have the president, the vice president, the secretary of homeland security all saying that this was self-defense, there’s zero chance that Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice will move forward with a prosecution at the federal level,” Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor, told USA TODAY.

At a Jan. 9 news conference, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and the top prosecutor for Minneapolis’ Hennepin County, Mary Moriarty, both said they haven’t yet made a charging decision when it comes to Good’s death, and will wait until evidence is evaluated.

Ellison led the state prosecution of Derek Chauvin, a Minneapolis cop convicted in 2021 of murdering a Black man who was under arrest, George Floyd. Moriarty was elected in 2022 on a platform of holding police accountable.