News
Minneapolis Promises Police Overhaul in Deal With Justice Department
The Minneapolis City Council unanimously voted on Monday to overhaul its police department to address a pattern of systemic abuses, as part of an agreement with the Department of Justice.
Lawyers from the Department of Justice and the city, where George Floyd was killed in 2020 by a police officer, have raced in recent weeks to finalize terms of the deal, known as a consent decree, before President-elect Donald J. Trump takes office. The previous Trump administration opposed the use of consent decrees, and the fate of nearly a dozen other federal investigations into American police departments is uncertain.
Under the deal approved on Monday, the Minneapolis department promised to closely track and investigate allegations of police misconduct, rein in the use of force, and improve officer training.
“This agreement reflects what our community has asked for and what we know is necessary: real accountability and meaningful change,” Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis said in a statement.
Federal oversight, the strongest tool available to overhaul police departments with histories of abuse, begins with an exhaustive civil rights investigation and a report of findings. Cities then usually agree to negotiate a consent decree, a court-enforced oversight agreement, in order to avoid a federal lawsuit.
The Minneapolis decree was set in motion in the summer of 2023 after the Department of Justice issued a report accusing the city’s police department of routinely discriminating against Black and Native American residents, of needlessly using deadly force and of violating the First Amendment rights of protesters and journalists. The Minneapolis police union did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
City officials and lawyers from the Justice Department said they intended to present the deal to a federal judge, who will be responsible for overseeing its implementation.
During Mr. Trump’s first term in the White House, the Justice Department rejected such decrees, coming out in opposition to deals in Chicago and Baltimore and refraining from entering new ones. More recently, during a campaign rally last year, Mr. Trump said that in order to crack down on crime, the police should be allowed to be “extraordinarily rough,” and he spoke about the possibility of letting officers loose from constraints during “one really violent day.”
Officials in Minneapolis said they would remain committed to lasting change in the city’s police department, even if the Trump administration were to walk away from federal consent decrees. Several months before the Department of Justice report was issued, the city agreed to a policing overhaul as part of an agreement with the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.
Minneapolis set aside $27 million in its 2024 and 2025 budgets to pay for changes in response to the state and federal investigations. The city also paid $27 million to Mr. Floyd’s family in 2021 to settle their wrongful death lawsuit.
Consent decrees were pursued aggressively under President Barack Obama, whose administration entered into 15 of the decrees in a time of a growing public outcry over police abuses.
After Mr. Trump’s administration steered away from such decrees, the Justice Department under the Biden administration sought to bring them back, launching a dozen civil rights investigations into police departments.
But the Biden administration has been slow to bring those efforts to a resolution, in some cases letting years elapse. The Justice Department’s civil rights division has released a flurry of investigative findings in recent weeks, covering cities like Memphis, where the department found excessive force and racial discrimination; Mount Vernon, N.Y., where it found illegal arrests and strip searches; and Oklahoma City, where it found chronic mistreatment of people with behavioral disabilities by the police.
Some cities, like Memphis and Phoenix, which was the subject of an investigation after an extraordinarily high number of shootings by the police, have balked at entering into oversight agreements. The agreements usually call for changes in a number of aspects of a police department’s operations, training, policies and discipline, and can take a decade to complete.
The Biden administration is currently enforcing 15 consent decrees reached under previous administrations, but has completed only one other new one besides Minneapolis, in Louisville, Ky.
Those agreements and the department’s remaining investigations will be handed over to the Trump administration.
Devlin Barrett contributed reporting.
Topline
The National Weather Service is cautioning people in Midwest and Northeast states to monitor local air quality as smoke from hundreds of Canadian wildfires continues to pour over the border and American politicians rail against the country as over 150 fires burn out of control.
People sit near the Brooklyn Bridge as wildfire smoke from Canada causes hazy conditions on July 16, 2026 in New York.
AFP via Getty Images
Key Facts
The National Weather Service issued air quality alerts early Saturday morning due to wildfire smoke spanning portions of Minnesota, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
Smoke will continue to affect New York City through the afternoon, according to the National Weather Service, which noted in a statement that “upstream areas in the Midwest and UpperGreat Lakes will likely contend with poor air quality” at least through Sunday.
New York, including New York City, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland dealt with “unhealthy” air and a widespread haze from the smoke on Friday.
The smoke is spilling across borders from roughly 820 wildfires burning in Canada, 156 of which are still designated “out of control.”
President Donald Trump said Friday he would increase tariffs against Canada because of the wildfires, accusing the country of “not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush.”
Republican members of Congress also slammed Canada’s government for what they perceived as inaction in preventing and stopping the wildfires causing the smoke and poor air quality, with one even calling for sanctions.
Four Michigan Republicans—Reps. John James, Jack Bergman, John Moolenaar and Lisa McClain—said in a letter this week that Canada “has the tools to prevent” the smoke from pouring into the U.S. and “has chosen not to,” and Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) said in a post on X that he will table a bill next week to “sanction Canada and the responsible Canadian government officials for this atrocity.”
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“Our constituents are breathing the consequences of this failure right now, and they deserve better than to be told, again, that it will be handled,” the Michigan lawmakers said in their letter.
HOW TO STAY SAFE FROM WILDFIRE SMOKE
Those in states with extreme air quality warnings are being cautioned to limit outdoor activity and, in states with very unhealthy and hazardous warnings, to stay inside altogether with windows closed. Doctors advise anyone with heart or lung disease to stay indoors, and other groups to take precautions. For people who work outside, health officials have recommended wearing an N95 mask, which can filter at least 95% of airborne particles.
WHY IS WIldFIRE SMOKE SO DANGEROUS?
Smoke from wildfires is made of water vapor, pollutants and particulate matter, which can penetrate the lungs and bloodstream, trigger systemic inflammation, exacerbate conditions like asthma and increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes. Smoke also contains a mix of harmful gases, most notably carbon monoxide. Wildfire smoke has been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular health problems, with children and teenagers, older adults, pregnant people and anyone with pre-existing heart or lung conditions at a particular risk.
SHOULD PEOPLE IN WILDFIRE SMOKE STATES WEAR A MASK?
When the Air Quality Index rises to unhealthy levels, masks are recommended for people who must spend time outside. Respirator masks worn correctly may provide some protection against fine particles in the smoke, but they do not help with hazardous gases. Staying inside is considered the safest option, but those who must go outside can mitigate some risk by wearing a mask. N95 or P100 respirators are considered the most effective.
Key background
Scientists say climate change is creating hotter, drier conditions and longer fire seasons, increasing the likelihood of large, intense wildfires across North America. NASA says human-caused warming is driving more frequent and severe wildfire conditions in many regions, and that extreme wildfire activity has more than doubled worldwide over the past two decades. Research shows fire seasons in some areas are now more than a month longer than they were 35 years ago, and those larger fires also produce more smoke, allowing hazardous air pollution to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles and affect millions of people far from the flames.
BIG NUMBER
$394 billion to $893 billion. That’s the annual cost of wildfires in the United States each year, according to the Joint Economic Committee, including direct and indirect deaths and injuries, health impacts from wildfire smoke, income loss, watershed pollution and other factors.
further reading
ICE agents stand guard outside a immigrant detention center in Newark, New Jersey in May 2026. Medicaid officials improperly shared data about millions of people with ICE, who then shared that data with the data analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings.
Adam Gray/Getty Images
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Adam Gray/Getty Images
After Medicaid officials improperly shared data about millions of people in January with immigration officials, ICE then shared that data with the data analytics firm Palantir, according to new court filings. Palantir operates an app called ELITE that is used by ICE agents to show the addresses of noncitizens who may be subject to deportation.
That revelation was made public in a motion filed Thursday by more than 20 Democratic attorneys general who sued the Trump administration last year over its data-sharing agreement between the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and ICE.
U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria in California ruled in December that health officials could share with ICE certain details from Medicaid data about immigrants without lawful status from the states that had sued, such as home addresses, dates of birth and immigration status.
Chhabria, who was appointed by former President Obama, then temporarily paused data sharing between CMS and ICE for immigration enforcement purposes in late May after federal officials admitted CMS had shared data with ICE in January that went beyond what the court order allowed. One dataset of refugees in Minnesota included U.S. citizens, and another that was transferred on Jan. 7 contained data of millions of people, including those in the country legally.
ICE was supposed to delete the improperly shared data. Chhabria set a hearing for August to further clarify his order and clear up ambiguity regarding which categories of noncitizens’ data could be lawfully shared with ICE.
But in recent days, federal officials have admitted to additional instances of improper data sharing.
In a court filing last week, the Justice Department said that CMS again inadvertently reshared with ICE the dataset with millions of names that CMS had first improperly shared with ICE in January. The government said the error occurred during an effort to share data from states not involved in the lawsuit.
Alberto Briseno, a section chief for ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, wrote in a declaration that ICE personnel deleted the file after it was discovered and it was not used for law enforcement purposes.
Then Briseno revealed that a day later, the agency had done a broader search and discovered that half a dozen users still had a copy of the Jan. 7 dataset.
In that most recent declaration, Briseno said he was not aware of any additional copies of the dataset, but said the recent searches have “highlighted technological difficulties of making a representation that every possible variation of the file has been searched for and located.” He added, “ICE will continue to make good faith efforts to delete any copies that may be found in the future.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is asking the judge to expand his order to allow ICE to receive data on a broader category of noncitizens – to potentially include all immigrants who are not legal permanent residents, citizens or have another form of permanent status.
“ICE’s inability to identify Medicaid records in its possession undercuts any claim that the agency should be entitled to more access to that data,” the Democratic attorneys generals wrote in their motion filed late Thursday.
Their motion continued, “Each successive revelation of a violation of the Order makes it more difficult for Plaintiff States to have confidence in Defendants’ ability to maintain and secure this data in compliance with the Order, and more difficult for Plaintiff States to communicate assurances to Medicaid providers, enrollees (and their counsel), and the public at large about the privacy and confidentiality of their healthcare data.”
Palantir did not immediately return a request for comment about whether the company had deleted the Jan. 7 dataset that ICE had shared after improperly receiving it from CMS. DHS also didn’t immediately return a request for comment about its transfer of data to Palantir.
According to a declaration filed by California deputy attorney general Anna Rich, when plaintiffs asked what federal officials did to ensure Palantir and other contractors had purged the data, defendants responded that the data had been shared over a Microsoft Teams chat and the shared data was deleted from the chat. Rich shared in her declaration a document turned over in discovery from federal officials that shows a redacted transcript of what appears to be ICE personnel asking Palantir to delete the file.
In an April 30 hearing, Chhabria had warned the federal government would not be able to continue using Medicaid data for deportation efforts if it continued improperly sharing the data of citizens and legal immigrants.
“If the federal government cannot be sufficiently careful then it can’t use the information, ok?” Chhabria had said.
ICE has been trying to continue its mass deportations without drawing headlines. Our White House correspondent Zolan Kanno-Youngs explains how two fatal shootings at traffic stops raise the question of whether the Trump administration can continue its campaign without deadly consequences.
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