Politics

On Minnesota’s Iron Range, Trump’s Tariffs Could Be Boom or Bust

Published

8 months ago

March 30, 2025

On Minnesota’s Iron Range, Trump’s Tariffs Could Be Boom or Bust

Once a week, most weeks, the ground in Chisholm, Minn., shudders underfoot.

“When they blast over here, we can feel it in town over there,” Jed Holewa, a City Council member, explained as he looked out over the pit of the Hibbing Taconite mine, a machine-made canyon of flint-colored earth extending to the hills just southwest of town.

The low rumble of controlled explosions is reassuring in an area where few livelihoods are more than a couple of degrees removed from the mines. But this month the ground beneath the Iron Range has begun to shift in a very different way.

The sedimentary rock known as taconite, found in abundance in northern Minnesota, yields most of the United States’ iron ore, which in turn is made into steel used by the American auto industry. Thus the seismic effects of President Trump’s March 26 announcement of a 25 percent tariff on all cars and auto parts imported into the United States. The measure is meant to benefit the domestic auto industry, and has earned praise from labor leaders. But analysts predict it will most likely throw that industry into near-term turmoil, and several domestic automakers saw their stock fall last week after Mr. Trump’s announcement.

The tariff announcement comes amid a brewing trade war between the United States and Canada prompted by Mr. Trump’s earlier threats to impose broad tariffs on America’s northern neighbor and its longstanding ally and trading partner. Canada has responded with its own tariffs.

At the same time, Cleveland-Cliffs, the steel conglomerate that controls Hibbing Taconite and other nearby mines, has announced plans to idle production lines and lay off more than 600 mine workers in the region, citing a softening of demand for cars. Mr. Holewa, a diesel mechanic at Hibbing Taconite, was among those waiting to hear his fate.

The son and grandson of miners, Mr. Holewa is well acquainted with both the fortunes and misfortunes of the industry, in which substantial union salaries go hand in hand with risk and uncertainty. His maternal grandfather was killed on the job, crushed by a haul truck. His father was laid off from a mine in Eveleth, Minn., in the 1980s, during the industry’s darkest period. The high points of its uneven recovery were memorialized in the model years of the Fords his family bought when he was growing up: a 1988 Tempo, a 1994 F-150.

Mr. Holewa, a Republican, is also indicative of the shifting politics of the Iron Range, where Mr. Trump made dramatic gains over previous Republican candidates in 2016 — the beginning of a collapse of a onetime rural Democratic stronghold where Republicans have since claimed most of the region’s seats in the State Legislature.

Mr. Holewa, who knocked on doors for Mr. Trump, was quick to note that the conditions that caused the layoffs preceded Mr. Trump’s tariff announcements.

“This has nothing to do with the tariffs,” he said. “Look at the price of vehicles right now. Sales are down. Lots are full.”

But a representative of Cleveland-Cliffs, whose chief executive has vocally supported Mr. Trump’s trade policy, has told local officials that the tariffs could potentially prolong the layoffs, according to Larry Cuffe Jr., the mayor of Virginia, Minn., another Iron Range town. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

And observers of Minnesota industry say the layoffs — the most serious non-Covid-related job cuts the Iron Range’s mines have experienced in a decade — are a reminder of how uniquely exposed the region is to Mr. Trump’s radical trade experiments: how much it stands to gain or lose — or both — from the shocks the president hopes to deliver to the system.

“It’s throwing a big uncertainty into the supply chain,” said Bob Kill, the chief executive of Enterprise Minnesota, an organization that assists manufacturers in the state. “You see it at the Iron Range happening with raw material.”

The range should in theory benefit from the expanded tariffs on imported steel that Mr. Trump announced in February. But it is also sensitive to shifts and uncertainty in the auto market, as this month’s layoffs have shown. And a trade war with Canada could upend many businesses in the region, which is closer to the Canadian border than to Minneapolis, and raise the price of an array of goods and services, including electricity and dairy products.

“We’re going to ride it out and see,” said Mike Jugovich, a county commissioner and a retired Hibbing Taconite miner in St. Louis County, which encompasses most of the Iron Range. “We don’t have a real choice in the matter. We’re joined at the hip to the tariffs.”

Boomtowns both wild and worldly

Most of America’s domestically produced iron has come from northern Minnesota since the turn of the 20th century, when steam shovels backed by Rockefeller and Carnegie money transformed miles of boreal forest into a muddy, sooty sprawl of hard-living frontier camps.

In those years, the mines drew thousands of immigrants from Finland and Croatia and everywhere in between, producing a boomtown culture both wild and cosmopolitan — a place where “the Babel of more than 30 different alien tongues mingles with the crash and clank of machinery,” as a federal immigration agent wrote in a 1912 report.

More than a century later, the Iron Range remains culturally distinct from the rest of the state. In towns like Chisholm, onion-domed churches punctuate residential neighborhoods, red-sauce Italian restaurants line the main drags and bars keep dusty bottles of pelinkovac, a Balkan wormwood liqueur, on the top shelf for the old-timers.

Many go back generations in the mines, their family trees intertwined with histories of corporate consolidations and labor strikes, of booms and, more often, busts.

“Anybody who’s lived on the range understands that these are the cycles that occur,” said Pete Hyduke, the mayor of Hibbing, just south of Chisholm, who went into government after he was laid off from his mining job in the 1980s.

Fewer than half as many miners are now employed on the Iron Range as were at the beginning of the ’80s, when jobs fell victim to technological improvements and to the decline of the domestic steel industry, undercut by cheaper imports and the migration of manufacturing away from the United States.

Today, the range’s fortunes turn largely on trade policy, the push and pull of free-trade agreements and tariffs. This became starkly evident in the 2010s, when China, whose steel production had grown to eclipse every other country’s, began flooding the international market, cutting global prices in half by 2015 and prompting thousands of layoffs at Minnesota’s mines. Since then, “the Iron Range has known that tariffs are important for our domestic production and survival,” said Cal Warwas, a Republican state representative and a steelworker from Clinton Township.

The Obama administration eventually imposed stiff anti-dumping tariffs on China, but the episode exacerbated local discontent with the Democratic Party. Iron Rangers’ fiercely pro-union politics had for decades made the region the great rural redoubt of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, Minnesota’s variant on the Democratic Party. But in a socially conservative area whose fortunes rest on resource extraction, many found themselves dissenting from the D.F.L. on environmental protection and social issues, and convinced that an increasingly urban and suburban party was insufficiently attentive to the range’s economic concerns.

“They’ve become way too woke for me,” said Mr. Cuffe, the Virginia mayor, who left the D.F.L. and endorsed Mr. Trump in 2016.

Mr. Trump outperformed previous Republican candidates in the region in 2016, and endeared himself further by imposing 25 percent tariffs on Chinese steel during his first term. Today, the region’s delegation to the State Legislature is entirely Republican save for one state senator.

Hope and anxiety over tariffs

Tariffs on China are broadly supported by Republicans and Democrats alike on the Iron Range. But Mr. Trump’s promises to levy 25 percent tariffs on Canada and similar penalties on cars and car parts imported to the United States have raised alarm.

“I’m very supportive of protectionist policies on industries that matter to our national defense,” said Grant Hauschild, a state senator from Minnesota’s Canada-bordering Third District, and the one remaining Democrat in the Iron Range’s legislative delegation. “However, haphazard, across-the-board tariffs on everything, everywhere, all at once, on allies as well as adversaries, is not the best policy.”

A core issue, manufacturing experts say, is that even the domestic industries Mr. Trump wants to bolster now rely on complex supply chains that run back and forth across borders with regional trading partners, which are difficult to untangle in places like the Great Lakes region.

This is particularly true of the American auto industry, which “is highly dependent on a robust North American supply chain that often involves cross-border trade,” said Matteo Fini, an analyst at S&P Global. American-made catalytic converters are shipped to Canada for installation in exhaust systems that are then shipped back to the United States. American lithium is made into cathodes in Canada, which are assembled into battery packs in the United States and then sent north again for vehicle production.

Jolts to this system may well be felt on the Iron Range, and broader tariffs on Canada, as well as any reciprocal tariffs Canada imposes, will affect the region in other ways. Minnesota utilities buy Canadian hydropower. Paper mills run on Canadian wood pulp. Tourism and Great Lakes shipping, other mainstays of the regional economy, rely on easy border transit.

The local implications of a trade war are severe enough that some of Mr. Trump’s supporters on the range have concluded that despite his years of tariff evangelism, the president’s recent threats must be a bluff.

“I think it’s just a negotiating tactic to try to get some compromise,” said Mr. Cuffe. He paused. “I’m hoping that’s the case.”

For local Democrats, however, Mr. Trump’s antagonism of their northern neighbors has added confusion to their discontent with the president.

“All this stuff about Canada — I mean, where did it come from?” said Mary Beth Perreira, a retired public health nurse in Hibbing. “If you have a brain, you know that we’re going to pay for it all.”

But others have begun to come around to Mr. Trump’s vision.

“I don’t mind them hitting Canada,” said Tim Simpson, a retired truck driver from Hibbing.

Mr. Simpson moved away from the region for a time in the 1980s, after losing his job at a local taconite mine. A political independent, he voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 but not in 2024.

Still, he said the president’s trade-war bluster might be good for the Iron Range.

“I hope it straightens a lot of stuff out, and we do get a lot of them jobs back,” he said. “We’ve been losing them since the ’60s, since I was a kid.”

Click to comment

Politics

USCIS halts ‘all asylum decisions’ after DC shooting of National Guard members

Published

5 hours ago

November 29, 2025

Press Room

USCIS halts ‘all asylum decisions’ after DC shooting of National Guard members

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced on Friday that it has halted all asylum decisions following the shooting in Washington, D.C., in which an Afghan national was accused of shooting two National Guard members, including one who died from her injuries.

USCIS Director Joseph B. Edlow said the asylum decisions would be suspended “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.”

“The safety of the American people always comes first,” he wrote on X.

The pause comes amid a broader immigration crackdown signaled by President Donald Trump, who on Thursday vowed to halt migration from “Third World countries” and reverse Biden-era admissions.

STATE DEPARTMENT ‘IMMEDIATELY’ HALTS ALL AFGHAN PASSPORT VISAS FOLLOWING DEADLY NATIONAL GUARD ATTACK

National Guard members Sarah Beckstrom, 20, and Andrew Wolfe, 24, were shot in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. (United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia/Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Edlow said on Thursday that officials would reexamine green cards issued to immigrants from every “country of concern,” including Afghanistan. USCIS also implemented new national security measures to be considered while vetting immigrants from “high risk” countries.

“I have directed a full scale, rigorous reexamination of every Green Card for every alien from every country of concern,” he wrote.

ATF and Secret Service officers are seen after two National Guard soldiers were shot near the White House in Washington, D.C., Wednesday, Nov. 26, 2025. (Evan Vucci/AP)

The Department of Homeland Security also said it had already halted all immigration requests from Afghanistan and was in the process of reviewing all asylum cases approved under the Biden administration.

Additionally, the Department of State has paused all visas for people traveling on Afghan passports in response to the attack against the National Guard members.

“The Department of State has IMMEDIATELY paused visa issuance for individuals traveling on Afghan passports,” the agency wrote. “The Department is taking all necessary steps to protect U.S. national security and public safety.”

National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom, 20, of West Virginia, died after the shooting on Wednesday in the nation’s capital, while the second service member wounded in the attack, Andrew Wolfe, 24, is still in critical condition.

The alleged gunman, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, faces multiple charges, including one count of first-degree murder and two counts of assault with intent to kill while armed. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that the Justice Department would pursue the death penalty against the suspect.

WHO IS THE DC NATIONAL GUARDSMEN SHOOTING SUSPECT? WHAT TO KNOW ABOUT AFGHAN NATIONAL RAHMANULLAH LAKANWAL

Undated file photo of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the suspect in the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C., November 26, 2025. (Provided by Department of Justice)

Lakanwal entered the U.S. legally in 2021 under humanitarian parole as part of the Biden administration’s Operation Allies Welcome, following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

He was vetted by the CIA in Afghanistan for his work with the agency and again for his asylum application in the U.S. A senior U.S. official told Fox News he was “clean on all checks” in his background check.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

Lakanwal had his asylum application approved by the Trump administration earlier this year.

A report released by the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General in June found there were “no systemic failures” in Afghan refugee vetting or subsequent immigration pathways.

Politics

Commentary: California’s first partner pushes to regulate AI while Trump and tech bros thunder forward

Published

6 hours ago

November 29, 2025

Press Room

Commentary: California’s first partner pushes to regulate AI while Trump and tech bros thunder forward

California First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom recently convened a meeting that might rank among the top sweat-inducing nightmare scenarios for Silicon Valley’s tech bros — a group of the Golden State’s smartest, most powerful women brainstorming ways to regulate artificial intelligence.

Regulation is the last thing this particular California-dominated industry wants, and it’s spent a lot of cash at both the state and federal capitols to avoid it — including funding President Trump’s new ballroom. Regulation by a bunch of ladies, many mothers, with profit a distant second to our kids when it comes to concerns?

I’ll let you figure out how popular that is likely be with the Elon Musks, Peter Thiels and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world.

But as Siebel Newsom said, “If a platform reaches a child, it carries a responsibility to protect that child. Period. Our children’s safety can never be second to the bottom line.”

Agreed.

Siebel Newsom’s push for California to do more to regulate AI comes at the same time that Trump is threatening to stop states from overseeing the technology — and is ramping up a national effort that will open America’s coffers to AI moguls for decades to come.

Right now, the U.S. is facing its own nightmare scenario: the most powerful and world-changing technology we have seen in our lifetimes being developed and unleashed under almost no rules or restraints other than those chosen by the men who seek personal benefit from the outcome.

To put it simply, the plan right now seems to be that these tech barons will change the world as they see fit to make money for themselves, and we as taxpayers will pay them to do it.

“When decisions are mainly driven by power and profit instead of care and responsibility, we completely lose our way, and given the current alignment between tech titans and the federal administration, I believe we have lost our way,” Siebel Newsom said.

To recap what the way has been so far, Trump recently tried to sneak a 10-year ban on the ability of states to oversee the industry into his ridiculously named “Big Beautiful Bill,” but it was pulled out by a bipartisan group in the Senate — an early indicator of how inflammatory this issue is.

Faced with that unexpected blockade, Trump has threatened to sign a mysterious executive order crippling states’ ability to regulate AI and attempting to withhold funds from those that try.

Simultaneously, the most craven and cowardly among Republican congresspeople have suggested adding a 10-year ban to the upcoming defense policy bill that will almost certainly pass. Of course, Congress has also declined to move forward on any meaningful federal regulations itself, while technology CEOs including Trump frenemy Musk, Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Zuckerberg and many others chum it up at fancy events inside the White House.

Which may be why this week, Trump announced the “Genesis Mission,” an executive order that seemingly will take the unimaginable vastness of government research efforts across disciplines and dump them into some kind of AI model that will “revolutionize the way scientific research is conducted.”

While I am sure that nothing could possibly go wrong in that scenario, that’s not actually the part that is immediately alarming. This is: The project will be overseen by Trump science and technology policy advisor Michael Kratsios, who holds no science or engineering degrees but was formerly a top executive for Thiel and former head of another AI company that works on warfare-related projects with the Pentagon.

Kratsios is considered one of the main reasons Trump has embraced the tech bros with such adoration in his second term. Genesis will almost certainly mean huge government contracts for these private-sector “partners,” fueling the AI boom (or bubble) with taxpayer dollars.

Siebel Newsom’s message in the face of all this is that we are not helpless — and California, as the home of many of these companies and the world’s fourth-largest economy in its own right, should have a say in how this technology advances, and make sure it does so in a way that benefits and protects us all.

“California is uniquely positioned to lead the effort in showing innovation and responsibility and how they can go hand in hand,” she said. “I’ve always believed that stronger guardrails are actually good for business over the long term. Safer tech means better outcomes for consumers and greater consumer trust and loyalty.”

But the pressure to cave under the might of these companies is intense, as Siebel Newsom’s husband knows.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent the last few years trying to thread the needle on state legislation that offers some sort of oversight while allowing for the innovation that rightly keeps California and the United States competitive on the global front. The tech industry has spent millions in lobbying, legal fights and pressure campaigns to water down even the most benign of efforts, even threatening to leave the state if rules are enacted.

Last year, the industry unsuccessfully tried to stop Senate Bill 53, landmark legislation signed by Newsom. It’s a basic transparency measure on “frontier” AI models that requires companies to have safety and security protocols and report known “catastrophic” risks, such as when these models show tendencies toward behavior that could kill more than 50 people — which they have, believe it or not.

But the industry was able to stop other efforts. Newsom vetoed both Senate Bill 7, which would have required employers to notify workers when using AI in hiring and promotions; and Assembly Bill 1064, which would have barred companion chatbot operators from making these AI systems available to minors if they couldn’t prove they wouldn’t do things like encourage kids to self-harm, which again, these chatbots have done.

Still, California (along with New York and a few other states) has pushed forward, and speaking at Siebel Newsom’s event, the governor said that last session, “we took a number of at-bats at this and we made tremendous progress.”

He promised more.

“We have agency. We can shape the future,” he said. “We have a unique responsibility as it relates to these tools of technology, because, well, this is the center of that universe.”

If Newsom does keep pushing forward, it will be in no small part because of Siebel Newsom, and women like her, who keep the counter-pressure on.

In fact, it was another powerful mom, First Lady Melania Trump, who forced the federal government into a tiny bit of action this year when she championed the “Take It Down Act”, which requires tech companies to quickly remove nonconsensual explicit images. I sincerely doubt her husband would have signed that particular bill without her urging.

So, if we are lucky, the efforts of women like Siebel Newsom may turn out to be the bit of powerful sanity needed to put a check on the world-domination fantasies of the broligarchy.

Because tech bros are not yet all-powerful, despite their best efforts, and certainly not yet immune to the power of moms.

Politics

‘Squad’ member mourns ’empty’ Thanksgiving seats due to ‘loved ones abducted & deported,’ ‘mass incarceration’

Published

23 hours ago

November 28, 2025

Press Room

‘Squad’ member mourns ’empty’ Thanksgiving seats due to ‘loved ones abducted & deported,’ ‘mass incarceration’

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

As Americans around the nation celebrated Thanksgiving on Thursday, progressive Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts — a member of the left-wing cadre of House lawmakers known as the “Squad” — indicated that there were vacant seats at some tables due to people being “abducted & deported.”

“This Thanksgiving, I’m thinking of our neighbors with an empty seat at the dinner table. Those with loved ones abducted & deported from their families. Those we lost due to gun violence, mass incarceration, & more. A more just America is possible, if we fight for it,” Pressley said in the post.

President Donald Trump’s administration has been cracking down on illegal immigration.

DEM REP CONDEMNS TRUMP ADMIN FOR BEING ‘CRUEL ENOUGH’ TO ISSUE WORK REQUIREMENTS FOR FOOD STAMPS

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., listens during a news conference near the U.S. Capitol Building on Sept. 25, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

Democratic Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, another squad member, said that Thanksgiving reminds some people of “stolen land and broken treaties.”

“Thanksgiving is a time of gratitude and community for many, but it’s also a reminder of stolen land and broken treaties for others. As we give thanks today, let’s also honor Indigenous communities by committing to the fight for sovereignty, justice, and freedom,” Lee declared in a post on Thursday.

SQUAD 2.0: MEET AMERICA’S NEXT WAVE OF RADICAL DEMOCRATS SHAPING THE PARTY’S FUTURE

Ranking Member Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., looks on as DHS Inspector General Joseph Cuffari testifies before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Federal Law Enforcement in the Rayburn House Office Building on July 23, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

In a post last month, Pressley indicated that Americans are living “on stolen land.”

“Happy Indigenous People’s Day! We are all on stolen land,” Pressley declared in the post.

‘SQUAD’ DEM LAUNCHES COMEBACK HOUSE BID AFTER ANTI-ISRAEL VIEWS TORPEDOED CAMPAIGN: ‘WE NEED A FIGHTER’

Ayanna Pressley speaks during the SXSW Conference & Festivals held at the Austin Convention Center on March 9, 2025, in Austin, Texas (Amy E. Price/SXSW Conference & Festivals via Getty Images)

“And while Republicans try to whitewash American history, we acknowledge our country’s role in inflicting trauma on our Indigenous neighbors. We’ll keep celebrating their contributions, centering Native voices in our policymaking, & building a more just, equitable future,” she added.

Alex Nitzberg is a writer for Fox News Digital.