Tell us something from your college years that you find inspiring.

I’ll never forget Jesse Jackson’s speech when he was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988. He talked about his own background — how he got his name from his stepfather, for example, and how the family had Thanksgiving dinner at night because that was when his mother got off work. And how they ate leftovers. He said that if they could persist in the face of challenges like that, any one of us can — and should. He said we should never give up, and that has stuck with me in my own career and in my own life.

You’ve completed your first year at the Council’s Public Affairs Institute. How was that experience?

For someone from Minneapolis, just being in Southern California in January is nirvana. But, seriously, the level of expertise assembled in one place is amazing. You get to learn so much from so many different perspectives. But one thing that impressed me in maybe an unusual way was a presentation from Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He talked about power and leadership, but what struck me at the time was a very 1980s perspective — like something out of the cutthroat world of Glengarry Glen Ross. He seemed to say power is attained by people who seek it at all costs, and once it is attained, then you are in a position not to have to apologize.

This rubbed me and some of the other participants the wrong way at the time. But it now occurs to me how valuable that understanding is in light of the current administration. This administration seems to operate from that 1980s paradigm, which is so far removed from how I have tried to conduct myself in my own career in politics and public service — and that is true, in many ways, for my whole generation. By contrast, we try to involve as many voices as possible in decision-making and the formulation of policy, to be respectful of different points of view, and to hold ourselves to the highest ethical standards.

How, as someone who lives and works in Minneapolis, do you regard media coverage of ICE operations there?

As wild as it might seem to people just following the news, media coverage, if anything, has been sanitized. The everyday reality has been dystopian — really post-apocalyptic — like something out of The Handmaid’s Tale. Everybody in my family now carries their passports at all times, and we have lived in the Minneapolis area since, like, 1908. We just never knew if we’d be accused of being undocumented. During the siege, you’d see ICE agents in masks and unmarked cars roaming up and down the streets, then suddenly surrounding a bar, ready to confront anybody who looked like they might be a person of color. I’ve served in the legislature and worked in government affairs for almost 20 years, and I’d never seen anything like it.

And all this goes back, in some respects, to the killing of George Floyd, right?

In a sense, it does, which is a tragedy. Because after that, in 2020, we were making real progress in Minneapolis in developing a community policing model. We were working toward a “guardian vs. warrior” mentality, where police are there to help — to be guardians. And then ICE arrived, and there was no cooperation at all between ICE and local law enforcement. So all that good work that was being done suffered a real setback.

How did the local business community respond to the troubles there?

We have something like 17 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. Target, for example, is actually an outgrowth of Dayton’s, which was a local department store founded in 1902. These Fortune 500 companies made an effort to address the problems during that period, issuing a letter that hoped to tone down the uproar.