Daily Digest: Ellison stays in Congress

Good morning, and welcome to Monday. I hope you had a good weekend. Apparently there was a big mix-up at the Academy Awards last night, but as far as I can tell no one was injured. Here's the Digest.

1. Keith Ellison left the Democratic National Committee meeting in Atlanta with a new title, but it wasn't the one he wanted. The Minnesota congressman is now the deputy chairman of the DNC, under Tom Perez, who out-polled him on Saturday for the top job. That means Ellison will be staying in Congress, and the host of Democrats who had hoped to succeed him will have to continue waiting. (MPR News)

2. A demonstration in Minneapolis over the weekend turned into an altercation inside the usually quiet Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Three people who appeared to be neo-Nazis fought with several others in another group of activists, a witness said Sunday. Institute Director Kaywin Feldman said some of those involved in the incident were among roughly two dozen people staging a protest outside the museum in opposition to anti-immigration sentiment in the United States. When the group said to look like neo-Nazis entered the admission-free museum, several from the protest outside followed, and a fight ensued amid the 18th-century European art. (Star Tribune)

3. About 54 percent of the presidential vote in Worthington went to Donald Trump, whose immigration policies are now causing plenty of concern in southwest Minnesota. The vote total doesn't seem to square up with the town's need for immigrant workers and its increasingly diverse population, which began transforming Worthington from a nearly all white community to a rainbow of faces some 30 years ago when the town's meatpacking plant expanded. (MPR News)

4. There is a backlog of more than 5,100 immigration cases covering Minnesota, the Dakotas and western Wisconsin. Nationally, the backlog exceeded 542,000 cases for the first time last year, according to data from Syracuse University. Supporters of the administration’s harder line on enforcement say record immigration court backlogs do pose a hurdle. But they note that the administration plans to bypass court hearings for more recent or repeat border crossers and for more immigrants with criminal convictions. (Star Tribune)

5. President Trump will instruct federal agencies on Monday to assemble a budget for the coming fiscal year that would include sharp increases in Defense Department spending; major cuts to other agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency; and no reductions to the largest entitlement programs, Social Security and Medicare, according to four senior administration officials. (New York Times)

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