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Good morning, Minnesota! Rain, rain, go away. It's winter for goodness' sake — let it snow ❄️ On to the news 📢

Leila Navidi/The Minnesota Star Tribune

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to curb refugee admissions into the United States. And the pledge has some people worried in Minnesota, which has a long history of accepting people displaced from Somalia and other East African countries.

“On Day One of the Trump presidency, I will restore the travel ban, suspend refugee admission, stop the resettlement and keep the terrorists the hell out of our country,” Trump said during a rally in St. Cloud this summer.

Trump lowered the ceiling for refugee admissions during his first presidency — only 100 Somali refugees were admitted to Minnesota in 2020. This year, by contrast, the state welcomed more than 1,200 Somali refugees.

Many fear those numbers will decline soon after Trump takes office.

Take Laali Mohamud, who resettled in the U.S. in 2015. She began the process to bring her family stateside soon after, but the case stalled soon after Trump began his first term.

Instead of going to college, Mohamud had to work two jobs so she could earn enough to feed herself and send money overseas to her family. Her grandmother died in a refugee camp.

Reporter Maya Rao has the full story at the link below, along with a couple of other stories about the ways other immigrant groups are preparing for a second Trump administration.

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Marlin Levison/The Minnesota Star Tribune

The VFW on Lyndale Avenue in Minneapolis — commonly referred to as the Uptown VFW — hosts raucous karaoke nights, holds high school battles of the bands and boasts some of the best quesa-birria tacos in the Twin Cities. (So we're told.)

Its official name is the James Ballentine VFW Post 246. Why?

That's the question at the heart of this week's edition of the Minnesota Star Tribune's reader-powered reporting project. Who was this Ballentine fellow? And why does he have a VFW named after him?

Reporter Erica Pearson has the full story at the link here.

@lauragmitchell.com via Bluesky

There are people who see the glass as half-empty and others who see it as half-full. (And journalists will tell you they're the kind of people who see 4 ounces of liquid in an 8-ounce glass.)

But this observation from Our Streets' Laura Mitchell certainly falls in the glass-half-full category. It can be difficult to navigate snowbanks as a motorist, pedestrian and cyclist. But sometimes those banks make for a good barrier between bike lanes and the rest of the street.

Eder Campuzano, reporter

David Taintor, editor