Case Explained: 2025 year in review • Minnesota Reformer – Legal Perspective

I moved from Boston to St. Paul in August not knowing what to expect, having talked to the Reformer team a few times and heard tales of the Twin Cities’ “underratedness.” My only experience with the place was a conference in March when the ground was covered with snow and I mostly stayed in the Minneapolis skyways.

Since then, I’ve gotten to know far more about the state’s political landscape, education system, political activists and human services programs than I could have foreshadowed this time last year.

In between writing stories for the Reformer, I’ve also loved exploring the music, food and nature of the Twin Cities and have met some wonderful communities here.

Here are some of my favorite topics from my first few months at the Reformer (plus a freelance piece I wrote in April).

Understanding law enforcement through data

In my role as the newsroom’s data reporter, I’ve tried to get more insight into how law enforcement agencies operate. For example, I wrote a piece in April looking at contracts that federal immigration enforcement has in Minnesota. This was before I joined the Reformer; I had just learned how to search through federal contracts data during the conference in Minneapolis (also where I learned about the Reformer).

Among other findings, I learned that the University of Minnesota was the country’s only university actively contracted with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via a lease of its gun range to ICE since 2022. University students had already been agitating against ICE and added the issue to its list of demands. The U stopped leasing its gun range to all outside groups, including ICE, in September.

I was able to experience firsthand how my work with publicly available data could translate to an issue for student activists.

I also looked through Minnesota’s asset forfeiture reports, inheriting former Reformer data reporter Chris Ingraham’s interest in the topic. The reports show how much money local law enforcement agencies seize and keep each year, sometimes from people who haven’t yet been convicted of a crime. I found that while state forfeitures dropped — a point of victory for the state’s 2021 asset forfeiture reform — local agencies’ proceeds from federal-state sharing of federal forfeitures went up in the last report.

I learned in the process that the Minneapolis Police Department spent over $500,000 of forfeiture gains on two cars.

Fraud in Minnesota’s Medicaid programs

Fraud in the state’s safety net programs, and the Trump administration’s recent attacks on Somali-Americans in Minnesota superficially related to that fraud, has received enough national attention that my friends in Massachusetts are sending me Instagram Reels on the subject.

In addition to data journalism, I cover health care, so recently I’ve been focused on the defrauding of state-run Medicaid programs designed to serve the disabled and elderly and how  state and federal governments are dealing with fraud.

The story Madison McVan and I wrote on Gov. Tim Walz’s office’s confusing announcement of a third-party audit of Medicaid programs was a lesson in the tricky language of appearance versus reality in politics. The audit is a frequent refrain from Walz when he fields questions about what his administration is doing to address fraud, though a month later, he still didn’t seem to understand the basics of how the audit works.

I don’t expect the average politically-engaged Minnesotan to be interested in the difference between a wholesale pause of 14 Medicaid programs and a pre-payment review of claims in those programs, but the governor who is facing national scrutiny on the topic — that feels a little different.

I’ve spoken to disabled Medicaid recipients and their lawyers; Medicaid providers — some accused of fraud by the state — and their lawyers; and trade organizations for providers, to get a better sense of the impacts of fraud as well as the state’s response.

For example, some providers suspected of disability services fraud were actually helping disabled people at least sometimes (whether they overbilled the state is another matter). This means that some disabled Medicaid recipients were cut off from important services as a result of the Department of Human Services’ crackdown on fraud, recipients’ lawyers told me.

I’m looking forward to going deeper into this subject in the new year, especially after some major recent developments: A federal prosecutor estimated that fraud in those Medicaid programs likely exceeds $9 billion — a figure since questioned by state officials. And the day before that, the House fraud chair dropped anonymized diagrams of fraud networks in assisted living homes and tied them to a Feeding Our Future defendant.

On the personal side, I’m excited to keep exploring Minnesota in 2026. Send recommendations, and any tips or thoughts on health care and data journalism, to [email protected].