Walter Hudson does not want someone protesting outside your home.
“Our culture has traditionally regarded the home as a sacred place not to be violated by disruptive or coercive activity,” the state representative from Albertville said at a House committee hearing last week.
But, Hudson warned, “In recent years, we’ve seen a troubling trend of coercive agitators, cloaked in the guise of activism, deliberately targeting private residences, not to persuade, not to make a credible argument, but to intimidate the individuals and families who reside there.”
He gave as an example protesters who six years ago smashed a piñata outside the residence of Bob Kroll, the former Minneapolis Police Federation president who retired shortly after the murder of George Floyd, and Kroll’s wife, journalist Liz Collin.
But Hudson’s bill to ban protests outside homes did not clear the House Judiciary and Public Safety Committee. DFLers expressed alarm that the bill is written so broadly that ICE protesters who walk past your house could get criminally charged.
Hudson, who said that the measure has nothing to do with ICE demonstrators (it was first introduced last session), said that he is open to revising the bill’s language.
Hudson’s idea is one of a variety of proposals that Republicans put forward in the first two weeks of a legislative session in which they share power in the House and are a one-vote minority in the Senate.
The proposals reflect the party’s unerring conviction that social services fraud under the watch of Gov. Tim Walz is the first, second and third most important issues that Minnesotans face today.
“We’re in the middle of the biggest welfare fraud scandal in American history, right here in Minnesota,” Sen. Michael Kreun, R-Blaine, exclaimed to reporters last week.
But Republican lawmakers also show nuance on how to address fraud. And measures like Hudson’s reflect Republicans trying to show they are the law-and-order party even after the chaos of Operation Metro Surge.
A look at legislative Republicans’ priorities.
Uncovering fraud in Minnesota social services
On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that it plans to claw back $259 million in Medicaid money that had been given to Minnesota at the end of 2025 due to general concerns about fraud. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison indicated in a statement that the state will probably sue to recoup the money.
This money is in addition to the Trump administration previously threatening to withhold $2 billion in Medicaid dollars, and up to $467 million child care assistance funding. The Medicaid withholding is tied up in federal administrative appeals, while a judge has blocked for now the child care cut.
Meanwhile, Republicans (and DFLers, including the governor) have proposed a series of measures that focus on tackling future fraud or present instances that have not been reported.
The most publicized fraud-fighting bill is creating an independent office of the inspector general to launch investigations across the executive branch.
Kreun served as co-author on a Senate version of this that passed last year. A companion measure is bottled up in the House largely because Republicans want the office to have law enforcement power, while the DFL would like the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension to prosecute bad actors.
Kreun said that IG law enforcement would be independent, warning that a future governor could have “undue influence” over the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and “stall out important work.”
But the IG office carries an estimated price tag of just $6 million-a-year and arguably replicates existing government parts. Republicans admit that preventing future scandals requires a lot more.
Related: With the Minnesota Legislature set to return, DFLers are on the offensive. Republicans have a leaner agenda, including fighting fraud.
Mike Koran, R-North Branch, said that the Minnesota Department of Human Services and counties that administer Medicaid must update their technology to better keep track of patients and care providers.
“We need to have an intensive eligibility determination process, utilizing the best of all technologies,” Koran said at a press conference last week.
DFLers agree.
“Many of the programs that are involved in the Medicaid space are Oregon Trail-vintage programming,” House DFL Leader Zack Stephenson, DFL-Coon Rapids, told reporters Wednesday. “You’ve got to remember DOS in order to be able to run them.”
There has yet to be a specific bill to do the unsexy work of building digital databases, which Koran estimated could cost up to $500 million. But Republicans indicated that expanding the government’s capabilities is worth it to combat fraud.
“What you’re seeing here is efforts to invest in small projects or big projects with small dollars relative to the fraud that’s going on,” said Senate Minority Leader Mark Johnson, R-East Grand Forks.
Fishing for government waste
Today, the federal government pays for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits received by 440,000 Minnesotans. But, under the One Big Beautiful Bill, states must (starting in 2027) pay a fraction of the cost if they have error rates above 6%.
The error rate is the federal Food Nutrition Service’s estimate of how many people on SNAP receive more or less money than they are entitled based on monthly income.
For fiscal year 2024, Minnesota had a 9% error rate. Seventy percent of this is accounted for by overpayments to SNAP recipients. The other 30% is underpayments, per federal data.
Minnesota does better than the rest of the country on this error rate, which is nationally at 10%.
And yet.
Last week, Rep. Pam Altendorf, R-Red Wing, and Rep. Nolan West, R-Blaine, floated a bill to crack down on how the state administers SNAP.
“What we’ve recently seen in Minnesota welfare programs is a lot of exploitation,” West said.
But neither lawmaker could provide an example from this decade of a Minnesotan deliberately exploiting SNAP, with the exception Hennepin County resident Latasha Thomas. A jury sentenced Thomas this month to one year in prison and ordered her to pay back $325,000 that she bilked from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Related: Walz resuscitates his push for an assault weapons ban, but has enough changed since Annunciation?
West and Altendorf blamed their lack of evidence on the state not sharing information requested by the Trump administration. (This is part of a convoluted legal saga where Trump wants the state of Minnesota to recertify SNAP recipients program eligibility.)
The lawmakers want to include an asset-based test so people with low-incomes but, say, a stock portfolio or a fancy car, cannot access SNAP. Channeling Ronald Reagan’s welfare queen, West said (with no supporting evidence) that SNAP recipients could be driving a Mercedes G-class SUV.
“You may love your G-wagon, but if you need taxpayers to pay for your food, it’s time to sell your G-wagon,” West said.
Altendorf is also on the warpath over voter rolls. The lawmaker said that Hennepin County provided her with voter records and that “there are thousands of voter records with discrepancies, omissions or questions of eligibility.”
Hennepin County told the Minnesota Star Tribune that the information was provided in error, and that Altendorf misunderstood the data. In an interview, Altendorf declined to pass along what she found.
“This data is not to be shared with anyone,” she said, stating it is highly sensitive.
The SNAP and voter issues raise questions about whether Republicans are reaching in their criticisms of DFL governance during an election year. Johnson said this is not the case, stating that bill authors are “working across the aisle and trying to get the support they need to get it done for Minnesota.”
Holding the line of immigration and guns
A few weeks ago NBC News asked over 1,200 Minnesota adults, “Do you approve or disapprove of the way Donald Trump is handling the issue of border security and immigration?”
Fifty-three percent of respondents replied that they strongly disapproved, while 31% strongly approved.
DFLers are quite aware of this, and they have employed a full-court press to keep measures to rein in ICE in the public eye. Republicans reply that most immigration enforcement issues are none of the state government’s business, and that even if these bills pass they will either be unenforceable or get thrown out in court.
“Democrats are going to spend a lot of committee time in the Senate talking about these bills,” Johnson said, but ultimately immigration enforcement is “federal jurisdiction and our actions here will have little impact on that.”
Republicans are also not budging on an assault weapons ban, despite a Lumaris Research poll of 1,200 Minnesota adults indicating that 69% support such a law. The party voted in lockstep at the House Public Safety Committee this week against a ban on assault rifles as well as high-capacity magazines.
As to what Republicans want to change when it comes to public safety, Rep. Bidal Duran, R-Bemidji, has a bill similar in spirit to Hudson’s ban on residential protesting. Duran wants to make it a crime for someone to knowingly publish the public address of a police officer, a protection that already exists for judges.
And Hudson has a separate measure to increase criminal penalties for second-time gun offenders.
At last week’s House Public Safety Committee hearing, DFLers explored the unintended consequences of these proposals.
Protesters “expressing what’s happening in their community as they pass in front of anybody’s home is a violation in how this is written,” Rep. Dave Pinto, DFL-St. Paul, told Hudson.
But Democrats also expressed openness to working with Republicans. Rep. Sandra Feist, DFL-New Brighton, suggested that the protest ban could be furled into existing statute concerning targeted residential harassment.
Hudson replied to Feist, “That’s an intriguing idea. Let’s talk about it.”
