Minnesota is experiencing a federal action targeting our state’s most vulnerable, marginalized communities. Minnesotans from all walks of life are volunteering as legal observers, in school patrols, and as donors to community funds to keep their neighbors safe, fed, and housed.
Federal efforts jeopardize neighbors’ fundamental freedom to move safely through Minnesota communities, stripping access to family and friends, jobs, school, daily needs, and the safe streets necessary to make those connections possible.
Our Streets focuses on these questions of freedom and racial and economic equity. Our organization seeks to make streets places that connect and uplift, rather than harm and divide people across the Twin Cities and Minnesota. The heart of our work is to empower and uplift marginalized voices at the grassroots level, building a more equitable and just future.
Communities impacted by transportation projects deserve full consideration of their goals and concerns, as well as actionable input in project decision-making. Today, because of our current crisis, that is impossible.
How Transportation Decisionmakers Can Meet the Current Moment
1. Direct MnDOT to Pause Its Largest Projects in Vulnerable Communities
The Rethinking I-94 and Highway 252 projects are the Minnesota Department of Transportation’s (MnDOT) largest and most politically fraught transportation projects. Both corridors run through marginalized communities, including immigrant, low-income, Black and Brown folks; all groups that have been historically harmed by transportation decision-making and are the targets of current federal attacks.
The stakes couldn’t be higher for those living along I-94 and Highway 252. MnDOT’s projects will define their neighborhoods for the next century, yet residents cannot safely attend project engagement events for fear of being targeted by federal immigration enforcement. Beyond these immediate dangers, communities facing economic hardship and political crises simply don’t have the bandwidth to engage with processes that have historically ignored them despite their participation.
If MnDOT is serious about reparative work, the agency must pause these projects until legitimate community engagement can happen. Moving forward with business-as-usual would amount to rubber-stamping a vision for the corridors without community consent. Ignoring the threats to inclusive community engagement will hurt the same communities targeted by the current federal administration and lock them into the Trump Administration’s framework—not Minnesota’s.
2. Direct MnDOT to follow Minnesota Environmental Law
Federal changes to the environmental review process have prompted MnDOT to strip state environmental protections, including equity, climate, community health, and environmental justice from major highway projects like Rethinking I-94 and Highway 252/94. This creates a concerning gap between federal and state environmental reviews and could put MnDOT out of compliance with Minnesota’s Environmental Policy Act (MEPA).
MnDOT claims it will continue to uphold our state values and its statutory goals through a non-legally binding secondary document. However, the agency’s assessment fundamentally misunderstands—or misrepresents—how federal and state environmental review works. Changing language is more than a cosmetic change; it matters because it determines 1) what must be legally analyzed, 2) how alternatives are considered or harmful ones dismissed, and 3) what impacts trigger legally binding mitigation requirements.
This workaround does not satisfy local governments. For example, Brooklyn Center opposes the Highway 252/94 Project and passed a unanimous resolution asking MnDOT to reinstate environmental justice considerations and protections in their project process. If Minnesota does not stand up to the Trump Administration’s assault on environmental review now, Minnesota will demonstrate its lack of commitment to environmental justice, clean air, reconnecting communities, and protecting vulnerable residents.
3. Reform the Community Engagement Process
The federal community engagement process was born from organizing and resistance to highway construction in the 1960s, a process that itself destroyed communities without consequence. Today, these hard-won processes have too often devolved into bureaucratic box-checking, where public meetings and comment periods manage and control opposition rather than foster genuine collaboration. This leaves community members and the elected and appointed officials who represent them without a voice or a seat at the table.
Meaningful engagement requires agencies to build trust by showing up consistently, listening deeply, and meeting people where they are. It means co-creating visions with communities, not presenting polished plans for rubber-stamp approval. When people don’t feel heard by their government, they disengage—not just from transportation planning, but from democracy itself.
The Minnesota legislature must reform MnDOT’s community engagement to center the voices of those most impacted by transportation decisions. This means supporting efforts like the Community Preferred Alternatives Act, conducting engagement in partnership with trusted community organizations, rethinking public meetings and engagement tactics, ensuring events are safe and accessible for all residents, and committing to genuine collaboration—not consultation theater. Until engagement processes truly reflect the needs and experiences of frontline communities, we cannot build a transportation system that serves all Minnesotans.
4. Pass Policies that Get at the Root of Social, Economic, and Environmental Costs of our Transportation System
Legislators must address the root causes of social, environmental, and economic inequities in communities to build resiliency and prosperity long after the current immigration enforcement crisis eases.
Environmental justice and affordability must be central to solving transportation issues. Rethinking transportation is a key tool to achieving both goals.
Creating a process to evaluate the cumulative impacts of transportation would protect the same vulnerable communities targeted by ICE from polluted air and other highway health harms. This would help meet MnDOT’s stated goal to “provide multimodal and intermodal transportation facilities and services to increase access for all persons and businesses and to ensure economic well-being and quality of life without undue burden placed on any community.” (MN Statute 174.01).
Increasing transit and active transportation funding in the state budget and spending existing funds more efficiently by clarifying highway purposes is more critical now than ever, as Minnesotans seek more affordable and accessible transportation options.
Creating this system for the future also means supporting efforts like Fix-it-First and Fix-it-Right, which prioritizes road maintenance before expanding or building new roads, making our limited transportation dollars go further. Further, this framework would make it more affordable to get around without a car, which gets more expensive and less accessible each year.
Advancing innovative infrastructure pilot projects, such as the effort to Bring Back 6th Avenue North in Minneapolis, would demonstrate what community-centered transportation investment looks like in practice. Led by Our Streets and supported by a Biden Administration USDOT Reconnecting Communities grant, the project reimagines how transportation can connect rather than divide communities, putting safety first, bringing back housing, small businesses, workforce development, and other opportunities along a right-sized, safe, multimodal corridor.
Together, these policies and projects form a cohesive vision: transportation that protects community health, expands affordable mobility, and reconnects neighborhoods—building the resilient, equitable Minnesota that every resident deserves.