Franken tests the waters on returning to public life
Former U.S. Sen. Al Franken is testing his welcome on the speaking circuit as he takes more steps into public life after sexual misconduct allegations derailed his political career.
The Star Tribune reported tickets went on sale Friday for “An Evening with Al Franken” Oct. 2 at Revolution Hall in Portland, Oregon.
The hall said Franken will share behind-the-scenes stories from his 15 years on “Saturday Night Live” and his 8½ years representing Minnesota in the U.S. Senate.
Franken recently told The New Yorker magazine that he regretted resigning from the Senate in December 2017 after several women accused him of unwanted kissing or touching.
SEATTLE — The Trump administration is opposing Washington state’s effort to make a privately run, for-profit immigration detention center pay detainees minimum wage for the work they do.
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued The GEO Group in 2017, saying its Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma must pay the state minimum wage to detainees who perform kitchen, laundry, janitorial, maintenance and barbershop tasks.
U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan has already issued some key rulings in the state’s favor. But in a “statement of interest” filed last week, the Justice Department called the lawsuit “an aggressive and legally unjustified effort by the State of Washington to interfere with federal immigration enforcement,” and it urged Bryan to reject it.
The department said that because the state’s minimum wage act doesn’t apply to inmates of state prisons, it impermissibly discriminates against the federal government to apply it to a federal contractor holding detainees on civil immigration violations. The judge has already rejected that argument, but on Thursday agreed to reconsider it and other arguments and set a hearing for Sept. 12.
“The State insists that these federal immigration detainees are ‘employees’ under state law, even though it simultaneously exempts similarly-situated detainees in state facilities from the minimum wage,” the Justice Department said. “Basic constitutional principles prevent a State from interfering with the federal government’s activities in the way Washington is trying to do here.”
The Northwest Detention Center is a 1,575-bed facility, one of the nation’s largest privately run immigrant detention centers. On any given day, about 470 of them perform some sort of work through a voluntary program, earning $1 per day. GEO has the authority to pay more, but Congress will only reimburse it up to that amount.
Washington argues it is entitled to enforce the minimum wage law against GEO just as it’s entitled to enforce it against any other company. The law exempts state prisons from paying inmates for work.
GEO has called Ferguson’s lawsuit “politically motivated.” In court documents, the company says the state has known about the dollar-a-day payments since as early as 2009, but that Ferguson did not file a lawsuit until after the 2016 election of President Donald Trump.