Michigan Advance

As Detroit looks to renew its multimillion-dollar ShotSpotter contract, officials admit they can’t verify where sensors sit or how the system is used. Additional ShotSpotter investigation published here: 

As Detroit weighs renewal, ShotSpotter data raises cost-benefit questions

Privacy, efficacy concerns continue as Detroit police seek more than $2M extension to ShotSpotter

Detroit City Council narrowly votes to extend gunshot detection tech, after passionate split debate

On Oct. 18, 2025, ICE arrested and detained Jose Pedro Hernandez Lupercio in Brethren, Mich., along the Manistee River — and both records and official statements indicate that Michigan Department of Natural Resources officers were involved in the operation. 

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, said that the arrest was made “during a targeted operation led by the USFS in conjunction with the DNR,” referring to the U.S. Forest Service and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, respectively.

In the wake of the announcement that SNAP benefits would be paused in November amid the ongoing federal government shutdown, recipients like Symone Wilkes, a Detroit mother of two, began to question how to weather this storm. 

Concerns like Wilkes’s are front of mind for many of the approximately 1.4 million people in Michigan receiving SNAP benefits, about 43% of whom are families with children and 36% with members of the family who are older adults or disabled.

Amid November’s honoring of Native American Heritage Month — a time when many communities reflect on the responsibilities embedded in ancestral teachings —Meredith Migizi, the executive director of indigenous advocacy organization Miigwech, Inc., sees the way that Michigan’s tribal governments respond to the lapse in SNAP benefits amid a government shutdown as parallel to an Anishinaabe oral history of the Hoof Nation Treaty.

Allegation that Jocelyn Benson’s husband would make millions on data center deal are based on testimony in the Michigan House Oversight Subcommittee on Corporate Subsidies and State Investments from Christy Gillenwater, a witness introduced as a senior management consultant who never actually worked in that position.

Having reviewed a redacted copy of multiple documents of a Michigan State Police report into the fatal shooting of Da’Quain Johnson by a Grand Rapids police officer in February, the lawyers representing Johnson and his family say that the report “does nothing but open even more inquiries.”

“Everything about this case raises alarm bells,” said Ben Crump, one of the lawyers representing Da’Quain’s family.

Michigan House Appropriations Committee Chair Rep. Ann Bollin alleged that money from Rx Kids, a prenatal and infant direct cash support program, was going to parents who would take the money and then get abortions. There is no evidence to Bollin’s claims — Founder Dr. Mona Hanna noted that evidence actually shows that the program is supporting mothers’ decisions to keep their baby and not have an abortion for financial reasons.

The Professional Women’s Hockey League is coming to Detroit with both an expansion team and the 2026 draft, which will be hosted in downtown Detroit on Wednesday night.

With ten players signed to the still-unnamed team prior to the draft, excitement over the city of Detroit — dubbed “Hockeytown” in the 1990s by the city’s NHL team — and the state of Michigan has been evident from team leadership, league executives and the players themselves.

At a historic Lithuanian church in Detroit’s Mexicantown neighborhood, All Saints Literacy Center is working to open doors for community members who are not literate in English — whether that be parents who need to meet with their child’s teachers, workers looking to advance in their careers, or someone who needs to understand what a doctor is saying at an appointment. Executive Director Grace Irwin emphasized that, even given the fear and uncertainty that ICE creates in the community, they work hard to create a safe and welcoming space for everyone there.

Annmarie Zaremba, the Director of Food Sourcing at Forgotten Harvest in Oak Park, said that her organization had lost about $750,000 worth of food in these cancelled deliveries. Much of that was protein like chicken and pork — food items that other donations tend not to include, but that are important for recipients to have in their diets. 

ICE is planning to open a new detention center in Romulus, a western suburb in metro Detroit, and both residents and local officials have expressed their strong opposition to that happening. 

The path to actually slowing or stopping development of a federal facility on a local or state level is difficult at best, but it doesn’t mean that they aren’t trying. 

“At the end of the day, I didn’t even recognize my own child,” said Izora Clark, whose daughter Krystal has become a focal point of demands for reform at Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility, Michigan’s only women’s prison. 

She joined advocates outside the Michigan State Capitol and Michigan Department of Corrections headquarters to demand change at the prison.