Small businesses are often described as the backbone of the economy. But in moments of stress, they can also be an early warning system.

In metro Detroit, inflation has slowed — consumer prices in the Detroit area rose about two percent over the past year, but that has not translated into relief for many households or business owners. Spending remains cautious, and many small business owners say they are no longer planning for growth. Instead, they are focused on endurance.

One pressure point keeps coming up in conversations with owners: health care. Small-business health insurance plans in Michigan are set to rise again in 2026, while tens of thousands fewer Michiganders are enrolling in individual marketplace coverage this year as premiums increase and federal assistance shrinks.

The result is a heavy load for small businesses. They are helping families stay afloat, providing places for connection and routine in neighborhoods, and absorbing rising costs that often land directly on owners.

In this conversation, The Metro’s Robyn Vincent examines how small businesses have become survival engines, community anchors, and stress points all at once — and what that means for workers, customers, and neighborhoods across metro Detroit.

Our guest is Mark Lee, president of the LEE Group, a consulting firm that works with small businesses on strategy, marketing, and growth. Lee also teaches business at Michigan universities and regularly speaks with owners across southeast Michigan about the challenges they’re facing.

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Who wrote the Federalist Papers? What power does the president have? Name one right only U.S. citizens possess.

Those are real questions from the U.S. citizenship civics test. The test now draws from 128 possible questions. It asks up to 20 on the spot. Individuals must answer at least 12 correctly to pass.

Many native-born Americans would struggle with questions like these.

As immigration enforcement intensifies in the United States and federal authorities expand arrests and deportation efforts, the question of what it means to be an American is being thrust into public view.

That is because citizenship isn’t just something written on a test. It is a lived experience, felt in neighborhoods, courtrooms, and in the center of our political conversation.

To unpack what it means to be an American, and how that’s changed over time, The Metro‘s Robyn Vincent spoke with Marc Kruman. He’s a retired professor of history at Wayne State University and the founding director of its Center for the Study of Citizenship

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Every fall, college campuses come alive with small rituals: new students finding their way, roommates negotiating shared space, classrooms filling with questions and ideas.

But this year, something is missing.

International students—once a steady presence—are arriving in far smaller numbers. At the University of Michigan-Dearborn, the change is felt in classrooms, group projects, and everyday conversations that no longer happen.

Behind the absence are visa delays, shifting federal rules, and a broader signal. The Trump administration is advancing a more nationalist, transactional approach to foreign policy, and the U.S. is increasingly seen abroad as unpredictable. For students deciding where to study, that uncertainty matters.

Gabriella Scarlatta, interim chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and a former international student herself, says what’s happening on campus reflects something larger about how welcome America feels right now. She joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to explain what Michigan risks losing.

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There are weeks when the news feels like weather; something that happens over there, something you brace for and then move through.

And then there are times when it lands in your body.

In the last few weeks, vigils have spread across the country after a federal immigration officer killed Renee Good. People are mourning, but they’re also organizing — and not just with signs and speeches. Some are choosing disruption. Some are choosing civil disobedience. They’re asking a blunt question: if systems can take a life in broad daylight and then argue about vocabulary, what exactly are we supposed to do with our grief?

Detroiters know what it means to be extracted from, written off, and still survive. And that makes these stories feel like different chapters of the same book— a book about power, and whose lives it’s allowed to break.

To help us read that book more clearly, Robyn Vincent spoke with Saqib Bhatti of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. His work traces the money behind public pain, and it asks what happens when communities confront the power brokers who, he says, are facilitating that pain.

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Detroit ended 2026 with fewer people killed than it’s seen in decades: 165 homicides.

That number carries an enormous amount of grief. But it is also a sharp turn from where the city was just a few years ago, when violence rose alongside deep disruption, loss, and instability wrought by the pandemic.

Whenever numbers like this drop, there is a rush to explain them, to credit a program, a policy, or personality.

But behind the statistics are hushed forces: housing stability, courtrooms, community trust, the slow work of keeping people from falling through cracks most of us never see.

Detroit Justice Center has been working for years in the background of Detroit’s public safety story, often far from patrol cars and police tape. Executive director Nancy A. Parker joined The Metro’s Robyn Vincent to discuss how this work has helped lower Detroit’s crime rate and what it means to repair a system from the inside.

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During President Trump’s second term, immigration enforcement has become more dangerous and more visible. 

Detention has expanded rapidly. Last year was the deadliest year in more than two decades. Federal records show people have continued to die in custody in the opening days of this year.

There have also been multiple fatal shootings at the hands of on-duty and off-duty ICE agents in recent months. 

In Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Nicole Good. That killing prompted lawsuits from Minnesota and its largest cities. There were also resignations inside the Justice Department after leadership declined to open a customary civil rights investigation.

Other people have also been killed by ICE agents, including Silverio Villegos González near Chicago and Keith Porter Jr. in California. Those deaths, though, did not trigger the same national response.

In Detroit, City Council Member Gabriela Santiago-Romero is pushing the city to act. She represents Southwest Detroit and chairs the City Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee. She’s asking whether Detroit can legally restrict ICE activity on city property and in sensitive areas, such as schools and hospitals. 

Santiago-Romero joined Robyn Vincent on The Metro to discuss how cities can respond when federal immigration enforcement becomes more aggressive, and how local governments weigh responsibility, risk, and trust.

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In Michigan, hundreds of millions of dollars that people are counting on remain frozen.

Last year’s state budget included roughly $645 million in “work-project” funding for things like local roads, public safety, and community services. But in December, House Republicans voted to block it. With that money still on hold, projects aren’t moving.

The Democrat-controlled Senate voted to restore the funding. 

This week, Attorney General Dana Nessel said the committee didn’t have the constitutional authority to do that, calling it an improper “legislative committee veto.” 

House Republicans are considering a court challenge. 

Meanwhile, lawmakers debate tax breaks for data centers, how cannabis revenue should be used, and the regulation of consumable hemp products—decisions that affect utility bills, road repairs, and small businesses.

Politics reporter for the Michigan Public Radio Network, Colin Jackson, joined Robyn Vincent to break down the constitutional fight over the funding freeze and what it reveals about power, process, and everyday life in Michigan.

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For more than half a century, the American environmental movement has struck a familiar rhythm: alarm, action, and industry backlash.

The first Earth Day in 1970 helped launch the modern movement, and by the end of that year, the Environmental Protection Agency was born. It was a promise that government had a crucial role to play, that it could protect our air and water from industry polluters.

Over the decades, that promise has ebbed and flowed: environmental rules were expanded under presidents from both parties, then pared back under others, only to be reinforced again as new science and public pressure emerged.

Critics — including historian Douglas Brinkley and former EPA administrators from both parties — argue the rollback push is an attempt to turn back decades of federal environmental protections.

Meanwhile, a striking silence is showing up in a place with massive moral reach. A new large-scale study of more than 700,000 Catholic parish sermons finds that climate change is rarely mentioned, even after the late Pope Francis issued some of the strongest language on climate change written by a religious leader.

Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes led that research. She joined The Metro’s Robyn Vincent to discuss the price of that silence.

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Michigan’s schools are increasingly tasked with more than teaching.

They are expected to raise reading and math scores, address rising mental health needs, manage technology and discipline, and serve as safe, stable places for families under stress. In some communities, they’re also absorbing fear sparked by immigration enforcement actions. That includes the detention of Detroit students seeking asylum.

Academically, the picture is mixed. On national exams, Michigan’s scores remain close to the U.S. average. But since the pandemic, other states have improved more quickly, especially in early reading. Michigan has moved more slowly, and over time, that difference adds up.

Meanwhile, chronic absenteeism is improving, but many students, especially in Detroit, still miss school regularly.

The state has increased funding and continued free school meals. Educators say those steps help. They also say long-standing challenges persist in special education, staffing, and student support.

This is the landscape facing Michigan’s new top education official.

Dr. Glenn Maleyko was sworn in last month as State Superintendent of Public Instruction. He steps into the new role after nearly a decade leading Dearborn Public Schools. He has identified literacy as his priority and launched a statewide listening tour.

The Metro’s Robyn Vincent sat down with Maleyko to learn how he plans to lead a system being asked to do more than it was designed to handle.

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Immigration enforcement in the United States has escalated sharply this year. Under the Biden administration, the daily number of people detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) peaked at just under 40,000. In President Trump’s second term, that number has surged to more than 65,000.

A striking majority of those detainees — nearly three-quarters — have no criminal convictions.

Michigan has felt this shift acutely. Longtime residents with work authorization, U.S.-citizen children, and active immigration cases are increasingly being detained. One of them is Ernesto Cuevas Enciso.

Who Ernesto is

Ernesto came to the United States from Mexico in 1995. He was three years old. His baby sister, Miriam, was one. They grew up in Detroit one grade apart, sharing classrooms, milestones, and daily life.

As an adult, Ernesto became a DACA recipient. That protection was later revoked when prior, nonviolent misdemeanors surfaced during a renewal screening—a common outcome even for minor offenses from many years earlier.

Today, Ernesto has legal work authorization through a different process and is pursuing a marriage-based green card application. He is a construction worker, a husband, and a father to a one-year-old daughter.

Arrest in Ypsilanti

Last week, Ernesto and another construction worker were near a job site in Ypsilanti when an unmarked vehicle approached. ICE detained both men.

Ernesto is now being held more than three hours from home at the North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin — currently the largest immigration detention facility in the Midwest.

Operated by the private prison company GEO Group, North Lake has been the subject of repeated concerns from families, attorneys, and civil-rights groups, who describe cold temperatures, limited access to medical care, and difficulty contacting legal counsel. ICE has disputed these claims, saying the facility meets federal standards.

Ernesto is awaiting an immigration hearing on December 17.

Family and lawmakers call for his release

Ernesto’s family and several Michigan lawmakers are urging ICE to release him on bond. They describe him as not a safety risk, a man who has been following the legal process, supporting his family, and working toward lawful permanent residency.

His sister, Miriam Stone, spoke with The Metro’s Robyn Vincent about the impact of this detention on their family and why they believe Ernesto should come home while his case proceeds.

What comes next

To understand the legal and policy context behind Ernesto’s case and why so many longtime Michigan residents are being detained this year, The Metro also spoke with Christine Suave of the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, who explains the legal landscape and what options remain for someone in Ernesto’s position, and State Sen. Stephanie Chang, who discusses what Michigan lawmakers can and cannot do in response to federal immigration enforcement decisions.

ICE response

The Metro contacted Detroit’s office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. We asked why they detained Ernesto, given his legal work authorization and his pending marriage-based green card, and if ICE considers a person with two nonviolent misdemeanors, which occurred over a decade ago, to fall within its priority categories of enforcement.

The agency has not yet responded.

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For years, Detroit students have borne the weight of decisions made far from their classrooms.

They’ve studied in buildings neglected through decades of disinvestment, crossed dangerous neighborhoods reshaped by school closures, and grown up in a district that spent years under state control. This trauma came from policy decisions that left Detroit students with less than their peers across Michigan.

Now, a new ballot initiative, Invest in MI Kids, argues it can help repair that history. The campaign proposes a 5% surtax on only the very highest incomes, with the money flowing into Michigan’s public schools. 

That surtax would apply to income above $500,000 for single filers and above $1 million for joint filers. All revenue would be deposited into the Michigan School Aid Fund, where it would be legally restricted to classroom and student supports. The money could go toward things like smaller class sizes, educator pay, mental health staff, and career and technical education.

Funds would then be distributed through the state’s existing school-funding formula, meaning every public district would receive additional dollars. Higher-need districts, such as Detroit, would see greater impact if the state administers funds equitably.

Imani Foster with 482 Forward is organizing families and young people around this campaign. She joined Robyn Vincent to discuss what Detroit kids and students across Michigan stand to gain.

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