An ad by liberal candidate Susan Crawford claims conservative candidate Brad Schimel went easy on defendants in domestic violence and child pornography cases.
The post Crawford ad accuses Schimel of going easy on defendants as Wisconsin Supreme Court race ramps up appeared first on WPR.
Several government web sites serving Wisconsin went offline this week after President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday that seeks to dismantle federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
The post Wisconsin government websites go offline temporarily following Trump’s anti-DEI order appeared first on WPR.
While many of Trump’s executive orders are expected to face legal challenges, Wisconsin immigration attorney Erin Barbato says there is an uphill road ahead for immigrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.
The post Refugees in Wisconsin may remain separated from families after new executive order appeared first on WPR.
Milwaukee County saw a decline in overdose deaths for the second year in a row in 2024 — an encouraging trend for local leaders after years of climbing overdose deaths.
The post Overdose deaths declined for second straight year in Milwaukee County appeared first on WPR.
In this aerial view, Mexican immigration officials and police escort deportees after they were sent back into Mexico on Jan. 22, 2025, as seen from Nogales, Arizona. U.S. President Donald Trump signed executive orders on his first day in office declaring a state of emergency at the U.S. southern border, halting asylum claims and launching a campaign of mass deportations. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is giving immigration officers an expanded authority to rapidly deport immigrants, including people the Biden administration temporarily allowed into the country under parole authority, according to an internal memo.
The Thursday memo from U.S. Department of Homeland Security Acting Secretary Benjamine Huffman means that officials can try to cancel parole — something the agency has authority to do because it’s a discretionary immigration status — for immigrants who arrived in the country within the last two years. That parole conferred a temporary legal status for those immigrants.
The New York Times first reported on the memo revoking parole status.
Such cancellation could throw those immigrants into quick deportation proceedings — which is now possible with the separate reinstatement of a 2019 policy this week known as expedited removal. President Donald Trump, who campaigned in 2024 on a pledge to enact mass deportations, oversaw that policy in his first administration.
Under expedited removal, immigrants without authorization anywhere in the country who encounter federal enforcement must prove they have been in the United States continuously for more than two years.
If they cannot produce that proof, they will be subject to a fast-track deportation without appearing before an immigration judge.
The Trump administration policy is far more expansive than former President Joe Biden’s expedited removal policy. It was limited to 100 miles from the southern border and applied to immigrants without authorization who had to prove they had been in the country for more than 14 days.
Immigration experts said the speed of expedited removal can put numerous people at risk, even U.S. citizens.
“In expedited removal … the burden is on the migrants to show that they’ve been here for more than two years, that they have a lawful status, or that they have a claim of persecution,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an attorney at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies migration. “You could even have a lawful permanent resident or U.S. citizen mistakenly arrested or even deported because of how fast the procedure works.”
One of those parole programs that could fall under the Thursday memo is the CBP One app, through which nearly 1 million appointments have been made with U.S. officials by people seeking asylum. Those who used the app and have been in the United States for less than two years could face a fast deportation.
Another is the initiative through which roughly 530,000 people from Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti were allowed to work and live in the United States. It could also potentially include those from Ukraine who received parole.
Trump has often criticized the use of the programs, and on Monday he signed an executive order to end parole for Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Haiti, along with shutting down the CBP One app.
That means those immigrants who were part of those programs are left potentially vulnerable to expedited removal.
Karen Tumlin, an attorney who challenged several immigration policies during the first Trump administration, said the recent memo is “very sweeping and quite unlawful.”
“I do think it’s intended to clearly apply to (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela) parolees. Exactly how they do it, I still have a lot of questions,” Tumlin, who is the director of the immigration advocacy group Justice Action Center, said. “I don’t think it’s legally valid. Certainly we won’t hesitate to challenge that in court.”
Because those in the parole program have to give so much information to be approved, DHS can easily find them and prioritize them for removal, Bush-Joseph said.
“So unlike people who have been living in the shadows, who the government doesn’t know that they exist, the government does know that these people exist, and knows where they live,” she said.
The memo followed a separate directive from Huffman on Thursday to expand immigration enforcement abilities to several law enforcement offices within the Department of Justice, such as the U.S. Marshals, Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
During the first Trump administration, expedited removal was put in place in 2019, but due to legal challenges, the policy was only in place for three months before Trump’s first term ended.
What’s different this time around, Bush-Joseph said, is that more people have been paroled into the country within the last two years and there is no injunction blocking implementation of the 2019 notice.
On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a new lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against the Trump administration’s reversion to the 2019 policy.
Anand Balakrishnan, the senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel on the case, said in a statement that the policy will fuel Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
“Expanding expedited removal would give Trump a cheat code to circumvent due process and the Constitution, and we are again here to fight it,” he said.
In Trump’s first week into his second term, he also expanded ICE enforcement. He rescinded a memo that limited immigration enforcement to occur in so-called sensitive areas, such as schools, places of worship, hospitals and funerals, among other social services and relief locations.
On Thursday, ICE officials conducted a raid on a business in Newark, New Jersey, where officials detained a citizen who is a U.S. military veteran and multiple undocumented residents without producing a warrant, city officials said.
Moments before 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow opened fire inside her Madison, Wisconsin, school, killing two people and herself last month, a social media account believed to be hers posted a photograph on X showing someone sitting in a bathroom stall and flashing a hand gesture that has become a symbol for white supremacy.
As news about the shooting broke, another X user responded: “Livestream it.”
Extremism researchers now believe that second account belonged to 17-year-old Solomon Henderson, who police say walked into his high school cafeteria in Nashville, Tennessee, on Wednesday and fired 10 shots, killing one classmate and then himself. Archives of another X account linked to him show that he posted a similar photo to Rupnow’s in his final moments.
While there isn’t any evidence that Rupnow and Henderson plotted their attacks together, extremism researchers who have tracked their social media activity told Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica that the two teenagers were active in the same online networks that glorify mass shooters, even crossing paths. Across various social media platforms, the networks trade hateful memes alongside terrorist literature, exchange tips on how to effectively commit attacks and encourage one another to carry out their own.
The researchers had been tracking these networks for months as part of work looking into growing online extremist networks that have proliferated across gaming, chatting and social media platforms and that they believe are radicalizing young people to commit mass shootings and other violence.
The researchers’ analysis found only a few instances in which Rupnow and Henderson appeared to interact directly. But in the hours, days and weeks that followed the Madison shooting, Henderson appears to have become fixated on Rupnow. He boasted on X that Rupnow and him were “mutuals,” a common internet term for following each other, and shared another post that said, “i used to be mutuals with someone who is now a real school shooter ;-).”
The researchers, who have collaborated with counterterrorism organizations, academics and law enforcement to prevent violence by tracking how extremist networks radicalize youth online, agreed to share information as long as they weren’t named out of concerns for their physical safety. The news outlets vetted their credentials with several experts in the field.
It’s impossible to know with complete certainty that online accounts belong to particular people without specialized access to devices and accounts from law enforcement. The Metropolitan Nashville Police Department has acknowledged the existence of two documents they believe Henderson created, both of which contain details about his social media accounts. Other researchers and groups — including The Anti-Defamation League, Canadian extremism expert Marc-André Argentino and SITE Intelligence Group — have also determined these likely belong to Henderson.
The extremism researchers linked accounts to Rupnow, who went by Samantha, by tracing her activity across multiple social media profiles that revealed common biographical details, including personal acquaintances and that she lived in Wisconsin. On the bathroom post, one person the account regularly interacted with referred to Rupnow by her nickname, “Sam.” Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica were able to verify the social media posts and the connections between the accounts by retracing the researchers’ steps through archived social media accounts and screenshots.
On Thursday, ABC News cited law enforcement sources in reporting that a social media account connected to Henderson may have been in contact with Rupnow’s social media account. The information reviewed by Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica details their suspected connections and interactions. Nearly all of the accounts that researchers have linked to Rupnow and Henderson have now been suspended.
A Madison Police Department spokesperson said the agency knows Rupnow “was very active on social media” and it is “just starting” to receive and review documents from tech companies. The Nashville police said they had nothing further to add beyond their previous statements.Rubi Patricia Vergara, 14, and Erin West, 42, were killed at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison. Josselin Corea Escalante, 16, died at Antioch High School in Nashville. Both attackers also killed themselves.
Rupnow and Henderson both had multiple X accounts, the extremism researchers told Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica. At the time of her attack, Rupnow followed just 13 other users. Two of those accounts have been linked to Henderson.
In November, Rupnow shared a post from Henderson, which appeared to wish a happy Veterans Day to the man who killed more than a dozen people at University of Texas at Austin in 1966.
After the Madison attack, someone wrote to Henderson and others on X, saying that one of their “buddies” may have “shot up a school.” Henderson told another user, “I barely know her,” and said he had never exchanged private messages with her. Later, in a 51-page screed that Nashville police are examining, he emulated and praised several past attackers including Rupnow and said, “I have connections with some of them only loosely via online messaging platforms.”
After Rupnow’s shooting, Henderson called her a “Saintress,” using a term common in the networks, and posted or reshared posts about her dozens of times, celebrating her racist, genocidal online persona and the fact that she had taken action. On one platform, he used a photograph of her as his profile picture. In his writings, he said he scrawled Rupnow’s name and those of other perpetrators on his weapon and gear.
The online networks the two teenagers inhabited have an array of influences, ideologies and aesthetics. To varying degrees of commitment and sincerity, they ascribe to white supremacist, anti-Semitic, racist, neo-Nazi, occult or satanic beliefs.
In this online world, the currency that buys clout is violence. This violence often involves children and teenagers harming other children and teenagers, some through doxing or encouraging self-harm, others, like Rupnow and Henderson, by committing mass attacks in the nonvirtual world.
“This network is best described as an online subculture that celebrates violent attacks and radicalizes young people into committing violence,” said one of the violence prevention researchers. “Many of the individuals involved in this network are minors, and we’d like to see intervention to give them the help and support they need, for their own safety as well as those around them.”
Members of some of these communities, including Terrorgram, 764 and Com, have engaged in activities online and offline that have led to convictions for possessing child sexual abuse materials and sexually exploiting a child and indictments for soliciting hate crimes and soliciting the murder of federal officials. The cases are pending, and the defendants have not filed responses in court. This month, the U.S. State Department designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, saying “the group promotes violent white supremacism, solicits attacks on perceived adversaries, and provides guidance and instructional materials on tactics, methods, and targets for attacks, including on critical infrastructure and government officials.”
When details of the Nashville shooting began to emerge, researchers realized they had seen some of Henderson’s accounts and posts within the network of about 100 users they are tracking. They had previously reported one username of an account belonging to Henderson, as well as others within the network to law enforcement and filed several reports with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.
They had not been aware of Rupnow’s accounts before her attack, but were able to locate her within the network after the fact, discovering she had regularly interacted with other accounts they had been following.
Alex Newhouse, an extremism researcher at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said these subcultures have a long history of lionizing and mimicking past attackers while goading each other to enact as much violence as possible — even by assigning “scores” to past attacks, something Henderson engaged with online. “The Antioch one is very obviously copycat,” Newhouse said.
Although Henderson’s diary indicates he had been contemplating an attack for months prior to Rupnow’s, her shooting drew his attention. Hours after, he retweeted another post that said: “There should be a betting market for which rw twitter figure will radicalize the next shooter.” (RW stands for right wing.)
However the two teens entered this online subculture, their writings reveal despair about their personal lives and the world around them and expressed violent, hateful views.
After the Madison shooting, a separate social media user noted their association and tweeted at the FBI, accusing Henderson and others of having prior warning. They “need to be locked up,” the poster said, “no questions asked.”
The FBI declined to comment. But after Henderson’s attack, social media users returned to the tweet: “hey so this guy literally just ended up calling a future school shooter a month ahead of time and the FBI did nothing about it.”
If you or someone you know needs help:
If you or someone you know has been harmed online, you can contact the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children at 1-800-THE-LOST or https://report.cybertip.org/.
This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Wisconsin Watch. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.
Madison and Nashville school shooters appear to have crossed paths in online extremist communities is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.
Brad Schimel reached a plea bargain with a criminal defendant whose attorney made donations to Schimel’s election campaign.
An attack on Schimel, the conservative candidate in the April 1 Wisconsin Supreme Court election, was made by Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate. Schimel has considerably more front-line criminal prosecution experience.
In June 2013, Schimel’s Waukesha County district attorney’s office charged Andrew Lambrecht with felony possession of child pornography.
In May 2014, Lambrecht’s lawyer, Matthew Huppertz, wrote a letter to Schimel, filed in court. Schimel had said that if Lambrecht pleaded to the charge, he would not file more charges and would recommend the mandatory minimum three-year prison sentence.
In January 2015, Lambrecht, who had no prior record, pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to three years.
Schimel announced his run for state attorney general in October 2013. From December 2013 until Schimel won the election in November 2014, Huppertz made monthly contributions to Schimel’s campaign totaling $5,500.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Did Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel offer a plea deal to a man whose attorney contributed to Schimel’s campaign? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Of the nearly 200 uncounted ballots that Madison city clerk’s staff discovered after Election Day, about 70 might have gotten counted if the staff members had promptly alerted the county.
The clerk’s office staff didn’t find 125 of the uncounted ballots until Dec. 3 — after the state already certified the election. But the staff found 68 of them well before that, on Nov. 12, the same day Dane County certified the election. If the clerk’s office had reported the missing votes to the county within a few days, the county election board could have petitioned the Wisconsin Elections Commission to amend its results to include those ballots.
Kevin Kennedy, formerly the state election chief for over 30 years and a chief inspector at a Madison polling site not associated with the errors, said the county canvass, or official count, could have been reopened at that point if officials had known about the problem.
“From my perspective, you find the ballots, you tell the city attorney. The city attorney is going to advise you to tell the mayor and to reach out to the county board of canvassers,” Kennedy said. “That’s what should have happened once they were discovered.”
Informing the city attorney in this case could have been especially helpful: Madison’s city attorney, Mike Haas, was formerly the administrator of the Wisconsin Elections Commission and is regarded by some as one of the state’s top election lawyers.
In a letter to the state election commission, obtained by Votebeat, Madison Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl claimed she “believes” somebody from her office did, in fact, tell the Dane County Clerk’s Office about the ballots on Nov. 12.
On that day, Witzel-Behl said, an employee identified as “employee F” “believes he spoke to the Dane County Clerk in his office but cannot remember what the Dane County Clerk said,” though he was “certain” the conversation had taken place. The office was left with “a general sense that the County would not want” the ballots that had been discovered that day.
Witzel-Behl didn’t supply additional information substantiating that interaction and through a spokesperson said she had nothing to add to the information she shared with the elections commission.
But Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell said he “strongly disagrees” with the city’s claims.
“Prior to the information being released publicly, my office and the Dane County Board of Canvassers had no communication with the Madison City Clerk’s Office regarding the discovery of unopened absentee ballots,” he said.
“I find the claim that a conversation took place, without providing details about what was said, difficult to understand,” he continued. “If I had been told about 60 or more uncounted ballots, I would have advised that they talk to their city attorney, who is an election expert.”
“The frustrating part of this whole situation is that a fix allowing some of the ballots to be counted was pretty simple,” he said. “An error of this size is extremely unfortunate, and I worry it will make it difficult for voters to trust their ability to cast an absentee ballot in future elections. I will work to do whatever I can on my part to help ensure our municipal partners know what to do if a similar situation occurs in the future.”
Under state law, if the Dane County Board of Canvassers — the entity that certifies elections on the county level — becomes aware of a mistake, it can ask the Wisconsin Elections Commission for permission to amend the county results. The window for such a correction stays open until the commission receives every other county’s certification, which in this case didn’t happen until Nov. 18, several days after Madison staff found the 68 ballots.
Other provisions may also allow the election commission to require the county to correct its canvass, said Bree Grossi Wilde, executive director of the State Democracy Research Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Law School. Wisconsin law appears to allow for the “ability to make a correction” if the county board of canvassers or the Wisconsin Elections Commission becomes aware of an error, she said.
Instead, the 68 Madison ballots went uncounted and unreported for weeks. City election staff were under the impression that the ballots couldn’t be counted unless there was a recount, Witzel-Behl said in December.
“They should have asked someone,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democratic member on the Wisconsin Elections Commission.
Staff in the city clerk’s office apparently didn’t report the ballot discovery to non-election city staff or any external election agency until Dec. 18, when they told the Wisconsin Elections Commission. The commission told city staff, and the mayor’s office soon after disclosed the oversight to the public. By that point, the window to make any of those ballots count toward the election had all but closed. The 193 ballots weren’t tallied until a Jan. 10 city election board meeting, though none of those ballots counted toward any official election results. Madison voters cast over 174,000 ballots in the November election, and the 193 votes wouldn’t have changed any election outcome.
At that meeting, Witzel-Behl addressed the lack of city processes that likely contributed to the ballots going missing on Election Day and said there would be new procedures for city election staff and poll workers to prevent a recurrence.
But at that meeting, Witzel-Behl didn’t explain why her office didn’t communicate with city staff or the county immediately after the ballots were discovered, or identify policies to communicate future errors quicker.
She told Votebeat on Jan. 14 that she’s still developing specific policies.
Kennedy, the former state election chief, said having clear instructions in place from the state would have made a difference. The election commission “needs to lay out some expectations so that everybody in the state, every municipal clerk and county clerk knows, ‘If you have a problem, this is what we expect you to do,” he said.
Here’s what we know so far about what happened:
At a polling site in Ward 56, just west of downtown, election officials didn’t open two large carrier envelopes used to transport absentee ballots from the clerk’s office to polling sites, where they are tabulated. Those two envelopes contained a total of 125 ballots, which were discovered on Dec. 3.
At another site, poll workers at Ward 65 didn’t open a carrier envelope carrying 68 absentee ballots, including one ballot that should have been sent to a different polling place. That batch was found on Nov. 12, and it’s not clear what steps the clerk’s office took after the discovery.
There are two clear issues that arose from the uncounted ballots, Kennedy said. One is the matter of process and communications. Poll workers didn’t count the ballots, and city staff took a long time to find them, but still didn’t report having found them.
The other is the impact on the voters who cast these ballots. “It’s still personal to them” that their votes didn’t get counted, Kennedy said, even if they wouldn’t have changed any election outcomes.
Among those voters was Carol Troyer-Shank, who received an apology letter from the city about the error.
“It’s so funny, because I have been a reluctant early voter simply because I imagined such a thing happening,” she said. “It’s too bad this had to happen, but it’s not a big enough deal to lose sleep over. I’m glad the city is apologizing, and I’m glad the city is taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Troyer-Shank said she may still vote early in the future. But she added that there remain outstanding questions about what led to 193 ballots, including hers, going uncounted on Election Day.
“We still don’t know what went wrong,” she said. “We still don’t know why they were uncounted at the sites.”
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.
Some missing Madison ballots could have been counted — if clerk’s staff had acted in time is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
Kody Green of La Crosse has a new book out that shares his experiences living with schizophrenia and struggling in the workplace.
The post ‘Mind Over Meetings’ offers workplace strategies for people with mental illness appeared first on WPR.
Camellia sinensis prefer a balmy climate (zones 7A or warmer), but there’s hope for the Wisconsin tea lover: the plants can be grown inside, if you’re up for the challenge.
The post Tips for cultivating your own tea plants, right here in Wisconsin appeared first on WPR.
In his new memoir, “Aflame: Learning From Silence,” Pico Iyer reflects on how spending time in quiet retreat saves him from the noise and distractions of the everyday world and brings him joy.
The post Lessons from Pico Iyer’s second home appeared first on WPR.
Federal prosecutors would only have the legal authority to bring criminal charges against local agencies for non-compliance with immigration laws under "very narrow" circumstances, said law professor Kevin Johnson.
The post Trump’s DOJ threatens locals who don’t aid immigration enforcement. What could that mean for Wisconsin? appeared first on WPR.
Author Kyle Chayka talked with WPR's "BETA" about his book, "Filterworld: How Alogrithms Flattened Culture," in which he explains how algorithms create generic coffee shops, shape Icelandic tourism and curate the music we listen to.
The post Kyle Chayka on ‘Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture’ appeared first on WPR.
WPR's "BETA" sat down with critic Peter Ames Carlin to discuss R.E.M. and how the band found its unique sound.
The post R.E.M.: ‘A bunch of well-adjusted, nice young men’ appeared first on WPR.
Dueling ads in Wisconsin’s high-stakes Supreme Court election focus on a backlog of criminal cases that took place during one candidate’s stint as the state’s top lawyer.
The post Dueling Wisconsin Supreme Court ads focus on rape kit backlog appeared first on WPR.
Charlie Brooker recently spoke with WPR’s “BETA” host Doug Gordon, where he talked about Cunk's deadpan naiveté and the similarities between "Black Mirror" and "The Twilight Zone."
The post Charlie Brooker on the universe of ‘Black Mirror’ and new Netflix special, ‘Cunk On Life’ appeared first on WPR.
State and local health officials say it's too early to tell how a temporary halt on federal health communications will affect their work.
The post State, local health departments watching Trump administration’s health communications pause appeared first on WPR.
Login