The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging five Wisconsin sheriffs’ practices of holding detainees in their jail for handoffs to ICE.
The ACLU filed the lawsuit in September on behalf of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. It names sheriff’s offices in Brown, Kenosha, Marathon, Sauk and Walworth counties as respondents.
All five sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers — nonbinding requests that a law enforcement agency assist ICE in taking custody of a person suspected of being in the country illegally by holding an inmate in a jail up to 48 hours past the person’s scheduled release. The local law enforcement agency can then pass the detainee directly to ICE officers.
The lawsuit argues that the detainers qualify as an arrest and that state statutes prohibit law enforcement agencies from making arrests based on ICE’s administrative warrants.
While most Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers, the lawsuit claims that five named offices received roughly a quarter of all detainers issued to Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices between January and July of this year.
The sheriff’s offices have differing relationships with ICE. Brown and Sauk counties, for instance, also contract with ICE to hold immigrant detainees in their jails, meaning a person could remain in the same jail after entering ICE custody. Kenosha County has no such contract, but it does participate in a federal grant program that partially reimburses local law enforcement agencies for incarceration costs in exchange for data on undocumented inmates.
ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July of this year. Nearly 40% of those arrested were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case.
In its initial petition, Voces de la Frontera urged the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case as a statewide concern. The court’s order, published on Wednesday afternoon, allows the plaintiffs to skip the lower courts entirely.
Liberal justices have a 4-3 majority on the court. At least four unnamed justices voted to immediately accept the case. Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, both conservatives, dissented. Justice Brian Hagedorn, who often votes with conservatives, discussed the process in an opinion that did not specify his vote.
“When this court grants review in a case, we almost always let our grant order proceed without comment or dissent,” he wrote, later adding: “Even if some of my colleagues publicly record their dissent, as in this case, that does not necessarily reveal which justices voted for or against the petition in closed conference.”
Voces de la Frontera has 30 days to file a brief in the case. The court has not yet scheduled oral arguments in the case.
None of the five sheriffs’ offices named in the lawsuit immediately responded to requests for comment.
“We are reviewing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order and evaluating our next steps in this litigation,” Milwaukee attorney Sam Hall, who is representing all five sheriffs, wrote in an email Wednesday evening. “We are confident, however, that Wisconsin sheriffs who honor ICE detainers do so fully within the bounds of Wisconsin law and the federal legal framework governing immigration enforcement.”
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The state of Wisconsin generally cannot consider U.S. citizenship or national origin in hiring for state jobs.
Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany of northern Wisconsin, who is running for governor in 2026, said Nov. 17 he would ensure state jobs “go to Americans.”
His congressional and campaign offices did not respond to requests for comment.
The U.S. Supreme Court has held that states cannot restrict public employment to citizens.
Both public and private employers are generally barred by federal law from treating people differently based on national origin or ethnicity.
Wisconsin laws prohibit discrimination by public or private employers based on national origin or ancestry.
The state’s hiring handbook says the state can hire only people legally in the U.S., but “shall not refuse to hire aliens based on their foreign appearance, accent, language, name, national origin, citizenship, or intended U.S. citizenship.”
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
Can Wisconsin require state jobs go only to Americans? 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.
For decades, corn has reigned over American agriculture. It sprawls across 90 million acres — about the size of Montana — and goes into everything from livestock feed and processed foods to the ethanol blended into most of the nation’s gasoline.
But a growing body of research reveals that America’s obsession with corn has a steep price: The fertilizer used to grow it is warming the planet and contaminating water.
Corn is essential to the rural economy and to the world’s food supply, and researchers say the problem isn’t the corn itself. It’s how we grow it.
Corn farmers rely on heavy fertilizer use to sustain today’s high yields. And when that nitrogen breaks down in the soil, it releases nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Producing nitrogen fertilizer also emits large amounts of carbon dioxide, adding to its climate footprint.
Agriculture accounts for more than 10% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and corn uses more than two-thirds of all nitrogen fertilizer nationwide — making it the leading driver of agricultural nitrous oxide emissions, studies show.
The corn and ethanol industries insist that rapid growth in ethanol — which now consumes more than 40% of the U.S. corn crop — is a net environmental benefit, and they strongly dispute research suggesting otherwise.
Since 2000, U.S. corn production has surged almost 50%, further adding to the crop’s climate impact.
Yet the environmental costs of corn rarely make headlines or factor into political debates. Much of the dynamic traces back to federal policy — and to the powerful corn and ethanol lobby that helped shape it.
The Renewable Fuel Standard, passed in the mid 2000s, required that gasoline be blended with ethanol, a biofuel that in the United States comes almost entirely from corn. That mandate drove up demand and prices for corn, spurring farmers to plant more of it.
Many plant corn year after year on the same land. The practice, called “continuous corn,” demands massive amounts of nitrogen fertilizer and drives especially high nitrous oxide emissions.
At the same time, federal subsidies make it more lucrative to grow corn than to diversify. Taxpayers have covered more than $50 billion in corn insurance premiums over the past 30 years, according to federal data compiled by the Environmental Working Group.
Researchers say proven conservation steps — such as planting rows of trees, shrubs and grasses in corn fields — could sharply reduce these emissions. But the Trump administration has eliminated many of the incentives that helped farmers try such practices.
Experts say it all raises a larger question: If America’s most widely planted crop is worsening climate change, shouldn’t we begin growing it a different way?
Corn has been a staple of U.S. agriculture for centuries, first domesticated by Native Americans and later used by European immigrants as a versatile crop for food and animal feed. Its production really took off in the 2000s after federal mandates and incentives helped turn much of America’s corn crop into ethanol.
Corn’s dominance — and the emissions that come with it — didn’t happen by accident. It was built through a high-dollar lobbying campaign that continues today.
In the late 1990s, America’s corn farmers were in trouble. Prices had cratered amid a global grain glut and the Asian financial crisis. A 1999 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis said crop prices had hit “rock bottom.”
In 2001 and 2002, the federal government gave corn farmers and ethanol producers a boost — first through the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bioenergy Program, which paid ethanol producers to increase their use of farm commodities for fuel. Then the 2002 Farm Bill created programs that continue to support ethanol and other renewable energy.
Corn growers soon after mounted an all-out campaign in Washington. Their goal: persuade Congress to require gasoline to be blended with ethanol. State and national grower groups lobbied relentlessly, pitching ethanol as a way to cut greenhouse gasses, reduce oil dependence and revive rural economies.
“We got down to a couple of votes in Congress, and the corn growers were united like never before,” recalled Jon Doggett, then the industry’s chief lobbyist, in an article published by the National Corn Growers Association. “I started receiving calls from Capitol Hill saying, ‘Would you have your growers stop calling us? We are with you.’ I had not seen anything like it before and haven’t seen anything like it since.”
Their persistence paid off. In 2005, Congress created the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires that a certain amount of ethanol be blended into U.S. gasoline each year. Two years later, lawmakers expanded it further. The policy transformed the market: The amount of corn used for ethanol domestically has more than tripled in the past 20 years.
When demand for corn spiked as a result of the RFS, it pushed up prices worldwide, said Tim Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. The result, Searchinger said, is that more land around the world got cleared to grow corn. That, in turn, resulted in more emissions.
That lobbying brought clout. “King Corn” became a political force, courted by presidential hopefuls and protected by both parties. Since 2010, national corn and ethanol trade groups have spent more than $55 million on lobbying and millions more on political donations, according to campaign finance records analyzed by Floodlight.
In 2024 alone, those trade groups spent twice as much on lobbying as the National Rifle Association. Major industry players — Archer Daniels Midland, Cargill and ethanol giant POET among them — have poured even more into Washington, ensuring the sector’s voice remains one of the loudest in U.S. agriculture.
Now those same groups are pushing for the next big prize: expanding higher-ethanol gasoline blends and positioning ethanol-based jet fuel as aviation’s “low-carbon” future.
Corn and ethanol trade groups didn’t make their officials available for interviews.
But on their websites and in their literature, they have promoted corn ethanol as a climate-friendly fuel.
The Renewable Fuels Association cites government and university research that finds burning ethanol reduces greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40-50% compared with gasoline. The ethanol industry says the climate critics have it wrong — and that most of the corn used for fuel comes from better yields and smarter farming, not from plowing up new land. The amount of fertilizer required to produce a bushel of corn has dropped sharply in recent decades, they say.
“Ethanol reduces carbon emissions, removing the carbon equivalent of 12 million cars from the road each year,” according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
Growth Energy, a major ethanol trade group, said in a written statement that U.S. farmers and biofuel producers are “constantly finding new ways to make their operations more efficient and more environmentally beneficial,” using things like cover crops to reduce their carbon footprint.
But some research tells a different story.
A recent Environmental Working Group report finds that the way corn is grown in much of the Midwest — with the same fields planted in corn year after year — carries a heavy climate cost.
Research in 2022 by agricultural land use expert Tyler Lark and colleagues links the Renewable Fuel Standard to expanded corn cultivation, heavier fertilizer use, worsening water pollution and increased emissions. Scientists typically convert greenhouse gases like nitrous oxide and methane into their carbon dioxide equivalents — or carbon intensity — so their warming impacts can be compared on the same scale.
“The carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24% higher,” the authors concluded.
Lark’s research has been disputed by scientists at Argonne National Laboratory, Purdue University and the University of Illinois, who published a formal rebuttal arguing the study relied on “questionable assumptions” and faulty modeling — a charge Lark’s team has rejected.
A 2017 report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the RFS was unlikely to meet its greenhouse gas goals because the U.S. relies predominantly on corn ethanol and produces relatively little of the cleaner, advanced biofuels made from waste.
The problem isn’t just emissions, researchers say. Corn ethanol requires millions of acres that could instead be used for food crops or more efficient energy sources. One recent study found that solar panels can generate as much energy as corn ethanol on roughly 3% of the land.
“It’s just a terrible use of land,” Searchinger, the Princeton researcher, said of ethanol. “And you can’t solve climate change if you’re going to make such terrible use of land.”
Most of the country’s top crop isn’t feeding people. More than 40% of U.S. corn goes to ethanol. A similar amount is used to feed livestock, and just 12% ends up as food or in other uses.
Globally, corn production doubled from 2000 to 2021.
That growth has been fueled by fertilizer, which emits nitrous oxide that can linger in the atmosphere for more than a century. That eats away at the ozone layer, which blocks most of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation.
Global emissions have soared alongside corn production. Between 1980 and 2020, nitrous oxide emissions from human activity climbed 40%, the Global Carbon project found.
In the United States, nitrous oxide emissions from agriculture in 2022 were equal to roughly 262 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the EPA’s inventory of greenhouse gas emissions. That’s equivalent to putting almost 56 million passenger cars on the road.
The biggest increases are coming straight from the Corn Belt.
Ethanol’s climate footprint isn’t the only concern. The nitrogen used to grow corn and other crops is also a key source of drinking water pollution.
According to a new report by the Alliance for the Great Lakes and Clean Wisconsin, more than 90% of nitrate contamination in Wisconsin’s groundwater is linked to agricultural sources — mostly synthetic fertilizer and manure.
The same analysis estimates that in 2022, farmers applied more than 16 million pounds of nitrogen beyond what crops needed, sending runoff into wells, streams and other water systems.
For families like Tyler Frye’s, that hits close to home. In 2022, Frye and his wife moved into a new home in the rural village of Casco, Wisconsin, about 20 miles east of Green Bay. A free test soon afterward found their well water had nitrate levels more than twice the EPA’s safe limit. “We were pretty shocked,” he said.
Frye installed a reverse-osmosis system in the basement and still buys bottled water for his wife, who is breastfeeding their daughter, born in July.
One likely culprit, he suspects, are the cornfields less than 200 yards from his home.
“Crops like corn require a lot of nitrogen,” he said. “A lot of that stuff, I assume, is getting into the well water and surface water.”
When he watches manure or fertilizer being spread on nearby fields, he said, one question nags him: “Where does that go?”
Reducing corn’s climate footprint is possible — but the farmers trying to do it are swimming against the policy tide.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, backed by President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans, strips out the provisions of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act that had rewarded farmers for climate-friendly practices.
And in April, Trump’s USDA canceled the $3 billion Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative, a grant program designed to promote farming and forestry practices to improve soil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The agency said that the program’s administrative costs meant too little money was reaching farmers, while Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins dismissed it as part of the “green new scam.”
University of Iowa professor Silvia Secchi said the rollback of the Climate-Smart program has already given farmers “cold feet” about adopting conservation practices. “The impact of this has been devastating,” said Secchi, a natural resources economist who teaches at the university’s School of Earth, Environment and Sustainability.
Research shows what’s possible if farmers had support. In its recent report, the Environmental Working Group found that four proven conservation practices — including planting trees, shrubs and hedgerows in corn fields — could make a measurable difference.
Implementing those practices on just 4% of continuous corn acres across Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin would cut total greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of taking more than 850,000 gasoline cars off the road, EWG found.
Despite setbacks at the federal level, some farmers are already showing what a more climate-friendly Corn Belt could look like.
In northern Iowa, Wendy Johnson farms 1,200 acres of corn and soybeans with her father. On 130 of those acres, she’s trying something different: She’s planting fruit and nut trees, organic grains, shrubs and other plants that need little or no nitrogen fertilizer.
“The more perennials we can have on the ground, the better it is for the climate,” she said.
Across the rest of the farm, they enrich the soil by rotating crops and planting cover crops. They’ve also converted less productive parts of the fields into “prairie strips” — bands of prairie grass that store carbon and require no fertilizer.
Under the now-canceled Climate-Smart grant program, they were supposed to receive technical assistance and about $20,000 a year to expand those practices. The grant program was terminated before they got any of the money.
“It’s hard to take risks on your own,” Johnson said. “That’s where federal support really helps. Because agriculture is a high-risk occupation.”
The economics still favor business as usual. Johnson knows that many Midwestern corn growers feel pressure to maximize yields, keeping them hooked on corn — and nitrogen fertilizer.
“I think a lot of farmers around here are very allergic to trees,” she joked.
In southeast Iowa, sixth-generation farmer Levi Lyle, who mixes organic and conventional methods across 290 acres, uses a three-year rotation, extensive cover crops and a technique called roller-crimping — flattening rye each spring to create a mulch that suppresses weeds, feeds the soil and reduces fertilizer needs.
“The roller crimping of cover crops is a huge, huge opportunity to sequester more carbon, improve soil health, save money on chemicals and still get a similar yield,” he said.
But farmers get few government incentives to take such climate-friendly steps, Lyle said. “There is a lack of seriousness about supporting farmers to implement these new practices,” he said.
And without federal programs to offset the risk, the innovations that Lyle and Johnson are trying remain exceptions — not the norm.
Many farmers still see prairie strips or patches of trees as a waste, said Luke Gran, whose company helps Iowa farmers establish perennials.
“My eyes do not lie,” Gran said. “I have not seen extensive change to cover cropping or tillage across the broad acreage of this state that I love.”
Despite mounting research about corn’s climate costs, industry groups are pushing for policies to boost ethanol demand.
One big priority: pushing a bill to require that new cars are able to run on gas with more ethanol than what’s commonly sold today.
Corn and biofuel trade groups have also been pressing Democrats and Republicans in Congress for legislation to pave the way for ethanol-based jet fuel. While use of such “sustainable” aviation fuel is still in its early stages domestically, corn and biofuel associations have made developing a market for it a top policy priority.
Secchi, the Iowa professor, says it’s easy to see why ethanol producers are trying to expand their market: The growth in electric vehicles threatens long-term gasoline sales.
Researchers warn that producing enough ethanol-based jet fuel could trigger major land use shifts. A 2024 World Resources Institute analysis found that meeting the federal goal of 35 billion gallons of ethanol jet fuel would require about 114 million acres of corn — roughly 20% more corn acreage than the U.S. already plants for all purposes. That surge in demand, the authors concluded, would push up food prices and worsen hunger.
Secchi calls that scenario a climate and land use “disaster.” Large-scale use of ethanol-based aviation fuel, she said, would mean clearing even more land and pouring on even more nitrogen fertilizer, driving up greenhouse gas emissions.
“The result,” she said, “would be essentially to enshrine this dysfunctional system that we created.”
This story is from Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powers stalling climate action. Sign up for Floodlight’s newsletter here.
Corn’s clean energy promise is clashing with its climate footprint 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.
SUPREME COSTS:This is the first in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.
A quarter-century ago, the total cost of every state Supreme Court race in the country reached an unprecedented $45.6 million.That figure was so high that it prompted the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University to warn that “a new and ominous politics of judicial elections” posed a “threat to fair and impartial justice.”
Yet in 2025, spending on a single Wisconsin Supreme Court seat exceeded $114.2 million.
That doesn’t include a legally questionable $30.3 million voter giveaway by billionaire Elon Musk.
The $144.5 million spent on one seat in Wisconsin was even more than the $100.8 million spent on all other state high court contests in the nation in 2021 and 2022 combined.
At the same time, this state’s two major political parties have become the largest donors — and in some cases, the majority donors — to the candidates for an officially nonpartisan office.
And the last two justices elected to Wisconsin’s highest court received most of their individual campaign contributions from people who don’t live in Wisconsin.
State Supreme Court races have become everything they were never meant to be — highly partisan, astronomically expensive national political battles in which the candidates’ ideologies overshadow their qualifications for an office that requires them to swear an oath to “administer justice … faithfully and impartially.”
Several factors are driving the massive spending in Wisconsin, one of 22 states that elect justices rather than appoint them. Reducing the influence of those factors would require changing the state constitution, state law or judicial rules of conduct. The factors include:
Some of those factors have pushed high court races in other states into the seven- or even eight-figure range, but only Wisconsin — the first to see nine-figure spending on a court contest — has all of them.
“It’s the whole picture that makes us so obscene,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which advocates for transparent and accountable government.
Wisconsin Watch estimates the final total was $114.2 million — more than double the previous national record of $50.4 million for high court races — also set in this state, only two years earlier.
And that total doesn’t include the largest and most controversial expenditures of the spring campaign: Musk’s payments of $100 each to Wisconsin voters who signed a petition against “activist judges,” plus $1 million checks to three signers. Add in that $30.3 million effort and the race’s price tag jumps to $144.5 million.
The 2025 Supreme Court election was the fourth-most expensive campaign for any office in Wisconsin history, behind only the 2022 and 2024 U.S. Senate contests and the 2022 governor’s race.
“As politics has grown more intense, more polarized and more expensive, high court election campaigns now resemble the worst of a presidential primary, complete with attack ads, dark money and presidential endorsements,” Brennan Center President Michael Waldman wrote in a March analysis. “All this hardly seems the best way to induce public trust in the courts.”
Since the era of multimillion-dollar Supreme Court campaigns came to Wisconsin in 2007, candidates and special-interest groups have spent $217.2 million on 12 contested races, with the 2023 and 2025 elections accounting for three-quarters of that total, excluding the petition spending, based on information compiled by the campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.
Voters could be in for more of the same, facing a high court election every spring for the next four years. And even if the 2026 race doesn’t break records, it’s guaranteed to be another multimillion-dollar contest.
The liberal candidate, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, reported in July that she had raised $583,933 in the first six weeks of her campaign, ahead of now-Justice Susan Crawford’s record-breaking 2025 pace. By late August, Taylor’s campaign manager said the former Democratic state legislator had taken in more than $1 million.
After conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley announced she wouldn’t seek a second 10-year term, Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar entered the race. Spending topped $1 million in the conservative Lazar’s successful 2022 bid to unseat incumbent Lori Kornblum. That was almost certainly Wisconsin’s second-most expensive appellate court race, behind a $1.6 million contest for another seat in the same southeastern district in 2021.
Although Wisconsin now outpaces every other state in Supreme Court campaign costs, it wasn’t an early leader in the national trend of divisive multimillion-dollar contests.
In its 2002 report, the Brennan Center called 2000 “a watershed year for fundraising and spending in state supreme court elections,” as the total raised by candidates nationwide leaped 61%, from $28.3 million in 1998 to $45.6 million in 2000, led by Alabama, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois.
*Video shows TV ad clips of Supreme Court candidates in Wisconsin, 2011 - 2025.
Sources: Brennan Center for Justice, WisPolitics
Much of that money was spent on “television advertising — especially by political parties and interest groups — that has grown increasingly negative and controversial, and in some cases fallen far beneath the level of dignity most Americans associate with their judicial system,” the report said.
That kind of “strident, negative television advertising” characterized Wisconsin’s first million-dollar contest in 1999, then-Rep. Mary Hubler, D-Rice Lake, complained at the time. Liberal Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson won reelection against conservative challenger Sharren Rose in a race that cost $1.4 million.
Before then, high court candidates in the 1990s typically spent around $250,000 each, which “looks like a pittance” now, former Justice Janine Geske said in an interview. Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called those earlier races “gentlemanly” and “low-key affairs.”
The low-key tone returned for the 2000 high court race. Justice Diane Sykes, a conservative appointed by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, and liberal challenger Louis Butler kept their pledges to run positive campaigns. Both scrupulously avoided commenting on any issues that might come before the court. They spent a total of $430,963, with both accepting public financing that limited their expenditures.
But that contest and the similarly civil 2003 race turned out to be only a temporary reprieve. After Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle appointed Butler to a vacant seat, Butler wrote a landmark 2005 product liability decision, holding that a lead paint poisoning victim could sue product manufacturers even if he couldn’t figure out which company was responsible.
That 4-2 ruling triggered a sharp reaction from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, which spent an estimated $2.2 million to ensure conservative Annette Ziegler defeated liberal Linda Clifford in 2007. The race cost $5.8 million, with conservatives outspending liberals almost 2.5 to 1.
The following year’s contest promptly broke the new record as spending jumped to almost $6 million in conservative Michael Gableman’s successful bid to oust Butler. WMC dropped an estimated $1.8 million in support of Gableman as conservatives again outspent liberals, $3.2 million to $2.7 million.
Gableman’s victory created a solid conservative majority that controlled the court for the next 15 years. And after Republicans took control of the legislative and executive branches in 2011, they changed the product liability law to prevent future rulings like the 2005 lead paint case.
Similar story lines are playing out nationwide as big-money donors target court races to influence specific cases or issues, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the judiciary program at the Brennan Center.
Musk is a prime example of that trend, said Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. At the same time that Musk was spending $55.9 million to boost conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel’s losing Supreme Court bid, the billionaire’s Tesla Inc. was suing to overturn the state law prohibiting auto manufacturers from owning their dealerships, a key part of Tesla’s business model. The Tesla case is pending in Milwaukee County Circuit Court and could reach the high court that Musk unsuccessfully tried to influence.
Big spenders are rarely transparent about their agendas on issues like auto sales or product liability, instead pouring their money into television advertising that luridly accuses one candidate or the other of mishandling criminal cases as a lower court judge or attorney. Special interests see crime as “just a visceral idea that they can use to get voters’ attention in an ad,” Keith told Wisconsin Watch. But as the UW Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recently noted, “Only a tiny fraction of the state’s criminal cases ever get to the Supreme Court level, and in recent years such cases have made up only about a third of the court’s docket.”
Big donors are reflecting and reinforcing a growing feeling among voters that “the court is just one more institution to obtain the policies that we (the voters) want,” similar to the legislative and executive branches, said conservative former Justice Dan Kelly. And with frequent deadlocks between the GOP-controlled Legislature and Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, both sides are relying more on lawsuits than lawmaking, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The stakes range all the way up to control of the White House. In 2020, President Donald Trump’s campaign filed suit seeking to throw out more than 220,000 absentee ballots from the Democratic strongholds of Milwaukee and Dane County. The state Supreme Court tossed the suit, but only because Justice Brian Hagedorn broke ranks with fellow conservatives to join the body’s three liberals.
That razor-thin 2020 presidential election was part of a nationwide record five times in 24 years that Wisconsin’s electoral votes were decided by less than one percentage point. Schweber, Ramos and Heck said the same swing-state energy pumps up both sides in high court races — even though only two of the last 12 contested Supreme Court elections were that close.
And while conservatives ruled the court for 15 years, their majority was never more than five of seven seats, meaning that a change in ideological control could be just one or two elections away for most of those years. That’s one of the most common factors driving big-spending court elections nationwide, Keith said.
Spending on high court contests is rising nationwide, hitting $100.8 million for the 68 justice seats decided in the 2021-22 cycle, according to the Brennan Center’s most recent report on the politics of judicial elections.
Electing a single Wisconsin Supreme Court justice cost more this year than operating the entire seven-member court for three years.
The 16-member Court of Appeals costs $12.9 million per year.
The high court and other statewide court services, including the CCAP system for looking up cases online, cost $40.7 million.
The state share of circuit court costs in all 72 counties, including salaries and benefits for all 261 trial judges as well as reserve judges and court reporters, totals $132 million.
*Each circle represents $1 million.
Sources: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and OpenSecrets
Efforts to keep partisan politics out of judicial campaigns date back to Wisconsin’s 1848 founding. In a provision that survives to this day, the first state constitution prohibited electing judges at the same time as most other state officials, a move that some constitutional convention delegates hoped would discourage parties from nominating judicial candidates. That proved to be a vain hope, but it laid the groundwork for formally nonpartisan spring elections to evolve by 1891, according to the State Law Library.
Wisconsin is one of only four states that hold judicial elections in the spring or summer. Other states that elect judges hold those elections in the fall, regardless of whether they are partisan or nonpartisan. That means they’re competing for donations with many other high-profile races, while Wisconsin’s high court races are often the biggest spring contests outside presidential primaries, noted Burden, Keith and Marquette University Law School Poll Director Charles Franklin.
The spring timing took on national political significance this year, as the first major election in a battleground state after Trump’s November 2024 victory, Burden said. Musk “essentially connected the dots for voters” by turning the contest into a referendum on Trump’s policies, and by extension on Musk’s own role in slashing the federal government, Burden said. That strategy backfired so spectacularly that Musk said afterward he planned to cut back his future involvement in politics.
But it took more than a century for that partisan dynamic to evolve. Even as the total cost of high court campaigns soared into the millions, a relatively small percentage of the cash was coming from the parties, although the state Republican Party soon became the largest single donor to some conservative candidates.
Total Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign expense paid by Democratic and Republican parties, 2007-2025
*2025 data not including related $30.3 million petition drive.
**Graphic only includes main liberal and conservative candidate.
***Includes both contributions to candidates and independent expenditures.
Sources: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and OpenSecrets
The proportions started to change after 2015, when a campaign finance overhaul by the GOP-dominated Legislature allowed unlimited donations to political parties and unlimited contributions from parties to candidates. While wealthy donors can contribute no more than $20,000 directly to a Supreme Court candidate (up from $1,000), they now can give as much as they want to a party, and the party then can donate all of that money to the candidate.
Donations from state and local Republican parties jumped more than fivefold, from $75,926 to Bradley in the 2016 campaign (which was already under way when the new law took effect) to $423,615 to Sauk County Circuit Judge Michael Screnock in the next contested race in 2018. The GOP cash was more than 39% of the money raised by the conservative Screnock, who lost to liberal Rebecca Dallet.
Democrats still weren’t spending heavily on high court races until fundraising powerhouse Ben Wikler took over as state party chair in 2019. The state, local and national parties poured $1.4 million into Jill Karofsky’s 2020 campaign, $9.9 million into Janet Protasiewicz’s 2023 campaign and $11.8 million into Crawford’s 2025 campaign. The state party was the largest single donor to each justice, accounting for more than 59% of Protasiewicz’s treasury, just under half of Karofsky’s fundraising and more than one-third of Crawford’s cash.
That far outpaced Republican contributions of $328,586 to then-incumbent Kelly in 2020 and $900,461 to his unsuccessful comeback bid in 2023. The GOP didn’t start to catch up until this year, when it threw $9.7 million into Schimel’s losing campaign, representing more than 61% of the former attorney general’s war chest.
Together, the two major parties spent $34.9 million on officially nonpartisan Supreme Court races from 2007 through 2025, almost all of it in the last three campaigns. Democrats outspent Republicans by $23.2 million to $11.7 million, or nearly 2 to 1.
In February, the Marquette poll found 61% of Wisconsin voters believe party contributions reduce judicial independence, compared with 38% who think partisan support gives voters useful information about candidates.
State Democratic and Republican party leaders didn’t respond to interview requests. But some GOP activists blamed party chair Brian Schimming for the conservative losses in 2023 and 2025. That led to a study that called for an even greater party role in high court elections, while discouraging advertising by other outside groups like Musk’s PACs.
Party contributions represent less than one-quarter of the $161.5 million that special interests spent on the last 12 Supreme Court races. Nearly all of that spending fell along ideological lines. In addition to the parties, conservative organizations and business interests spent $80.2 million supporting conservative candidates, while progressive groups and unions spent $46.4 million backing liberal candidates.
Of all the special-interest spending, only $38.3 million, or 24%, went into candidates’ campaign treasuries from 2007 through 2025, $25.8 million on the liberal side and $12.5 million on the conservative side. The rest was spent directly by outside groups, typically on advertising that is usually outside the candidates’ control. That money mainly fell into two categories: independent expenditures and “issue ads,” both operating under rules that were significantly loosened by the conservative-led U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision.
Campaign ads funded by independent expenditures clearly state which candidates they support or oppose. Like the campaigns themselves, political action committees making independent expenditures must file reports with the Wisconsin Ethics Commission, disclosing how much they received and spent and who their donors were. Unlike campaigns, they can take money from corporations and unions, and anyone can give them unlimited contributions.
By contrast, “issue ads” try to sway voters under the guise of expressing concern about a particular issue, but without using specific phrases like “vote for” or “vote against.” Issue ad groups aren’t required to reveal how much they spent or who gave them cash. Their funding is often called “dark money” because it’s hidden from the light of public disclosure.
Because of the way issue ad spending is reported, the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign was unable to distinguish the exact amount spent on issue ads in the Supreme Court race from similar spending that targeted the simultaneous campaign for state superintendent of public instruction. Based on preliminary data from the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center, Wisconsin Watch estimates $13.9 million was aimed at the Supreme Court contest.
Using that estimate and previous Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates, issue ads accounted for most of the special-interest spending in eight consecutive Supreme Court contests from 2007 through 2018. For the entire 2007-2025 period, issue ad spending totaled $40.2 million, $31.8 million for conservatives and $8.4 million for liberals.
By contrast, most of the special-interest money went into independent expenditures in the last four high court campaigns. Liberal groups spent slightly more than conservative organizations in the 2019, 2020 and 2023 races, but this year, Schimel supporters outspent Crawford backers, $33.3 million to $18.1 million. From 2007 through 2025, independent expenditures totaled $83.5 million — $47.6 million for conservatives and $35.4 million for liberals, plus almost $450,000 on candidates eliminated in the 2023 primary.
Musk’s petition giveaways don’t fit neatly into either the independent expenditure or issue ad categories — and whether they fit into campaign finance law at all is a subject of litigation. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign filed a civil suit against Musk, accusing him of violating Wisconsin’s election bribery law.
Out-of-state donors like Musk didn’t play a major role in high court elections until relatively recently. From 2007 through 2018, most Supreme Court candidates received more than 90% of their individual donations from state residents, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign figures show. During that time, the highest proportions of out-of-state donations were:
Out-of-state donations to conservative candidates remained below 10% as out-of-state donations to liberals rose to about 23% each for Hagedorn’s opponent Lisa Neubauer in 2019 and Karofsky in 2020.
But the out-of-state cash exploded for liberals after 2022, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and left each state to regulate abortions. The decision revived an 1849 Wisconsin law that was interpreted as banning all abortions except to save the life of the mother.
As Protasiewicz positioned herself as the abortion rights candidate, her 2023 campaign took in a record $3.6 million — 57% of individual contributions — from donors outside Wisconsin, while Kelly’s $340,405 in out-of-state money represented just one-eighth of his individual donations.
Similarly, Crawford, a Dane County judge who had represented Planned Parenthood as an attorney fighting a different abortion law, received $14.6 million from out-of-state donors for her 2025 campaign, hitting a likely unprecedented 69% of individual contributions.
Crawford took in more from individual out-of-state donors alone than all liberal candidates from 2007 through 2023 had received from all individual contributors combined. By contrast, Schimel’s $1.1 million from other states amounted to less than one-fifth of his individual donations.
In July, after Crawford was elected but before she took her seat, the liberal-controlled court voted 4-3 along ideological lines to overturn the 19th-century law.
Over the last 12 campaigns, out-of-state donors contributed $20.7 million to Wisconsin Supreme Court races, all but about $1 million of that in the last two races. Liberal candidates took in almost $19 million from outside Wisconsin, more than 10 times the nearly $1.8 million that went to conservative candidates. In its review of the 2025 campaign, the state GOP called for a greater effort to attract out-of-state dollars for conservatives.
From the parties’ perspective, Democrats have beaten Republicans at their own game, triumphing under rules largely crafted by GOP lawmakers and conservative judges. Now Republicans hope to win back their advantage with more of the same.
But for reformers, the most pressing issue is how to stop the competition for ever-greater spending and reduce the influence of big money on the high court.
Next: Could new laws and recusal rules stem the tide of Supreme Court campaign spending?
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Because of the use of scrolling graphics, the republication button is not available for this story. Reach out to Matthew DeFour at mdefour@wisconsinwatch.org if you would like to republish.
Wisconsin Supreme Court elections have drawn an ‘obscene’ amount of spending. Here’s why and what can be done about it. 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.
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Construction on a new city hall in Raleigh, N.C., was at a standstill Nov. 18 as word of immigration raids kept away most workers. Industries with large immigrant workforces, such as construction, are asking for federal relief as they combat labor shortages and raids. (Photo by Clayton Henkel/NC Newsline)
As food prices remain high, the Trump administration has made it easier for farmers to hire foreign guest workers and to pay them less. Now, other industries with large immigrant workforces also are asking for relief as they combat labor shortages and raids.
Visas for temporary foreign workers are a quick fix with bipartisan support in Congress. And Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ office told Stateline that “streamlining” visas for both agricultural and other jobs is a priority for the Trump administration.
But some experts warn that such visas can be harmful if they postpone immigration overhauls that would give immigrant workers a path to green cards and citizenship.
“Lack of permanent status is costly to migrants, employers, and the broader economy,” wrote Pia Orrenius, a labor economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, in a report published in June. Workers are “vulnerable to policy changes triggered by a change in administration, most recently the threat of mass deportations.”
In a Nov. 25 interview with Stateline, Orrenius said the crackdown on illegal immigration could be a good thing if it leads to permanent solutions.
“If you can stop undocumented immigration, then great. This is a great time to work on comprehensive immigration reform,” Orrenius said. “Where is there a scarcity of workers and how do we address those legally instead of illegally?”
Restaurants, construction and landscaping businesses have lost a combined 315,000 immigrant workers through August this year, more than any other industries, according to a Stateline analysis of Current Population Survey data provided by the University of Minnesota at ipums.org.
The construction industry needs more foreign worker visas like those already being provided for agriculture to prevent more delays in building everything from homes to highways, business owners say.
The industry needs help to “provide lawful workers while working to prepare more Americans for permanent careers in construction,” said Jaime Andress, testifying at a congressional hearing last month on behalf of the Associated General Contractors of America trade group. About 92% of contractors with open positions are having trouble finding enough skilled labor, whether it’s for construction of buildings, highways or utility infrastructure, she testified.
There are about 145,000 fewer immigrants working in restaurants, on average, through August of this year compared with the same period in 2024, the Stateline analysis found. There are about 127,000 fewer in construction and 43,000 fewer in landscaping.
One landscaping firm, which did not agree to an interview, lost $50,000 in contracts this year when workers stopped showing up because of rumored immigration raids, said Rebecca Shi, chief executive officer of the Chicago-based American Business Immigration Coalition, which advocates for employers seeking immigration changes.
“He had 75 workers and 50 of them didn’t show up one day because there were rumors ICE was going to be in the area,” Shi said. “Many of them were citizens and legal workers, but they were worried about family members and neighbors, so they didn’t show up either. It’s bad for the economy when you lose a worker, but it’s also the fear and uncertainty. We know restaurants that have lost 50% of staff and are at risk of closing because people just aren’t showing up.”
The coalition organized a “fly-in” in October to Washington, D.C., to ask members of Congress for more help to legalize immigrant workers through work permits in hospitality, agriculture, construction, elder care, health care and manufacturing.
In a letter dated Dec. 2, thousands of businesses in all 50 states asked the administration for an additional 64,716 H-2B visas, saying they rely on them for seasonal surges in hospitality, tourism, landscaping, forestry, seafood production and other industries.
And a bipartisan group of 33 U.S. senators from 22 states signed a letter Nov. 13 by Maine Independent Sen. Angus King and South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds asking for more H-2B seasonal employment visas.
“Employers’ workforce needs cannot be met with American workers alone,” the letter said.
Construction contractors say they need visas that are similar to the H-2A visas for agriculture that the Trump administration streamlined in October to make them easier and cheaper for farmers to hire temporary foreign workers.
The Associated General Contractors of America wants visas like the proposed new H-2C visas floated by Pennsylvania Republican U.S. Rep. Lloyd Smucker. Those would allow up to 85,000 less-skilled temporary workers in construction, hospitality and other fields to stay in this country up to nine years. The bill, introduced in September, has not advanced.
The association also supports a pathway to legal status for some workers already in the country, as proposed by Florida Republican U.S. Rep. María Elvira Salazar and Texas Democratic U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar. The bill, introduced in July, also has not advanced.
“Workforce shortages are the leading cause of construction project delays,” said Brian Turmail, a vice president at the association. “Nearly 1 out of 3 contractors have been impacted in one way or another by enhanced ICE enforcement activities. That number is almost certain to increase now that ICE has received significant boosts to its budget as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Workforce shortages are the leading cause of construction project delays.
– Brian Turmail, Associated General Contractors of America
Those industries are asking for more help as the latest federal immigration raids further affect workforces in Illinois, Maryland and North Carolina, with more raids planned in Louisiana. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data research organization at Syracuse University, reported a “massive redeployment of government military and civilian personnel to immigration enforcement” in recent months, with total detentions reaching more than 65,000, according to a Nov. 24 report. Nearly three-quarters of those arrested have no criminal convictions.
Construction, landscaping and other industries are already heavy users of H-2B visas for temporary non-agricultural foreign workers, according to government figures reviewed by Stateline.
In fiscal year 2025, which ended in September, there were about 209,000 H-2B visas, with Texas (20,051), Florida (18,515), North Carolina (8,634), Colorado (7,723) and Louisiana (7,234) getting the most. The most common occupations were building and grounds (94,152); food service (31,403); construction (16,729); farming, fishing and forestry (15,665); and personal care (12,170).
Some of the largest users of the visas last year were Core Tech Construction of New York City, a concrete coring and cutting firm (2,619 visas); ABC Professional Tree Services of Texas, which provides land clearance services (1,913); and Progressive Solutions LLC of Arkansas, which provides herbicide application to utilities (1,882).
The H-2B visa program needs to be streamlined and expanded to be useful for employers and workers, said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian CATO Institute, who has written about the visas.
Employers don’t always get the workers they want because the United States limits H-2B visas to 33,000 twice a year. Requests for the visas have already surpassed the 33,000 cap for the first half of fiscal 2026.
“The paperwork is a nightmare for employers and there are a lot of steps for workers also,” said Bier. “And there are so few visas available that your chance of getting all you need is almost nil.”
Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A drone watching a protest. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
“It is a unique bill that has a lot of emotion and nuances to it,” said Rep. Chuck Wichgers (R-Muskego), describing a bill to give local law enforcement the power to disable or destroy drones. Speaking to the Assembly Committee on Criminal Justice and Public Safety on Wednesday, Wichgers said that the bill would give “the bare minimum protection” for both the public and police as global drone technology continues to rapidly evolve.
Although current state law prohibits the use of weaponized drones, the devices are not actually defined in statute. Wichgers’ bill would define a weaponized drone as one which “is equipped with a taster, firearm, flamethrower, chemical, or explosive device.”
Wichgers cautioned that “we can easily complicate this bill,” especially given the growth of drone technology around the world. Over the last two decades, drones have gone from being scarcely heard of outside military settings to becoming household objects. The U.S. military’s infamous Reaper and Predator drones, some of which are the size of small planes, have long been used in combat for reconnaissance and lethal strikes. Today, however, the same small and cheap quad-copter drones used by photographers, landscapers and children are being outfitted with explosives for kamikaze-style attacks on armored vehicles on Russian and Ukrainian battlefields, where an estimated 70-80% of casualties are caused by drones.
“It’s beyond fascinating,” Wichgers said of “this is a big and global issue.” Wichgers told committee members that “we need to start getting language in statute,” since only certain federal agencies currently have the authority to down weaponized drones. “This bill allows Wisconsin law enforcement to mitigate a threat posed by a weaponized drone by detecting, tracking and identifying the drone and then intercepting, disabling, or in a worst case scenario, destroying the drone.”
In order to protect public safety, Wichgers said that “these powers should be extended to local law enforcement.” He added that the federal government provides grants to help mitigate drone threats, as well as $500 million set aside for fiscal year 2026-27, as part of the Trump administration’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.” “The difficulty is that law enforcement should not have to waiver if there is an immediate threat for a drone that is weaponized or carrying a load that is harmful to the public,” said Wichgers. “Our airspace needs to be safe, just like we’re safe on our roads.”
The bill was requested by the Police Chief Association of Waukesha County, Wichgers said. “State law must be enacted that is responsive to current and future needs as best as we can determine them in order to prevent harm and protect our communities,” he added.
Committee members chimed in with a variety of questions. Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers) joked about farmers using weaponized drones to eliminate sandhill cranes consuming crops. Wichgers brought up his own examples, including nervous neighbors calling the police to check out roofers who might be using drones for survey work, or a drone being used at a concert to drop fentanyl on people who then overdose in the crowd. “Right now the police would say, ‘Sorry, the Wisconsin Legislature is dragging their feet on passing a law that gives me permission to disarm that drone that’s a threat, we’ll have to wait till next session,” said Wichgers.
Dan Thompson, chief of the Waukesha Police Department, told the committee, that “drones carry contraband, surveillance equipment or worse, weaponized payloads” and that the technology can “present a unique danger that demands an immediate intervention.”
The chief’s comments prompted Rep. David Steffen (R-Howard) to seek clarification that under the proposed bill a drone does not, in fact, need to be weaponized, and that law enforcement only need to “reasonably suspect” that it could pose a public safety threat in order to shoot it down. Sortwell said that the bill’s language seemed broad.
Sortwell questioned whether as the bill is written, shooting down a drone could be justified at any time. Legislative counsel said, “I don’t know that I can really answer that.” Sortwell shot back, “The fact that you can’t say ‘no’ is troubling.”
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Gov. Tony Evers appointed John W. Miller, a venture capitalist, to serve as the next secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation. (Photo courtesy Evers' office)
Gov. Tony Evers appointed John W. Miller, a venture capitalist who previously served on the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents, to serve as the next secretary and CEO of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation.
Miller will fill the spot left vacant by Missy Hughes, who had served in the position since 2019 but stepped down from it in September just ahead of launching her campaign for governor. She joined a crowded field of candidates seeking Democratic nomination in 2026.
Evers said in a statement that Miller has a “proven track record of helping spearhead business growth and success in Wisconsin and around the Midwest, which makes him uniquely qualified to lead the exceptional team at WEDC.”
“Under my administration, WEDC has entered a new era, focused on helping build an economy that works for everyone from the ground up. From investing in our workforce and higher education to bolstering entrepreneurs and budding businesses to leveraging public and private partnerships, John understands what it takes to build the 21st-century economy Wisconsinites need and deserve, and I have no doubt that his leadership will help us continue our work toward a stronger future for our state and communities across Wisconsin,” Evers said.
Miller, who currently lives in Fox Point with his family, started his career as a congressional staffer for former U.S. Rep. Jerry Kleczka, a Democrat who represented Wisconsin’s 4th Congressional District (now represented by U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore). He went on to attend the University of Wisconsin Law School, graduating in 2006.
Miller then worked at Miller-St. Nazianz Inc., his family’s agricultural equipment manufacturing business, including as president and CEO for several years. He founded a venture capital fund called Arenberg Holdings LLC. in 2015 in Milwaukee; the firm works to mentor and invest in early-stage companies in the Midwest.
Miller said in a statement that he is “honored” that Evers selected him for the position.
“WEDC celebrated a record year of investments in 2025, and I have every intention of using my experience in the business community to continue that success into 2026 and beyond,” Miller said.
Evers previously appointed Miller to serve on the UW Board of Regents in 2021, though the state Senate fired him from the position in 2024 after he rejected a deal reached between Republican lawmakers and the UW System that traded concessions on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) for funding for employee raises and capital projects.
Miller was also previously appointed to and served on the Library of Congress Trust Fund Board of Directors under President Barack Obama and on the United States Trade Representative Advisory Committee for Trade Policy and Negotiations under President Joe Biden.
His appointment takes effect Dec. 15.
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