Galo Suárez, 25, was in a car near the El Rey Food Market on 13th St. in Milwaukee with his fiance Reyna Elizabeth Garcia and her brother Teodoro last weekend, when they realized they were being followed. A truck stopped in front of them and four more pulled up behind them. Suárez, related the experience  in Spanish as members of Voces de la Frontera translated during a Tuesday press conference. He said  masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents began breaking their car windows and threatened them with “several heavy consequences” if they didn’t comply. 

“They had guns pointed at us,” Suárez said, as he sat beside other witnesses of ICE arrests, Voces de la Frontera leaders and local elected officials at the Voces office in Milwaukee. “They didn’t ask us for our names, they didn’t ask us for an I.D. They took us violently out of the car.” His fiance was put against the car “in a very violent way” said Suárez. The agents called her a dog, he said, and told her “that is what happens to you.”

The encounter was not an anomaly. As of Tuesday, Voces de la Frontera’s hotline had corroborated 26-28 ICE detentions over the last few days in Wisconsin. “We know that many of the people are being held in Dodge, Waukesha County, Chicago-Maywood, Kentucky, Miami, Florida,” Voces said in a statement. Even as the press conference played out, two more confirmed ICE reports came in from Fitchburg, a suburb of Madison.

Some detainees have serious medical conditions, Voces director Christine Neumann-Ortiz said, adding that the detentions have been traumatic. She said Voces has documented four cases of excessive use of force and two cases of people who were crime victims actively going through legal proceedings when they were detained by ICE. “One of which is a U-Visa applicant, that is not supposed to be deportable,” she said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security said in an email statement that ICE arrested “39 illegal aliens” in Wisconsin over the weekend, stating that “many of them” had criminal histories including sexual assault, driving under the influence, obstructing police, domestic abuse, property damage, “dangerous drug possession,” and other crimes. The spokesperson said that all detainees receive due process, and that pending applications for protected status or asylum “do not confer legal status in this country.”

Neumann-Ortiz called this “a targeted ICE surge” hitting “working-class families” including those seeking asylum from violence in their home countries and people with Temporary Protected Status. The “overwhelming majority” of the people ICE has swept up in Wisconsin over the last several days have no criminal record, Neumann-Ortiz said, though some have deportation orders. Voces is partnering with the Community Immigration Law Center to review cases, help families locate their loved ones and to prepare legal support.

Violence, insults and trauma from federal agents

Suárez said that he and his family were handcuffed by agents who refused to tell them where they were going and would not allow them to speak. “They said I didn’t have the right to know anything, “perro” — dog,” said Suárez, his words translated into English by Alexandra Guevara, communications director for Voces de la Frontera. “We stopped at a parking lot. They took my belongings. They took my wallet, found my working permit. They were trying to force me to say it was fake. I insisted that it was real and that he could check online, so he did.” Most of the agents behaved this way, Suárez told Wisconsin Examiner. 

He kept asking the agents about his fiance, as they had been separated by the agents. “The agents said that she definitely would be detained and not come back yet,” he said. When one of the agents found his documentation and said he’d be freed, another reneged the assurance because they also wanted to look for drugs among his belongings. When the agents questioned why he had money in his wallet, Suárez said it’s because he works. They checked the work permit again, said, “You’re a good person,” and agreed to release him. They took the cuffs off and told him to “run and not look back, because if I looked back I would regret it.” 

His fiance, who also has a work permit, and her brother were kept in detention. Although Suárez has been able to contact his fiance, who was taken to Kenosha, he hasn’t been able to find her brother. “We don’t know where he is,” said Suárez. 

Jacqueline Eckstrom, a resident of the suburban city of Greenfield, witnessed another arrest. On Friday afternoon she has just left a market where she was buying  food  when she saw SUVs with Illinois license plates blocking the road. She chose to park behind the vehicles instead of driving into oncoming traffic. “They did have police vests, but they also had masks,” Eckstrom said, adding that she knows Milwaukee well enough to know that police officers don’t wear masks. “They proceeded, they smashed the window of the car and grabbed the mom aggressively out of the car. And it all happened real quickly, and they took off.” 

Eckstrom remembers crying children, and walking up to the car’s broken window. “There’s shards of glass everywhere,” she said, “and there’s two kids in the backseat.” Her voice trembled as she spoke.  Eckstrom recalled that “the sister was hugging her brother. It broke my heart.” Neumann-Ortiz translated Eckstrom’s words, her voice also strained with emotion. Eckstrom recalled meeting a child  whose mother had been deported and who came through her foster home a decade ago. “He had trauma, but he never watched his mom smashed and grabbed out the car,” said Eckstrom. “I can’t get it out my mind, this weekend, the trauma that these kids are going to think, with someone wearing police vests, that’s not the police, with masks on their head, taking their mom.”

 

 

A neighbor and the fiance of Estenderly Marte Polanco, from the Dominican Republic, also spoke at the Voces office Tuesday. Polanco was arrested on Saturday. The neighbor said she’d gotten a call from her 11-year-old son, who was crying because he didn’t know how to console Polanco’s distraught son, who was in the backseat when agents removed his mother from the car. Her neighbor said that Polaco fainted at one point, and that she was telling agents they were hurting her as she was taken to the car. The arrest was captured on video. 

The masked agents took the keys and made the father and the son walk home. The neighbor said she’d lived near Polanco for two years, and sees her as a dedicated mother who is not a threat to the community. Her fiance called her “a very good person” and said the arrest has been “very devastating for our family.” She added that the agents busted Polanco’s lip, threw her on the ground, called her names and choked her. “They had her face in between her legs where she couldn’t breath,” Polanco’s fiance said, stating that she had to bite one of them to make him let her go.

The sister of a Nicaraguan man who was arrested on Friday also spoke at the press conference. She said that her brother has kidney disease and is sick. “It’s a serious problem,” the woman said in Spanish as Guevara translated. She described him as a shy, hard worker who supports his kids and takes care of his mother. She said that she has been trying desperately to reach him. “He is in urgent need of medicine or his kidneys could collapse and he could even die,” Guevara translated. “He really needs special attention and special food.” The arrest has devastated his family and his sister. Unsure of what to do, they are begging for assistance.

A Homeland Security spokesperson said that ICE agents are trained to use “the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations,” and that agents prioritize the safety of detainees, the public and officers. All use of force incidents are documented and subject to review, the spokesperson said. Although the spokesperson said that detainees get “comprehensive medical care,” deaths in ICE custody in 2026 are outpacing those from 2025, when 32 people died, making it the worst year for deaths in ICE custody in two decades. 

Broken trust and promises with Milwaukee PD and sheriff 

Like Neumann-Ortiz, Milwaukee city Ald. Marina Dimitrijevic and Milwaukee County Board Supervisor Juan Miguel Martinez — who also attended the Tuesday press conference — became emotional while listening to the stories of witnesses. Dimitrijevic shook her head, looking disgusted. Neumann-Ortiz cried at one point, and Martinez looked weary and sad. 

Video of the arrests shows ICE agents violating the city’s prohibition on law enforcement wearing masks. The prohibition is part of Milwaukee’s “ICE Out Package,” which local officials passed almost unanimously after watching the scenes of violence during the ICE surge in Minnesota.

A Homeland Security spokesperson said that such local orders are unconstitutional, that federal law trumps state or local laws, and that agents wear masks to protect themselves and their families from “real-world threats,” claiming that assaults on agents are up more than 1,300%, vehicular attacks by more than 3,300%, and death threats death threats by 8,000%. Dimitrijevic said that masked agents are unidentifiable and are terrifying to local residents.

Dimitrijevic said that the recent arrests do not make the city safer. She also said that city officials were shocked to learn that some of ICE’s activities were filmed taking place at a Milwaukee Police Department station. “We didn’t believe it, we couldn’t believe it,” she said. Not only did the ICE Out Package prohibit that sort of thing from happening, but MPD has its own long-standing policy of not cooperating with or participating in immigration enforcement in order to preserve the community’s trust in local law enforcement. 

An MPD spokesperson confirmed that ICE agents used the District 2 station on Milwaukee’s South Side. The spokesperson said that MPD has asked ICE to not use the parking lot, and that the department did not know in advance that ICE would be using it. MPD also said that no one, including the district’s command staff, gave ICE permission to use the parking lot or allowed them in. 

Suárez said that he was confused by the use of MPD facilities by ICE. “It’s very confusing to think that they’re taking us to a parking spot that is the police’s parking spot,” said Suárez, as Guevara translated, recalling his arrest. “And knowing that they’re not supposed to collaborate, but all of a sudden we’re there in front of that area. And so it does make me think and wonder if they’re not really collaborating.”

 

 

Martinez said that the county board learned that ICE had staged in a county park, violating a local ordinance. Sheriff Denita Ball said that she only found out after the fact, and that deputies will communicate to ICE in the future that the agency can’t stage in the parks. 

Martinez urged residents to continue documenting these instances so that the county can sue ICE in the future for not complying with local ordinances. 

“These are kind of small things that we’re trying to get done,” said Martinez. “Not allowing them in our parks is the idea here to slow them down or stop what they’re doing to terrorize our communities as much as possible. Just hearing these stories…My brain is a little bit scrambled right now. I feel like we’re not dealing with people. I feel like we’re dealing with some kind of entity that’s just here to terrorize, and disrupt, and break apart our way of life.” 

Dimitrijevic said that moving forward the city will need to trust what MPD says about ICE activity, but also verify it. “And there is now going to be more questions and an investigation into what happened, who knew, etc.” She told the Examiner. Martinez said he’s been skeptical of law enforcement ever since officers pulled guns on him when he was 11 years old. “I would hope that they would do what they’re supposed to do,” he told the Examiner. “And all I can do is just keep pushing and making sure that they’re going to do what they’re going to do.”

He also rejected a suggestion  from a reporter that  the ICE Out Package was a bad idea and put a target on the city. Pointing to President Donald Trump’s promises of a mass deportation campaign, and internal ICE memos saying that judicial warrants aren’t needed to enter homes, and other examples, Martinez said, “We had to prepare for what was coming and what we were going to be dealing with.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson said that “being in detention is a choice.” The agency encouraged “all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App,” adding that immigrants without documents are being offered $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport. “We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”

Neumann-Ortiz said that ICE needs to be abolished. “It’s a fairly new agency,” and yet it has a “long record of functioning like a rogue agency,” she said. 

She said ICE has been one of the worst agencies in terms of oversight and accountability. “And I think that has just reached its most extreme level, and clearly the priorities are not safety. It is white nationalist ideology, and it’s using violence to enforce this,” Neumann-Ortiz said. She called for comprehensive  immigration reform and said Wisconsin’s political importance is also a reason why the surge is happening now.

“I want people to know that they are lying,” Suárez told the Examiner. “They’re saying that they are only detaining criminals, but the truth is my fiance and her brother are good people, they’re hardworking, they have no record, and those lies are being used against us and to confuse us.”

The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program, established in 1989 to help Wisconsin obtain and maintain its natural areas expired Tuesday. Cause of death, according to advocates, was legislative obstinance. 

Initially created through a bipartisan piece of legislation, the program has helped local governments build boat launches, playgrounds, bike paths and hiking trails in every corner of the state; helped land trusts and non-profits obtain and conserve thousands of acres of forest land and helped the Department of Natural Resources grow and manage Wisconsin’s state parks. 

“Every single community has a boat launch, or a playground, or a neighborhood park, or a bike path that was funded with Knowles Nelson dollars,” said Charles Carlin, the director of strategic initiatives for Gathering Waters, an alliance of 40 land trusts around Wisconsin.  “So, the state just looks a lot different than it would if we didn’t have Knowles Nelson, and we all have more opportunities to get outside and enjoy all these places that make Wisconsin special than we would have without the program.”

Since its inception, the program has enjoyed broad support from voters and been seen as a national model for land conservation systems. However, in recent years, a handful of Republican legislators — largely representing the northern parts of the state — began to sour on the program’s aims. 

This group has argued that too much land in northern Wisconsin has been conserved, leaving  struggling local governments without enough of a property tax base to fund their budgets or grow their communities. An analysis by the Examiner found that most of the public land in northern Wisconsin is national forest land and that land purchased through Knowles-Nelson is a tiny portion of Wisconsin’s public lands portfolio. 

Opposition to the program was supercharged after the state Supreme Court ruled that the Legislature’s Republican-controlled Joint Finance Committee was unconstitutionally exercising its power by allowing members to anonymously hold up any proposed land acquisitions through Knowles-Nelson. 

The decision angered legislators who had previously been able to quietly stop projects in their districts, and the program suddenly faced energized opposition. Proposals that aimed to bring together bipartisan support to continue the program from Gov. Tony Evers, a handful of Republicans and the Legislature’s Democratic caucus failed to gain traction during the most recent legislative session. 

“Scoring a few political points in the Capitol at the expense of your community and of your voters just encapsulates what people hate about politics right now,” said Carlin. “What happened this session is a very small number of Republican senators decided that political retribution inside the Capitol in Madison was more important than good policy for their constituents. That’s bad governance. It undermines their own communities, and I would hope that they are questioning that choice, perhaps regretting it. I think we’re all going to be looking to see what happens in November, and to see, gosh, are there consequences for choosing to govern like that?” 

With the program’s expiration this week, legislative Democrats have stated that if voters elect Democratic majorities in the Legislature and a Democratic governor next year, re-authorizing the program will be among the first priorities. 

Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein (D-Middleton) said at an event Tuesday morning at Governor Gaylord Nelson State Park in Waunakee that with trifecta control of government, Democrats would bring the program back.

“Senate Republicans … have ensured that towns and cities across our state do not have the money to repair boat launches or keep our trails safe,” she said. “They have made it impossible for the state to preserve more of our landscape, giving developers free rein. They have decided to disregard the will of the residents, and no wonder why the Republican party is losing so much at the polls. The expiration of this program today is just another example of Republican failures, but my message to Wisconsin is very simple: Vote for Democrats in November, and we promise, especially with the Democratic trifecta, we will bring the Knowles Nelson Stewardship Program back in full force, so people can enjoy nature regardless of their zip code, every single place in the state of Wisconsin.” 

Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay), one of the authors of the failed Democratic bill to reauthorize the program, told the Examiner Monday that the expiration was just a “pause.” 

Habush Sinykin said that she’s working on ways to get a Knowles-Nelson bill through the Legislature no matter the result of the November elections. 

“We’ll find out just in a matter of months what we have to work with,” she said. “But we have quite a bit of give with regard to how we can keep the program going forward productively, in terms of funding and for oversight mechanisms. And again, I would be certainly grateful to be able to work across the aisle and with legislators in my own party to come up with the Knowles Nelson reauthorization program that makes sense for Wisconsin. It contributes so much to our state and local economies and quality of life. It really is a wise investment.” 

Even if a bill to restart the program is introduced immediately at the start of the next session and fast tracked to the governor’s desk, it could be close to a year before the program is back on track. Carlin said that because of the long-term planning required for the type of land acquisitions funded through Knowles-Nelson, the “ripple effects go way beyond that 12-month period of time.” 

“Every single land trust and every single local government is cash strapped, and they are strained for capacity as well. There’s more to do than there is people and money to get it done,” he said. And so, as the future of Knowles Nelson became more and more uncertain, you know, land trusts, they really ramped down their land acquisition planning. Because if they don’t have a sense of how the heck they’re going to fund a project, they don’t pursue it. And so what that means is, is fewer conversations are happening with prospective landowners, that fewer negotiations about land purchases are happening. And that’s not an on/off switch; it takes a while to ramp that up and to get going again.” 

Carlin added that the state knows there’s a growing maintenance backlog for the state’s outdoor recreation facilities and a need to help communities across the state build infrastructure to manage the effects of climate change. 

“By pulling the rug out from under ourselves to make those investments for a year, we’re causing delays that might wind up lasting three years or five years until we get ourselves back on track, even when Knowles Nelson is fully funded,” he said. “So you know what’s done is done, and now we’ve just got to figure out how to fix it and get back on track as quickly as possible.”

Wisconsin mothers on Medicaid will officially begin keeping coverage for a year after giving birth starting July 1, as the postpartum Medicaid extension signed into law earlier this year takes effect. 

Wisconsin became the 49th state in the U.S. to opt into the Medicaid extension in March, following years of gridlock in the Legislature. Republican Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) had opposed taking the expansion even as a majority of state legislators  including Republican and Democratic members and Gov. Tony Evers supported the move.

Evers said in a statement that the extension was “the right move for Wisconsin families and the right move for our state, and I’m darn proud that we got this done so that more moms and babies have the care they need when they need it.” 

“We know that postpartum recovery is a heckuva a lot longer than 60 days, and expanded postpartum coverage can and will save lives,” Evers said. “That’s why I’ve been fighting to get this done for a long time, and I am glad Wisconsin’s women and families are finally getting the expanded coverage they deserve.”

During a press call Tuesday, Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) Secretary Kirsten Johnson said it’s expected that 16,000 mothers over the next year — from today until July 2027  — will benefit from the expanded coverage. 

“This is a tremendous win for our state to provide access to care when a person needs it the most. Continuous coverage during the first year after pregnancy is critical to help moms manage their health, reduce long-term emotional and financial strain on families, reduce preventable deaths in the months following a pregnancy, and prevent gaps in healthcare coverage,” Johnson said.

Johnson said the agency is hoping the expanding coverage will lead to a decrease in maternal death and infant mortality rates. She said some of the metrics that the agency will be looking at to understand the impact include overall use of benefits, including how frequently women are using them and what they are using them for, as well as data on claims and maternal deaths.

Medicaid covers two out of every five births in Wisconsin, according to DHS. 

People in Wisconsin are typically only eligible for Medicaid coverage if they make up to 100% of the federal poverty level, but pregnant women can receive Medicaid coverage if they have an annual income of up to 306% of the federal poverty level. Without the expansion, babies born in Wisconsin covered by Medicaid received coverage for a full year, while their mothers would lose Medicaid coverage 60 days after giving birth if they made over 100% of the federal poverty level. 

Now, mothers between the 100% and 306% levels will get to keep their coverage for a full year.

Coverage will continue automatically for anyone whose 60-day postpartum coverage was scheduled to end on May 31 or later. 

According to DHS, Medicaid members whose 60-day postpartum coverage ended after the law was signed on March 18 and no longer have any BadgerCare Plus or Medicaid coverage will need to call their agency to request reinstatement of their coverage for the remainder of their 12-month postpartum period. DHS plans to send those individuals a letter with instructions. 

Jasmine Zapata, state epidemiologist for maternal and child health and chronic diseases and chief medical office at the Bureau of Community Health Promotion, said mental health conditions, including overdoses, constitute one of the leading causes of death for postpartum women and many of those deaths tend to happen after 60 days postpartum. She said expanded access to mental health services will be one piece that helps save lives.

“Basically, per 100,000 live births, we’re hoping that between one and seven can be saved based on all of the projections, so that’s something we’ll be watching closely,” Zapata said. 

Johnson and Zapata said the next step will be for the agency to encourage its healthcare partners and providers to help Medicaid members understand how their benefits have changed. 

“It’s one thing to have access to care, but there are groups of people who have access to care, but who don’t utilize that care, and so that’s something that is definitely going to be important,” Zapata said, adding that the state  will continue to work on expanding Wisconsin women’s use  of benefits.

Twenty-five Democratic-led states plus the District of Columbia have sued the Trump administration over its new work requirements for people who get their health insurance through Medicaid.

At issue is a “medically frail” designation that the states say is too narrow and will make it too difficult for ill and disabled people to remain on Medicaid.

They’re challenging the administration’s guidance on who can be exempt from the work requirements included in the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the broad tax and spending measure President Donald Trump signed a year ago.

Medicaid is the publicly-funded health insurance for people with low incomes. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, states that have expanded Medicaid eligibility to more adults under the Affordable Care Act — 40 states plus the District of Columbia — must require those adults to prove they’re working, going to school or serving their communities for at least 80 hours a month to receive Medicaid. Georgia, Tennessee, and Wisconsin, which have used federal waivers to expand their Medicaid programs, are also subject to the new work rules.

The new lawsuit specifically targets new federal guidance that narrows the definition of who can qualify as “medically frail,” a key exemption used to excuse Medicaid recipients from work requirements if they have serious disabilities or illnesses. The guidance came in the form of an interim final rule published this month by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

The Democratic attorneys general and governors who are plaintiffs in the suit claim the feds surprised them with this new rule months after they’d already been working with CMS on how to implement the work requirements.

“This eleventh-hour attempt to further narrow protections for medically frail Medicaid recipients seeks to punish those who cannot fend for themselves,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, in a statement.

“Further, this Administration is once again attempting to sidestep Congress by unlawfully reinterpreting the law, and coercing the states to rush to implement their last-minute changes or face penalties,” he said.

To qualify as “medically frail” and therefore exempt from work requirements, the new guidance says, a Medicaid recipient must have a significant health condition and be significantly impaired in their ability to work. It’s a distinction the states say Congress did not make in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

The states also claim the new guidance violates federal law by ignoring evidence that work requirements cause people to lose coverage due to red tape.

For example, Arkansas tried instituting work requirements for Medicaid recipients in 2018, during Trump’s first term. A federal judge halted the policy less than a year later, after 18,000 adults had lost coverage. Studies later found that Arkansas’ work requirements didn’t increase employment. A recent analysis from the Urban Institute projects that 3-7 million people could lose coverage because of the new work requirements.

Supporters of the new work rules say they are sufficiently flexible and that the category of who qualifies as “medically frail” remains broad.

“This rule helps Americans build skills and independence through work, education, job training, or community service, creating new opportunities for themselves and their families,” said Dr. Mehmet Oz, director for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, in a statement earlier this month announcing the new guidance.

The lawsuit says states have already invested significant resources into implementing the new work requirements based on the original law’s language and prior federal guidance. They’re staring down an August 31, 2026, deadline for notifying Medicaid recipients about changes to the “medically frail” designation, a timeline the states say is not workable. They face financial penalties for not meeting the deadline.

States are expected to put the new work requirements into place by January 1, 2027, though the feds could choose to grant them temporary extensions through 2028.

The lawsuit was filed by the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, as well as the governors of Kentucky and Pennsylvania.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Dozens of public housing authorities, tribes, property owners and community groups have joined a new coalition organized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to promote work requirements and time limits for people who receive federal housing help.

HUD is currently finalizing a rule that would allow public housing authorities and property owners who participate in federal housing voucher programs to impose work requirements and time limits on work-ready adults, or working-age adults (younger than 62) who are not disabled.

The federal agency says members of the coalition support the idea of giving housing authorities and providers discretion to require work of up to 40 hours per week for nonelderly, nondisabled adults, supplementing those rules with job training and other supportive services.

HUD argues that current housing policies discourage work and self-sufficiency, and extend the amount of time that people remain on housing assistance. In a social media post, Public and Indian Housing Assistant Secretary Ben Hobbs said the new requirements could generate over $500 million in new resident income.

In 2023, 31% of the people receiving federal housing assistance were nonelderly, nondisabled adults. Of that group, 44% were working and 56% were not, according to a 2025 report by the Congressional Research Service.

More than a hundred public housing authorities, tribes, property owners and community groups have joined the Work & Dignity Coalition, according to HUD. The National Housing Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates for more low-income housing, produced a list of 58 entities, including the public housing authorities in Fort Worth, Jacksonville, Orlando, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Tampa.

Less than 1% of public housing authorities, known as Moving-to-Work agencies, are currently allowed to impose time limits or work requirements on people receiving housing assistance. HUD cites Champaign County, Illinois — which requires each able-bodied adult to work or be in school for at least 15 hours per week, and each household to generate 30 hours of work income at the minimum wage.

“I think that the important thing to note is that this is all about self-sufficiency, even if there might be some fear over what is required and how that would affect their housing,” said Peyton Pannell-Johnson, a spokesperson for the Housing Authority of Champaign County. “There is a team that needs to connect people to work, and then a team that follows up with each client.”

But housing advocates argue that the proposed requirements will make it more difficult for people to keep their housing assistance. The Congressional Research Service also warned in its 2025 report that imposing work requirements on federal aid recipients often trips up people who are working already.

“Work requirements can increase the burden for working recipients to prove that they remain eligible for benefits by requiring that they produce additional or more frequent information about their wages and hours,” the research agency stated. “There is an inherent tension between helping families meet their basic needs and promoting work in low-income assistance programs.”

Stateline reporter Robbie Sequeira can be reached at rsequeira@stateline.org

WASHINGTON — White House budget director Russ Vought testified before a U.S. House panel Tuesday that his agency needs lawmakers to increase its annual budget, even though he hasn’t spent much of the $100 million Republicans approved in their “big, beautiful” law.

That earlier funding, he said, is intended to help the agency keep track of fraud throughout the federal government and to oversee a substantial increase to the annual defense budget should Congress agree to provide the $1.5 trillion requested. 

“That would be one of those portfolios that we feel like we have nowhere near the number of (full-time employees) to be able to provide accountability for,” Vought said of the proposed defense budget. “And we are trying to invest in tools that would allow us to use technology to do OMB’s work better.”

The Office of Management and Budget, the agency’s official title, would then use the increase in its annual funding level to update a computer system, provide security and pay rent in two locations while it moves office space.

OMB asked Congress to approve $146.1 million in its annual spending bill, which is supposed to become law before the start of the next fiscal year on Oct. 1. That would represent a 13.3% increase compared to its current funding level if both chambers agree to match the request. 

The $100 million that Republicans provided OMB in their “big, beautiful” law last year is in addition to the agency’s annual budget. 

Vought testified during a hearing before the House Appropriations Financial Services and General Government Subcommittee the agency hopes to increase the number of full-time employees from about 500 to 675.

Whether other agencies will be able to bolster their funding levels and staffing will be up to their directors, Vought said. 

Proposed cuts across departments

The Trump administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request asked Congress to cut domestic spending by 10% and increase defense spending to $1.5 trillion, a $445 billion increase.

The proposal envisions cuts to spending across several departments, including Agriculture, Health and Human Services, Interior, Labor and State. 

Lawmakers from both political parties pressed Vought about staff reductions and funding cuts throughout the federal government, some of which were carried out by the U.S. Doge Service. 

New York Republican Rep. Nick LaLota asked why OMB allowed staffing at the World Trade Center Health Program to drop from 93 to 84 employees, despite it being approved for 120 people. 

“There were delays reported in claims of processing, treatment authorizations and enrollment appeals,” LaLota said. “For a program serving 9/11 first responders and survivors, what should have OMB’s early warning indications have been that those staffing levels were dropping to dangerously low levels that would impede their ability to deliver on this important mission?”

Vought testified OMB was unaware of the issues at the program. 

“OMB does not have this all-encompassing view of what is happening across the entire federal government,” he said. “We are a nerve center, I would agree with that, but we do not have the ability to know everything that is happening in the agencies.”

Screwworm and foreign aid

Georgia Democratic Rep. Sanford Bishop asked Vought a series of questions about whether cuts to staff at the USDA had an impact on the New World screwworm, which had resurfaced in the United States after six decades without a case.  

“We don’t believe that this issue is under-resourced,” Vought said. “We believe that USDA has everything it needs to both create a long-term capability here and also find as many shots on goal to be able to deal with this in real time for farmers.”

Wisconsin Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan pressed Vought repeatedly during a tense exchange about whether cuts to foreign aid programs, including those at the U.S. Agency for International Development, led to deaths.

Vought said “there is nothing about those studies that has caused us to think differently about” the Trump administration’s approach to foreign aid spending.  

Pocan asked Vought whether he believes it’s morally or ethically wrong “to facilitate the death of children.”

Vought responded he doesn’t believe the Trump administration’s actions have led to that and that the United States provides “adequate foreign aid.”

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday struck down President Donald Trump’s attempt to redefine the constitutional right to birthright citizenship.

In the decision, a majority of the justices upheld the country’s long understanding of automatic citizenship by birth on American soil, regardless of the immigration status of a newborn’s parents. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., found the president’s executive order violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. 

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

While six of the justices agreed — Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — that the president’s executive order was unlawful, conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented. 

Only five of the justices agreed that the 14th Amendment extends citizenship to the children of immigrants, with Kavanaugh partially dissenting along with Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch. 

Kavanaugh argued that Trump’s executive order did not violate the 14th Amendment, but instead violated federal statute. He added in his dissent that Congress could “enact new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country. But Congress has not yet done so.”

The White House did not immediately respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment, but a day before the decision, Trump said in the Oval Office that he would accept the Supreme Court’s ruling. 

“It’s up to them, but in terms of for the good of the country, it’d be great if they … didn’t allow it,” Trump, who in a highly unusual move for a president attended the oral arguments on the case, said of birthright citizenship. 

After the ruling, the president called on Congress, which is controlled by Republicans, to pass legislation to codify his executive order into law, dismissing the need for a constitutional amendment. 

However, a constitutional amendment would be needed, not legislative law, because a majority of the justices still found that any change to birthright citizenship violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Utah’s GOP Sen. Mike Lee, who previously clerked for Alito, noted that “we’re going to need a constitutional amendment.” 

The opinion is a major blow to Trump, who has sought to redefine who is American as part of his broader immigration agenda. 

But it also follows two decisions from the high court that vastly expanded the president’s authority over immigration policy by allowing him to limit asylum seeker claims at the Southern border and strip legal protections for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.  

Tuesday’s decision is based on one of the first executive orders that the president signed on the first day of his second term. It aimed to deny citizenship to children born to parents who either do not have legal status, or hold temporary legal visas. 

Experts warned if the order were to take effect, it could create an entire class of stateless people and cause chaos for hospitals and local governments.

Case brought by expectant parents

The case, Trump v. Barbara, was brought by expectant mothers who feared their children would not be American citizens because of their immigration status.

During oral arguments in April, a majority of the justices seemed skeptical of the Trump administration’s arguments, presented by Solicitor General D. John Sauer. 

Before the justices, Sauer argued that the citizenship clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which is the basis for birthright citizenship, was meant to apply to newly freed African American slaves after the Civil War, not to children of immigrants. 

Most legal scholars and historians disagree with that interpretation and have argued the Supreme Court in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark already settled the idea that automatic citizenship was granted to children born on U.S. soil.

Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents. When he left California, he was denied entry back into the United States after visiting relatives in China. 

Officials at the time argued that because Ark’s parents were Chinese citizens in the United States on temporary visas at the time of his birth, and therefore were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S., he was not a citizen. 

Ark took the issue to the Supreme Court. In 1898, the high court affirmed that he, along with any child born on U.S. soil, were guaranteed citizenship, and rejected the argument that the 14th Amendment only applied to newly freed African American slaves.

American Civil Liberties Union lead attorney Cecillia Wang, who argued before the justices, said that when the federal government tried to strip Ark of his citizenship, “largely on the same grounds (the Trump administration) raised today,” the Supreme Court at that time rejected those efforts and upheld the 14th Amendment.

“This Court held that the 14th Amendment embodies the English common law rule (that) virtually everyone born on U.S. soil is subject to its jurisdiction and is a citizen,” Wang, who is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants, said.

Her parents were in the U.S. on student visas when she was born in Oregon, meaning that if Trump’s executive order were in effect at that time, she would have been denied U.S. citizenship.

Roberts agreed that the Supreme Court made the correct decision in 1898 about Ark’s case.

“What the Court held in Wong Kim Ark was simple: the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States,” he wrote. “Not surprisingly, then, in the 128 years since, we have repeatedly understood the rule of Wong Kim Ark to guarantee citizenship to all children born in the United States and subject to its power.” 

“We see no reason to depart from that view today,” he continued. 

One of the mothers in the case, who appeared under a pseudonym, gave another ACLU attorney who worked on the case, Cody Wofsy, a statement following the high court’s decision.  

“It is a difficult time in the world to stand up. We were scared to come forward, but the decision today showed me that I stood up for the right thing,” Wofsy read from her statement during a virtual press conference.

14th Amendment argument

During April’s oral arguments, Sauer made that case that the phrase in the 14th Amendment “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that children born to parents without legal status or temporary visitors are not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” and are instead subject to the laws of their home country. 

The 14th Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

Roberts rejected Sauer’s position, and wrote that the Trump administration’s “[a]rguments for limiting birthright citizenship to those domiciled in the United States fail.”

“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” he wrote. “Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”

The 14th Amendment was passed to rectify the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which justices ruled that neither free or enslaved Black people could have citizenship or rights. The amendment was also meant to give African Americans citizenship while also denying citizenship to the mass migration of Chinese laborers not born on U.S. soil. 

The “jurisdiction” language in the amendment, tribal scholars have said, was aimed to exempt Indigenous people who resided in Native nations — part of their tribal governments — from birthright citizenship, along with the children born to foreign diplomats.   

Congress in 1924 specifically passed the Indian Citizenship Act to grant birthright citizenship to Indigenous people, regardless of their residence in Native nations. 

Because of this, tribal scholars have explained the language “subject to the jurisdiction” was never meant to apply to immigrants and their home country, and instead refers to the political alliance of tribes.

Congress reacts

Following Tuesday’s decision, Democrats praised the decision.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, said in a statement that “despite Trump’s best efforts to bully them, the Supreme Court just reaffirmed that if you are born in America, you belong in America.”

“No matter how much President Trump tries to steal citizenship from people that the Constitution has said have earned it and reverse the grand American tradition of welcoming newcomers to our nation, the Supreme Court confirmed today that those born in America are American,” he said.

Chairs of the Congressional Tri-Caucus — the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus — issued a joint statement that the high court’s ruling was a rejection of “Trump’s dangerous and exclusionary vision of America.”

“We are American, we belong here, and we will continue to defend birthright citizenship for generations to come,” said New York Reps. Adriano Espaillat of the CHC; Grace Meng of the CAPAC; and Yvette Clarke of the CBC. 

Wang, of the ACLU, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said in a statement that Tuesday’s decision reaffirmed a core American principle. 

“If you are born here, you are a citizen,” she said. “A president cannot change the Constitution by executive fiat.”

An immigration advocacy group that has also challenged the Trump administration’s efforts to redefine birthright citizenship, We Are CASA, said the decision was a victory for immigrant families. 

“The Trump administration’s attempt to deny citizenship to United States-born children, threaten generations of children with legal uncertainty, and overturn more than a century of settled constitutional law has failed,” said Shana Khader, the deputy legal director at We Are CASA.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday kept in place state laws banning transgender athletes from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams.

The decision stems from challenges to bans in Idaho and West Virginia and marks a major setback for transgender rights across the country. The opinion also came as President Donald Trump’s administration has pursued a broad anti-trans agenda that has extended beyond athletics.

The nation’s highest court found, 6-3, that the bans in Idaho and West Virginia do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment — a key question in both cases before the court. 

The court was unanimous that Title IX, a landmark 1972 law that mandated sports teams be equally provided to male and female students, does not block bans like the ones in Idaho and West Virginia.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, rejected the argument from Becky Pepper-Jackson, the transgender West Virginia girl in the case, that excluding trans girls from girls’ teams ran afoul of a 1974 amendment to Title IX that schools set “reasonable” provisions about sports participation.

West Virginia’s law — similar to those imposed by 26 other states, the International Olympic Committee, the NCAA and other sports bodies — was at least reasonable, Kavanaugh said.

“Whether biological males may participate on women’s and girls’ sports teams may be a debated policy question,” he wrote. “But the legal question for Title IX purposes is whether West Virginia may limit women’s and girls’ sports teams to biological females. As a matter of text and history, West Virginia may do so.”

Liberals would impose more scrutiny

The court’s three liberal justices agreed that Title IX did not prevent laws such as West Virginia’s and Idaho’s.

But they disagreed on the equal protection issue, and would have remanded the case back to the West Virginia federal trial court for further fact-finding.

“In not taking this modest step, the majority badly errs in two ways,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

There is an “unresolved factual dispute” about if transgender and cisgender girls “are similarly situated,” Sotomayor said. And the majority invoked “scientific uncertainty” to give too much deference to West Virginia. Both matters could have been resolved at lower courts, Sotomayor wrote.

“None of this is to suggest what the eventual outcome of this litigation would have been, or even should have been, had the majority allowed the courts below to make the missing factual determinations and had those courts correctly applied heightened scrutiny with the benefit of those facts,” she said. “The point, rather, is that this Court’s equal protection precedents require a very different approach.”

Idaho law

The Idaho case contested the Gem State’s 2020 law categorically banning trans athletes from competing on women’s and girls’ sports teams.

Lindsay Hecox sued over the ban in 2020, just months before the law — the first of its kind in the nation — was set to take effect. 

Hecox wanted to try out for the women’s track and cross-country teams at Boise State University, but the Idaho law would have prevented her from doing so because she is transgender. 

An Idaho federal court halted the law from taking effect later in 2020. A federal appeals court upheld the ruling in 2023 but later adjusted its scope in 2024 to only apply to Hecox, not other athletes.

In July 2024, Idaho appealed to the Supreme Court.

Hecox later asked both an Idaho federal court and the Supreme Court to drop the case. 

Though a federal judge in Idaho rejected that attempt in October, the Supreme Court deferred the request until after oral arguments were heard back in January. 

Idaho Republicans cheer

Several of Idaho’s leading elected officials, all Republicans, issued statements praising Tuesday’s ruling.

Gov. Brad Little noted in an emailed statement that the Idaho law was the first of its kind at the state level.

“We are leading the nation in supporting generations of women and men who fought hard to uphold Title IX protections and keep girls and women safe,” he said. “I want to thank the Idaho Legislature and Representative Barbara Ehardt in particular for her leadership on this issue of great importance to female athletes across Idaho and the nation. This is a historic moment for common sense!”

Ehardt,who sponsored Idaho’s ban in the state Legislature called the decision the end of an “amazing journey.” 

“I said from the very beginning that it would end up at the Supreme Court, and when it did, I was privileged enough to sit in that courtroom and listen,” Ehardt said. “I expected my legislation, and thus Title IX, to be upheld as it should be. Opportunities for girls and women should never be confused with male feelings!”

West Virginia law

The case in West Virginia surrounded a 2021 Mountain State law that also bans trans athletes from participating on women’s and girls’ sports teams.  

Pepper-Jackson wanted to try out for the girls’ cross-country team when starting middle school, but would have been prevented from doing so under the state law because she is transgender. 

In 2021, Pepper-Jackson’s mother sued on her behalf.

A federal appeals court in 2024 barred the state from enforcing the ban, which prompted West Virginia to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in. 

Trump’s anti-trans agenda

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has sought at the federal level to prohibit trans athletes’ participation in women’s sports teams aligning with their gender identity, including through an executive order Trump signed last year.

That executive order made it the policy of the United States to “rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities, which results in the endangerment, humiliation, and silencing of women and girls and deprives them of privacy.”

The NCAA promptly changed its policy to comply with the order, limiting “competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth only.”

Trump has signed other executive orders targeting trans people, including orders that make it the “policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” restrict access to gender-affirming care for kids and aim to bar openly transgender service members from the U.S. military.

Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social, to commend the justices.

“BIG WIN: The United States Supreme Court  just RULED AGAINST MEN PLAYING IN WOMEN’S SPORTS,” he wrote. “Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!”

Other reaction

Reaction poured in Tuesday from lawmakers and other officials, both in favor and against the court’s ruling.

Many who endorsed the decision, including U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman Tim Walberg, made some version of the declaration that “women’s sports are for women.”

“Unfortunately, radical gender ideology bolstered by policies pushed under the Biden-Harris administration chipped away at Title IX protections. As a result, the very female athletes the law was meant to empower were sidelined in the name of ‘equality,’” Walberg, a Michigan Republican, said in a statement.

He added that he was “grateful” to the justices and said his committee’s Republicans “will always stand with women athletes.”

U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito made a similar statement in a social media post

“Girls’ sports are for girls. It’s common sense,” the West Virginia Republican said. “I’m thankful SCOTUS has upheld West Virginia’s law protecting female athletes.”

Critics of the ruling vowed to continue efforts to create protections for trans people.

League of Women Voters CEO Celina Stewart said the decision “sends a dangerous message that some students are less worthy of dignity, opportunity, and belonging.” 

“Policies that intentionally target and marginalize young people simply for who they are weaken our democracy and violate the values of fairness and inclusion that define who we are as a nation,” she said. “The League stands in solidarity with all affected students, and we remain committed to ensuring that equality  becomes a lived reality for everyone.”

U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, a New Mexico Democrat who co-chairs the Democratic Women’s Caucus, said in a post to social media the decision centered on “whether LGBTQ+ rights are civil rights protected by federal law.”

“The answer is YES—and we will keep fighting until it is clear this is the law of the land!” she added.

And leaders in blue states that do not have laws like the ones upheld Tuesday said they would not be affected.

“Today’s ruling, while predictable, is yet another disturbing affront to personal liberties by providing states with a license to discriminate,” Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey said. “The Court was clear that this decision had no bearing with respect to a state’s choice to include transgender athletes and as such, will not implicate the Department of Justice’s case against Maine.”

Federal officials have cut off more than $2.4 million in federal funds for 2026-27  and 2027-28 targeting teen pregnancy prevention that would have gone to the Wisconsin health department, according to federal records.

The funds would have gone to a variety of nonprofits and agencies in counties  with the highest rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections, federal grant information reviewed Monday showed.

The single largest grant had been allotted to Embolden WI, a nonprofit supporter of health equity and advocacy projects, to help fund a program to improve communication between healthcare providers and Wisconsin teenagers.

Providers and Teens Communicating for Health — PATCH for short — employs teenagers who “have conversations with healthcare professionals about what teens want and need when they show up in the healthcare system and how we can better serve them to make sure that they get the care they need and deserve,” said Amy Olejniczak, the founder and executive director of PATCH.

PATCH has been operating since 2010, hiring, training and paying the teen participants who conduct workshops and serve as consultants for healthcare providers, including providers who are working to prevent teen pregnancy.

“Our role as PATCH is take what we know about working directly with youth and to help other organizations doing more direct teen pregnancy prevention work around the state improve their youth engagement, and make sure that they are engaging youth in ways that are effective and improving the quality of work that they’re doing,” Olejniczak told the Wisconsin Examiner on Monday. “A lot of what we do is work to improve communication between teens and the adults that serve them.”

 About 300 Wisconsin teens have participated in PATCH since it launched, Olejniczak said. Currently 75 teens ages 14 to 18 take part all around the state.

In addition to putting on workshops for healthcare providers, they also hold peer workshops for other teens, “talking to other youth about how to start to manage their own healthcare experiences,” Olejniczak said.

The federal government cut the funds immediately on Friday, June 26. PATCH lost $130,000 for the July 1, 2026-June 30, 2027 fiscal year and another $130,000 for the July 1, 2027-June 30, 2028 fiscal year. 

An annual grant to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services was among 53 grants out of 67 grants under the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program that were canceled Friday by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Stateline reported the canceled grants totaled about $68 million and affected grant recipients in more than two dozen states. The canceled grants included funds awarded to universities, community organizations, state health departments and Planned Parenthood affiliates in some states.

The grants were canceled two years before their expiration dates because, recipients were informed, the programs did not align with agency priorities, one of the grantees who received a termination notice told Stateline — specifically that the program “normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”

Teen birth rates have fallen dramatically over the past two decades, Stateline reported. Experts attribute the drop to fewer teens deciding to have sex earlier, sex education and better access to contraception, especially for girls.

The Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program was launched in 2010 in the HHS Office of Population Affairs.

On Monday, Embolden WI credited the federal program with helping to reduce teen birth rates nationally by 72% since 2007. The organization called that “a historic public health achievement that experts attribute to evidence-based programming, improved access to health information, and the kind of sustained investment in adolescent health that TPP was designed to support.”

Federal records that were still accessible Monday showed that the Wisconsin Department of Health Services was approved for $1,215,905 per year on a five-year cycle through June 2028. The funds were in turn distributed as subgrants around Wisconsin, including to Embolden WI for PATCH.

DHS did not respond Monday to a request for information about subgrant recipients affected by the federal action. A list that the department distributed includes public health departments in Bayfield, Clark and Oneida counties, the Verona Area School District and more than a half-dozen other nonprofits, with grants ranging from $10,000 to $125,000.

Olejniczak said the PATCH program has helped guide health providers and public health organizations to communicate with teens more effectively.

“We actually love working with med students and nursing and PA [physician assistant] students because they’re just getting started in their training. And we want to make sure that they’re thinking about their patients from their perspective,” she said.

The program works with a variety of local health clinics. For the teens who take part, the experience also serves as a job-readiness program, she said, leading some to enter healthcare professions such as nursing.

The grant covered about 25% of the PATCH annual budget. Olejniczak said PATCH and Embolden WI are seeking other sources of funding to replace what’s been cut so that the program can keep going.

The impact of the cuts goes well beyond just the effect on the PATCH program, she said.

“We know that teen pregnancy prevention has been effective — a lot of the work that has been done over the past decade has improved outcomes. So it’s really just devastating for public health overall,” Olejniczak said. “Our youth just got the message from their federal government that their health, well-being and transition to adulthood is not important.”

As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, my son and I recently spent a week driving across the country, visiting Rocky Mountain, Arches, Great Basin, and Yellowstone National Parks. The trip reminded me that despite our differences, Americans share a common responsibility: to leave our country stronger and more prosperous than we found it.

Wherever we traveled, people wanted many of the same things: good-paying jobs, thriving communities, affordable energy and opportunities for future generations.

Those hopes are shaped by many decisions, but few are more important than how we produce, deliver and pay for energy.

Most families are not thinking about climate policy. They are thinking about utility bills, housing costs, job opportunities and whether their communities can compete in a changing economy.

A recent Wisconsin Conservation Voters poll found that 84% of Wisconsin voters are concerned about rising electricity costs — ranking utility bills alongside groceries as a financial stress.

Wisconsin families want affordable energy, reliable electricity, good-paying jobs and a stronger future for their children. Clean energy helps deliver all four.

More than 75,000 Wisconsinites already work in clean energy. Wisconsin manufacturers supply components used across the country. Electricians, engineers, construction workers, and skilled tradespeople are modernizing our energy system while helping businesses and homeowners lower energy costs.

This is not tomorrow’s economy. It is today’s.

Clean energy is an economic development strategy, a manufacturing strategy, a workforce strategy and an affordability strategy. Communities embracing innovation are attracting investment, creating jobs, and becoming more competitive.

Unfortunately, federal policy is moving in the opposite direction.

The Trump administration recently announced a $700 million taxpayer-funded effort to keep aging coal plants operating, including one in Wisconsin. At the same time, it has proposed spending approximately $2.5 billion to buy out offshore wind leases representing roughly 13 gigawatts of generating capacity while redirecting support toward fossil fuel development.

These decisions matter because they directly affect affordability, health and our future.

Americans are increasingly being asked to support aging coal plants through both their electric bills and their tax dollars. Extending the life of outdated infrastructure delays investment in newer technologies that are often less expensive and more reliable.

We are already doing this with coal plants in Oak Creek, Sheboygan and Beloit. We cannot keep repeating that mistake.

Wisconsin also faces another challenge.

Artificial intelligence is creating unprecedented demand for electricity. Two proposed data centers alone could require nearly four gigawatts of power, more electricity than every Wisconsin household combined.

Data centers can create jobs and economic opportunity. But they also require new power plants, transmission lines and grid upgrades.

The question is simple: Who pays?

Wisconsin families, farmers and small businesses should not shoulder those costs.

Large energy users should pay the full cost of the infrastructure they require. Utilities should be transparent, regulators should protect ratepayers and communities deserve a meaningful voice before billions of dollars are committed.

This is not a choice between economic growth and environmental responsibility.

The strongest energy policies lower costs, strengthen energy independence, improve reliability, create jobs and protect the resources that make Wisconsin such a great place to live.

Wisconsin has everything it takes to lead: innovative businesses, talented workers, world-class manufacturers and practical problem-solvers.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, we should remember that every generation is called upon to build something lasting.

For ours, that means building an energy system that is affordable, reliable, resilient and capable of powering Wisconsin’s economy for decades to come.

The clean energy transition is not happening because it is partisan. It is happening because it works.

The question is whether Wisconsin will build it, power it and prosper from it.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), the national organization responsible for helping elect Democrats to state legislatures, announced a slate of six Wisconsin Assembly and three Senate districts they plan to provide support for this session. 

The new target seats belong to Republican incumbents facing Democratic challengers or are open due to Republican retirements. 

“2026 presents a historic opportunity to fundamentally transform the balance of power in Wisconsin and take control of the legislature,” DLCC President Heather Williams said in a statement. 

The organization consulted with the state Legislature’s Democratic caucuses to identify the races. According to the DLCC, the group will provide support and resources for data, research, polling, paid communication and direct voter contact for target seats. In addition, the organization also provides a direct link for fundraising for individual Democratic candidates who are featured on its website.

A first slate of target seats for the midterms was announced in April, comprised of incumbent Democrats running for another term in office in competitive districts including Reps. Joe Sheehan (D-Sheboygan), Ryan Spaude (D-Ashwaubenon), Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire), Steve Doyle (D-Onalaska) and Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Brunswick). 

During the 2024 election cycle, the DLCC invested heavily in Wisconsin and six other states. 

This year, the organization is hoping to build on that momentum and flip the Senate and Assembly and its first step is identifying target seats. The DLCC has not yet said how much it will spend in upcoming elections. 

Democrats currently hold 45 of 99 Assembly seats and 15 of 33 Senate seats, meaning they need to flip at least five Assembly seats and at least two Senate seats to hold majorities next session. 

“For over a decade, Republicans in the Wisconsin legislature have rigged their way to power and rubber-stamped Trump’s harmful agenda that’s raising costs, but now the tide is turning as Republicans retire in droves and Democrats build undeniable momentum,” Williams said.

There are a total of 27 states and 42 legislative chambers on the DLCC’s target list this year, though Wisconsin has been identified as one of its top priorities, given the potential to win Democratic majorities for the first time in 16 years and the success in the last election cycle when Democrats flipped 14 legislative seats. The success came after new legislative maps were adopted by the Republican-led Legislature and Gov. Tony Evers following a state Supreme Court decision that found the previous voting maps were an unconstitutional gerrymander.

There have been a number of Republican retirements in Wisconsin this year including both Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R- Rochester), Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) and Sens. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine) and Rob Hutton (R-Brookfield), who both represent competitive districts.

Apart from the developments in Wisconsin, the DLCC is looking at Democratic wins in the off-election years as a positive sign for the midterms. According to the DLCC, Republicans failed to flip any state legislative seats in elections since President Donald Trump was elected to a second term in 2024. Since then, Democrats in off-year elections have flipped 30 legislative seats, allowing them to secure a supermajority in New Jersey and flipping 13 seats in Virginia’s state legislative bodies. 

Williams said the DLCC would be with Wisconsin candidates “every step of the way until November.” 

Wisconsin Assembly races targeted by the DLCC:

• Assembly District 30 where Kevin Knoke, a veteran and educator from Hudson, is challenging incumbent Rep. Shannon Zimmerman (R-River Falls).
• Assembly District 51 where Ben Gruber, a conservation warden in Wisconsin who is member of AFSCME Local 1215, is challenging incumbent Rep. Todd Novak (R-Dodgeville). 
• Assembly District 53 where Becky Nichols, a former Menasha City Council member, is running for an open seat. Incumbent Rep. Dean Kaufert (R-Neenah) is retiring and David Daniels is the Republican candidate. Rachael Dowling is running as an independent. 
• Assembly District 85 where John Kroll, a Marathon County Board supervisor, is challenging Rep. Patrick Snyder (R-Weston)
• Assembly District 88 where Brandy Tollefson, a De Pere School Board member, is challenging Rep. Benjamin Franklin (R-De Pere). 
• Assembly District 92 where Jeremiah Fredrickson, a fish farmer from Elk Mound, is challenging Rep. Clint Moses (R-Menomonie).

The Wisconsin Senate races targeted by the DLCC:

• Senate District 5 where Rep. Robyn Vining (D-Wauwatosa) is running for an open seat against Republican Mike Roberts, a physical therapist from Waukesha. 
• Senate District 21 where Trevor Jung, who most recently worked as the transit director for the city of Racine, is running against Republican Jim Croft. 
• Senate District 25 where Charly Ray, a small business owner, is running for the seat left open by Sen. Romaine Quinn (R-Birchwood). There are two Republicans, Angie Sapik and Erik Severson, running for the Republican spot on the ticket in November.

Communities across Wisconsin are enduring a heatwave that’s breaking records across the nation and around the world. According to the National Weather Service, east central, south central and southeast Wisconsin are all under an extreme heat warning until 7 p.m. Wednesday, with the heat index nearing or exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Milwaukee, Kenosha, Madison and Green Bay. Local officials are highlighting access to cooling shelters and other emergency resources. 

In Kenosha, heat index could reach 107 degrees Fahrenheit, city officials warn. Residents should stay hydrated by drinking water, staying cool indoors and be aware of signs of heat stroke including confusion, dizziness, nausea or headaches. The Milwaukee Health Department offered similar warnings. 

A spokesperson for the  Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services said the county has a “No Wrong Door” model, which allows residents to connect with the department at many different health and human services agencies.  Local housing navigators are out in the community checking on people who are unhoused and offering them access to cooling sites, shelters and temporary housing. Residents can locate cooling sites by dialing 2-1-1 and many public cooling sites have been set up  along county transit routes. Residents who own properties they want to turn into a public cooling location should email IMPACT 211 at resourcechange@impactinc.org. 

The Department of Natural Resources has issued air quality alerts for the Kenosha, Milwaukee, Racine, Ozaukee, Racine and Sheboygan counties. Local health officials in Dane County and Madison noted that over 1,000 deaths from extreme heat occur each year in the United States. People who are  most at risk are older adults, people working outside, infants, children, unhoused people and those with chronic medical conditions.

Wisconsin state law prohibits a utility from disconnecting electrical service to occupied dwellings during a heat advisory, warning, or emergency situation, according to the Wisconsin Public Service Commission. 

Utilities are also required to make “reasonable attempts” to reconnect service to dwellings disconnected due to unpaid bills when an occupant notifies them that  there is a potential threat to health or life. However, the utility may require a licensed physician’s statement or a notice from a public health, social service or law enforcement official in those circumstances. When the  heat warning is over, the utility is allowed to disconnect the power again.

Scientists have long warned that worsening heatwaves and extreme weather are becoming more common due to man-made climate change. Green Bay is still recovering from severe floods that hit last week, damaging  roadways and businesses. In April, Milwaukee County, which has also experienced historic flooding in the last year, re-affirmed its commitment to the Paris Climate Accords, which called on the world to take necessary steps to prevent average global temperatures from increasing beyond 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Gilberto Pacheco was driving to work for a construction job in California when he was pulled over in what court papers called a “traffic stop” in January. He was not accused of any crime, not even a traffic infraction, but he was imprisoned without bond for months because he arrived illegally in the United States more than 30 years ago from Mexico.

Cases like that of Pacheco, who has applied for legal status through three U.S. citizen children, are what the Supreme Court has to consider when it rules next year on the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy. 

Justices are expected to hear the case as soon as October after the U.S. solicitor general requested the court to resolve conflicting rulings on the matter from appeals courts. 

The Trump administration’s policy requires detention without bond for anyone who crossed a border illegally, and has been used to pressure immigrants into voluntary departure to escape sometimes squalid conditions.

For now, plenty of U.S. district judges are questioning the idea that immigrants should be incarcerated indefinitely at the whim of the executive branch. 

Stateline reviewed every immigrant habeas petition case decided in a single day — June 16 — across the country, in order to sample judicial opinion. A habeas case is a request from an immigration prisoner for a judge to review the legality of his imprisonment and order a bond hearing or release. 

Of the cases that were decided that day, judges released detainees immediately or ordered bond hearings 142 times, and denied them only 36 times. Many of the judges, even Republican appointees, argued that unlimited detention was unconstitutional.

One of those judges was U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison, who heard Pacheco’s case.

After being picked up in California, Pacheco was held in Houston, and filed a habeas case in Texas.  Ellison ruled that it was a violation of Pacheco’s civil rights to detain him for months. He ordered Pacheco to be freed immediately.

“Given the severity of this ongoing unconstitutional deprivation of liberty, the Court concludes that immediate release from custody is required,” Ellison wrote. 

He wrote that he recognized that the Trump policy applied to Pacheco, and that it was upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which governs Texas, but said that he was releasing the man anyway. 

“The Due Process clause does not permit the government to ‘detain any noncitizen, no matter how long they have actually lived in the United States, for any length of time, without any individualized justification [merely because] that person initially entered the country without lawful admission,’” Ellison wrote, partially quoting a 2003 Supreme Court ruling. 

Ellison is a Democratic appointee from the Bill Clinton administration, but judges from both parties, including Trump nominees, ordered bond hearings for immigrants and found the Trump policy unconstitutional. They included judges in states where appeals courts had already upheld the policy. 

Many judges are going beyond bond hearings and ordering release directly, as Ellison did. In some situations the judges are holding the legal cases open to make sure releases are made or bond hearings are fair. 

Few immigrants get bond hearings because of the policy, making court challenges their only recourse, said Xin Tian, an attorney representing an immigrant who was released June 16 in a California case. His client’s case was among those reviewed by Stateline.

“The individual’s only recourse for release is to seek a writ of habeas corpus,” Tian wrote in an email to Stateline. “Fortunately, federal judges uphold the Constitution and will grant such a writ, leading to direct release. Aside from this, there are virtually no other ways to obtain release.”

A Trump appointee in Texas, U.S. District Judge Jason K. Pulliam, ordered five releases in one day, calling the detentions “unlawful” and ordering immediate release during court proceedings. In each case, he wrote that the detainee “has no known criminal history, had been complying with the terms of a prior release, and there is no indication of flight risk or danger to the community.”  

He acknowledged in court papers that he made the rulings despite the fact that an appeals court ruling for the Fifth Circuit — affecting Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — had concluded mandatory detention was legal in those cases.

A President Joe Biden appointee in Utah, U.S. District Judge Ann Marie McIff Allen, was one of the rare judges to agree with the Trump administration’s policy, according to Stateline’s review. 

McIff Allen denied a petition for a bond hearing by a man from Venezuela who had arrived in Texas in 2024 to seek asylum. He had scheduled an appointment with U.S. Customs and Border Protection through an official mobile app, then settled in Florida. 

His immigration case was still pending when the Trump administration revoked his parole and arrested him in May. The man was “not entitled to immediate release or a bond hearing,” McIff Allen ruled, acknowledging that “some district courts have determined the issue differently.” 

The detention was legal under a Trump administration policy that interprets immigration law to mean all immigrants who arrived illegally can be treated as if they’re at the border “seeking admission” to the country. 

Stateline found only seven cases where judges favorably cited the administration’s policy of mandatory detention when denying a habeas case. Besides the ruling from a Biden appointee in Utah, there were six involving Trump judicial appointees: four in New York and one each in Puerto Rico and Texas. 

U.S. District Judge Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach, a Trump appointee, denied release to Marcelo Jerez, a Dominican Republic native living in Puerto Rico with a U.S. citizen wife and sick 1-year-old child who required his help with monitoring and care.  

“The crux of this case has been the subject of myriad lawsuits throughout the nation and dutiful judges have reached divergent answers,” Arias-Marxuach wrote. 

But relatively few judges in the Stateline review considered the mandatory detention policy valid: Four of the other six cases for the day that did so, other than the Utah case, were denied by a single judge, Trump appointee Judge John L. Sinatra in New York’s Western District court.

Sinatra wrote in one of the cases, for a Venezuelan man who had been allowed into the country in 2024 on parole, that such people should be treated as if they were still at the border “seeking admission,” and face mandatory detention, and should not get the constitutional rights of someone already in the United States with legal status.

“How could it be otherwise? If he were not seeking admission he would have given up and departed already,” Sinatra wrote in his decision. 

David Wilson, a Minnesota immigration attorney who serves on an immigration court committee for the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said that criminal records among immigration detainees are a bone of contention among judges. There’s widespread disagreement over whether they should be detained indefinitely without bond, he said, even if a U.S. citizen in the same circumstance would be freed on bond in a criminal court. 

“This kind of lingering question is, how long is too long for people with criminal records? Some circuits have come along and said, ‘There is not too long because your criminal activity is what it is, you’re just stuck, if you want to end this stop fighting your case,’” Wilson said. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that states can count mail-in ballots that arrive after Election Day, a blow to the Trump administration and some Republican states that had urged the justices to require all ballots to arrive by the close of polls.

In a 5-4 decision, the court found that federal law does not prevent states from accepting late-arriving ballots. The ruling is a victory for Democrats and voting rights advocates, who had said setting a hard, Election Day deadline for ballot arrival would risk disenfranchising voters amid fears of deteriorating mail service.

The case, RNC vs. Watson, centered on whether federal law overrides a Mississippi law that requires mail-in ballots postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive within five business days of the election. Thirteen states have similar laws, which extend a “grace period” to ballots that arrive through the mail after polls close.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said that federal law didn’t preempt the state law because elections represent when voters make a decision, which must be done on or before Election Day. Voters who cast their ballot by mail have made a decision by Election Day, Barrett reasoned.

“The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Barrett wrote.

Barrett cautioned that the decision rested on the interpretation of federal law, not the U.S. Constitution. She noted that the court was not considering the scope of Congress’ authority to regulate federal elections — suggesting that if Congress passes a nationwide ballot arrival deadline that the justices might uphold such a law.

Barrett was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. 

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined part of the dissent.

“If ballots received after election day are added to the set of ballots that dictate the election’s outcome, the electorate’s choice does not occur on election day, and the federal election-day statutes are violated,” Alito wrote.

States with grace periods

In addition to Mississippi, other states with some form of grace period include Alaska, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, called the Supreme Court decision a win for these states, as well as 30 states that accept military and overseas ballots delivered after Election Day.

“This is a victory for all the states and for all those who respect the will of the Founders, who ensured the security of our elections by giving the power to run those elections to the states — not to one person sitting in Washington, DC,” Becker said in a statement.

Some local election officials had warned that requiring all ballots to be received by the close of polls would burden their offices as they try to quickly warn voters about the change just months before the midterms. More ballot drop boxes that let voters keep their ballots out of the mail could help, they say, but also cost money.

“Ultimately, the voters may be harmed as well,” election officials in California, Massachusetts, Oregon and Washington wrote in a court brief, warning that some ballots may not be received in time, “despite best efforts by careful and proactive administrators and local governments.”

But some Republican secretaries of state had urged the justices to strike down “grace period” laws. Louisiana Secretary of State Nancy Landry and Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray wrote in a court brief that an Election Day deadline “provides the bright-line rule that effective election administration demands.”

At least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day 2024 and arrived within a legally accepted post-election window, The New York Times has reported, citing election officials in 14 of 22 states and territories where late-arriving ballots were accepted that year. 

Overall, about 30% of voters cast a mail ballot in 2024, according to data gathered by the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

RNC challenged law

The Republican National Committee challenged the Mississippi law, which was defended by Mississippi Republican Secretary of State Michael Watson. The RNC argued a longstanding federal law that sets the Tuesday after the first Monday in November as Election Day for federal offices preempted state laws that allow ballots cast by Election Day, but received later, to count.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in October 2024 that federal law requires ballots to be received by Election Day. President Donald Trump last year also unilaterally attempted to require mail ballots to be received by the end of Election Day in a sweeping executive order on elections. Much of that order was blocked in federal court.

The Supreme Court “rejected the RNC’s radical attempt to rewrite election laws in a way that would have resulted in the rejection of hundreds of thousands of ballots and the disenfranchisement of voters nationwide through no fault of their own,” Elisabeth Frost, litigation chair at Elias Law Group, said in a statement. 

Elias Law Group represented two nonprofit voting rights groups, Vet Voice Foundation and the Mississippi Alliance for Retired Americans, that had intervened as defendants in the case.

The Supreme Court issued Monday’s decision against a backdrop of uncertainty surrounding mail ballots. Trump signed an executive order in March that would restrict voting by mail by requiring states to provide lists of possible mail ballot voters to the U.S. Postal Service in advance. A federal judge recently blocked major portions of the order, triggering a near-certain appeal.

Republican National Committee chairman Joe Gruters accused Democrats of inviting chaos by allowing elections to “drag on” for days and weeks after ballots are cast. He said Republicans wouldn’t be deterred by the decision.

“If we want fair and secure elections, Election Day should mean exactly what it says, which is why this decision makes it even more imperative that Congress pass the SAVE America Act,” Gruters said in a statement, referring to restrictive voter legislation pushed by Trump that lacks the votes to pass the U.S. Senate.

Trump said the decision was a “tremendous loss” in a social media post and again urged passage of the SAVE America Act.

Paul Clement, an attorney for the Republican National Committee, said during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in March the prospect that the outcome of an election could change because of ballots arriving after Election Day would be unacceptable to losing candidates. After the 2020 election, President Donald Trump demanded election officials not count ballots that came in after Election Day, but states kept counting ballots.

“If you have an election and the election is going to turn on late-arriving ballots in a way that means what everybody kind of thought was the result on Election Day ends up being the opposite a week later, 21 days later, the losers are not going to accept that result. Full stop,” Clement told the justices.

Attorneys for Watson argued that both legal and historical precedent supported his position. States may decide that voters have made their final choices when ballots are submitted to state officials rather than when they’re received, according to Watson.

Watson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This is a developing report that will be updated.

President Donald Trump was speaking to supporters at a Pennsylvania rally June 23 when he made an extraordinary admission about an election a continent away.

Trump and his allies had spent several days in June savaging California over its slow vote counting and baselessly alleging its contests were fraudulent. But now the president divulged that his actions went beyond just public criticism.

“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California and I said, ‘Do me a favor, take a look, they’re trying to steal that election, too,’” Trump recounted. 

Over the past six months, the Trump administration has focused the power of federal law enforcement — and even a top U.S. intelligence official  — on elections and discredited grievances over the president’s 2020 loss. 

In January, the FBI raided an elections facility in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing hundreds of boxes of 2020 ballots. FBI agents are probing the 2020 election in Milwaukee and subpoenas have gone out to officials in Arizona. The Department of Justice demanded to see Detroit-area ballots and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed it took voting machines from Puerto Rico. The FBI searched the offices of an Ohio voting rights group in June.

Democrats, election experts, former federal prosecutors and others say the administration’s actions raise deep concerns about whether the White House will use groundless investigations to disrupt the November midterm elections. They say Trump’s recent acknowledgment that he personally directed a federal prosecutor to examine voting in California only underscores their fears.

“The notion that a president or anybody in the White House calls up the U.S. attorney’s office, certainly on our end, would have been considered, I think, completely inappropriate,” said Stephen McAllister, who served as the U.S. attorney in Kansas during the first Trump administration.

Shattering a norm

After Watergate, the Department of Justice built a reputation for independence from the White House. While presidents nominated DOJ leaders and set broad priorities for the department, they were expected to steer clear of specific investigations. The norm was tested during the first Trump term but didn’t entirely break. 

By contrast, the second term has shattered it, creating a clear path for the president to act on his false claims of stolen elections, according to individuals who have worked in the Justice Department and critics of the Trump administration. Growing evidence, they say, points to Trump personally intervening in federal law enforcement action on elections — or top officials getting the message and acting accordingly.

“I think the focus and the direction is whatever the president wants, and I think this is wrong,” McAllister, now a law professor at the University of Kansas, said of the current Justice Department. 

“The DOJ, especially post-Watergate, there were a lot of things done to try to strengthen it as an institution that could stand up and protect, defend the rule of law,” he said. “And this administration has torn so much of it down.”

The California election shows how quickly the Justice Department can take action after Trump makes his views known.

California’s primary election was Tuesday, June 2, but election officials are allowed to take roughly a month to complete vote counting. The lengthy process is a product of the state’s large population, as well as its reliance on voting by mail. 

While politicians, including Democrats, have called on the state to speed up its count, the sometimes plodding process isn’t evidence of fraud.

Late the night after the primary, Trump posted on Truth Social that Democrats were trying to steal the election. “Here we go with the very late and massive numbers of MAIL IN BALLOTS,” he wrote.

It isn’t clear which U.S. attorney received the call from Trump or when exactly he placed the call or if it actually occurred. California is divided into multiple federal judicial districts, each with their own top federal prosecutor. 

Asked about the call, the White House referred States Newsroom to Trump’s comments and the Justice Department, which didn’t respond to questions.

By the Friday morning after the election, First Assistant U.S Attorney Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, announced that his office had multiple election fraud investigations underway with the FBI. He also dispatched a prosecutor to observe vote counting.

In the days that followed, Essayli gave several interviews with conservative media, including an appearance on commentator Glenn Beck’s show where he predicted criminal cases. “I expect people will be charged,” he said.

After Trump’s comments in Pennsylvania, the office of California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who frequently clashes with Trump, posted on social media that Trump had “just admitted it.”

“The President of the United States is personally directing federal prosecutors to start investigations into his political opponents when his preferred candidate may lose the election,” the post said.

DOJ pursuing 30 lawsuits on voter rolls

Ahead of the midterms, Trump and other administration officials have shown a high level of interest in how elections are administered. 

Last week, the president refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill to pressure the Senate to pass the SAVE America Act, which would implement a nationwide requirement that voters show documents proving their citizenship. In March, he signed an executive order attempting to restrict voting by mail, which a federal judge blocked last week.

The Justice Department has filed 30 lawsuits against states that have refused to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers. 

The Department of Homeland Security also overhauled a powerful computer program into a system that can search voter rolls for possible noncitizen voters (a judge recently halted use of the reconfigured system).

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement when asked about Trump’s approach to election-related investigations.

Jackson named several federal laws — including the Civil Rights Act, National Voting Rights Act and Help America Vote Act — that she said give the Justice Department “full authority to ensure states comply with federal election laws, which mandate accurate state voter rolls.”

“This campaign pledge from the President is why millions of Americans sent him back to the White House,” Jackson said, noting Trump’s support of the SAVE America Act.

Within the Justice Department, criminal investigations involving elections have traditionally been treated with particular sensitivity, McAllister said. 

Anything touching on elections needed to be coordinated with the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., he said, adding that there was a lot of centralized control to prevent U.S. attorneys “from just poking around where they shouldn’t be.”

The Justice Department has previously published a manual on prosecuting election crimes on its website, but at some point it was removed without explanation. In June, a group of Democratic senators voiced concern its disappearance could presage attempts to interfere in the midterms. They noted that during Trump’s first term the manual was accompanied by a memo outlining the DOJ’s election non-interference policy.

Robert Weiner, who served in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the Biden administration, said the government used to enjoy what the legal community calls the presumption of regularity — the belief among judges that it was acting lawfully. He said courts should not extend that presumption now.

Trump may be trying to impair the ability of local election officials to conduct fair elections and “generally create chaos” that could serve as an excuse to seize voting machines and not accept legitimate election results, Weiner said.

“I am very worried,” said Weiner, who is now the director of the Voting Rights Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, an advocacy group. “I think we have to act on the assumption that bad things are going to happen. That’s not saying that they will. We have to be prepared and able to counter.”

US Senate Dems form task force

Some Democratic states — including California, Colorado, Connecticut and others — have passed new limits on federal election interference. At the federal level, Senate Democrats have formed an election protection task force and announced plans to train their staff members as election observers.

“The president of the United States is clearly laying the groundwork to try to interfere with the midterms and try to undermine confidence in any election results that he is not happy about,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, told reporters.

Voting rights advocates fear the FBI’s raid on a Fulton County election facility in January offered a window into what it might look like for federal law enforcement to seize ballots after the November election.

While Trump has long promoted false allegations about voter fraud in Fulton County, which includes Atlanta, the raid shocked election experts in part because the FBI obtained a search warrant, meaning a federal judge found probable cause to believe evidence of federal crimes would be found at the election facility.

Fulton County officials vocally condemned the raid and successfully sued to unseal the affidavit used to support the warrant. The 19-page document included previously investigated claims about the 2020 elections and revealed the investigation originated from a referral by Kurt Olsen, an election denier who Trump last fall made a special government employee to look into the 2020 election. 

Trump appears to have taken a personal interest in the Fulton County raid. Tulsi Gabbard, then the director of national intelligence, was photographed at the scene and later told Congress she was present at Trump’s request. The New York Times reported that she put the president on the phone with FBI agents the next day.

Gabbard left her role in June, but Trump has indicated he wants the new acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, to also look into elections. The director of intelligence, a Cabinet-level position established in the wake of 9/11, is supposed to help lead the U.S. intelligence community and has no formal role in elections.

Pulte, who has no previous intelligence experience and previously led the Federal Housing Finance Agency, is known for antagonizing the president’s perceived opponents, including the former Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell and New York Democratic Attorney General Letitia James.

“He may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters in early June.

Marisa Pyle, senior democracy defense manager at All Voting is Local Georgia, praised Fulton County officials for aggressively pushing back against the raid. 

She said that while she is concerned the search could create a chilling effect among voters and election workers, she has been heartened that it had also motivated some people to sign up to work the polls.

While no one has a crystal ball, Pyle said, she expressed hope that Fulton County’s rejection of federal interference will minimize future attempts.

“I think that’s optimistic,” Pyle said. “I think we prepare as best as we can and we just have to be ready to defend the results.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that law enforcement searches for the location history of cellphones near crime scenes are covered by the Fourth Amendment, requiring warrants to obtain the data.

But the high court left unsettled when searches for the information are reasonable — likely meaning the justices will eventually weigh in again on the privacy rights of Americans in the electronic era.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that police officers conducted a search for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment when they obtained cellphone location history data during an investigation into a bank robbery in Virginia. The amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

“An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location, and police intrude on that constitutionally protected interest when they demand the information — even though for only a limited time, and from a third-party tech company,” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in the majority opinion.

Kagan was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Kentanji Brown Jackson. Justice Neil Gorsuch concurred in the judgment but did not join the majority opinion.

Justice Samuel Alito dissented, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett.

States ask warrants be upheld

Over the past two decades, geofence warrants have become a major tool of law enforcement. At a basic level, they allow police to identify phones within a geographic area for a certain period of time. The data can be tremendously valuable to investigators, offering a way to develop suspects in crimes where their identities aren’t otherwise known. 

Civil liberties advocates warned that geofence warrants ensnare people in digital dragnets, handing the government data on anyone who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. They argued that accessing data on anyone within a certain area — the geofence — amounts to a general warrant prohibited by the Constitution.

A broad bipartisan coalition of states urged the justices to uphold the warrants. Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia filed a brief with the court arguing that geofence warrants can be more precise than many traditional investigative methods when supported by probable cause and appropriately tailored. In the brief, they urged the justices not to prohibit geofence warrants altogether.

Geofence warrants can generate critical leads when the perpetrators of crimes are otherwise unknown, they wrote. When suspects are unknown but the suspected wrongdoing is linked to a specific place and time, location data provides one of the narrowest available tools for finding leads, the brief argues.

Credit union robbery in Virginia

The case centered on a 2019 robbery of a federal credit union in Midlothian, Virginia. Okello Chatrie was convicted of armed robbery after surveillance footage showed the robber using a cellphone. A detective then obtained a geofence warrant directed at Google for devices within 150 meters of the credit union within an hour of the robbery.

Google initially provided anonymized data in response to the warrant. The detective then requested and received additional location data on nine users. Finally, the detective received de-anonymized information on three users, without obtaining an additional warrant.

While Google has since changed the way it stores location history data to limit geofence warrants, other apps and tech firms collect the data. Lawyers for Chatrie argued that geofence warrants open the door to the authorities requesting information on everyone at a sensitive location — perhaps an abortion clinic or a political convention — at a particular time.

The records serve as a “personal journal of a user’s movements,” Kagan wrote. Location history resembles other private materials like emails, documents, photos and calendars that, even if stored on Google’s servers, users reasonably view as their own, she wrote. Users, in turn, expect the data to be shielded from the “inquisitive eyes” of the government, Kagan wrote.

‘Reasonable’ question unanswered

But Kagan and the court’s majority didn’t wade into whether the search of Chatrie was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. While the warrant in the case was an uncommon, multi-step warrant, Kagan wrote, the lower appeals court found that a search did not occur, so it did not decide whether the warrant was reasonable.

“We are, as we have said many times before, ‘a court of review, not of first view,’” Kagan wrote. “It is therefore now up to the Court of Appeals to decide whether, at each step of the search process, the warrant satisfied the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of particularity and probable cause.”

In his dissent, Alito wrote that the Supreme Court’s decision “further destabilizes” longstanding jurisprudence on the Fourth Amendment. He accused the majority of issuing an advisory opinion by not addressing whether the search of Chatrie’s data was reasonable.

“Indeed, by refusing to review the one question that could have at least theoretically given Chatrie some hope of relief, the Court carefully set the stage for its planned performance: striking a pose as a great champion of privacy in the digital age. I cannot support this irresponsible escapade,” Alito wrote.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has nominated a former Oklahoma state trooper to lead U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency tasked with carrying out the president’s mass deportation campaign. 

Richard “Lance” Schroyer’s nomination on June 27 comes on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed the Trump administration to strip legal status for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, a move that opens them up to deportation. 

“Lance Schroyer has what it takes to DETAIN AND DEPORT Illegal Alien Criminals …,” Trump wrote on social media June 27. “…he LOVES the men and women of ICE.”

He’ll have to be confirmed by the Senate, and if he is, he’ll be the first Senate-confirmed ICE director in 11 years. 

The current acting director of ICE is David Venturella, a longtime federal immigration official and former vice president of the private prison company GEO that rakes in billions through federal contracts it holds to detain immigrants at its facilities across the United States.

Former acting ICE director Todd Lyons stepped down in May, following the shooting of two U.S. citizens by immigration officials in Minneapolis earlier this year.

$70 billion in new funding 

Schroyer will come into an agency that Congress recently funded until fiscal year 2029 at $70 billion, not including a separate funding stream of billions Republicans included in the president’s signature tax cuts and spending bill in 2025. 

Schroyer does not have much experience working for the Department of Homeland Security, but serves as an adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who previously served as Oklahoma’s U.S. senator. 

Schroyer also worked to establish Oklahoma’s law enforcement partnership with the federal government to assist with immigration enforcement in the 287g program. He served in law enforcement for nearly 30 years.

Mullin noted Schroyer’s work with the 287g program. 

“Lance is coming straight from the operational field where he ran large scale operations and worked alongside state and federal partners to remove illegal aliens from Oklahoma under the 287g program,” Mullin said in a statement. “With over 29 years of law enforcement experience, Lance will play a vital role in helping deliver on the President’s mandate from the American people to target, arrest, and deport illegal aliens.” 

Oklahoma praise

Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt also praised the announcement, along with Schroyer’s career in law enforcement. 

“He was a huge asset to the Oklahoma Highway Patrol and now he’ll continue to make us proud at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Stitt said in a statement. “Oklahoma yet again leads the nation. We have consistently supported President Trump’s work to keep our border secure, and we have led in enforcement actions against those here illegally who engage in criminal behavior.”

Schroyer is also the recipient of the Chief’s Award for his work in 2015, when he assisted a woman whose car crashed outside of his district, in the Tulsa Police Department’s jurisdiction.

“He found her face down with her head pinned between the end of the dashboard and the passenger door. The woman was choking and was unable to speak,” according to a press release from the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. 

Schroyer called for first responders and stayed with the woman, according to the release. “In order to enable her to breathe, he moved the car seats and kicked open a jammed door in order to reposition the woman allowing her to breathe,” according to the release.

For his work, he was presented with the Chief’s Award, “honoring his dedication to the protection of lives and service to the public.”

Oklahoma Voice Editor Janelle Stecklein contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump both a win and a loss Monday in allowing his firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, but ruling that he cannot remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors.

The 6-3 decision in Trump’s favor in the Federal Trade Commission case essentially expands the president’s authority over agency governing panels, further calling into question which bodies are independent of the executive branch.

The court, split along its familiar ideological divide, held that requiring for-cause removal for political appointees on the FTC’s five-member panel is “contrary to the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.”

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion.

“The FTC has the power to promulgate substantive rules carrying the force of law, investigate businesses and enforce statutes through in-house adjudications, and file civil suits on behalf of the United States in federal court,” Roberts wrote. “The FTC unquestionably exercises executive power and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive.”

The decision nullifies the court’s 1935 unanimous decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which overruled President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s removal of William Humphrey from the commission. The framework of the nearly century-old ruling “has not withstood the test of time,” Roberts wrote.

“If anything more is left of Humphrey’s, the Court overrules it. Humphrey’s has for decades been a result in search of a rationale …” he continued.

Trump hailed the decision in a post on his Truth Social platform Monday.

“To show the importance of the Slaughter Case, 90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed!” Trump wrote. 

Dissent presses for independence

Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

Sotomayor wrote that the structure of executive boards that manage nuclear energy, consumer products and workplace safety, among others, “allows the agencies to address complex problems while enjoying some independence from Presidential removal and thus absolute partisan control.”  

Trump fired Slaughter on March 28 in an email that said her “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.” Slaughter sued and won in federal district court and at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Slaughter has served as an FTC commissioner since 2018, during Trump’s first term. President Joe Biden reappointed her and the Senate unanimously confirmed her for a second term in 2023.

Alvero Bedoya, who served as FTC commissioner under Biden, said the decision reduces the commission to a “little lap dog” for Trump’s allies. 

Bedoya delivered the remarks during a press call organized by the progressive think tank Groundwork Collaborative.  

“The idea that putting the FTC under the direct control of Donald Trump is going to make people’s lives easier is laughable, and it is only going to make things worse,” Bedoya said. “The only people who are going to be helped by this are this president’s billionaire donors who are actively being sued by the Federal Trade Commission.”

Bedoya noted the commission is in litigation with Amazon and Meta, whose leaders, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, each donated $1 million for Trump’s inauguration. 

Cook firing disallowed

But the president’s power over firing members of governing boards falls short when it comes to the Federal Reserve, and when the targeted appointee is in the midst of a separate legal battle.

In a 5-4 opinion, also delivered by Roberts, the court denied the Trump administration’s application to stay a lower court ruling allowing Cook to remain a board governor while litigation plays out.

Trump fired Cook in August 2025 via post on social media after Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, now Trump’s acting head of national intelligence, accused Cook of mortgage fraud.  

“The ultimate question of whether the President can remove Cook for cause will depend in part on the underlying facts,” Roberts wrote. “In this opinion, we have not addressed the facts, as they have yet to be found or analyzed under the relevant legal standards.”

Trump, critics note ‘procedural’ basis

Trump said the justices sent the case back to the lower court on a “strictly procedural basis.”

“We will take appropriate action immediately to make sure that someone who has committed wrongdoing will not be making vital decisions concerning the Welfare of the United States of America!” he wrote on Truth Social. 

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett dissented. 

Thomas argued the court’s decision violates a president’s constitutional powers to remove executive officers at will.

“Cook’s office was not her ‘property’ because, in this country, government officials do not own the public offices in which they serve,” Thomas wrote. “Apparent mortgage fraud was a ‘cause’ to remove Cook. And, the statute authorizing the President to remove Cook for ‘cause’ says nothing about notice or a hearing, so it does not require notice and a hearing.”

Graham Steele, former assistant secretary of financial institutions at the Treasury Department, said during the Groundwork Collaborative call that the decision is “cold comfort.”

“It was a 5-4 decision,” Steele said. The “majority rests on a narrow set of procedural grounds, and it should have been obvious to members of the court how illegal the president’s actions were in trying to remove Governor Cook. And yet this was, to use a technical legal term, ‘a squeaker’ of a case when it came down to the opinions themselves.”

Trump and the Fed

The Cook ruling is a setback in Trump’s ongoing interest in exerting influence over the central bank. 

The Senate approved Trump’s new pick for Fed chair, Kevin Warsh, last month.

Justices heard oral arguments in January over whether Trump overreached his authority in firing Cook. The arguments drew a high-profile appearance of then-Fed Chair Jerome Powell to the court.

Even conservative justices showed skepticism that Trump’s social media firing Cook was within his powers under the Federal Reserve Act, which stipulates presidents can only remove board governors “for cause.”

Trump claimed his firing of Cook, which accused her of “deceitful and potentially criminal conduct in a financial matter,” was not reviewable in court.

Cook, a Biden appointee, denied any wrongdoing and challenged the termination, arguing that an “unsubstantiated allegation about private mortgage applications,” submitted prior to her Senate confirmation, does not amount to cause for removal. 

Cook also argued that Trump denied her due process in not giving her notice or a chance to respond to the allegations.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate Ethics Committee has dismissed a complaint against Sen. Ruben Gallego, writing in a letter it found no evidence the Arizona Democrat violated the chamber’s rules or federal law.

Florida Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna filed a complaint to the six-member committee earlier this year, claiming the senator had violated campaign finance laws and engaged in what the letter described as “inappropriate conduct of a sexual nature.”

Gallego wrote in a social media post Monday the “dismissal by the Ethics Committee reaffirms what I have said about these accusations from the beginning: they were right-wing conspiracies peddled by far-right activists like Anna Paulina Luna, the White House, and their allies.” 

“I look forward to an apology from Rep. Luna for weaponizing the ethics process while refusing to investigate historic corruption that’s making life harder for families,” Gallego added.

Luna wrote in a social media post in response to Gallego’s post that she doesn’t believe the complaints are “conspiracy theories.”

“The good news about DC is everyone talks, and eventually the reporters come forward with your texts,” she wrote. “Do yourself a favor and keep raising for your legal defense fund. Once a creep always a creep, and you’re gonna need it.”

The Ethics Committee wrote in the letter dated June 26 that it “retains the authority to revisit this matter should additional facts become known to the Committee.”

Ethics Committee Chairman James Lankford, R-Okla., ranking member Chris Coons, D-Del., Idaho Republican Sen. James Risch, Hawaii Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz, Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer and New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, signed the letter. 

Luna made the allegations against Gallego in April just after California Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell and Texas Republican Rep. Tony Gonzales resigned amid sexual misconduct allegations. 

She wrote in a social media post addressed to Senate Majority Leader John Thune on April 15 that it “seems like the Senate has its own trash to take out. @LeaderJohnThune You need to look into the allegations against one of your Senators, it’s very disturbing. My chief will be contacting your chief.”

A quarter-century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people who are elderly or live with disabilities and need long-term care have a right to get those services at home instead of in a hospital or nursing home.

Now advocates fear that protection could be pulled away, and with it, government support for the care of people with disabilities in their homes or in the community.

The Supreme Court’s Olmstead ruling in 1999, combined with a series of federal laws going back to 1973, “have changed what it means to be a person with a disability,” says Jenny Price, executive director of the Wisconsin Board for People with Developmental Disabilities.

“People just went away, out of their family homes,” Price says. “It is because of these protections that are in place that that doesn’t happen now.”

The Olmstead decision’s author, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, wrote that “unjustified institutional isolation of persons with disabilities is a form of discrimination” under the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act, and that the law  gives them the right to live in a “less restrictive setting.”

Then-President Bill Clinton called on states to adopt more community-based services and enable people with disabilities to obtain care and services outside institutions as much as possible. Subsequent administrations continued in that direction, including taking legal action to require states to expand community care options.

A June 18 opinion from the U.S. DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel reverses course. The opinion “concluded states may disregard decades of Supreme Court precedent and ensuing regulations mandating integration of individuals with disabilities into home or community settings,” Bloomberg Law reported.

Price says advocates are concerned that the opinion signals the Trump administration won’t enforce the right of people with disabilities to be integrated into the wider community that was underscored in Olmstead.

Along with that memo, the federal Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services has been focusing on Medicaid coverage for home- and community-based services, HCBS for short, and suggesting it is a source of fraud — a claim rejected by outside Medicaid experts.

“All of these things are happening at the same time,” Price says. With CMS warning states about fraud investigations, “a lot of states are figuring out how to limit home and community based services. It just kind of makes it more likely that there won’t be as much care at home.”

The DOJ memo, “says to states if you don’t have the home care people need to live in the community safely, the federal government isn’t going to care about that,” Price says — nor will it enforce the principle of community integration as it has in the past.

The two women who brought the 1999 Supreme Court case lived with intellectual disabilities as well as mental health diagnoses. Both of them “were in and out of a psychiatric institution but there was no dispute that their needs could appropriately be met in community-based programs,” American University law professor Robert Dinerstein wrote for the American Bar Association in 2025.  

“Needing help or support to live the life that you choose shouldn’t be a reason for the government to take you out of the community, or away from living the life you want,” Price says.

Lives changed for people with disabilities

Stacy Ellingen has a form of cerebral palsy, a result of complications during her birth, that affects all of her muscles. The 41-year-old uses a power wheelchair and technological aids to help her communicate.

Ellingen also has an active life in the community. She has a journalism degree, is a graphic designer and lives on her own in an apartment in Oshkosh. And she manages an online community for people with disabilities, the Self-Determination Network.

Wisconsin’s IRIS program, which enables her to hire caregivers and is covered through Medicaid, makes it possible for her to live in a home of her own where she receives daily care.

“Thanks to the services and supports I receive through Medicaid, I’m able to lead a successful life and be an active member of my community,” Ellingen told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.

With her IRIS caregivers, she doesn’t have to depend on her parents, now in their 70s, although they are able to provide backup help.

“I need assistance with all of my basic needs such as eating, toileting, showering, and dressing,” Ellingen wrote. “I literally rely on assistance from caregivers for everything from getting out of bed each morning, to getting dressed, to using the restroom multiple times a day, to eating each meal, to showering and getting back into bed every night.”

Carl Schulze was 27 when he broke his neck in a fall in 2007 after a night of partying. Surgery and two months in the hospital enabled him to survive, but the injury left him a quadriplegic.

 Now 45, Schulze lives near Neenah in Winnebago County. In April he was elected to the Winnebago County Board.

“I can’t get in and out of my wheelchair on my own,” Schulze said in a phone interview. “I can feed myself, but I still need help having my food made.”

He’s been able to live independently thanks to home healthcare workers whom he hires through Medicaid.

The DOJ memo angered him. “The federal government wants to tell the states that they’re not going to enforce it if the states stop funding community-based services. That’s my home health aides,” Schulze said.

In August 2025 Schulze rode his wheelchair to Madison to call attention to home healthcare workers’ low pay and urge lawmakers to support increases in their wages. He said he worries now about having to go to an assisted living home because he’s had trouble finding enough home healthcare workers.

Better care at lower cost

Advocates and people with disabilities say care in the community helps the person thrive and have a more fulfilling life — its most important benefit

Ellingen has lived with disability from birth but has never had to live in an institution, and she can’t imagine having to do so now.

“I know that my needs are pretty high which is concerning when talk of putting people with disabilities back in institutions comes up,” she wrote, in response to a question about the DOJ memo. “Personally, after all the hard work my family and I have done to get me to where I am today, I can’t fathom being forced into an institution.”

In addition to being better overall for the person, Price says, “If we were providing that care the way we used to, it would cost a lot more.”

Advocates say there’s still another problem: There simply aren’t institutions available to house people who are now able to live in the community.

“It’s not as if tomorrow suddenly everyone could go someplace,” Price says. “Our concern always with all of these things going on is, does it mean some people have nowhere to go?”

Without services provided by the state, care would fall on the shoulders of family members.

“There’s so much unpaid caregiving that’s already going on,” Price says. “That burden might increase.”