White House budget director Russ Vought speaks with reporters inside the U.S. Capitol building on Tuesday, July 15, 2025. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Senate on Tuesday night moved one step closer to canceling $9 billion in previously approved funding for several foreign aid programs and public broadcasting after GOP leaders addressed some objections.

Nearly all the chamber’s Republicans voted to begin debate on the bill, though Maine’s Susan Collins, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski opposed the procedural step along with every Democrat.

The 51-50 vote marked a significant moment for President Donald Trump’s rescissions request, which faced more headwinds in the Senate than in the House. Vice President JD Vance cast the tie-breaking vote.

Trump proposed doing away with $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that lawmakers had approved for the next two fiscal years as well as $8.3 billion from several foreign aid accounts.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting provides funding to National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service and local media stations throughout the country.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said before the vote that some of the progress stemmed from removing a spending cut for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, a global health program to combat HIV/AIDS launched by former President George W. Bush.

“There was a lot of interest among our members in doing something on the PEPFAR issue and that’s reflected in the substitute,” Thune said. “And we hope that if we can get this across the finish line in the Senate that the House would accept that one small modification.”

South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, who had raised concerns about cutting funding for rural public broadcasting stations run by tribal communities, announced a few hours before the vote he’d reached an agreement with the White House.

“We wanted to make sure tribal broadcast services in South Dakota continued to operate which provide potentially lifesaving emergency alerts,” Rounds wrote in a social media post. “We worked with the Trump administration to find Green New Deal money that could be reallocated to continue grants to tribal radio stations without interruption.”

Rounds said during a brief interview that $9.4 million will be transferred from an account within the Interior Department directly to 28 Native American radio stations in nine states.

“I had concerns specifically about the impact on these radio stations that are in rural areas with people that have basically very few other resources, and to me, they got caught in the crossfire on public broadcasting,” Rounds said. “And so I just wanted to get it fixed and I was successful in getting it fixed.”

White House budget director Russ Vought told reporters after a closed-door lunch meeting with Republican senators that he didn’t want to get “too far ahead” of discussions, but that his office was working with GOP senators to ensure certain local broadcast stations “have the opportunity to continue to do their early warning system and local reporting.”

Maine’s Collins wants more details

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Collins, who voiced reservations about several of the rescissions during a June hearing, said preserving full funding for PEPFAR represented “progress.”

But Collins said a few hours before the vote she still wants more details from the White House budget office about the exact source of the other $9 billion in cuts to previously approved spending.

“One of the issues, which I raised at lunch, is the total is still $9 billion and it’s unclear to me how you get to $9 billion, because he’s listed a number of programs he wants to, quote, protect,” Collins said, referring to Vought. “So we still have the problem of not having detailed account information from OMB.”

Collins, R-Maine, then held up a printed version of the 1992 rescissions request that President George H.W. Bush sent Congress, which she said was “extremely detailed” and listed each account.

“I would contrast that to the message that we got for this rescission, which just has a paragraph and doesn’t tell you how it’s broken down in each program,” Collins said, adding she’s still “considering the options.”

The Senate’s procedural vote began a maximum of 10 hours of debate that will be followed by a marathon amendment voting session that could rework the bill. A final passage vote could take place as soon as Wednesday.

Trump expected to send more requests

The House approved the legislation in June, but the measure will have to go back across the Capitol for a final vote since the Senate is expected to make changes.

The effort to cancel funding that Congress previously approved in bipartisan government funding bills began last month when the Trump administration sent Congress this rescission request.

The initiative, led by White House budget director Vought, is part of Republicans’ ongoing efforts to reduce federal spending, which totaled $6.8 trillion during the last full fiscal year.

Vought expects to send lawmakers additional rescissions proposals in the months ahead, though he hasn’t said publicly when or what funding he’ll request Congress eliminate.

Once the White House submits a rescission request, it can legally freeze funding on those accounts for 45 days while Congress debates whether to approve, amend, or ignore the proposal.

Johnson slams funding for public media

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said during a press conference before the PEPFAR removal was announced that he hoped the Senate didn’t change the bill at all.

“I’ve urged them, as I always do, to please keep the product unamended because we have a narrow margin and we’ve got to pass it,” Johnson said. “But we’re going to process whatever they send us whenever they send (it to) us and I’m hopeful that it will be soon.”

Johnson said canceling the previously approved funding on some foreign aid programs and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting represented “low-hanging fruit.”

Federal funding for public media, Johnson said, embodied a “misuse of taxpayer dollars” on organizations that produce “biased reporting.”

“While at its origination NPR and PBS might have made some sense, and maybe it does now,” Johnson said. “But it shouldn’t be subsidized by taxpayers.”

Trump has also sought to encourage Republican senators to pass the bill without making any significant changes.

“It is very important that all Republicans adhere to my Recissions Bill and, in particular, DEFUND THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING (PBS and NPR), which is worse than CNN & MSDNC put together,” Trump wrote on social media last week. “Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

A federal judge has ordered Wisconsin to stop denying unemployment insurance to applicants who are also on Social Security Disability Insurance. (Getty Images creative)

Wisconsin residents who receive federal disability benefits and also work will no longer be denied unemployment compensation if they get laid off under a federal court order issued this week.

The order effectively ends enforcement of a 12-year-old state law that disqualifies people from unemployment insurance coverage if they collect Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) payments.

The order, released late Monday, comes a year after U.S. District Judge William Conley found that the Wisconsin law barring unemployment insurance for SSDI recipients unlawfully discriminates against people with disabilities.

The Department of Workforce Development (DWD) did not respond Tuesday to requests for comment on the order. 

The law was passed in 2013 with only Republican support in the Legislature and signed by then-Gov. Scott Walker. It was based on the premise that most SSDI recipients didn’t work and that when they filed UI claims they were “double-dipping” and probably committing “fraud.”

That impression is false, according to Victor Forberger, whose legal practice is almost exclusively focused on unemployment insurance claims.

Many people with disabilities who qualify for SSDI are still able to do some kinds of work, and they often want and need to, Forberger said Tuesday.

“They need to do this work to support themselves,” Forberger said. The typical monthly SSDI benefit “is a bare minimum, and in some cases not even that.”

Forberger, working with two other law firms, filed a lawsuit in 2021 against Amy Pechacek, secretary-designee at the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD). The suit charged that banning SSDI recipients from filing for unemployment compensation when they lose work violates the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

In a ruling July 17, 2024, Conley sided with the plaintiffs. Despite that ruling, DWD continued to reject unemployment insurance claims made by people receiving SSDI payments.

Conley’s new order, filed late Monday, instructs Pechacek and DWD to stop enforcing the UI ban for people on SSDI.

The lawsuit was filed as a class action. In an order June 11, Conley certified two classes of people with claims under the litigation: Those who applied for unemployment benefits in Wisconsin after Sept. 7, 2015 and were denied because they received SSDI benefits; and those who had received UI benefits after that date, but then were ordered to pay them back because they also were on SSDI.

The plaintiffs and DWD still differ on how to handle remedies for the two classes of people.

DWD wants to reprocess their claims from the start, and argues in a court brief that some of them might still not qualify for unemployment insurance for other reasons. The plaintiffs want the order to include a provision for supplemental filings and hearings.

Conley’s order requires both sides to work out a remedy agreement by Aug. 18, and if they can’t, to each submit a proposed order and identify their differences.

The judge rejected two other proposed classes: UI claimants who were penalized after failing to report their SSDI income, and SSDI recipients who never filed for unemployment insurance after losing a job.

The penalties in the law were not part of the lawsuit, Conley wrote. Identifying who might have applied for UI and did not was “unknown and unknowable,” he added.

Forberger said Tuesday that there may be several thousand people who were on SSDI and were denied unemployment compensation as a result. Once the remedy details are resolved, he expects that notifying everyone who qualifies for payment will be a complicated and time-consuming task.

“We’ve got to do a lot of outreach and a lot of explanation,” Forberger said.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, speaks at a rally on Friday, March 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C, protesting the U.S. Education Department’s mass layoffs and President Donald Trump’s plans to dismantle the agency. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON  — The U.S. Department of Education has emerged as central in the struggle over control of the power of the purse in the nation’s capital.

Democrats in Congress are pushing back hard on the Trump administration’s freeze of $6.8 billion in funds for after-school programs and more at public schools, some of which open their doors a few weeks from now. California alone lost access to $939 million and every state is seeing millions of dollars frozen.

At the same time, the Supreme Court on Monday slammed the door on judicial orders that blocked the dismantling of the 45-year-old agency that Congress created and funds.

The nation’s highest court cleared the way for the administration to proceed, for now, with mass layoffs and a plan to dramatically downsize the Department of Education that President Donald Trump ordered earlier this year.

In her scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “the majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”

Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote that the president “must take care that the laws are faithfully executed, not set out to dismantle them.”

“That basic rule undergirds our Constitution’s separation of powers,” she wrote. “Yet today, the majority rewards clear defiance of that core principle with emergency relief.”

Just a day after the Supreme Court’s decision, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters at a Tuesday press conference that while he hasn’t had a chance to digest the Supreme Court’s order, he also knows that “since its creation, the Department of Education has been wielded by the executive branch.”

“I think that was the intent of Congress, as I understood it back then. We have a large say in that, but we’re going to coordinate that with the White House,” the Louisiana Republican said.

“If we see that the separation of powers is being breached in some way, we’ll act, but I haven’t seen that yet,” he added.

Letters from Democrats on frozen funds

Two letters from Senate and House Democrats demanding the administration release the $6.8 billion in federal funds for various education initiatives also depict the Education Department as a key part of the tussle between the executive branch and Congress.

Just a day ahead of the July 1 date when these funds are typically sent out as educators plan for the coming school year, the department informed states that it would be withholding funding for programs, including before- and after-school programs, migrant education, English-language learning and adult education and literacy, among other initiatives.

Thirty-two senators and 150 House Democrats wrote to Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought last week asking to immediately unfreeze those dollars they say are being withheld “illegally.”

“It is unacceptable that the administration is picking and choosing what parts of the appropriations law to follow, and you must immediately implement the entire law as Congress intended and as the oaths you swore require you to do,” the senators wrote in their letter.

The respective top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee and its subcommittee overseeing Education Department funding, Sens. Patty Murray of Washington state and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, led the letter, alongside Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

In the lower chamber, House Democrats wrote that “without these funds, schools are facing difficult and unnecessary decisions on programs for students and teachers.”

“No more excuses — follow the law and release the funding meant for our schools, teachers, and families,” they added.

Georgia’s Rep. Lucy McBath led the letter, along with the respective top Democrats on the House Committee on Education and Workforce, its subcommittee on early childhood, elementary and secondary education and its panel on higher education and workforce development: Reps. Bobby Scott of Virginia, Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon and Alma Adams of North Carolina.

Democratic attorneys general, governors file suit

Meanwhile, a coalition of 24 states and the District of Columbia sued the Trump administration on Monday over those withheld funds, again arguing that Congress has the power to direct funding.

The states suing include: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington state and Wisconsin.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro and Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, both Democrats, also signed onto the suit filed in a Rhode Island federal court.

“Not only does Congress require that Defendants make funds available for obligation to the States, Congress, in conjunction with (Education Department) regulations, also directs the timing of when those funds should be made available,” the coalition wrote.

An analysis earlier in July by New America, a left-leaning think tank, found that the top five school districts with the greatest total funding risk per-pupil include those in at least two red states: Montana’s Cleveland Elementary School District, Kester Elementary School District and Grant Elementary School District, along with Oregon’s Yoncalla School District 32 and Texas’ Boles Independent School District.

The think tank notes that program finance data was not available for Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Wisconsin. 

In an aerial view from a helicopter, the migrant detention center dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz" by Florida Republicans is seen at the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport on July 4, 2025 in Ochopee, Florida.  (Photo by Alon Skuy/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Former top immigration officials from the Biden administration warned Tuesday that billions for immigration enforcement signed into law earlier this month will escalate the rapid detention and deportations of immigrants.

During a virtual press conference with the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice, the former Department of Homeland Security officials said they expect to see a trend toward states building “soft” temporary detention centers similar to Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz,” the name given by Florida Republicans to an Everglades detention center.

Funding for those initiatives will come from President Donald Trump’s tax break and spending cut bill signed into law earlier this month that provides roughly $170 billion for immigration enforcement, the former officials said.

Trump’s massive tax and spending cut bill provides $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, making it the nation’s highest-funded law enforcement agency, to hire 10,000 new agents and carry out deportations. Another $45 billion will go to ICE for the detention of immigrants and $450 million in grants to states to partake in border enforcement.

Billions more are provided for border security and for the military to partake in border-related enforcement.

Andrea Flores, who directed border management for the National Security Council under former President Joe Biden said she expects to see states running their own immigration detention centers similar to the “Alligator Alcatraz” center that state officials quickly erected to hold immigrants. That state-run facility in the Florida Everglades is expected to house up to 5,000 immigrants.

Safety for migrants questioned

Jason Houser, who served as ICE chief of staff in the Biden administration, said the quickly built detention centers will likely create an unsafe environment for immigrants brought there. The lack of experience and training for employees running those centers will also put migrants at risk, he said.

“People are gonna get hurt,” he said. “They’re gonna die.”

He added that with the arrest quotas that immigration officials have been given, roughly 3,000 arrests a day, “ICE is going to focus on those (immigrants) that are easily reachable, those who have been complying and checking in,” either with immigration officials or appearing in immigration court.

“Hitting quotas is not in the national security interest,” Houser said.

Houser said with the rapid arrest and detention of immigrants, the need for detention centers will likely lead to states building the “soft sided” detention centers in “some of the most rural parts of the country where they cannot be properly staffed and resourced.”

Flores said if states work to build their own centers like the one in Florida, there will likely be a lack of oversight because DHS has significantly fired federal employees that ran the watchdog that conducted oversight of ICE — the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties.

Flores currently serves as the vice president of immigration policy at FWD.us, which focuses on immigration policy and reform.

Increase expected in third-country removals

Royce Murray, a former DHS assistant secretary for border and immigration policy and a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services official during the Biden administration, said she is concerned that the Trump administration will now be able to ramp up third-country removals with the increase in funding.

Any removals  to a third country “have to be to a country that is safe,” she said.

If an immigrant has a final order of removal but their home country will not accept their deportation, then the United States typically looks for another country that will accept the removal — a third country.

The Trump administration has tried to secure agreements with countries to take deportees, such as Mexico and South Sudan, which recently ended a civil war, but is still experiencing violence. The State Department warns against travel to South Sudan, but the Trump administration won a case before the Supreme Court seeking to use the East African country for third-country removals.

Murray said that the Trump administration is using third-country removals to “create a climate of fear” and get immigrants to self-deport.

She said if third-country removals are going to take place, they “need to be a place where people can successfully integrate.”

Wisconsin has joined a lawsuit against the Trump administration's action to withhold $6.8 billion for education progams supporting English language learners, migrants, low-income children, adult learners and others. (Photo by Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images)

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul joined 23 states and the District of Columbia Monday in suing the Trump administration for withholding $6.8 billion meant for six U.S. Department of Education programs, which help support English language learners, migrants, low-income children, adult learners and others. 

The funds, approved in the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act 2025 and signed into law on March 15, are typically distributed to states by July 1. However, the Department of Education notified the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction as well as other state education agencies on June 30 that they would be withholding the funds. 

“Depriving our schools of critical resources is bad for our schools, bad for students, and bad for Wisconsin,” Attorney General Josh Kaul said in a statement. “This unlawful funding freeze should be stopped.”

The Wisconsin DPI said in a statement that the federal agency gave no specific explanation for the action. Instead, the U.S. Department of Education said that “decisions have not yet been made concerning submissions and awards for this upcoming academic year” and “accordingly, the Department will not be issuing Grant Award Notifications obligating funds for these programs on July 1 prior to completing that review. The Department remains committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the President’s priorities and the Department’s statutory responsibilities.” 

The withholding of funds comes as the Trump administration continues to pursue closing the Department of Education with a plan to lay off more than 1,000 agency employees and resume drastically cutting the agency after getting the greenlight from the U.S. Supreme Court Monday. The Trump administration has also withheld other funds this year, including for grants for mental health in schools. A spokesperson for the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement about the review of education funding that “initial findings have shown that many of these grant programs have been grossly misused to subsidize a radical leftwing agenda.” 

The multi-state lawsuit argues that the freeze of the $6.8 billion violates federal laws and regulations that authorize and fund the programs, federal laws, including the Antideficiency Act and Impoundment Control Act, that govern the federal budgeting process and the constitutional separation of powers doctrine and the Presentment Clause. 

The coalition of states is requesting that the court provide declaratory relief by finding the freeze is unlawful and offer injunctive relief by requiring the release of the funds. 

Over $72 million is being withheld from Wisconsin. Without the funding, school districts face funding shortfalls for programs that have already been planned, DPI may have to lay off 20 employees and programs at Wisconsin’s technical colleges are in trouble with $7.5 million in adult education grants being withheld.

State Superintendent Jill Underly said in a statement that Wisconsin schools depend on the federal funding distributed through an array of programs to support students. There are five programs affected: Title I-C, which supports migrant education, Title II-A, which goes towards teacher training and retention, Title III-A, which supports education of English language learners, Title IV-A, which is for student enrichment and after-school programs and Title IV-B, which supports community learning centers.

“Make no mistake, stopping this money has had and will continue to harm our families and communities,” Underly said. 

Wisconsin schools have received funding through these federal programs for decades to help carry out related programs. According to DPI, federal funding makes up about 8% of funding for Wisconsin schools with nearly $850 million coming into the state. 

Sen. Tammy Baldwin alongside 31 other U.S. senators penned a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought and Education Secretary Linda McMahon, calling on them to release the money. 

“This delay not only undermines effective state and local planning for using these funds to address student needs consistent with federal education law, which often takes place months before these funds become available, but also flies in the face of the nation’s education laws which confers state and local educational agency discretion on permissible uses of federal formula grant funds,” the senators wrote. “We are shocked by the continued lack of respect for states and local schools evidenced by this latest action by the administration.”

“It is unacceptable that the administration is picking and choosing what parts of the appropriations law to follow, and you must immediately implement the entire law as Congress intended and as the oaths you swore require you to do,” the lawmakers said. 

The lawmakers also said the “review” being undertaken by the administration appears to be intentional to delay the funding and will result in budget cuts for schools. They said it is happening “with no public information about what the review entails, what data the administration is examining or a timeline for such review.”

A Social Security Administration field office in San Jose, California. An email message from the agency about the tax cut bill that President Donald Trump signed July 4 has drawn sharp criticism. (Photo by Michael Vi/Getty Images)

Updated 2 p.m. Tuesday, 7/15/2025

Retired professor Larry White says the email message he got on July 4 from the Social Security Administration was unlike any he’s ever seen from the agency.

“The Social Security Administration (SSA) is celebrating the passage of the One Big, Beautiful Bill,” the email message began — using the official name of the massive legislation signed by President Donald Trump that cuts taxes and also slashes spending on Medicaid and SNAP, along with making numerous other policy changes.

White, 71, who lives in Madison, has been getting Social Security Administration email since he retired from the Beloit College psychology faculty in 2019. But until the July 4 message, he said, every single one has been straightforward, factual — and nonpolitical.

The message included a misleading description of one provision in the new law. The Social Security Administration later published a correction.

That alone angered White. But that the message was sent at all was just as irritating, he told the Wisconsin Examiner.

The email, including a quote from Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano, “appeared to value currying favor with the president over telling Americans the truth,” White said. “I want our federal agencies to be independent, nonpartisan offices that act with integrity and serve the public, not the president.”

The Social Security message claims that the legislation “ensures that nearly 90% of Social Security beneficiaries will no longer pay federal income taxes on their benefits…”

“This is a historic step forward for America’s seniors,” Social Security Commissioner Frank Bisignano stated.

As was soon widely reported, however, the message itself was off the mark.

“I was surprised to see SSA send this out as an email to such a large list since this seems more about politics than anything specific to the program,” said J. Michael Collins, a household economics expert at the University of Wisconsin. Collins directed a Social Security research center at the UW until the Trump administration shut it down earlier this year.

The actual change that the message refers to is to income taxes paid by all people 65 or older with incomes $75,000 a year or less for single filers and $150,000 a year or less for couples — regardless of whether they’re collecting Social Security or not, Collins explained.

While the message appears to single out Social Security income, “there is no new exemption of SSA income from federal income taxes, just a new deduction for all people 65+ regardless of income source,” Collins told the Wisconsin Examiner in an email message.

For people who are 64 or younger and who get income from Social Security, there’s no comparable tax cut, he added.

To be sure, the reduction does give some help to taxpayers 65 or older who collect Social Security.

 A 2022 IRS tax tip explains that half of Social Security income is taxable for  a single person whose income is $25,000 to $34,000 and for a married couple filing jointly whose income is $32,000 to $44,000.

For a single person with income over $34,000 or a married couple with income over $44,000, 85% of their Social Security income is taxable.

Social Security beneficiaries with incomes below the $75,000 or $150,000 ceiling will get relief from those tax bills — along with everyone else 65 or older whose income also falls below those limits.

The tax break also lasts just a few years, ending in 2028 — stretching the claim that qualifying beneficiaries “will no longer” pay income taxes.

The email message produced a sharp blowback.

“I was appalled — it was really unprecedented,” Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, told the Wisconsin Examiner in a phone interview. “They’ve taken an agency that’s supposed to be above politics and made it an arm of propaganda.”

Altman recalled that when Social Security checks were mailed in October 1972, President Richard Nixon suggested including an insert in which he could take credit for a benefit increase — even though he had initially opposed it. The commissioner at the time, Robert Ball, threatened to resign if Nixon followed through, and Nixon backed off, Altman said.

As originally worded, the email message appeared to suggest two separate tax cut provisions — one for Social Security recipients 65 and older and one for others:

“The new law includes a provision that eliminates federal income taxes on Social Security benefits for most beneficiaries, providing relief to individuals and couples. Additionally, it provides an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older, ensuring that retirees can keep more of what they have earned.”

On July 7, the Social Security Administration added a correction and changed the second sentence in that paragraph to, “It does so by providing an enhanced deduction for taxpayers aged 65 and older…”

The correction was previously reported by HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney.

The morning that he received the Social Security message, White, the retired Beloit professor, wrote back to Bisignano directly — guessing at a direct email address for the Trump-appointed Social Security Commissioner.

“Commissioner Bisignano, When did the Social Security Administration become so blatantly political? I thought government agencies like the USPS were supposed to just go about their business from one administration to the next, but clearly that’s not the case with the SSA. You have become an unabashed mouthpiece for Trump. Shame on you!”

“I was upset that the head of a major federal agency would act in a way that undermines the public’s trust,” White told the Wisconsin Examiner.

“For years, Trump has expressed contempt for America’s once-revered institutions — courts, universities, the press, medical experts, climate scientists, long-time allies abroad … the list is a long one,” White added. “Trump wants to diminish any group or individual who questions his aims or methods.”

The email message appears to play directly to that characteristic of the president, he said, and White fears that will diminish the agency in the public eye.

“What upsets me is that the commissioner of the SSA foolishly wrote a letter that will prompt millions of Americans to question the integrity of the SSA,” White said. “It takes years for an organization to build up a good reputation, but it can be fatally damaged almost overnight.”

This report has been updated with a statement Tuesday from Sen. Tammy Baldwin.

As federal aid ran out, advocates called on lawmakers to fund the Child Care Counts program using state dollars, as Evers proposed. (Baylor Spears | Wisconsin Examiner)

This summer Democratic  and Republican legislators along with the Gov. Tony Evers participated in closed-door negotiations to come up with  the 2025-27 state budget. All of the  parties involved are touting the budget as a historic advance for children and patting themselves on the back for compromising with each other and the work they accomplished. In other words, they played well in the sandbox together. While yes, the state budget has never included funding for child care in its history, as we were one of only six states that didn’t, crowing about it now is kind of like touting the fact that you’ve just changed a diaper for the first time when your child is 2 years old. It’s not something to brag about, and the new state  budget is nothing to  brag about either.  

On the surface, as you read the claims about historic investments in child care and K-12 schools, you might think the budget really solved some big problems. Take Evers’ statement celebrating “Over $330 million to support Wisconsin’s child care industry and help lower child care costs for working families, a third of which is in direct payments to providers.” That means only $110 million is to continue the direct investment to all 4,700 eligible regulated child care programs. The original amount for this program was $480 million. Child care is receiving less than 25% of the requested amount. You might have  surmised from Evers’ victorious statement that parents will see a decrease in tuition costs with the new budget. However, the opposite is going to be occurring, and tuition increases will start in August. The $110 million will cause child care rates to increase next month because the new state investment  is less than a third of what Child Care Counts, funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, originally provided. 

The purpose of that money was to stabilize a field that had been declining for decades. It  increased teachers’ wages while holding down tuition costs for parents. It worked. The data showed a decline in closures and it raised the average child care educator’s wage from $11 an hour to $13 an hour in Wisconsin. (In our state, over 50% of early child care teachers have some college education or degree, with an average of 10 years experience.)

This month the ARPA funds run out, and for the past few years, knowing the federal funding would be ending, families, child care providers, and businesses have been advocating for the state to fill the gap and to subsidize child care. We know that for every $1 a state invests in early childhood education, the rate of return is between $10-$16.  Not only does quality early child care give children an opportunity for greater success as adults, it also supports our workforce, families and the economy. 

Regardless of the research and well-being of children, the gatekeepers of our tax dollars on the Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee deleted Evers’ $480 million direct state investment budget request for child care. Instead, child care funding was determined behind closed doors with Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein and Evers in one corner and Rep. Vos and Senate Majority Leader Devin Lemahieu in the other. It should be noted that no one in that  space is considered an expert in child care policy. What came out of this room was a compromise for the sake of compromise.  

The $110 million for child care won’t come from state dollars. It’s the interest that has accrued on the federal ARPA funds. It will be allocated directly to child care providers over the next 11 months, until June of 2026. It comes to about 70% less than the original amount paid through  CCC. This is why, starting in August, there will be significant closures of child care centers and home daycares in rural areas of the state — already considered a child care desert. Tuition will increase at the child care operations that try to stay open. So no, working families will not “see a decrease in childcare costs” as stated by Evers.  

And when the $110 million ends next year, there is nothing to replace it. The Wisconsin Legislature will gavel out in March and not gavel in until January of 2027, as legislators will be campaigning the rest of 2026. There won’t be an opportunity to pass emergency legislation  funding child care. Rates will increase again and closures will continue. 

The remainder of the $330 million in child care funding in the new state budget is for several new programs. A $66 million state investment for 4-year-olds to access “school readiness” in their child care program. This will help parents as the state will pay for their “preschool” time, but it replaces tuition for part of the school day. Child care programs that have school districts with all-day, free 4K will likely find it almost impossible to compete with public schools when they still need to charge for the remainder of the day plus wrap-around care. 

In addition, there is a $28 million pilot project to deregulate the child care field, which ends in July 2027. This move comes directly from the Republicans’ playbook. The pilot project will incentivize providers to increase their ratios, meaning more children per teacher, lower quality and safety for children and more stress on teachers. 

Another harmful policy in the new budget is that 16-year-olds are now allowed to be assistant teachers and count as adults in the ratio. Coupled with the pilot project mentioned above, this means a classroom of 14 toddlers can be supervised by one 18-year-old and one 16-year-old. This reduces the quality, safety, care and education for the children in our programs. Recall that while these decisions were being made behind closed doors, there were no experts in child care policy in the room. This policy was made without consideration of our state accreditation program, YoungStar, and our national accreditations. Any program that participates in the pilot project will no longer qualify to be accredited. And in Wisconsin, accreditation is not just a certificate to state you are following high safety standards, but our YoungStar program is tethered to our Wisconsin Shares (subsidy for child care). Programs with a five or four-star rating receive a bonus subsidy rate. It can mean a considerable loss of funding for providers to participate in the new pilot project.  

The politicians who wrote the budget deal behind closed doors neglected to consider the increased cost or loss of insurance for providers when we increase the teacher-to-child ratio and when we allow 16-year-olds to count as adults. 

The same group of non-experts also decided to allow policies that, in 2023, were already proposed and had failed to become law due to the overwhelming outcry from families, providers and the medical field against a policy that reduces quality and safety for our children. The state is  throwing millions of dollars in the garbage for these policies, which won’t benefit child care programs and will cause actual harm to Wisconsin children. 

Enacting policies like these without holding hearings raises the question: Who is representing us? The public already overwhelmingly said no to these policies two years ago. Furthermore, funding for child care is one of the top priorities that the JFC heard from voters throughout the state at budget listening sessions. Surveys show that the majority of both Republican and Democratic constituents support funding early child care. The only real compromise made in this budget was the compromise of safety and quality of our youngest children in the state.

Wisconsin’s K-12 budget

So how did school-age children fare in the state budget? Again, we are reading about record-setting investments in schools, along with the biggest investment our state has ever made for children with disabilities. Evers proclaimed that the new budget  “secures the largest increase to special education reimbursement rate in state history.”  You might think, great, finally children with disabilities will receive the support and resources they need. But you would be wrong. Evers’ budget request was for a 60% reimbursement for children with disabilities. After all, 90% reimbursement is the amount that Wisconsin voucher and charter schools have already been receiving for children with special needs. Unfortunately, the new budget allows public schools a maximum of 42% in 2026 and 45% in 2027 reimbursement, which is a far cry from the 60% request — the rate of the 1980s. Yes, the increase in this budget is technically the largest increase in recent years, but it is still miles away from the finish line. 

To make matters worse, the budget also provided a $0 per-pupil increase in general aid funding to public schools; however, a provision was placed in the budget paperwork that guaranteed voucher and charter schools would receive additional funding for their general aid in the budget. I can’t recall a year when no new general funding was provided in a budget to public schools in Wisconsin. Last year Wisconsin saw a record number of public schools go to referendum to squeeze additional funding from their communities to compensate for the lack of state and federal funding. Under the new budget, we will see another record number of schools going to referendum next year. We will also likely see more schools close, specifically in rural, poorer areas where the communities cannot be squeezed any more than they already have been. As you can imagine, this budget will only continue to widen the education gap in quality between the wealthy and the poor.  

Not to be all doom and gloom, there was one category of children that fared quite well with the new budget: our juvenile offenders. The budget will invest $1 million per juvenile offender. Yes, $1 million per kid. Remember when it was mentioned that investing in our youth early on saves us tenfold later on? The children in our juvenile justice systems are children who were not given the opportunity for quality early child care, children who were raised in poverty, children who have been abused, children who experience trauma, children with mental health issues. 

The children in our juvenile systems are those who have been failed by our state. Their families could not afford child care, so they were shuffled from one person to another. They lived with violence and addiction in their homes. And when they got to school at age 5, they were already on a trajectory of despair; the school systems cannot afford to provide all the services and support these children need, especially for those who have suffered trauma at an early age. 

Our new state budget only prioritizes these children once they are ready to be locked away. 

Unfortunately the hype about Wisconsin making record investments in our children is terribly overblown. Instead, the truth of the matter is that we are putting in the minimum, and this budget keeps us on the lowest tier as a state for investment in our public schools and our young children compared to other states. Meanwhile, we continue to be among the biggest spenders  on our juvenile offenders. 

Our political leaders have misled us.

I don’t think most Wisconsinites care whether their representatives can compromise or not. I think we would all rather have elected politicians who will actually represent us with integrity.  Represent us with values that prioritize our children, families, workforce and our economy. This is our common humanity. We can stop generational poverty. We can stop children from going hungry, we can support children who have been abused and neglected, and we can give children a chance in life. But we just made the choice not to do that.    

Correction: An earlier version of this commentary misstated the amount of Gov. Tony Evers’ budget request as 90% instead of 60%. We regret the error. 

The Raccoon River weaves past downtown Des Moines, Iowa, in June. One of the primary drinking water sources for the region, the river has high nitrate levels that have led to water restrictions for some 600,000 customers. (Photo by Cami Koons/Iowa Capital Dispatch)

For nearly a month, hundreds of thousands of Iowans have not been allowed to water their lawns — even though there’s no drought.

Local authorities previously asked the public to refrain from washing cars and filling pools. And some cities turned off splash pads in the height of summer heat.

While such measures are common during dry periods, there’s no shortage of water: Rather, the water in and around Des Moines contains too much nitrate, a natural component of soil and a byproduct of commercial fertilizer and livestock manure. Persistent rainfall has flushed nutrients out of fertilized fields into streams and rivers.

While the water bans are temporary, they’re the starkest sign yet of the state’s long-brewing struggle with high nitrate levels in streams and rivers that supply drinking water.

“It’s a big deal: the first time ever that lawn watering has been banned,” said Tami Madsen, executive director of Central Iowa Water Works, a regional water authority serving 600,000 people.

Federal law limits nitrate levels in drinking water because of its association with infant asphyxia, also known as blue baby syndrome. And a growing body of research has found links between nitrate consumption and cancer.

While Iowa’s problems are uniquely severe, nitrate levels are a rising concern in other regions, from California to the Chesapeake Bay. And climate change is expected to worsen the problem as more intense cycles of drought and severe storms increase farm runoff.

Iowa’s concentration of fertilized row crops and massive livestock confinements that produce tons of nitrogen-rich manure have caused concerns over increased nitrate levels for years. And the state’s unique underground system of farm drainage pipes quickly pumps nitrate and other nutrients into streams and rivers.

The water system serving the Des Moines metro area has invested heavily in nitrate filtration and removal equipment. The primary facility in Des Moines, one of the largest nitrate removal systems in the world, costs $16,000 per day to operate, Madsen said.

“I’m confident in our ability to continue to provide safe drinking water,” Madsen said. “It’s just going to be at what cost.”

More frequent and extreme storms because of climate change will heighten the problems nationwide, said Rebecca Logsdon Muenich, an associate professor of biological and agricultural engineering at the University of Arkansas.

Because nitrogen travels with water, nitrate levels are especially hard to control during times of severe weather.

Muenich said farm conservation practices such as establishing wetlands and landscape buffers can help keep nitrogen out of water supplies. But the growth of the livestock industry, availability of cheap crop fertilizer and lack of regulation over nitrogen application make nitrate levels hard to control.

“We’ve kind of put ourselves in a bind unless we start investing in better technologies or more conservation,” she said.

The role of agriculture

As hundreds of thousands of residents were being asked to conserve water last month, a group of 16 experts released a years-in-the-making report analyzing the quality of the Raccoon and Des Moines rivers, the main sources of drinking water for the Des Moines region.

The researchers found that central Iowa rivers have some of the nation’s highest nitrate levels, routinely exceeding the federal drinking water standard. While some pollutants are naturally occurring, the researchers concluded that most of the nitrogen in the two rivers comes from farmland.

Commissioned in 2023 by Polk County, the state’s most populous county and home to Des Moines, the report underscored the connection between industrial agriculture and water quality.

Larry Weber, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Iowa who worked on the report, said Iowa’s problem spreads to other areas: Iowa waterways export hundreds of millions of pounds of nitrogen per year, much of it flowing into the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico’s dead zone.

He said water restrictions may become more common as more cities confront high nitrate levels.

“This is happening more frequently and it’s going to continue to happen more frequently,” he said.

Weber said individual farmers aren’t necessarily to blame for the crisis. They’re doing their best to survive market demands and operate within federal farm policy. But he said the broader industry and the state could do more to invest in conservation methods to prevent pollution.

He noted that Iowa lawmakers in 2023 cut $500,000 for a water quality monitoring network across the state. While the Iowa Nutrient Research Center received a short-term grant to stay open, Weber said next year it will shut down 75 sensors that measure nitrate and other pollutants in state waters.

“The agricultural system doesn’t want this unfortunately difficult information to be made available,” he said.

A spokesperson for the Iowa Farm Bureau referred questions to the state agriculture department.

In a statement to Stateline, Agriculture Secretary Mike Naig, a Republican, said many Iowa groups are working on conservation and infrastructure projects to improve water quality.

“We’re not interested in stoking animosity between rural and urban neighbors,” the statement said. “Agriculture, conservation, recreation, urban and rural development, and business growth can and must co-exist in Iowa.”

In a lengthy social media post last month, Naig said nitrate levels were primarily driven by weather and stream flows. The secretary said advances in farming practices can help farmers apply fertilizer more efficiently and touted efforts such as new wetlands and structures that reduce stream erosion. But he said the fast-growing Des Moines area also needed to examine its investments in water treatment infrastructure to meet future needs.

“The blame game is unproductive,” he wrote.

On Tuesday, Naig’s department announced a $1.9 million water quality project upstream of Des Moines. That project will install landscape buffers and bioreactors to help reduce runoff of nitrate and other nutrients. The department is contributing $244,000 of that money.

Matt McCoy, chair of the Polk County Board of Supervisors, said that local government is trying to work with landowners and farmers to prevent water pollution. The county has spent millions on projects to seed cover crops and plant vegetative buffers between fields and waterways to prevent runoff of pollutants, including nitrogen.

“I don’t think we want to disparage agriculture and farming because it’s such a big part of who we are as a state,” McCoy said.

A former Democratic state lawmaker, McCoy said the recent water restrictions and daily news reports on nitrate levels in local rivers have elevated public awareness of water quality concerns.

“There are conversations that I know are happening now that were not happening prior to the restrictions,” he said.

Citizen action

The water restrictions in Iowa sparked an influx of interest from locals in the Izaak Walton League of America’s Nitrate Watch program, which provides volunteers with nitrate test kits and maps the results from across the country.

Heather Wilson, the league’s Midwest Save Our Streams coordinator, said the nonprofit environmental organization received more than 300 inquiries from Iowans during a single week in June. For comparison, the organization received about 500 inquiries from across the nation during the first six months of the year.

While the problems in the Des Moines area are severe, she said, volunteers are recording rising nitrate levels across the state. The project gives people who can often feel helpless an active way to contribute to the understanding of nitrate pollution.

“It’s really empowering to be able to put resources in people’s hands so that they can measure the waterways that they personally care about,” she said.

Retired science teacher Birgitta Meade has been testing nitrates around her rural northeast Iowa home for years both as classroom instruction and for Nitrate Watch.

“They’re higher than I have ever tested at any prior point,” she said. “I feel like I’m meticulously documenting the death of my home and nobody else gives a rip.”

Meade said she’s considering investing in a reverse osmosis system to remove nitrates from her home’s private well. Though her nitrate levels are below the federal drinking water standard, she pointed to the growing body of research linking cancer with consumption of nitrate — even at lower levels.

Meade acknowledged the pressures facing farmers, but she said she grows frustrated every time she drives past giant storage containers full of fertilizer and other farm chemicals.

“These are people who are choosing to poison their neighbors,” she said. “And this is just untenable.”

Small towns struggle

Climate change will only intensify nitrogen pollution, said Thomas Harter, a professor and water researcher at the University of California, Davis. Last year, he worked on research that found drought and heavy rains accelerate the speed of nitrogen absorption into groundwater.

In some parts of California’s Central Valley, nearly a third of drinking and irrigation wells exceed federal nitrogen standards.

“We are ever more productive on the grower side, and that means more fertilizer being used and more fertilizer being lost to groundwater and to streams,” Harter said.

That’s particularly challenging for drinking water systems serving small population bases.

“It gets really expensive for really small systems and it’s also a lot of maintenance,” he said.

That’s a reality currently facing Pratt, Kansas, a community of about 6,500 people, where some wells have recorded nitrate levels above the federal standard.

City Manager Regina Goff said nitrate levels are pushing the community’s pursuit of a new water treatment facility that’s expected to cost upward of $45 million. The city’s proposed 2025 budget totaled about $35.7 million.

Goff said the city is exploring financing options, including potential grants. But she said it’s frustrating for the town to spend so much to meet regulatory standards for safe drinking water, which she characterized as an “unfunded mandate.”

Currently, nearly a quarter of the city’s groundwater supply is unavailable because of high nitrate levels. But the city must notify residents of high nitrate levels even in wells that are not pumping.

“It causes a panic,” Goff said. “That’s been a hard pill for us to swallow as a city — that we have to alarm our population even though we know there’s no possibility of harm.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the name of the Izaak Walton League of America.

Stateline reporter Kevin Hardy can be reached at khardy@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

The Milwaukee County Courthouse (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin Republicans are proposing a bill to stop paying judges who have been suspended in response to the arrest and suspension of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan. 

Dugan was indicted in May by a federal grand jury and has pleaded not guilty to charges that she impeded the arrest by federal agents of an immigrant who was appearing in her court room.  She was arrested by FBI agents in April.

Critics have condemned the arrest as an example of the Trump administration discouraging pushback to mass deportation efforts and a worrying sign for democracy. Federal and state Republicans have supported the arrest of Dugan, saying those who stand in the way of deportations should be arrested and that Dugan should resign or be removed.

The bill, cosponsored by Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee), Assembly Majority Leader Tyler August (R-Walworth) and Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers), would require that if the state Supreme Court imposes a suspension as proceedings are pending or as a disciplinary sanction due to misconduct, it must be without pay. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court chose to suspend Dugan in April, saying it was in the public interest to relieve her of her duties for now. Dugan is still being paid her nearly $175,000 annual salary.

The lawmakers noted that Dugan’s trial was postponed from July 21 and may not take place until 2026. They said taxpayers will be paying for “an extended vacation” even as reserve judges have to fill in for her and they argued the bill is needed to stop suspended judges from getting paid in the future.

According to the Wisconsin Judicial Commission, 15 judges have been suspended by the Supreme Court from 1978 to 2024.

“In these rare circumstances, these judges’ actions and alleged misconduct rose to such a level that suspension was warranted,” the lawmakers said in a memo.  “Simply put, Wisconsin taxpayers must be protected from the misconduct and/or commission of a crime by rogue judges.”

Children enrolled in the Head Start early education program operated by Western Dairyland Economic Opportunity Council. (Photo courtesy of Western Dairyland EOC)

A new Trump administration federal rule would bar immigrants without legal status from a range of public programs, canceling a policy that was implemented nearly three decades ago.

The change bars the children of those immigrants from the Head Start child care program. It also closes the door to immigrants lacking legal status for various programs that provide mental health and substance abuse treatment, job training and other assistance.

Head Start, which provides early education and child care for low-income families, has never been required to ascertain the immigration status of its families, said Jennie Mauer, executive director of the Wisconsin Head Start Association.

Families enrolling in the program have to provide a variety of pieces of information to verify they are eligible, Mauer told the Wisconsin Examiner Monday, and the programs are “very compliance oriented” and collect “exactly what they have to collect.”

Mauer said a trusting relationship between Head Start programs and the families they serve is important.

“We’re serving some of the neediest families in our community,” she said. Some have had “challenging relationships” in the past with schools and other government agencies — making nurturing that trust even more critical, she added.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a notice July 10 that declared Head Start and a list of other federally funded programs would now be considered “public benefits” that exclude immigrants without legal status under a law enacted in 1996. The notice revokes a policy enacted in 1998 that had exempted the affected programs from the 1996 law.

The federal announcement said that the policy change was instituted to “ensure that taxpayer-funded program benefits intended for the American people are not diverted to subsidize illegal aliens.”

Mauer said there has been no implementation guidance from HHS since the notice.

The Wisconsin Head Start Association is among the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed in April by the American Civil Liberties Union opposing Trump administration actions against Head Start. The other plaintiffs include parent groups in Oregon and in Oakland, California, along with state Head Start associations in Washington, Illinois and Pennsylvania.

In a statement Friday the plaintiffs said they will amend the lawsuit if the administration follows through with the limits in the July 10 announcement.

Mauer said that the Wisconsin association is advising Head Start providers to “refrain from making any immediate changes to enrollment policy until they have an opportunity to fully evaluate their legal obligations.”

She said the notice has heightened concern about the safety of children whose families might be targeted by the new federal stance. But it will affect the entire program, she said.

Mauer said a second concern is that the policy could lead some families to take their children out of the program despite their need for it. If enrollment falls below the federally prescribed level of 97% of capacity, she’s concerned that the federal government might then take back grant money — creating “a negative feedback loop,” she said.  

“I am so afraid for our families,” Mauer said. “This is fracturing the safety of all of our children. This will hurt all of the children in Head Start.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in an unsigned order to allow President Donald Trump to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration, for now, to proceed with mass layoffs and a plan to dramatically downsize the Education Department ordered earlier this year.

The decision from the nation’s highest court marks a major victory for President Donald Trump, who has sought to overhaul the federal role in education.

The order was unsigned, while Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, indicating a 6-3 decision.

The dissent, authored by Sotomayor, was scathing.

“The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive,” she wrote. “But either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.”

The Supreme Court’s order temporarily suspends lower court orders that: forced the agency to reinstate more than 1,300 employees gutted from a reduction in force, or RIF, effort; blocked the department from carrying out Trump’s executive order to dismantle the department; and barred the agency from transferring some services to other federal agencies.

In a statement Monday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon celebrated the decision, saying “today, the Supreme Court again confirmed the obvious: the President of the United States, as the head of the Executive Branch, has the ultimate authority to make decisions about staffing levels, administrative organization, and day-to-day operations of federal agencies.”

“While today’s ruling is a significant win for students and families, it is a shame that the highest court in the land had to step in to allow President Trump to advance the reforms Americans elected him to deliver using the authorities granted to him by the U.S. Constitution,” she said.

“The U.S. Department of Education will now deliver on its mandate to restore excellence in American education. We will carry out the reduction in force to promote efficiency and accountability and to ensure resources are directed where they matter most — to students, parents, and teachers.”

A coalition of teachers, unions and school districts that sued over Trump’s order to eliminate the department and the mass layoffs said they were “incredibly disappointed by the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the Trump-Vance administration to proceed with its harmful efforts to dismantle the Department of Education while our case moves forward.”

“This unlawful plan will immediately and irreparably harm students, educators and communities across our nation. Children will be among those hurt the most by this decision. We will never stop fighting on behalf of all students and public schools and the protections, services, and resources they need to thrive,” they added.

Challenge from Democratic state AGs, unions

The labor and advocacy coalition and a slew of Democratic attorneys general each sued in March over some of the administration’s most consequential education initiatives.

One of the lawsuits comes from a coalition of Democratic attorneys general in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington state and Wisconsin.

The other lawsuit was brought by the American Federation of Teachers, its Massachusetts chapter, AFSCME Council 93, the American Association of University Professors, the Service Employees International Union and two school districts in Massachusetts.

A Massachusetts federal judge consolidated the lawsuits and granted the states’ and groups’ preliminary injunction in May.

The administration appealed that decision, leading to a June decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit keeping in place the district court’s order.

The Trump administration then asked the Supreme Court to intervene. 

New townhomes are under construction this year in Minnesota. Milwaukee joined two Minnesota counties along with dozens of cities and counties suing over Trump administration threats to tie federal funding for housing and other programs to local policy on immigration enforcement; diversity, equity and inclusion; and abortion. (Photo by Ellen Schmidt/Minnesota Reformer)

Twenty-eight cities and counties including Baltimore, Los Angeles, Milwaukee and Rochester, New York, joined a lawsuit July 10 challenging Trump administration attempts to withhold federal funds because of local policies on immigration enforcement; diversity, equity and inclusion; gender equity; and abortion access.

Funding for housing, transit, health care, civil rights and other essential programs has been threatened by new grant conditions, according to the lawsuit, which now includes 60 cities, counties and other entities.

U.S. District Judge Barbara Rothstein issued a restraining order in May against tying unrelated federal funds to ideological conditions, saying the Trump administration was forcing the local governments to “choose between accepting conditions that they believe are unconstitutional, and risking the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grant funding.”

The first places to sue in early May were three counties in Washington state, two more in California, plus Boston, Columbus, Ohio, and New York City. Since then, 52 cities, counties and other entities have joined from states including Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Wisconsin.

Two of the latest to join are Ramsey County and Hennepin County in Minnesota, where Minneapolis and St. Paul and located. Hennepin County has almost $272 million in federal funding for this year for things such as emergency shelter and road projects, all threatened by new grant conditions imposed by the Trump administration, according to the court filing.

“Communities shouldn’t have to lose critical services because of the Trump administration’s political agenda,” said Jill Habig, CEO of Public Rights Project, a nonprofit legal organization doing work in the case. “These federal funding conditions aim to strip billions of dollars from local governments working to help people thrive.”

Lawyers for the Trump administration opposed the injunction, saying the court had no authority to require the federal government to pay local governments grant money.

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

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Congresswoman Gwen Moore speaks during the protest against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk on April 5, 2025. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore joined U.S. Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) in issuing a letter calling on the heads of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to reinstate directives protecting crime victims who are seeking T or U visas from immigration enforcement.

Moore and Jayapal called for the Trump Administration to reinstate ICE Directive 11005.3, which offered protections for immigrant crime victims, and for people currently in ICE custody who have applied for a T or U visa to be released within 60 days of the letter.

“Congress created victim-based immigration benefits to encourage noncitizen victims to seek assistance and report crimes committed against them despite their undocumented status,” Moore and Jayapal wrote.

The Biden-era directive posited that, rather than hindering law enforcement, “when victims have access to humanitarian protections, regardless of their immigration status, and can feel safe in coming forward, it strengthens the ability of local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, including ICE, to detect, investigate, and prosecute crimes.”

In their letter, Moore and Jayapal highlighted the directive’s ties to the Violence Against Women Act,  stressing that, “T and U visas were designed to strengthen the relationship and build trust between victims of crime and law enforcement.” Prosecutors often rely on T and U visa holders for “critical eyewitness testimony” the letter states. “These visa programs make everyone in our communities safer. Without them, undocumented victims and witnesses might be too scared to come forward to report crimes to the detriment of all.”

Under ICE Directive 1105.3, the agency was instructed to “exercise prosecutorial discretion to facilitate access to justice and victim-based immigration benefits by noncitizen crime victims.” Agents were directed to “refrain from taking civil immigration enforcement action against known beneficiaries of victim-based immigration benefits and those known to have a pending application for such benefits.” ICE officers were also directed to “look for indicia or evidence that suggests a noncitizen is a victim of a crime, such as being the beneficiary of an order of protection or being the recipient of an eligibility letter from the Office of Trafficking in Persons.”

The Trump administration’s broad crackdown on immigrants who lack permanent legal status has targeted  crime victims who hold or are applying for T or U visas.  In June Ramone Morales Reyes, a Milwaukee man who had lived in the United States for decades and was actively cooperating in a U-Visa investigation, was arrested and detained by ICE. After arresting Morales Reyes, DHS Sec. Noem issued a press release claiming that Morales Reyes had penned a letter threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump. The letter, however, had been written in perfect English with only a few misspellings. Morales Reyes’ family, as well as immigration advocates and attorneys, said that it was impossible for him to have written the letter as he could not speak English and was not proficient in reading or writing in Spanish. When ICE arrested Morales Reyes, local law enforcement were already investigating the possibility that someone was attempting to frame him. 

In early June, Morales Reyes was released from ICE detention on bond, and a man who’d been arrested for attempting to rob him months earlier admitted to forging the letter to trigger a deportation, and prevent Morales Reyes from testifying against him. Moore and U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan sought to visit Morales Reyes while he was in custody, and called on Noem to retract her statement accusing him of threatening Trump. 

Rather than retracting the accusations, however, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin issued a statement after Morales Reyes was released on bond calling him a “criminal illegal alien” and claiming that, while he is no longer under investigation for threats against Trump, “he is in the country illegally” and has committed previous crimes. The statement asserted  that “DHS will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of illegal aliens who have no right to be in this country.” 

ICE also worked to deport Yessenia Ruano, a Milwaukee  teacher’s aid. Ruano had been a victim of human trafficking, and was applying for a T-Visa. In mid-June, Ruano opted to return to El Salvador with her two daughters, who were born in the United States. 

A PFAS advisory sign along Starkweather Creek. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Now that work on the state budget is complete, environmental groups and residents of communities affected by PFAS contamination believe progress can still be made on getting money out the door to help remediate water pollution across the state. 

Since the last biennial budget was passed, $125 million in funds meant to help with cleaning up contamination of water from PFAS has been sitting untouched with no legislative mechanism for getting that money out to communities.

PFAS, a family of man-made chemical compounds known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the environment, have been connected to cancer and other diseases. The chemicals have been used in products such as firefighting foam and household goods such as non-stick pans and fast food wrappers. Communities across the state have found PFAS contamination in their water. 

During the last legislative session, early hopes of compromise crumbled after Democrats and Republicans failed to reach agreement on a provision aimed at protecting “innocent landowners” from being subject to enforcement actions for PFAS contamination under the state’s toxic spills law by the Department of Natural Resources. 

Republicans, including the bill’s author, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) argued the bill had to include language that protected people who have PFAS contamination on their property through no fault of their own. Democrats said the language in the bill defining innocent landowners was so broad that it would exempt property owners responsible for pollution from being held responsible. 

Ultimately, Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill. 

Wimberger and Rep. Tim Mursau (R-Crivitz) authored legislation this year to get the $125 million earmarked for PFAS remediation out the door. 

Sara Walling, Clean Wisconsin’s water and agriculture program director, says she’s “hopeful” that discussions between the Republican bill authors, Evers and affected residents have been productive. 

“There is opportunity now I think that the budget is done for Wimberger and others, of course, to pay attention, put a little energy into this, and really sit down and hash out the provisions in there, and get to a point that there’s something hopefully that we can all live with, and that will get the money to impacted communities and private well owners and all the things that the money is intended to be used for,” Walling says. 

While people see progress being made, there are still objections to the legislation. Wimberger and Mursau have proposed two bills, one of which exempts certain groups of people from enforcement under the spills law. 

Exempting ‘innocent landowners’

The exemptions include anyone who spread biosolids or wastewater contaminated with PFAS onto a field while in compliance with a DNR permit; owns land on which contaminated biosolids were spread under a permit; a fire department, public airport or municipality that used PFAS-contaminated firefighting foam to train for or respond to emergencies; solid waste disposal facilities that accepted PFAS and anyone that owns, leases, manages, or contracts for property on which PFAS has moved through the groundwater (unless they caused the contamination on another piece of property). 

Earlier this year, Evers suggested he’d support exempting farmers and residents from being held financially responsible for cleaning up PFAS contamination if they unknowingly caused it by spreading contaminated biosolids. 

But Walling says she’d like to see that language tightened further to make sure it does not create a loophole for responsible parties. 

“The provisions that are laid on that out there now just provide far too big of a loophole for who would be considered an innocent landowner in the current bill language,” she said. “And we really want to see that tightened so that truly innocent landowners, the passive receivers, the farmers out there who unknowingly were accepting municipal biosolids … those are the innocent landowners that I know that the authors are trying to protect.” 

What’s an allowable level of PFAS?

The other bill creates the mechanisms and grant programs through which the $125 million would be awarded to affected communities. 

Doug Oitzinger is the former mayor and a current city councilmember of Marinette and a founder of a group of community members fighting to clean up PFAS pollution in his area from the manufacture of fire suppression technologies by Tyco/Johnson Controls. 

Oitzinger says he’s wary of a provision in the bill that exempts private property owners who don’t qualify as innocent landowners from enforcement under the spills law unless the level of PFAS present violates an existing state or federal standard. The federal government doesn’t regulate groundwater and for years the state Department of Natural Resources has been unable to promulgate an administrative rule that sets the allowable amount of PFAS in groundwater. 

The DNR failed once because of a deadlocked vote on the state Natural Resources Board and a second time because the proposed rule had a potential economic impact greater than $10 million and therefore required approval of the full Legislature under a law known as the REINS Act. 

The DNR is currently working on the economic impact analysis of another proposed groundwater standard. Oitzinger says he’s doubtful that proposal will stay clear of the REINS Act. So, he says, he’s working with Mursau to include a groundwater standard in the bill. 

The most significant amendment Oitzinger is fighting for in the legislation is the creation of a temporary standard for the regulation of PFAS in Wisconsin’s groundwater. 

“We’ve been working to see if legislatively, we can get something that does not undermine the spills law to get the $125 million out the door, that the governor would sign, that we would be in support of and, at the same time, establish some kind of interim groundwater standard for PFAS,” Oitzinger says. 

As someone fighting for a community that’s been heavily polluted with PFAS, Oitzinger says his goal is to find a compromise that helps people get clean water, even if environmental and industry groups aren’t fully satisfied. 

“It doesn’t do us any good to get into our respective camps and not find common ground,” he says. “And then the bill reaches the governor’s office and he vetoes it. That’s not helping anybody, so we’ve got to find compromise. Some of the environmental groups won’t like it, and certainly I think some of the industry lobbying groups won’t like it, but this is what we’ve got to do.”

A new national school voucher program allocates up to $1,700 in federal tax credits for individuals who donate to organizations that provide private and religious school scholarships. (Photo by Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A national private school voucher program is now law, though the school choice initiative comes with a huge caveat. States also choose — whether or not to participate. 

It’s a setback for advocates who hoped to see the program — baked into the mega tax and spending cut bill President Donald Trump signed into law on July Fourth — mandated in all 50 states.

The permanent program, which starts in 2027, saw several versions between the House and Senate before getting to Trump’s desk as part of congressional Republicans’ massive reconciliation package.

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of EdChoice, touted aspects of the program, but said his organization would have preferred to see a 50-state program, rather than allowing states to opt in or decline. 

“I think I’m really worried about that because this is seen as a sort of more partisan issue and as a result, what would make a governor in a blue state say, ‘Let me bring in school choice’?” said Enlow, whose nonprofit focuses on advancing school choice options.

Still, Enlow described the program as “just another step along the way of giving parents more choices.”

Who will join?

It remains to be seen which states will participate, including those with their own voucher programs already underway.

Jon Valant, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, said he’s “not clear on how states will shake out on the question of whether or not to participate.”

“I’m sure the vast majority of, really, all red states will participate in this thing, but I don’t know what’s going to happen in blue and purple states,” said Valant, who also serves as director of the think tank’s Brown Center on Education Policy.

Despite that unknown, Valant said that states “do have some incentive to participate because if they don’t, then they’re potentially losing access to some funds that they wouldn’t otherwise get.”

How the program works

The program allocates up to $1,700 in federal tax credits for individuals who donate to organizations that provide private and religious school scholarships.

There is also no cap to the cost of the program, unlike earlier versions seen in both chambers of Congress.

The scholarship funds would be available to families whose household incomes do not exceed 300 percent of their area’s median gross income.

More than 138 million people could be eligible to make use of the tax credit in 2027, according to an analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

However, Carl Davis, research director of the left-leaning think tank, notes in the analysis that “most of those people will not contribute” given the necessary paperwork and vouchers’ unpopularity with the public.

A state’s program participation will be decided by its governor or “by such other individual, agency, or entity as is designated under State law to make such elections on behalf of the State with respect to Federal tax benefits,” according to the final bill text.

The GOP’s school choice push

The umbrella term “school choice” centers on alternative programs to one’s assigned public school.

The effort has sparked controversy, as opponents say these programs drain critical funds and resources from school districts, while school choice advocates describe the initiatives as necessary for parents dissatisfied with their local public schools.

Trump and congressional Republicans have made school choice a major part of their education agenda.

The program also reflects a sweeping bill that GOP Reps. Adrian Smith of Nebraska and Burgess Owens of Utah and Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana reintroduced in their respective chambers earlier this year.

‘Very little quality control’

Valant, of the Brookings Institution, expressed several concerns about the program, saying “there’s very little quality control, transparency or accountability for outcomes in this program, and it’s potentially a major use of public taxpayer funds.”

He said he doesn’t see anything in the program’s text that “protects against widespread waste, fraud and abuse and from programs and schools that aren’t providing much value at all to students from continuing to get a large amount of funding.”

The program also came as Trump and his administration continue to dramatically redefine the federal role in education.

Trump’s fiscal 2026 budget request calls for $12 billion in spending cuts to the Education Department. A summary from the department said this cut “reflects an agency that is responsibly winding down.”

Billions on hold

The administration has also taken heat for its recent decision to put on hold $6.8 billion in federal funds for K-12 schools.

Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy at AASA, The School Superintendents Association, said that a time when the administration is withholding billions of dollars in these funds for public schools, “the idea that we’re going to spend an unlimited amount of tax dollars to support private and religious schools is unthinkable, unimaginable — it’s horrific.”

“This is yet another handout to wealthy Americans who can already afford to send their children to private religious schools and at a cost that comes from tax dollars being deferred away from public education that serve the poorest and neediest students in America,” added Pudelski, whose organization helps to ensure every child has access to a high quality public education.

A worker walks beneath a United Airlines Boeing 737-900ER after it arrived at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) on June 5, 2019. The flight from Chicago to Los Angeles used aviation biofuel, a critical component of airlines’ goal of reaching a net-zero carbon goal by 2050. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Congress’ passage of President Donald Trump’s spending and tax cuts bill this month could help grow the market for sustainable aviation fuel, a nascent industry that could be a boon for corn-producing states as airline operators are betting on it to decarbonize the sector.

The Republican budget reconciliation law that Trump signed July 4 pared back some of the credits for sustainable energy in the law that congressional Democrats passed and President Joe Biden signed in 2022 — the Inflation Reduction Act.

But the recent law extended one energy tax credit for producing clean fuels, such as sustainable aviation fuel, an alternative to the typical jet fuel planes use. The credit initially went through 2027, but the GOP law extends it through 2029.

Advocates for sustainable aviation fuel had been pushing Congress to extend the tax credit to support production as states across the U.S. have passed or proposed their own tax credits to grow the sector and lure production within their borders. Lawmakers in Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan and New York have introduced bills enacting tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel.

For airlines, increasing availability of the fuel is essential for the sector to meet its net-zero goal for 2050, with the International Air Transport Association estimating the cleaner fuel could get the industry 65% of the way toward its target.

“We’re not yet at commercial-scale production and you need that longer lead time for these types of projects so I think the extension is really key,” said Chris Bliley, senior vice president of regulatory affairs at Growth Energy, a biofuel industry group.

While the credit’s lifetime was extended, others say the environment for sustainable aviation fuel isn’t as favorable as it was just a few years ago. The new budget reconciliation law also included provisions to lower the credit amount for sustainable aviation fuel specifically and clawed back unobligated grant funding to support the sector.

The amount of sustainable aviation fuel that producers make today is far from how much the airline industry needs to be able to use the alternative fuel regularly. U.S. production capacity over the last couple of years, however, has grown, jumping from less than 5,000 barrels per day at the start of 2024 to more than 30,000 by February of this year, according to a May report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Badger State bill

Wisconsin state Rep. David Steffen, a Republican who sponsored a bill to incentivize sustainable aviation fuel, said he learned about a sustainable aviation fuel production company based in Madison called Virent Inc., now a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum Corp. Virent’s fuel helped power the first domestic flight powered by 100% sustainable aviation fuel in one of its engines.

“I was intrigued that we had this company in our state and I want them and other companies of similar interest to find Wisconsin as their new home,” Steffen said. “It’s a great opportunity for not only the environmental benefits that come with it but for our farmers, dairies and timber producers to access a brand-new market for their product.”

Steffen’s bill also requires that to receive the tax credit, source materials for the fuel must be domestically sourced.

Wisconsin’s legislative session doesn’t end until next March and Steffen said he’s “very comfortable in saying (the bill) will have a clear path to the finish line.” Should it pass in its current state, the tax credit would go into effect in 2028.

Other states

Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska and Washington state all already have enacted laws to provide tax credits for sustainable aviation fuel.

Lawmakers in New York and Michigan have also proposed legislation to create their own tax credits. The New York bill barely moved in the most recent session, while legislation in Michigan has made it out of one committee and been referred to a second.

New York state Sen. Rachel May, a Democrat, plans to re-introduce the legislation next year. She said she wants to amend her bill to offer a larger tax credit for companies making sustainable aviation fuel specifically by mimicking photosynthesis so it doesn’t incentivize diverting feedstock like corn from being used for food, she said.

Her concern is moving the agriculture industry “away from both food production and maybe what might be the best uses of the land,” she added.

Corn ethanol, a common ingredient in automotive fuel, can be used to make sustainable aviation fuel.

Federal extension

While the extension of the federal clean fuels tax credit could be beneficial to the sustainable aviation fuel industry, the new law also lowers the amount of the tax credit for the fuel. It’s now the equivalent to what other biofuel producers qualify for, giving sustainable aviation fuel production less of a competitive advantage.

One version of the budget reconciliation bill also called for extending the tax credit by four years instead of two, but that got scaled back in the version of the bill ultimately signed into law.

The new law also took away any funding not yet obligated as part of a grant program for sustainable aviation fuel and makes fuels derived from feedstocks that come from outside the U.S., Canada or Mexico ineligible for the tax credit.

Despite any limitations, some analysts expect the law will still boost sustainable aviation fuel.

“The Trump administration has yet to outline its approach to SAF, but we expect the fuel to benefit from the administration’s focus on supporting biofuel-producing states,” analysts for Capstone DC, a firm that advises business clients on policy issues, said in a note in late June.

But changes to the federal tax credit could also make states more interested in adopting their own credit to support sustainable aviation fuel, Capstone added.

‘Not nearly as strong’

Tariffs, meanwhile, could also make U.S. feedstocks for producing the fuel more competitive, Paul Greenough, a vice president on Capstone’s energy team.

But Greenough cautioned that sentiment around sustainable aviation fuel still isn’t as rosy as it used to be.

“Momentum still exists for SAF but it’s not nearly as strong as it was under the Biden administration,” he said.

Some climate groups have also expressed concern over changing the clean fuels tax credit at the federal level. The Clean Air Task Force, ahead of the bill becoming law, said extending the credit will largely service other fuels that aren’t sustainable aviation fuel, which will in turn be costlier for the government.

“This purported attempt to incentivize ‘clean fuels’ is little more than a giveaway to the conventional biofuels industry,” the organization said in a post on its website.

A protester holds a photo of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia as demonstrators gather to protest against the deportation of immigrants to El Salvador outside the Permanent Mission of El Salvador to the United Nations in New York City on April 24, 2025. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

GREENBELT, Maryland — U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis seemed inclined during a Friday hearing to grant a temporary restraining order to block the Trump administration from deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he is released from pretrial detention next week.

Xinis said if she granted a temporary restraining order, it would be narrow and would prevent immigration officers from deporting Abrego Garcia from the U.S. It would also keep the longtime Maryland resident at a detention center near Maryland as the immigration lawsuit about the conditions of his deportation under a final order of removal proceeds.

She also upbraided Justice Department attorneys for claiming immigration officials had a detainer on Abrego Garcia, but not producing the document.

The attorneys for Abrego Garcia’s case in Maryland, which was brought after the longtime resident was unlawfully arrested by immigration officials and mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March, are asking Xinis for a 72-hour restraining order if he is released from pretrial detention Wednesday.

Abrego Garcia awaits federal trial in Tennessee on criminal charges lodged while he was mistakenly removed to El Salvador.

The restraining order, if granted, would prevent the Trump administration from removing Abrego Garcia to a third country without proper notice and an opportunity to challenge his removal.

“The concern that we have here is that he’ll be gone in a blink and never to be heard from again,” Andrew Rossman, one of Abrego Garcia’s attorneys, said.

Abrego Garcia detailed psychological and physical torture he experienced at the notorious Salvadoran prison CECOT. The U.S. is paying El Salvador up to $15 million to detain roughly 300 men at the prison.

Prosecution

As soon as Wednesday, Abrego Garcia could be released from pretrial detention on charges that accuse him of human smuggling that stem from a 2019 traffic stop. A hearing is scheduled for Wednesday in Tennessee federal court on an order pausing Abrego Garcia’s release, at his lawyers’ request over concerns the administration could deport him if he is released from jail.

DOJ attorneys have said that the Trump administration intends to deport Abrego Garcia before his trial in Tennessee is complete.

Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to the federal charges. His attorneys have accused President Donald Trump’s administration of using the indictment to save face in light of court orders finding Abrego Garcia’s deportation unlawful and the Supreme Court’s order for the federal government to facilitate his return.

Abrego Garcia has had deportation protections in place since 2019, barring his removal to his native El Salvador due to concerns he would experience gang violence there.

The Trump administration has labeled Abrego Garcia a leader of the gang MS-13, but has not produced any evidence of those allegations in court.

Xinis also raised the concern that Abrego Garcia could face harm in a third country because the Trump administration has labeled him a gang leader.

She raised the possibility that if Abrego Garcia is deported to a third country, that country could then take him to El Salvador.

ICE detainer produced

The Trump administration has placed a detainer on Abrego Garcia upon his potential release, meaning U.S. Marshals would hold him until immigration agents can arrest him and take him into custody.

Xinis has repeatedly asked DOJ lawyers for a copy of the detainer to determine what statue Abrego Garcia is being detained on.

DOJ attorneys said they were still working on it and Xinis slammed them for not producing it and said she wouldn’t take the DOJ’s word that the detainer even existed.

“You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it, in my view,” Xinis said.

Halfway through the hearing, DOJ attorney Sarmad M. Khojasteh produced the detainer and gave a copy to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, who have also been asking for a copy of the form.

Rossman said the detainer “has a massive hole in it.”

He said that according to the detainer, the reason for holding Abrego Garcia is a final order of removal.

However, a top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official testified Thursday that because Abrego Garcia is not in removal proceedings yet, the federal government cannot detail what actions it will take in removing him.

“We have an obvious chicken-and-egg problem,” Rossman said.

DOJ argument ‘defies reality’

Thomas Giles, ICE’s assistant director for enforcement and removal operations who testified Thursday, could not detail which track the Trump administration planned to take for Abrego Garcia. The agency is likely to try either deporting him to a third country or  challenge the bar on removal to El Salvador.

Xinis also expressed doubt that the Trump administration has not had conversations on what to do about Abrego Garcia, given the high-profile nature of the case.

Khojasteh said that an immigration officer would determine next steps for Abrego Garcia.

“It defies reality that this is going to be left to a desk officer,” Xinis said.

Xinis said she’ll make a decision before Wednesday on a temporary restraining order.

Federal immigration authorities face off against protesters during an ICE raid at Ambiance Apparel in Downtown Los Angeles on June 6, 2025. (Photo by J.W. Hendricks for CalMatters)

This story was originally published by CalMatters. Sign up for their newsletters.

Carlos was pulled out of a deep sleep by a series of frantic phone calls one Friday morning in June. By the time he arrived at a downtown Los Angeles garment factory sometime after 10 a.m., his brother was in chains.

Agents from a constellation of federal agencies descended on the Ambiance Apparel factory and storefront on June 6, detaining dozens of people. It was the first salvo of the Trump administration’s prolonged engagement in Southern California, where masked federal agents are filmed daily pulling people off the street as part of what the president has promised will be the largest deportation program in American history.

Carlos’ brother, Jose, 35, was shackled at the wrists, waist and ankles. Carlos watched as agents in Immigration and Customs Enforcement vests led Jose and 13 other garment workers into a waiting white Sprinter van. Carlos hasn’t seen his brother since, though he did confirm that Jose is being held at an immigration detention center in Adelanto.

“We had just lost our other brother, he died,” said Carlos, whom CalMatters is only identifying by his first name because of his own fears of deportation. “Then, for our family, losing Jose, it was like someone died again.”

Worksite raids like the one at Ambiance are an attention-grabbing component of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, one that it remains committed to despite a brief reversal in mid-June. They’re unfolding across California, from Los Angeles’s Fashion District to farm fields in the San Joaquin Valley and a restaurant in San Diego.

While one stated purpose of worksite raids is to remove illegal competition from the labor marketplace, the reality is far messier: Studies have found that immigration raids don’t do much to raise wages — and actually deflate them. Even after a raid, employers are no more likely to use federal immigration verification tools like E-Verify during hiring.

Nevertheless, on the campaign trail, President Donald Trump focused on the threat of illegal competition as the political and emotional lynchpin of his deportation plans.

“They’re taking your jobs, they’re taking your jobs,” Trump told a crowd in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 21. “ Every job produced in this country over the last two years has gone to illegal aliens, every job, think of it.

“We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you. We’re going to save you.”

Every new job between 2022-2024 was not, in fact, filled by undocumented immigrants. Studies show actually deporting workers en masse from industries that rely on undocumented labor does little for U.S. workers. Giovanni Peri, a UC Davis economist who has studied the economic impacts of deportations in the 1930s and during the Obama administration, has found doing so actually reduces job opportunities for American-born workers.

That’s in part because many American workers, even those outside of immigrant-heavy industries, rely on the services generated by low-wage, undocumented labor — the costs of which would rise with mass deportations.

“Losing some of these workers and jobs that Americans are moving out of, it shrinks the local economy and there’s a reduction in jobs for Americans,” he said.

There is no evidence, Peri said, that in the face of mass deportations, immigrant-heavy industries would raise their wages to hire American workers instead.

“If there is such a world, it has not been the reality in the U.S. in a long time,” he said.

What does tend to happen, according to a study last year by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is that raids lead to more job turnover while showing little net change in the employment rate.

“Actions that target employers — audits, investigations, fines, and criminal charges — have larger effects than raids, which target workers,” the study authors wrote.

The impact to the families can be long-term and devastating. Absences, suspensions, expulsions and rates of substance abuse and self-harm increased among Latino students in a Tennessee town that was raided, even among students whose families were not directly impacted. Property crime dropped but violent crime increased in a small northeast Iowa meatpacking town after a massive 2008 raid. Infants born to Hispanic mothers in that same Iowa town had a 24% risk of low birth weight compared to the same population one year before the raid.

“Our mom is devastated, and she’s scared for herself, too,” Carlos said. “A lot of us are from the same (Zapotec Indigenous) community in Mexico, a lot of people kidnapped in the raid, so it’s like a whole bunch of families had a death.”

In his first term, Trump’s worksite raids focused on the South and the Midwest, when more than 1,800 people were detained, mostly at manufacturing plants and meat and poultry processing facilities. That’s a tiny segment of the estimated 1.5 million people deported under Trump from 2017 to 2021, but it played a significant role in another of the administration’s goals: To create enough fear and mistrust among undocumented immigrants that they self-deport.

But this time, Trump’s focus is on California.

‘There’s no money’ after raid

Employees at Ambiance Apparel told each other that immigration enforcement was likely coming to their garment factory. Employees who did not want to be identified told CalMatters that people in Department of Homeland Security jackets were on site at least twice this year, most recently in April. Those workers say they were told by the company not to worry about a raid.

Ambiance Apparel, through an attorney, denied that the company had any advance warning or involvement with the raid and the company declined to comment further.

The garment industry is a logical target for immigration enforcement because so much of the workforce is undocumented. The same is true of agriculture. Estimates vary, but anywhere from one third to more than one half of California farmworkers are undocumented immigrants.

William Lopez, a University of Michigan public health professor who has written a book on the impact of immigration raids on mixed-status families, said he learned in interviews of people present at six immigration raids in the Midwest and South in 2018 that people “haven’t developed the language” to capture the impact of large-scale immigration raids on a community.

After a raid, “people don’t drive, there’s no money because everyone’s paying bond, no one’s going to school anymore,” Lopez said.

He continued, “the comparisons were, there was hurricanes, there was tornadoes, there was war, some people compared it to a public execution. Some people described it like the death of a grandchild.”

Congress made it illegal to knowingly hire workers who don’t have authorization in 1986, as part of an overhaul of the nation’s immigration system. The overhaul also legalized about 2.7 million undocumented immigrants.

Still, false Social Security numbers have been fairly easy to obtain, and employers are largely able to duck liability with only a cursory review of the documents workers present when they’re hired.

Employers have had little incentive to get stricter, even after the high-profile raids of meat and food processing plants during the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Demand for labor has remained high, fines for those caught have been lax and the use of contractors and subcontractors has proliferated, spreading out the risks of hiring..

“The number of employers who have been fined or imprisoned under the statute is very low compared to the number of employees who have been rounded up as a result of these (workplace) raids,” said Leticia Saucedo, a professor at the UC Davis School of Law. “The idea behind all of these was, yes, to target the employers, but employees were collateral damage.”

Saucedo said workplace raids and the deportation of workers highlight tensions between two wings of the Republican Party. Nativist groups want to curb immigration because they believe it displaces American workers, while business interests want access to a stable, legal pool of immigrant workers.

California farmer ready to demand a warrant

California farmers are especially sensitive to potential immigration raids. The Border Patrol conducted a sweep in Kern County just before Trump took office in January that previewed its approach in the new administration. In June, agents swept through farms in Ventura County, conducting immigration raids. iIndustry groups implored the administration to reconsider such tactics.

“To ensure stability for our farm families and their communities, we must act with both common sense and compassion,” Bryan Little, policy director at the California Farm Bureau, said in a statement. “The focus of immigration enforcement should be on the removal of bad actors or lawbreakers, not our valuable and essential farm employees.”

In an interview, Little said he hasn’t seen evidence of widespread enforcement at farms. But reports of any ICE sightings or arrests in agricultural areas have spread on social media, spreading fear among the workforce.

“The way this is all being handled, it’s interfering with food production,” he said.

In Ventura County, federal agents ultimately arrested more than 30 immigrants in June, said Hazel Davalos, director of the local farmworker advocacy group CAUSE.

Lisa Tate manages three of her family’s eight ranches in the county, where they grow citrus, avocados and coffee. Depending on the day, anywhere from five to 100 directly hired and contracted workers plant, trim or harvest on the land.

They were not among the farms visited by immigration agents, but Tate said she held a meeting with her workers to communicate a longstanding company policy: if agents ever show up, “nobody’s to be on our farm without proper authorization.”

Tate said the raids have put employers like her in a tough position. She said she has never knowingly hired any undocumented workers. She said she reviews the employment documents her workers present, fills out the I-9 form and follows the rules.

Still, she called it a “well-known secret” that many in the industry don’t have valid work permits.

She’s tried to use the guest worker visa program before, but it comes with costly requirements to provide housing and transportation, and to guarantee the guest workers have enough paid hours for the months they’re here. That was hard to budget for on a smaller farm like hers, she said, so she prefers hiring contracted workers locally as needed.

“We need an immigration program that allows for longer-term workers,” she said. “Until we have a solution in place, we shouldn’t take action because the whole system is built on what it is. And if you start picking it apart, there’s all kinds of fallout.”

This story was updated to clarify that President Trump has promised in his campaign to carry out the largest deportation program in American history. The largest mass deportation event took place during the Eisenhower administration in 1954 and 1955.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. To republish, go to the original and consult the CalMatters republishing guidelines.

Child care provider Corrine Hendrickson addresses a rally in front of the state Capitol Friday demanding a re-do on the state budget to increase child care funding. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

While Gov. Tony Evers has touted the new state budget’s child care funds as a compromise victory, some providers say they’re deeply disappointed. 

“This was not a win,” said Bloomer child care provider Caitlin Mitchell at a rally outside the Capitol Friday morning organized by Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN). “It was a temporary fix with long-term consequences.”

A press release from Evers’ office after he signed the budget early on July 3 said the document contains “Over $360 million to support Wisconsin’s child care industry and help lower child care costs for working families, a third of which is in direct payments to providers.”

A majority of Democratic lawmakers voted against the budget, citing shortcomings in funding for public schools as well as for child care. Assembly and Senate Democrats who voted in favor of the plan described it as a compromise. 

“I really really wish that the governor and the Democrats had just admitted that this was the best that they could do and that it’s still not good,” Corrine Hendrickson, a child care provider and WECAN co-founder, told reporters at the Friday morning rally.

“Everything we’re being told about the budget absolutely does not help children in our state at all,” said WECAN’s other co-founder, Brooke Legler. “The only compromise was the children’s safety. And this isn’t OK.”

WECAN members say that the budget’s child care funding is well short of what they need, and that regulatory changes are bad for providers, families and children. 

A pilot program increases Wisconsin Shares payments by up to $200 a month if providers agree to higher ratios of four children to one teacher for children 18 months or younger, and seven children to one teacher for children 18 months to 2½ years old. Wisconsin Shares subsidizes child care for low-income families.

According to Hendrickson, the ratio increase lowers the quality of care, and tying it to the subsidy program treats the poorer children differently than the rest of the children in care.

“Those children deserve to have more time and attention,” she said in her address to the rally. “Their parents are loving, their parents are caring, but their parents are stressed because they’re in poverty and that affects those kids.”

Child care providers should refuse to participate in that pilot, she said. 

Another provision lowers the minimum age for an assistant child care teacher to 16 from 18, while retaining the education requirements for the position.

“Sixteen-year-olds are wonderful human beings but they are not teachers of young children,” said Hendrickson.

“Those exact same policies were presented two years ago through the normal process of creating a bill. And we as a state overwhelmingly said no,” said Legler. “It did not even make it out of committee.”

In addition to $110 million in direct payments to providers, the child care total’s other big ticket items include $123 million to increase reimbursements that providers get for children in the Wisconsin Shares subsidy program and $65 million for providers who participate in a new “school readiness” program similar to 4-year-old kindergarten.

The $110 million direct payments, which would end after the budget’s first year, amount to about one-fourth of the $480 million that Evers originally sought. His budget proposal aimed to continue the state’s Child Care Counts program, funded by federal pandemic relief money.

At its height, Child Care Counts paid out $20 million a month and was credited with helping providers boost wages for child care teachers without raising tuition for parents. Two years ago the Evers administration dialed the program back to $10 million a month to stretch out its payments. The federal funds have now run out.

In a survey of child care providers earlier this year the University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty reported that about one in four said they could close without continued payments. Evers cited the survey during the spring while campaigning for his original $480 million child care proposal.

WECAN leaders sent Evers a statement Friday, calling on him to order a special session of the Legislature and seek the full amount of child care support that he originally submitted for the 2025-27 state budget.

“We’re asking Gov. Evers to finish what’s been started,” Mitchell said in her rally speech. “Temporary funding and weakened standards are not enough. We need a comprehensive long-term investment in child care.”

After the 2023-25 budget was enacted without the child care investment that Evers sought, the governor called a special session and introduced a bill that included funding for child care, education and other priorities. The Legislature’s Republican majority rewrote the bill, replacing his provisions with tax cut measures that Evers vetoed. 

Hendrickson acknowledged the outcome of the special session call two years ago, but said in an interview that Evers should pursue  effort anyway. 

“This is the only thing that we can do to keep this in front of everybody, to keep it top of mind,” she said. 

“The $110 million over the next 11 months is around 20% less than we are currently receiving,” WECAN’s letter to the governor states. “So, no, tuition prices will not be lowering; in fact, they will be going up next month to cover this loss, or providers will be closing their doors, especially in rural areas.”

The WECAN statement tells Evers that his public assertion that the child care provisions will lower costs “creates confusion and parents will blame us; disrupting our important relationship due to the distrust your words have sown.”

Legler told the Wisconsin Examiner later Friday that when the WECAN group delivered the letter and spoke with Evers’ communications director, Britt Cudaback, the conversation didn’t go well from her perspective.

“We felt very minimized, unheard and condescended to,” Legler said.

Evers’ office has not responded to requests for comment.

The Waupun prison sits in the middle of a residential neighborhood (Photo | Wisconsin Examiner)

Most of those speaking at the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC) online public hearing on community supervision – parole, probation and extended supervision – said the system is  too rigid. Instead of helping people successfully integrate back into society, they said, the system creates a tripwire of rules that can easily be broken and result in too many people being ordered back to prison when supervision is revoked.

The public hearing on July 8 took up proposed rules to amend the DOC’s Administrative Code because of a law passed in April 2014, Act 196, that directs the creation of a system of appropriate short-term sanctions for violation of conditions of supervision. The law sets out  eight criteria, including minimizing the impact on the offender’s employment and family, and offers rewards for those complying with conditions of supervision.

Of the 18 members of the public who spoke at the hearing, most addressed the need for implementing the spirit of the 2014 law to create a less burdensome system of community supervision and reduce the number of revocations that in 2023 represented over 30% of those entering prison and in 2024 reached nearly 60%. Update: DOC disputes the 60% figure, saying about half of those included in that number are people whose revocation was related to the commission of new crimes.

Several people who had been on community supervision or were still serving on supervision also spoke and asked that the DOC do more than just provide accountability and make the system less oppressive and also offer resources, such as help obtaining housing.

One of the first to speak was Tom Gilbert, an advocate for WISDOM, a statewide network working on reform of the prison and criminal justice systems and other social justice issues. Gilbert, whose son has twice had supervision revoked, has been pushing since 2019 for the DOC to implement Act 196.

“Act 196 is a good law passed with broad bipartisan support, and it calls for a cultural shift in how the Department of Corrections administers its supervision programs,” he said. 

“For many years, WISDOM has called on the department to implement the law and thereby provide a solid alternative to thousands of revocations each year,” he added. 

However, Gilbert said, when he read DOC’s proposed rules for implementing the law he was upset that the DOC only stated the eight criteria without creating or describing a system for “new and revised policies and practices.”

Gilbert accused the DOC of not wanting to fulfill the intent of the law.

“This cannot be an oversight. It is a conscious omission,” he said. “To me, it signals that the DOC is not committed to creating a system of short-term sanctions, that it is not serious about shifting the community corrections program from an operation that sabotages the successful reentry of people into their communities to an operation that is focused on healing individuals, families and communities by providing the treatments and supports needed to accomplish that goal.”

Gilbert challenged the DOC’s current protocol of calling 90 days of jail a short-term sanction because, he said, even 60, 30, 21, or 14 days in jail has a negative impact on employment and family.

He also challenged the DOC’s perspective that the rules revision would only impact those on community supervision, vendors and DOC staff.

 “The decisions you and your agents make every day regarding people under your supervision widely affect families, employers, health care providers, social service providers, schools — in  other words, whole communities and this whole state,” Gilbert said. “The proposed rules should be revised by adding back the language from Act 196 that explains its whole purpose — creating a system of short-term sanctions.”

Sean Wilson, senior director of organizing and partnership of Dream.Org, a national non-profit working on social justice issues, was also critical of the proposed rule for offering no description for short-term sanctions.

“There’s no real short-term sanctions framework,” Wilson said. “Instead of building a system that redirects people before they spiral back into incarceration, this proposal simply restates the existing law; meanwhile, revocations without new convictions in Wisconsin still account for 40% of our prison admissions.” (The rate rose from 40% early in 2024 to nearly 60% at the end of the year)

“Here in this state, there are no guardrails to prevent over-punishment,” Wilson added. “The proposal leaves full revocation on the table for things like substance abuse, missed check-ins, minor violations that are far too often treated as major. There’s no real focus on rehabilitation. There’s no clear investment in helping people reintegrate successfully, and no mention of support, supportive services, trauma-informed care, or reentry pathways.”

He said the rules are “vague about how sanctions will be applied, who will review them, and how racial disparities, which are deeply embedded in our system, will be addressed.”

He also raised concerns about private contractors offering supervision, creating a “financial incentive that undermines fairness and accountability.”

Carol Rubin, a former administrative judge, also encouraged the implementation of Act 196 and was also critical of the proposed rules not fleshing out the intent of the 2014 law.

“I want to express my dismay that DOC has delayed issuing formal rules for Act 196 for 11 years, despite being ordered to issue rules in 2014 by the Wisconsin Legislature,” she said. “In the meantime, thousands of individuals have been denied the benefit of a real, short-term sanction system with trained agents that could have stabilized their new lives in the community.”

Rubin said the DOC should provide examples of how short-term sanctions should be employed to minimize the impact on employment.

“For a low violation, consider imposing a short-term sanction that does not restrict the hours that a client could be available for employment, such as a verbal or written reprimand,” she said. “For a medium or high violation, consider a brief house arrest or weekend jail sanction of two days or less that will not interfere with the client’s current or future hours of employment; if appropriate, a weekend home arrest could be repeated.”

Liz Monroe noted that the DOC’s manual for Evidence Based Response to Violations (EBRV) has two mentions of using rewards, including stating that rewards are “more effective than only using sanctions” and that incentives and rewards are “helpful for compliance and positive behaviour and that there should be at least four rewards for every sanction.”

As a reward for compliance, she encouraged reducing the supervision time, such as 30 days of compliance resulting in 30 fewer days on supervision.

Barbie Jackson, vice president of MOSES, an affiliate of WISDOM, asked for a description that “clearly defines short-term sanctions to assure that they focus on helping people avoid harmful behaviors and fulfill societal obligations, minimize disruption of the impacted person’s employment, minimize the effect on the impacted person’s family and establish incentives and rewards for compliance and positive behavior.”

Jeremy Dings, who said he had been originally sentenced to five years in prison but ended up serving 12 because of two revocations, talked about how he was unable to help his family during a health crisis after he broke a rule and was revoked. He was allso not allowed to attend his mother’s funeral.

“People on supervision have families, too, just like all of you,” he said. “Revocation for rule violation ends the person’s employment and their ability to support their family and themselves.”

Marianne Oleson, operations director for Ex Incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO), noted she had been on supervision for eight years and still had 18 more years to serve.

“I’ve rebuilt my life. Started over with nothing, and dedicated myself to helping others,” she said, “but despite everything I’ve done, I wake up every day with 18 more years of supervision ahead of me, not because I’ve reoffended, not because I’m a danger, but because the system has failed to evolve with science.”

She contended that recent research on community supervision says the ideal period is three to five years.

Oleson noted that her clients include many who have been revoked and sent back to prison for a technical rule violation. 

She said the present system often does not have the goal of rehabilitation but “surveillance disguised as support.”

“People on supervision are trying to live,” said Oleson. “We’re parenting, working, healing and giving back, but we live in fear that one misstep will erase years of progress. You have a chance to change that, to lead with justice instead of fear. Please rewrite this to reflect what the courts, the research and those of us directly impacted are telling you. Our futures matter. Please treat us like they do and we do.”

JenAnn Bauer of West Bend who had been in prison and on supervision said that “excessive supervision” creates challenges for rebuilding a life.

“Every job, every lease, every new agent and every step forward comes with extra scrutiny and extra risk,” she said. “I have done everything the system has asked of me. I pay taxes, I’ve reintegrated, I’ve contributed. These things don’t just affect the formerly incarcerated. They affect our families, our children and future generations. When a parent is stuck under financial pressure or the constant threat of being sent back for a technical violation, it creates instability that reaches far beyond one individual, it holds entire families hostage and in survival mode, and that affects the health, safety and future of whole communities and our entire state.”

Robert Thibault, vice president of Prison Action in Milwaukee, said he had been on supervision for 15 years and had experienced a “huge inconsistency” in how supervision was administered depending on the parole or probation officer (PO), adding the attitude of a PO over the interpretation of “arbitrary rules” could result in a revocation.

Meah Flowers of Madison talked of having family members going in and out of prison and the disruption that revocation causes. She encouraged implementing Act 196 to help families.

Eric Howland said there is an expectation that those coming into community supervision obtain employment, housing and a positive social network, but a 90- or 60-day jail sentence for a supervision violation negatively impacts those goals.

Why 11 years?

The DOC has not yet responded to questions from the Examiner on why it has taken 11 years to implement Act 196.  

Update: DOC spokesperson Beth Hardke responded to this story on Tuesday, July 15: “The idea that 60% of Wisconsin’s prison population is incarcerated for rules violations is simply untrue but it’s a common misinterpretation of the data.” She pointed to DOC’s prison admissions dashboard which shows 27.3% of people admitted to Wisconsin prisons over a one-year period are described as “revocation new sentence” while 32.5% described as “revocation only.” Taken together, those numbers represent about 60% of admissions. But, Hardke writes, about half of them were convicted of a new crime resulting in a new sentence, not for violating supervision rules. This story has been updated to include that response.