A teacher and students in a classroom. (Klaus Vedfelt | Getty Images)

An audit announced this week of changes in recent state testing standards is the latest reaction of Republican lawmakers to changes the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) approved last year in the names and cut scores for achievement levels. It also comes as state Superintendent Jill Underly campaigns for reelection facing a challenger criticizing DPI for “lowering” state standards.

Co-Chairs of Wisconsin Legislative Joint Audit Committee Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) and Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Caledonia) announced the audit Tuesday of DPI’s decision to update terms describing achievement levels and revise the cut scores used to measure student achievement. 

Underly and DPI have repeatedly defended the changes as part of the agency’s regular process to ensure standards are kept current. Assembly Republicans passed a bill last week that would reverse the changes, requiring  the state to reinstate standards set in the 2019-20 school year and tie changes to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAEP is a nationwide assessment meant to provide representative data about student achievement. 

Wimberger and Wittke noted in a statement that the recent NAEP results found that 31% of fourth grade students were at or above proficient in reading. Under the new state testing standards, Wisconsin had a proficiency rate of 48% in English/Language Arts and 49% in math. The legislators accused Underly of trying to hide the state’s literacy challenges.

The “unilateral changes to cover up DPI’s failing is absolutely unacceptable, and this audit will help us uncover exactly how and why these reporting standards were changed to stop future manipulation,” the lawmakers said.

According to the Legislative Audit Bureau, the audit could look at several topics related to the changes, including DPI’s written policies and procedures for developing the state’s annual school report card and for updating assessment cut scores. Other topics include, whether the current policies comply with statutory and administrative rule requirements, the way the agency gets input from educators and parents when developing changes, and how the process used for the recent changes versus previous years, State Auditor Joe Chrisman wrote in a memo to Wimberger and Wittke.

Deputy Superintendent Tom McCarthy said in a statement that the audit was for political purposes, noting the upcoming state superintendent election.

“Our approach has been transparent. If the Legislature were genuinely interested in this issue, and had listened to our testimony just a few weeks ago, they would understand that updating cut scores is a standard procedure whenever updates are made to our rigorous state standards,” McCarthy said. 

During a hearing on the bill to reverse the changes, McCarthy and other DPI representatives laid out the process the agency used, including a survey and consulting education experts to discuss potential changes and come up with recommendations. 

In his statement, McCarthy reiterated that the updates were recommended by experts and that  NAEP is a “national benchmarking tool” not a state accountability tool. The test is typically taken by only  a few thousand students in the state to develop a representative pool.

“It does not measure Wisconsin academic standards, which are used by teachers to deliver instruction. Comparing the two is like trying to use a thermometer to measure the length of a two-by-four — it makes no sense,” McCarthy said. “Especially since it seems NAEP is under attack by the White House, including canceling a major NAEP assessment and firing analytic staff.”

The Trump administration recently put NAEP Chief Peggy Carr on administrative leave. The Department of Education also recently canceled the NAEP Long-Term Trend exam, which measures the math and reading skills for 17-year-olds. 

McCarthy said DPI learned about the audit from a press release that “falsely states that the DPI didn’t support literacy reform.”

“Let’s be clear: we supported and still support literacy reform. The legislature, on the other hand, is still holding back nearly all of the $50 million meant to help kids learn to read. Instead of funding the solutions, they’re trying to manufacture controversy,” McCarthy said. “This newly announced ‘audit’ is not a desire to truly learn, but to lay a political hit on a state elected official in the middle of a campaign.”

State testing standards have become a central issue in the April 1 election for state superintendent as Underly’s challenger, Brittany Kinser, who is backed by Republicans, has said she is running on a platform of “restoring high standards.” 

State grants audit

Lawmakers also announced that they plan to launch an audit into the administration of state grants, which they say is meant to help examine whether there is waste, fraud and abuse in the state.

According to the LAB, the audit could look into the policies an agency has for administering grants, whether agencies are compliant with state statute and administrative rules in implementing grants, the amount of grants awarded in recent years and outcomes from those awards.

The audit request comes as lawmakers are starting the process of writing the next two-year state budget. 

Wimberger and Wittke said that given the budget it is “prudent” to look at how much is being spent on grants. 

“In the last budget, the state issued more than $44 billion in grant assistance funding. Evaluating these programs for wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive spending means we can identify and cut the fat of big government, making Wisconsin’s state government more accountable for our hardworking taxpayers,” the lawmakers said. 

A public hearing on the proposed audits is scheduled for Tuesday. 

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Black students at Milwaukee Area Technical College have regularly received the most funds through the state's Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant program. (Photo Courtesy of MATC)

A Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that a grant program run by the Wisconsin Higher Education Aids Board (HEAB) to provide scholarships to students of certain minority groups is unconstitutional. 

The 2nd District Court of Appeals cited a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision in its ruling that found the program discriminates based on race. 

A group of families, represented by the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL), sued the HEAB in 2021 to end the minority grant program. The program, established in 1985, targets student aid at students who are Black, Hispanic, Native American and immigrants or descendants of immigrants from Laos, Vietnam or Cambodia following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Students receive between $250 and $2,500 in aid. The program goes to students in Wisconsin’s technical colleges, private universities and tribal colleges. The UW System operates a similar program for its students.

In the 2021-22 academic year, $819,000 was given out through the program. 

In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College (SFFA) that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions are unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. 

“SFFA completely cut the legs out from under HEAB’s originally asserted government interest of student body diversity,” the Court of Appeals wrote. “But HEAB also does not meet its burden to show that its revised post-SFFA asserted government interest of increasing retention/graduation rates of students in the preferred groups, and relatedly reducing the disparity in retention/graduation rates between students from those groups and students from nonpreferred groups, is a compelling interest.” 

In a statement, WILL deputy counsel Dan Lennington said the ruling helps the state reach “true equality.” 

“The appellate judges agreed with WILL that the state of Wisconsin can offer aid based on need, income level, or personal hardships — but not race,” Lennington said. “Their comprehensive decision marks a turning point in the fight for true equality for both our state and country.”

After the Supreme Court ruled in SFFA, Wisconsin legislative leaders said they’d take aim at race-based scholarships like the minority grant program. While a legislative change would likely have been vetoed by Gov. Tony Evers, a Wisconsin Examiner analysis found that the money in the program largely went to Black students at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

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A fatal police shooting of an unnamed person in Fond du Lac is under investigation. | Getty Images

During a stop by law enforcement officers Monday night, Feb. 24, in the Town of Fond du Lac, a Fond du Lac County Sheriff deputy shot and killed a person the deputy believed was producing a firearm.

The person’s name has not been released, nor the name of the deputies involved with the stop.

According to a press release by the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ), on Monday evening, Fond du Lac County Sheriff’s deputies contacted someone via phone who was known to have a felony warrant. 

Law enforcement also received information from a civilian that this same person appeared to have a handgun.

A short while later, deputies located the person in the 6300 block of Cherrywood Drive, near a trailer park.  

The person refused to follow repeated commands, and one of the deputies discharged a non-lethal weapon. (The non-lethal weapon was not named in an official statement on the incident.)

The person then produced what deputies believed to be a firearm, and in response, a second deputy discharged a firearm at 6:22 p.m., striking the person.

Emergency medical specialists (EMS) were contacted, and law enforcement and EMS attempted life-saving measures.

The person was transported to a nearby hospital before being pronounced dead.

No members of law enforcement or other members of the public were injured during the incident.

The deputy involved in the shooting is on administrative assignment, per agency policy.

Law enforcement officers involved with the stop were wearing body cameras during the incident.

Additional details are being withheld during  the investigation and will be released to the public later.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ) Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) is investigating the officer-involved shooting, assisted by Wisconsin State Patrol, the Fond du Lac Police Department, and the Village of North Fond du Lac Police Department.

When the DCI investigation concludes, it will turn over the investigative reports to the Fond du Lac County District Attorney’s office.

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Gov. Tony Evers speaks to a group in Port Washington on Tuesday, Feb. 25, about highlights in his proposal for the state's 2025-27 budget. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

PORT WASHINGTON — Holding forth for a crowd of more than two dozen people gathered upstairs from a local coffee shop, Gov. Tony Evers recapped his budget pitch Tuesday for a friendly audience.

The governor highlighted his proposals to hold down or cut taxes for the middle class, increase school funding with particular attention to special education, and make a sustained investment in child care providers.

Evers is touting his budget for providing $2 billion “in tax relief — and it’s all everyday stuff,” he said.

Boosting state investment in public education and in shared revenue with local governments, he added, will in turn make it possible for school districts and municipalities to hold the line on property taxes.  

Evers also made a pitch — to willing ears — for the budget’s $480 million in child care support.

“That is something that, if you agree with me, you really have to work on this issue,” he said.

The governor’s 2025-27 budget  is replete with big proposals, just like each one he’s proposed since taking office in 2019, including provisions for new agencies and vows to invest in sectors that have long complained of underfunding.

And as with  each of Evers’ budgets, the Republican leaders of the state Legislature’s Joint Finance Committee dismissed the governor’s proposals the night he announced them and promised to follow up by stripping all of them from the budget draft on the first day of deliberations. Every biennium since Evers was elected in 2018, they have then built the budget “from the base” — in other words, from the spending plan as enacted in the last budget cycle.

Last week they announced minutes after Evers’ budget address they would follow the familiar script.

Reaching out to voters, supporters

Tuesday’s round table with local officials, small business owners, teachers and residents of the Ozaukee County city was the second in a series that Evers began on Monday with stops in Wausau and Superior.

Evers opened the session with a brief account of his recent visit to Washington, D.C., where he and other governors met with President Donald Trump, and where “people are on pins and needles” amid the drastic changes taking place in the federal government since Trump took office.

The governor emphasized the impending tariffs Trump has vowed to impose — 25% on goods from Canada and Mexico, among others — are “going to be a big deal,” potentially costing the average Wisconsin consumer $1,200 a year.

With that image as the scene setter, Evers went down a partial list of his budget’s tax proposals. He’s proposed eliminating the sales tax on medicine, utility bills, and cash tips for workers such as restaurant servers and others who are paid gratuities. Tips added to a credit card payment would not be included.

Part of the budget’s claim to $2 billion in tax relief reflects putting more state funds into education, shifting the burden for funding schools off local taxpayers.

“We will be investing heavily in public education, and that includes about $3.15 billion for K-12 schools, $800 million for University of Wisconsin System and a $60 million increase in the technical college system,” Evers said. The K-12 education money includes increasing the state’s share of special education funding, now about 30%, to 60%.

His proposal also would nearly double the personal exemption under the state income tax to $1,200 from $700.  For low- and moderate-income state residents who qualify, the state would increase the earned income tax credit. Additional tax relief is aimed at veterans and surviving spouses.

Referring to a recent blockage in federal funding that hit Head Start providers across Wisconsin and nationwide before payments resumed, Evers questioned whether the 60-year-old federal child care and early education program for low-income families might meet an early demise.

“I’m not sure Head Start will survive the federal government” under the Trump administration, Evers said. “And that would cause things to be much, much more difficult” when it comes to child care.

Child care: ‘We’re going to lose providers’

Evers recapped how federal pandemic relief funds enabled Wisconsin to bolster child care providers under the Child Care Counts program. The monthly payments enabled providers to increase wages for child care workers without raising the fees parents pay for child care, but the last payments will end this summer.

“That money is gone, and now we have an industry that is struggling,” Evers said. “If we don’t do something proactive to support them — directly support them — we’re going to lose providers.”

But so far, he added, “I’m not sure the other side gets it.”

Laura Klingelhoets, who owns and is administrator of a child care center in the community of Belgium about 10 miles north of Port Washington, said staffing remains her biggest challenge.

Klingelhoets recalled a recent conversation with a father. His teenage children “can go to work,” he told her. “My toddler cannot go to work. I need the help now — and I need you to stay open.”

Bob Steffes, vice president and general manager at Allen Edmonds, the high-end shoe manufacturer that has its factory in Port Washington, offered Evers one example of how the struggle for child care hits employers:  “We lose about 30% of our female [employees] that get pregnant,” he said.

Dana Glasstein teaches English as a second language and said she has seen “a lot of interrupted learning” for students who miss classes or put off taking them because they can’t get needed child care.

Klingelhoets said she’s had conversations with legislators on the Joint Finance Committee. “I have been very respectful in some of that lobbying,” she said, “but I have been told right to my face that women should not work — they belong at home, and child care isn’t a necessity in our state.”

School funding, lead pipes

Evers’ plan to increase the state’s contribution for special education would add “almost $3 million in our general fund for schools,” said Michael McMahon, superintendent of the Port Washington-Saukville School District. The district will hold a referendum April 1, asking voters to increase their property taxes to fund a new elementary school, replacing one built 70 years ago, McMahon said. The $59.4 million ask also includes money for deferred maintenance. 

“We’ve been taking care of our facilities,” McMahon said. “We just have had to defer that to make sure we’re putting teachers in front of kids and keeping programming.”

Provisions in Evers’ budget proposal would replace sources of lead, from old paint in buildings to lead water pipes. It contains $100 million for renovations removing lead paint in schools, home and child care centers, $7 million to replace lead water lines for home-based child care providers, and $200 million to replace homeowners’ lead service lines.

In Port Washington about 800 lead water service lines need to be replaced, said Dan Buchler, the city’s water utility director. At $7,000 a line, the cost is the responsibility of property owners. 

“We’re putting a huge burden on them,” Buchler said. “Just because you live in a house that has a lead line, you didn’t put that line in the ground. It’s not your fault.”

Urging voters to prevail on their lawmakers

Meeting with voters and urging them to let lawmakers know their concerns has been a standard political tactic for the Democratic governor as he’s confronted Republican majorities in both chambers of the Legislature.

“We need to have people engage with the [budget] bill,” Evers said in a brief interview after the session. “It’s important that people understand that.”

How this year’s budget deliberations unfold could offer a glimpse into the impact of the new legislative maps enacted in 2024 that are more evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats and resulted in a smaller gap between the parties in both houses after the November election.

“Some of Evers’ proposals frequently poll quite well, but a statewide audience has generally been irrelevant to the majority of GOP legislators who represent solidly red districts,” said John D. Johnson, a research fellow at Marquette University who has analyzed poll results and the state’s legislative maps, in an email message.

“However, since the 2024 redistricting, Republicans from safe districts no longer make up a majority of either chamber,” Johnson said. Evers may be “hoping that the Republicans representing swing seats will feel pressure to support popular policies he proposes.” Or perhaps, he added, Evers’ tactic could simply be “a rhetorical move made with an eye to the general election in 2026.”

The same dynamic works the other way, Johnson noted: “Of course, the flip side of this is that Republican legislators regularly try to pass bills they believe to be popular but which they know Evers will veto.”

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Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) speaks at a WisPolitics event. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) criticized much of Gov. Tony Evers’ budget proposal on Tuesday, saying Republicans wouldn’t get behind the spending increases and taxation proposals. He said Republican lawmakers are starting the process of coming up with their own proposals, including for a broad tax cut plan.

Evers’ 2025-27 state budget proposal dedicates $4 billion to K-12 and higher education, cuts nearly $2 billion in taxes and raises income taxes for the state’s wealthiest residents. Evers said during a Wisconsin Counties Association conference on Tuesday that his proposal was “realistic” and that he hopes the Legislature will agree. 

Vos said the plan was unrealistic, however, because it would increase state spending by about 20% and included plans to raise taxes. He also complained Evers presented his plans without speaking with lawmakers first.

Wisconsin has an estimated budget surplus of about $4 billion. Democrats are seeking greater investments in the state’s public services while Republicans want to limit state spending. 

Vos told the audience at the WisPolitics event people are thinking about the budget surplus the wrong way.

“People believe we have this huge surplus, which is true on one-time money, but we have very little money for the government to be able to expand or increase funding for programs,” Vos said.

Wants broad tax cuts

Vos said the last state budget was “really disappointing” because Republicans met Evers’ goals by increasing spending on education, but Evers vetoed most of Republicans’ tax cut proposals. In the upcoming session, Republicans will seek to focus on using the budget surplus for cutting taxes. 

Evers proposed an array of tax cuts in his budget including eliminating taxes on cash tips, sales taxes on electricity and gas for Wisconsin homes and on over-the-counter medications. Vos compared tax cuts to “chocolate cake,” saying they are all good. However, he said his caucus will likely look at doing broader tax cuts and that he wants cuts that “people can actually feel.”

“My preference is something that is ongoing and meaningful to families,” Vos said. 

Vos said that lawmakers will work to pass a tax cut bill package before the end of the budget process. 

“Hopefully that’ll get signed, but if not, unfortunately, the budget will probably have to wait until we can find consensus on that tax cut,” Vos told reporters after the event.

Evers also proposed a new tax bracket with a marginal rate of 9.8% for the state’s wealthiest residents — those making above $1 million for single filers and married joint filers. The current top tax bracket has a 7.65% rate and applies to single filers making $315,310 and joint filers making $420,420.

Vos said Republicans would not support increasing taxes.

Continued no on Medicaid expansion (even postpartum)

Evers for his fourth budget in a row proposed that Wisconsin join the 40 other states in the country that have taken the federal Medicaid expansion, which ensures coverage for people making up to 138% of the federal poverty line. One difference in this budget cycle, however, is that the Trump administration and Republican lawmakers are seeking to cut Medicaid funding in order to help pay for tax cuts. The new reality, Vos said, appears to validate his ongoing opposition to accepting the federal Medicaid expansion.

“Thank goodness we never expanded Medicaid,” Vos said. 

Vos said he would prefer block grants from the federal government, and that it would be better for Wisconsin to get 90% of the money from the federal government without “strings attached” than to get 100% of the money and have to follow federal guidelines for how to spend it.

Vos was also critical of expanding postpartum Medicaid to cover new mothers for the first year after giving birth, casting doubt on a Republican-backed bill that supports Wisconsin joining the 48 other states that have done this. Currently, Wisconsin only covers up to 60 days after birth for eligible mothers. 

Evers included the extension in his budget proposal and a Republican-authored bill that would extend coverage has 23 Senate cosponsors and 67 Assembly cosponsors.

Despite the widespread bipartisan support for extending postpartum Medicaid, Vos said he was not the only person in his caucus who opposes expanding coverage. He said it doesn’t make sense to expand Medicaid coverage because those with incomes up to 100% of the federal poverty line can still keep coverage after the 60 days and those who could lose coverage could seek coverage through Obamacare.

“I am not the only person in the Legislature who is opposed to it. Many Republicans are opposed to expanding welfare, it’s just they are more than happy to let me stand in front of the arrows,” Vos said.

Calls language changes ‘dystopian’

Vos also critiqued changes to the state budget proposed by Evers that would update language to be gender neutral. 

The proposal would change certain words like “father” to “parent” and “husband” to “spouse.” Another section that is about artificial insemination would change “the husband of the mother” to “the spouse of the inseminated person.”

Republicans have locked on the latter phrase to claim that Evers is trying to erase mothers and fathers. 

Evers told reporters Monday that the changes were made to ensure with “legal certainty that moms are able to get the care they need,” noting that same sex couples could have been excluded from coverage under the old language. He accused Republicans of lying about the issue.

“I didn’t know that Republicans were against IVF, but apparently they are because that is what it’s about,” Evers said.

Vos said the change was “dystopian” and said the changes don’t fix any issue and Evers was just coming up with an explanation. He later told reporters that the language made the state a “national embarrassment.” 

Prison reform

Vos also complained about Evers’ process for coming up with a plan to reform the state’s prisons, saying he should have included lawmakers in developing it.

The proposed plan, which would cost over $500 million, would make wide changes to many of the state’s facilities including transitioning Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth correctional facilities into adult facilities, updating Waupun Correctional Institution, the state’s oldest prison, and eventually closing Green Bay Correctional Institution.

Vos said it’s known that lawmakers have had an interest in the issue and questioned why they weren’t consulted in developing the plan.

“He chose not to do that because he has one way of operating, which is his way or the highway. Those of us that have some interest in corrections reform will get together and come up with our own package and present it to the governor and say, ‘Here it is,’” Vos said.

DPI and Supreme Court elections

Vos also weighed in on Wisconsin’s upcoming spring elections. 

State Superintendent Jill Underly, the Democratic-backed candidate, is running for a second term in office against education consultant Brittany Kinser, the Republican-backed candidate. 

Vos said that Kinser is “the best candidate” because she supports school choice and appears willing to work with the Legislature. He added that he isn’t sure whether he has ever met with Underly. He also criticized Underly for changes to the evaluation of Wisconsin’s standardized test scores.

He described the recent February primary as “low profile” and said that with a “different electorate” at polls in April, Kinser likely has a chance to win. 

The higher profile spring election is for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. The technically nonpartisan race pits Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate against  Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel, the conservative candidate.

Vos said he thinks that the race will be about the candidates, but it is “possible” that the race could be a referendum on Trump. He noted that Democrats are seeking to turn out voters who  agree with them and billionaire Elon Musk and Trump are trying to bring out Republicans in the race. A group tied to Musk canceled a social media ad this week that featured a photo of the wrong Susan Crawford.

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José Tlaxcala worked framing houses in Salem, Oregon, until he sustained a spinal injury and moved back to San Juan Texhuácan. People will continue crossing the border to work in the U.S., regardless of what politicians say, because of 'economic necessity' he says. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

VERACRUZ, MEXICO — President Donald Trump’s threats to deport millions of Mexicans who are working in the U.S. without authorization does not have a large number fleeing the U.S. in fear, nor will it stop Mexican citizens from crossing the border to find work, according to many residents who shared their stories with the Wisconsin Examiner.

“Yes, it has put the brakes on things a bit, I know people who were thinking of going and now they’re waiting,” said Fatima Tepole, who worked on a dairy farm in Minnesota for four years, earning money to build her house and start a school supply store in San Juan Texhuácan. “Of course it caused people to pause. It now costs $15,000 to cross the border. If they send you back? Of course you are going to stop and think about that.”

But, she added. “They are going to try again when things calm down. It’s inevitable.”

Tepole’s friend Blanca Hernández, a teacher at a bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl school, agreed. She crossed the border to work in the U.S. three times, smuggling herself in the trunk of a car and nearly suffocating on her way to take a factory job in North Carolina and returning two more times to milk cows in Wisconsin. She saved enough money to build her house and buy a car before returning home. “Yes, there are people who are afraid now,” she said. “But Mexicans are stubborn. They are going to keep immigrating.”

José Tlaxcala says no politician in either country has changed the underlying drivers of immigration. “People in Mexico continue to think about going to the U.S. to work because of economic necessity,” he said.

In his opinion, that’s the Mexican government’s fault. “The Mexican government isn’t doing enough. There’s not enough good work for the people,” Tlaxcala said. In the area where he lives, around San Juan Texhuácan, most people work in agriculture, growing coffee and corn, partly for subsistence and partly to sell. But the prices for agricultural products are very low. “It’s not enough to support a family,” Tlaxcala explained

A Stateline analysis of U.S. Census community survey data in 2018 found a sudden drop in the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S. between 2016 and 2017. More than 300,000 people went home that year, which experts attributed to deportation threats in the first Trump administration as well as improving job prospects in Mexico. Mexicans still represent the largest group of immigrants living in the U.S., but their numbers have been declining for more than a decade, from a peak of 11.7 million in 2010 to 10.91 million in 2023.

It’s too soon to tell if the second Trump administration, with its even more aggressive focus on rooting out immigrants, pushes down those numbers more.

But anecdotally, at least among dairy workers in the Midwest, that doesn’t seem to be the case — at least for now. 

“The concern was significantly more in the last Trump administration,” says Wisconsin dairy farmer John Rosenow, who has 13 employees from Mexico. “Especially people with families were afraid of being deported and separated from their children. Farmers were typically running three or four people short … I haven’t seen that this time.” 

High-profile immigration raids in the second Trump administration have so far focused on major cities, including Chicago, New York, Denver and Los Angeles. Some people who worked in restaurants have been deported, and have been able to return to the villages Rosenow recently visited in rural Veracruz.

“I have a friend who was deported,” said Tepole. “He went to get food one day and they grabbed him and sent him back, just like that, after eight years. Luckily, he had already built his house.”

As Rosenow traveled among mountain villages, meeting family members of his dairy workers, he stopped to see a large cement house one of his current employees was building. Guadelupe Maxtle Salas was plastering a wall inside. He showed us the attached garage where Rosenow’s employee intends to set up shop as an auto mechanic when he finally returns. 

Maxtle Salas worked in the U.S. from the age of 14 until he was 19, he said. He milked cows on a dairy farm not far from Rosenow’s. He is thinking about going back to the U.S. after he finishes helping to build the house. He had applied for a work visa and then, when Trump took office, the app that allowed him to get the visa was abruptly cancelled. “I lost my chance,” he said. Now he thinks he might go illegally. “If I get there, I’ll look for you,” he told Rosenow.

Tlaxcala, 30, won’t be going back because of an injury that prevents him from resuming the heavy labor he did when he was in the U.S. He came back home one year ago. He was working in construction in Salem, Oregon, framing houses, when a beam fell on his back, fracturing two disks in his spine. 

He had been working abroad for five years, sending home money to support his family in San Juan Texhuácan. After the accident, he decided it was time to come home. 

He doesn’t blame his employer for what happened.

“After I hurt my back I couldn’t work. That’s the risk I took,” he said. “Unfortunately, I was working without insurance – illegally. My employer was not going to be responsible if I was hurt. I knew that.”

His employer paid the hospital bill. But Tlaxcala wasn’t eligible for unemployment benefits. Since returning home, he  hasn’t been able to afford medical attention to deal with continuing problems with his spine.

Immigrant workers who don’t have authorization in the U.S. are barred from receiving unemployment benefits even though they pay into the system through tax withholdings. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, workers without authorization paid $1.8 billion into unemployment insurance, a joint federal and state program, in 2024. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 states created programs to temporarily provide unemployment benefits to excluded workers. Only Colorado has made its program permanent.

Asked if the risk he took to work without protection in the U.S. was worth it,  Tlaxcala laughed. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said.

“It depends on your situation. If you’re lucky nothing happens to you.”

It cost Tlaxcala $11,000 to cross the border, he said. “Obviously it was a big risk. You have to deal with organized crime in the north of the country to go through the desert. The cartels are still in control. Every person who crosses the border puts his life in the hands of the organized crime syndicates. It seems necessary to us. I know a lot of people who have died trying to cross.”

Like Tepole and Hernández, he doubts the deportation threats will have a big impact on Mexican workers. 

“It’s just politics,” he said. “It’s the same as in Mexico. Politicians say lots of things they don’t follow through with. Mexicans understand that.” For example, he said, for generations, Mexican politicians have said they are going to end poverty. “They don’t,” Tlaxcala said.

“When I was growing up I felt that I didn’t have things that I needed.” he added. “I had to go to school in broken down shoes. Sometimes I didn’t have shoes. I didn’t have a backpack, and I wore old, worn out clothing – for lack of money. I was determined to do something about that.”

Before he went to the U.S., Tlaxcala worked as a truck driver in Mexico. But the only way to get ahead, he said, is to start a business and it was all he could do to come up with the initial investment to get his store going. “I had to use all of the money I earned to pay off the bank. By working in the United States, little by little I could get ahead.”

After working abroad for five years, he was able to afford to pay off his debts, buy a house and finance his business, a small store. “Bank loans, credit — you can’t cover those things with a regular salary here,” he said.

Another reason Tlaxcala doesn’t believe millions of Mexicans will be deported, he said, is the sheer number of immigrants he saw when he was living in the U.S. “In Salem 30-40% of the population is Latino. I’d go to Walmart and see people from my village,” he said. “Plus, it’s very heavy work — construction, roofing — and it doesn’t pay well. They need people.”

In the U.S., 1 in 4 construction workers is an immigrant, according to a National Association of Home Builders report that emphasizes the industry’s reliance on immigrant labor as well as a significant labor shortage. “The concentration of immigrants is particularly high in construction trades essential for home building,” the report found, including plasterers and stucco masons (64%) drywall/ceiling tile installers (52%), painters, (48%) and roofers (47%).

By building houses in the U.S. so they can send home money to build houses in Mexico, Mexican workers are fueling the economies of both countries.

“I understand that there are people who do bad things and those people should be sent back,” said Tepole. “But the manual labor force that is strengthening the country? Most of them are Mexicans.”

This story is Part Three in a series. Read Part One: Amid Trump’s threats to deport workers, Wisconsin dairy farmers travel to Mexico and Part Two: A deceased farmworker’s son finally returns to Mexico to meet his father’s family

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Protesters march in Milwaukee calling for more community control of the police. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

What has become of the city of Milwaukee’s Fire and Police Commission (FPC) since the passage of Act 12, which traded its policy-making powers over the police department for a fiscal deal with the state? That’s the question the Milwaukee Turners’ – described as Milwaukee’s oldest civic group – sought to answer with hard data. 

From June to December 2024, the Turners’ “Confronting Mass Incarceration team” monitored the FPC – itself one of the nation’s oldest civilian-led oversight bodies for police and fire departments. The team monitored the FPC’s meetings, who attended, what attendees did, and how commissioners engaged in the meetings. A white paper published earlier this month, detailing the team’s findings, noted among other things that:

• The FPC spent 81% of its time discussing personnel matters, and often discussed these during closed sessions which the public cannot view. The Turners noted 359 minutes were spent discussing personnel matters, whereas just 49 minutes were spent on public comment. 
• The Turners noticed what they described in the white paper as “an overall lack of active engagement and participation from commissioners.”
• Law enforcement personnel attended FPC meetings more frequently than members of the general public. During the monitoring period, 30 police personnel attended meetings whereas 20 members of the public attended. Of those members of the public who attended the meetings, half engaged in public comment and of those, only three received a direct response from commissioners. 

The report states the FPC “appears to serve as a rubber stamp” and that the commission “has failed to secure public trust.” Dr. Emily Sterk, a research and advocacy associate with Milwaukee Turners who worked on the project, explained why the numbers looked the way they do. While citizens can discuss whatever they want during public comment, commissioners can’t discuss anything that isn’t on the agenda due to open meetings laws. “So therefore they just have this practice to, you know, have public comment but then not even address the public that is there,” Sterk told Wisconsin Examiner. 

While she understands the legal reason for this practice, Sterk said, “that is, for us, subjectively very troubling when a member of the public makes the time and effort to get themselves down there, go to this meeting which – as we alluded to in the white paper – the regular sessions are very frequently heavily delayed because of the closed sessions that are taking place.” As a result, the commission ends up engaging in back-and-forth discussions with city officials and law enforcement more frequently than the public, whose comments may be left unheard. 

Leon Todd, executive director of the FPC, told Wisconsin Examiner that personnel matters such as promotions, hiring or setting recruitment standards “are extremely important.” Todd added, “I don’t think it is necessarily problematic that the FPC spends a goodly amount of time on that. It is part of their core functions. It’s been part of their core responsibilities for more than 150 years…Since 1885 no person has been appointed or promoted to any position in the police or fire departments without the express approval of the FPC board.” 

Yet even this function of the FPC has come under fire. In January, the commission was criticized by conservative elected officials, right-wing media outlets and the Milwaukee Police Association after an officer was denied promotion. WISN12 reported that the FPC considered promotions for seven officers, and only denied officer Jason Daering. A couple of weeks later in early February, the FPC reversed its position and voted to promote Daering to sergeant. Prior to the final vote, FPC co-chair Bree Spencer said that the police department didn’t provide a full file, that Daering did not appear for an interview and was unprepared. “So we really encourage, going forward, that people take this process seriously,” said Spencer. 

The commission’s voting record was another issue for the Milwaukee Turners. In their report, the group noted that over its monitoring period last year, the FPC took up 122 agenda items, of which 120 received unanimous approval. Only two agenda items – one involving the promotion of a detective and another concerning reappointing a former police officer – received No votes, with both items receiving two No votes. “Given the current practices of the FPC, including closed sessions and lack of Commissioner participation during regular sessions, the public is left unaware of why these aye or no votes were made,” the report states. “We observed an overall lack of transparency when it comes to Commissioners’ voting records. Even if Commissioners are actively participating in deliberation and debate during closed sessions, the public has no way of knowing this.” 

Todd also pushed back against the Milwaukee Turners’ claim that the FPC has become a rubber stamp. Harkening back to the pre-Act 12 era Todd, who was appointed by former mayor Tom Barrett in November 2020, recalled the FPC’s record of pushing for police reform measures “that the [police] department did not agree with.” From a ban on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, to approving a policy of publicly releasing video of incidents like police shootings within 15 days of the incident. Those decisions – made when the FPC was led by Chairman Ed Fallone and Vice Chairwoman Amanda Avalos – were “probably, if not the reason, a big reason why the Legislature took away [FPC’s] policy-making authority, because they were acting independently and listening to community members from Milwaukee,” Todd told Wisconsin Examiner. 

After the passage of Act 12 in 2023, Fallone and Avalos resigned their positions in protest. Stripping the FPC of its decades-old policy-making powers emerged as a bargaining chip in negotiations between Milwaukee elected officials and the Republican-controlled Legislature. In exchange for targeting the FPC, reversing the Milwaukee Public School district decision to remove school resource officers from its facilities at the request of students and community members, and agreeing to never reduce the police force, the city of Milwaukee was allowed a new sales tax and county was allowed to raise its sales tax, which enabled both governments to avoid a fiscal catastrophe. Act 12’s law enforcement aspects had previously been proposed as bills favored by Republican lawmakers and the Milwaukee Police Association, which failed to pass.

For the FPC, it seems that many roads lead back to the shared revenue and sales tax deal codified by Act 12. In its report, Milwaukee Turners recommended that Act 12 be amended to return the policy-making powers of the FPC. This state-level solution, however, relies on cooperation from the Republican-controlled Legislature which helped craft, negotiate, and implement Act 12. 

In the meantime, the Turners recommend that the FPC bring ideas for policy changes to the common council. “We recommend that the FPC dedicate less of their regular sessions to closed door personnel matters, and instead publicly engage in discussions about new and amended [Standard Operating Procedures] that are brought forth by the [Milwaukee Police Department],” the report reads, adding that “the Common Council might actively invite policy recommendations from the FPC, especially as it relates to the concerns of their constituents.”

Todd told Wisconsin Examiner that the commission adopted a new rule requiring that the police department provide copies of any new or amended policies to the FPC within 48 hours, and no less than 30 days before the policies take effect. When that happens, a communication file is created by the FPC which goes into the regular agenda, and thus becomes public. Todd said that so far, the commission has not sent policy recommendations to the common council. 

Todd is considering other ways to beef up the FPC’s oversight capacity. Specifically, he wants to encourage a focus on the FPC’s audit unit as a way of being “more proactive” and “not just reactive.” Todd pointed to an audit on police pursuits, and the police department, Todd said, is also looking to create a vehicle pursuit committee. The commission also continues tracking citizen complaints about officer behavior, as well as progress the department makes in eliminating discriminatory stop and frisk practices as part of the Collins settlement agreement. This year, the audit unit is expecting to do six or seven audits which are unrelated to the Collins settlement, said Todd.

Additionally, an ordinance passed in the common council to ensure the elected body is quickly notified of policy changes. 

How the commission attracts more members of the public to attend meetings is another issue. Todd acknowledged that there have been fewer citizens attending public comment after the passage of Act 12. “I think that’s unfortunate,” he told Wisconsin Examiner. “I think that we welcome people to come and express their views, their input.” 

The last major policy he could recall passed before Act 12 was the video release policy concerning police shootings and related deaths. Local activists fought for the reform, as did the families of people killed in incidents involving Milwaukee-area police. 

Todd said that the FPC still has “soft power” such as through audits, which it can use to influence the police department. “So I’m hoping that we will get more public input going forward,” he said, noting that FPC recently welcomed in a new commissioner, Krissie Fung, from the Milwaukee Turners. 

“Our findings highlight the importance of fostering a culture of police and fire accountability within the FPC,” the Turners’ white paper concludes. “By advocating for legislative changes to restore policy making authority, increasing public engagement, and ensuring rigorous Commissioner participation, the FPC can rebuild public confidence and strengthen its capacity to address systemic inequalities in policing.”

“We really hope to continue to provide civilian oversight of the FPC and see what happens over the course of the next few months,” said Sterk, “especially as we continue our lobbying for the amendment of Act 12, as we hope members of the FPC and members of the public do as well.”

This report has been updated to clarify that Act 12 allowed the city to offer a sales tax and the county to raise its sales tax.

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Elon Musk arrives for the inauguration of President Donald Trump in the U.S. Capitol rotunda on Jan. 20, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty Images)

A political action group tied to Elon Musk that has sought to influence Wisconsin’s high stakes Supreme Court election canceled a social media ad this week after it featured the wrong person. 

The ad by the group Building America’s Future attempted to attack Dane County Judge Susan Crawford, the liberal candidate in the race. However the ad featured a photo of a different Susan Crawford. Instead of showing the judge, the ad, which attacked Crawford’s record on crime, featured former Harvard Law School Professor Susan P. Crawford.

Derrick Honeyman, a spokesperson for Crawford’s campaign, said in a statement the ad was a “fraud.” 

“Maybe an audit is needed of the staff at Musk’s shady far-right group,” Honeyman said. “Wisconsinites shouldn’t trust a single thing from these guys.”

First reported by the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the ad ran for four days and cost $3,000. 

Building America’s Future has promised to spend more than $1.5 million on airing anti-Crawford ads in a number of television markets across the state. Another Musk-associated PAC has invested $1 million in canvassing and field operations in support of the conservative candidate, Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel. 

Musk’s support of Schimel comes as Tesla has sued the state of Wisconsin over a law that prevents car manufacturers from owning dealerships in the state. 

The Supreme Court race will determine the ideological swing of the body. The race between Crawford and Schimel could break spending records for a Wisconsin judicial campaign after 2023’s race set the previous record at about $50 million. 

Both candidates have been supported by contributions from billionaires. Crawford has received help from George Soros and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker while Schimel received donations from Illinois billionaire Liz Uihlein, Beloit billionaire Diane Hendricks and outside help from Musk. 

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After a long flight and a rugged overland journey, Julio Hernandez and dairy farmer Stan Linder approach the Hernandez family home in Mexico. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

TEPANZACUALCO, Mexico — Julio Hernandez wasn’t even a year old when he first visited this tiny mountain village in the Mexican state of Veracruz. 

He doesn’t remember the trip he took with his mom, to attend his father’s funeral.

At the end of January, the 21-year-old finally returned. This time his mom stayed at home and he was accompanied by Stan Linder, 83, a dairy farmer his father Federico once worked for in Pepin County.

For the last 24 years, Linder has made an annual trek to Tepanzacualco to visit the Hernández family, which has sent a procession of relatives up North to work on Linder’s farm. This year he was determined to bring Julio along.

Like most dairy farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Linder relies heavily on Mexican workers. The decades-long relationship of interdependence between rural Midwesterners and rural Mexicans has fostered not just economic but also social ties. Nowhere is the strength of those ties more visible than in the life of Julio Hernandez. 

Julio’s father, Federico, met and married Julio’s mother, a local woman whose family had lived in Wisconsin for generations, while he was working for Linder. One day in 2003, Federico went swimming with some friends in Lake George and drowned. It was Linder who showed up to tell Julio’s mother that her husband was gone. 

Fawn Hernandez, 42, remembers when Linder came to her door. “He said, ‘I got some news,’ and I was like, ‘What? Is Federico in trouble?’ And he said, ‘No, he passed away — drowned.’”

“I was married, widowed and had a kid all at the age of 21,” Fawn said.

Federico Hernández’ brothers and cousins chipped in to have his body sent home. Fawn remembers the difficulty of getting to the funeral. “They had to carry the casket down a hill on a goat trail, because the road washed out just before we got there.”

For the last 20 years Fawn has worked at the same McDonald’s restaurant in Menominee, raising Julio and taking care of her mother, both of whom live with her in a mobile home in Cedar Falls. Julio went to high school in nearby Colfax. He attended the community college in Chippewa Falls for three months before dropping out. Now he works summers on a crew pouring cement for the Pember Company in Menominee.

He knows some of his father’s family members who’ve put down roots in Wisconsin, including his cousin Emanuel Montalvo Tzanahua, who married a U.S. citizen and runs a successful barbershop in Arcadia. Another cousin still works on Linder’s farm and has two teenage sons both born in the U.S. (who plan to go to college in Minnesota). But he was nervous about the trip to meet his family in Mexico. It was the first plane ride he remembered, and the steep mountain roads alarmed him. In the back of the pickup truck on the rugged ride up the mountain to Tepanzacualco on a winding dirt road, he started to panic. 

“I’m not comfortable. I want to get out and walk. I don’t like this,” he said. Linder pounded on the truck until the driver stopped and dairy farmer John Rosenow came back and switched places with Hernandez, so he could ride the rest of the way in the front.

In Tepanzacualco, Hernandez and Linder hiked the last half mile up a steep footpath to the family home. The view was spectacular, with the sun shining on the valley below, cows and burros grazing in the fields and huge bunches of calla lilies sprouting along the path, as if plucked from a Diego Rivera painting.

As they drew close to the house, Julio’s grandmother, Paula Montalvo Cervantes Hernández, came out to embrace her grandson. “Mi hijo, mi hijo,” (My son, my son) she said, taking Julio’s face in her hands to gaze at him and then hugging him over and over.

One of his aunts said he looked just like his father.

Inside the house, a sign on the wall said “Bienvenidos” (“welcome”). Julio’s aunts and cousins were preparing a big meal, patting out handmade tortillas and cooking them on a wood-burning stove, alongside breaded fried chicken, green salsa and Spanish rice.

Julio sat at the table next to his grandmother and put his head on her shoulder. “My son, thank you for remembering us,” she said in Spanish.

“How could I forget?” he replied in English.

One of his aunts, Aurelia Hernández, commented approvingly, “His hair is very black. He doesn’t look like  a gringo.”

Her husband, Juan, came in and greeted Linder. He had worked on Linder’s farm for four years.

Julio handed his grandmother and aunt a baby picture of himself. They produced a large, framed photo of him from when he was a toddler and passed it around.

Julio said to everyone: “I’m glad to meet you and grateful to be part of your family.”

Linder translated.

“Gracias, gracias — mucho thank you!” said Julio’s grandmother, smiling broadly and patting his arm.

Julio began to cry. “Why is he sad?” his grandmother asked. 

“I feel like I’m home. I’m with my family,” Julio said through his tears.

Everyone listened to the translation, then responded in a chorus, “Awwww!”

When Julio asked if the family had anything of his father’s, one of the cousins went to another room and fetched an enormous suitcase Federico had used when he traveled to the U.S.

Julio and each of the family members took turns posing for pictures with the suitcase. 

Arnulfo, Julio’s 86-year-old grandfather, who came up to the house when Julio arrived from working in the fields, said, “Tell him I’ll give him some land to build his house, just choose where.”

“You can send money and they’ll build it for you,” Linder told Julio. That’s what many family members have done, saving up from their U.S. jobs and sending money home to build houses on the family’s property.

For Julio, who works during the summers in Wisconsin at his construction job, the idea of building a house to spend at least part of the year in the place where his father grew up, though surprising, didn’t sound that far-fetched. He turned it over in his head for the rest of the trip.

A house in Mexico can cost between $25,000 and $35,000 to build, workers told the Examiner. That’s a lot more reachable than in Wisconsin, where, according to the Wisconsin Realtors Association, the median home price in January was $293,000.

But the most striking thing for Julio about his trip, he said, was the unexpected feeling of being so welcomed by his father’s family. “I didn’t think they’d love me so much,” he said.

After lunch the family went outside and took photos in front of the ruins of an ancient pyramid which sits directly behind the house on the family’s land, never excavated by the Mexican government. Then Julio and Linder walked down the mountain to a house being built by Julio’s cousin who still works for Linder. She has been building it for the past two decades. In a couple of years, when her sons graduate from high school, Linder said, she intends to finally move back to Mexico. “That’s when I’ll retire,” he said.

Recently, Linder brought her sons down to meet the family for the first time. Like Julio, they were warmly embraced. 

Since he didn’t speak a word of Spanish, Julio relied on Linder and a translation app on his phone, to help him communicate during his visit.  “I feel like I’m missing a part of myself because I can’t speak the language,” he said.

On the second day of his visit, the whole family took a trip to the cemetery in San Juan Texhuacán where his father is buried. Julio laid flowers on the grave. 

Julio returns 

After three days with his family, Julio and Linder met up in Zongolica with the rest of a group from the U.S. led by Mercedes Falk, a translator on dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota and director of the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, which organized the trip. The whole extended family came along for a protracted, tearful goodbye.

“The thing I learned the most is they like it the way they have it,” Julio said, reflecting on the visit. “They care so much about family, they want to stay where they are. They’re willing to live on top of each other just to be with family. And for me, to be part of it? It’s something that will change my life forever.”

He wants to bring his mom to visit next year.

After taking a tour of the town and learning about the pre-Columbian history of Zongolica, Julio marveled, “They’ve been here for so long. Like longer than the United States – I like that.” He wished he’d asked more questions about the pyramid behind the Hernández family home.

Back in Wisconsin, after the trip was over, Julio was starting to lift weights to get in shape for the construction season. It’s hard work, he said. But now he has a new sense of purpose. After working summers in construction, he’d like to spend winters in Mexico.

He’s been staying in touch with his cousins on WhatsApp and using DuoLingo to try to learn Spanish. “I honestly thought about giving up, it’s been so difficult,” he said. “But I know I have to do it to be able to communicate with my family.” 

This story is Part Two in a series. Read Part One: Amid Trump’s threats to deport workers, Wisconsin dairy farmers travel to Mexico.

 

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has approved a proposal to expand a Pierce County dairy factory farm, but critics have objected. Shown is a Wisconsin dairy CAFO, photographed in 2013. (Wisconsin DNR photo)

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources approved a permit allowing a Pierce County factory farm to expand from 1,700 cows to 6,500 despite heavy local opposition. 

On Friday, the DNR granted the Ridge Breeze Dairy approval for its permit under the Wisconsin Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (WPDES), which regulates the manure and associated nutrient runoff created by the farm. The dairy had previously been forced to re-submit its permit request after it was discovered the owners had listed properties as locations where manure would be spread without ever contacting those property owners. 

In its approval, the DNR said it had assessed the dairy’s nutrient management plan and found that all the properties listed were able to handle the spreading of manure created by the expanded farm. 

“The department reevaluated the nutrient management plan and field restriction maps based on comments received during the 30-day comment period and public hearing,” the DNR’s final determination states. “The department also required additional documentation to demonstrate Ridge Breeze Dairy’s ability to apply manure and process wastewater to fields in their nutrient management plan not under common ownership with Ridge Breeze Dairy. As a result, some fields were removed from the plan. Needed corrections were made by Ridge Breeze Dairy and included in the updated nutrient management plan.”

Opponents of the expansion say, however, that the dairy has still not gotten agreements from every property owner listed in the permit. 

“Promises that the DNR would require Ridge Breeze to submit signed agreements with landowners have been broken,” a news release from Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin (GROWW) states. “Instead, the DNR is only requiring signed affidavits from operators who rent land from landowners. These affidavits claim that landowners agree to receive manure from Ridge Breeze Dairy. However, landowners have come forward to state that they have no such agreement with Ridge Breeze despite being listed on signed affidavits.”

With the permit approval, Ridge Breeze Dairy will now become the largest factory farm operating in the seven county region of Barron, Buffalo, Dunn, Pepin, Pierce, Polk and St. Croix counties.

Ridge Breeze is operated by the Breeze Dairy Group, which runs a number of concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) across the state. The group has six factory farms totalling more than 10,000 cows around Wisconsin. The company has a history of manure spills at several of its properties. At the Pine Breeze in Waushara County, DNR records show nine manure spills in the last 11 years, totalling 150,000 gallons of spilled manure. 

Last year, Breeze Dairy Group purchased the Emerald Sky Dairy in the town of Emerald in St. Croix County shortly after the previous owners were granted permission to expand the operation from 1,600 to 3,300 cows. That operation has a history of harmful manure spills causing long-term damage to water and fish kills.

Last summer, hundreds of residents attended a hearing to testify against Ridge Breeze’s expansion. During the three-hour hearing, no one spoke  in favor of the expansion. The DNR’s determination opens a 60-day window in which the decision may be contested in court. Opponents said they would explore the possibility. 

“Massive livestock operations like these tear up roads, contaminate water and shut down small farms across the state, but this is just a bad permit for a rogue corporation,” Danny Akenson, a community organizer with GROWW said. “They operated a concrete factory without county permits, ignored DNR orders and have stated they won’t comply with local ordinances. We will be taking the next 60 days to explore contesting the DNR’s deeply flawed determination.”

Fights over the construction or expansion of factory farms have popped up across western Wisconsin. A number of communities in the area have passed ordinances that give local government the authority to require a permit that addresses a factory farm’s effect on local water, roads and environment. Judy Krohn, who worked on the committee that established a CAFO ordinance in Maiden Rock, said in a statement that the DNR’s Ridge Breeze decision shows the importance of local control. 

“Our fact-based ordinance provides rules and regulations to address citizens’ concerns, and is applicable to any factory farm using town roads and farmlands for manure hauling and disposal,” Krohn said. “At capacity, Ridge Breeze Dairy will generate more than 80 million gallons of manure every year that will have to go somewhere. It is urgent that towns in Pierce, Pepin and St, Croix Counties develop similar ordinances to protect the water, roads, health, safety and property values of their residents.”

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Mercedes Falk, executive director of the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, which takes Midwestern dairy farmers to Mexico to meet their workers' families, talks with Teresa Juarez Tepole in her home | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

VERACRUZ, MEXICO — John Rosenow climbed into a pickup truck in Zongolica, a small city in rural southern Mexico, squeezing into the front with several friends and relatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the back of the truck, six more people crowded onto benches, holding onto each other as the truck bounced over rutted dirt roads, climbing into the clouds as it traveled among little mountain villages in the state of Veracruz. The truck slowed down for a girl herding goats across the road and passed tiny wooden houses perched on the steep mountainside, with chickens in the yard and a few cows tied up by their horns.

“This never gets old,” said Rosenow, a 75-year-old dairy farmer from Waumandee, Wisconsin, who has made the same trip every winter since 2001, often joined by other dairy farmers who come to visit the families of their Mexican workers. He warned the group he might cry when he met up with some of his former employees. One current employee he’s particularly close to, Roberto, was contemplating moving home in December, but decided against it. “Man, that was the best Christmas present,” he said.

Along the way, the group saw wooden shacks with no indoor plumbing, dirt floors and tin roofs sitting next to big brick houses with shiny tile floors — the bigger houses built with money sent home by Mexican workers laboring in the U.S.

Economic interdependence and decades-long relationships have long bound dairy farmers in Wisconsin and nearby Minnesota to Mexican workers and their families. 

Of Rosenow’s 18 employees, 13 are from Mexico. That’s not unusual. Latin American workers, most of them from Mexico, perform an estimated 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. The money they send home has lifted many of their families out of poverty. And without them, dairies like Rosenow’s would go belly-up. Yet almost all of the immigrant workers who milk cows in the U.S. lack legal status. That’s because, while the U.S. government provides visas for migrant workers who pick seasonal crops and for immigrants with specialized technical skills, there is no U.S. visa program for low-skilled labor in year-round industries like dairy.

In San Juan Texhuacán, about an hour up the mountain from Zongolica, Rosenow and the group visited Fatima Tepole, 42, who milked cows on a farm in Minnesota for four years, from 2012 to 2016, saving enough money to build a house next door to her parents and siblings and to start her business, a little school supply store. 

“Here the average worker can make 300 pesos a day,” (about $15) she said. “There you can make that much in an hour.” (Her estimate is close to what Mexican government data shows: Mexico’s average monthly salary is the equivalent of $297 U.S. dollars, or about $15 per day for a five-day workweek. Subsistence farmers in rural Veracruz generally make less and work longer hours.)

The visitors from the U.S. gathered in Tepole’s parents’ kitchen to learn how to make tortillas on a wood-burning stove. Then Tepole and her family served them a feast – meat stewed in green chili sauce with fresh tortillas and cheese and bean tostadas. Tepole had hosted many other Bridges groups over the years, including the farmer she worked for in Minnesota. “You’re the first Americans deported by Donald Trump!” she joked. 

Building a house — ‘our biggest dream’

Tepole’s sister-in-law, Celeste Tzanahua Hernández, 31, stood near the stove while the group ate. “We thank you for visiting us,” she said. “It’s good that other people know that we’re not all bad people — that people know and can value the work and sacrifices we are making.”

Tzanahua Hernández’s husband, who previously milked cows and now works at a sawmill, has been away from his two children, ages 5 and 12, for the last three and a half years while working in the U.S., she said. They expect him to return in a few months.

Waiting for him has been “a heavy emotional burden,” she said. But with the money he sends home, supplemented with her earnings as a preschool teacher, they’ve been able to build a home — a spacious, open-plan living area and modern kitchen attached to the compound where the extended family lives — buy a used car and afford school tuition, music lessons, tae kwon do, dental work and doctor’s appointments for the children.

When he comes home, her husband is planning to buy some equipment and set himself up in business as a builder.

Lately the family has been worried about Trump’s deportation threats.

“My husband saw ICE at a restaurant. It scared him a lot. That would not be the best way to have to come home,” Tzanahua Hernández said. “He has a car there. He wants to sell it. My dad is worried about what will happen if he goes to jail, or if he has to leave with no money — and how they treat immigrants on the border.”

The family has urged him to send home his valuables: “If he has some good shoes, good things, start sending them home so he doesn’t lose them,” Tzanahua Hernández said.

“He comforts us by saying that the situation is not so dangerous,” she added. “But we see the news reports — the young men who had recently arrived and now have been deported. … He says he feels better knowing that now our house is built, which was our biggest dream.”

Tepole and other Mexican workers estimated that it costs $25,000 to $35,000 to build a small house — the goal of many who are sending home money from jobs in the U.S. The strength of the dollar means the money people earn in the U.S. goes much farther in Mexico.

“For the first year you work there, you pay off your debt to cross the border,” Tepole said. Border crossings can cost between  $11,000 and $15,000, workers told the Examiner. “If you work really hard you can do that in seven or eight months,” Tepole said. “After another year, you have enough to start building. But you are also covering expenses for your family. So it depends on those expenses how far you get. After that, in two or three more years you can finish your house if you give it your all.”

“Young people can do it faster,” she added. “It takes more time if you are paying expenses for your kids.”

Money sent home to Mexico by workers in the U.S. is the country’s largest single source of foreign income — more than Mexico brings in from tourism, exports of manufactured products or petroleum sales. In 2023 Mexico received $63.3 billion in remittances from its citizens who labor in the U.S. — about 4.5% of total GDP — according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mexico ranks second only to India for the size of the contribution made by people working abroad to their home country’s economy. And the amount of money sent home by Mexican workers in the U.S. has increased dramatically in recent years, by roughly 32% between 2019 and 2023, according to the same report. Beyond covering families’ basic expenses, remittances drive economic development, “providing households with the means to save money and make investments in education, upskilling, and community improvement,” the report found.

On the U.S. side, undocumented workers pay about $97 billion in total taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. About $26 billion of that goes to fund Social Security and $6 billion for Medicare — programs from which those workers are excluded. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking immigrants are taking money out of the pot,” says David Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative in New York. His group has done a lot of research over the years “to show how immigration is a big contributor to the overall economic success of this country,” Kallick adds. “But the economic damage done by tearing people away from their jobs is even bigger.” 

“You’re talking about 19% of the labor force and $4.6 trillion in economic output,” Kallick says of immigrant workers’ overall contribution to the U.S. economy. Deporting the estimated 11 million workers in the U.S. without legal status would have devastating ripple effects from the loss of farms, restaurants, construction projects, home health care and child care, he says. “We have a broken immigration system that has made it possible for people to become very much part of the economy across the board, and yet to be trapped in the lowest wage jobs in every sector.” 

“The reality,” he adds, “is there are not enough U.S.-born people to take the place of millions of people doing these jobs who are undocumented.”

One unintended consequence of the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border is that workers without authorization who would otherwise go home to Mexico have stayed in the U.S. for longer stints in recent years, knowing that once they go home they might never be able to cross the border again to come back.

‘When they go, it’s sad’

Up the hill from Fatima Tepole’s house, her friend Teresa Juarez Tepole, age 48, has four adult children between the ages of 26 and 33 who are working in the U.S, while she takes care of their children. Mercedes Falk, a translator on about 20 dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the director of the nonprofit group Puentes/Bridges, which organized the trip to Mexico, told Teresa that the farmer one of her sons works for in Minnesota is “an incredible person,” who wants to give her son special training so he can advance in his job. Teresa was glad to hear it. “He has confidence in my son,” she said, smiling.

When her children were very small their father died, Teresa said, and she barely scratched out a living by taking in washing and making tortillas. Sometimes the family was hungry.

She couldn’t afford to send the children to school beyond the early grades. From the time they were little, they helped with the washing and making tortillas. Her oldest son started working in a bakery as a teenager. “They’d give him four or five loaves of bread and he would bring them home, because I couldn’t afford to buy bread,” she said.

Now they’ve all gone to the U.S. “to see their kids grow up, to give them an education, too, because here there’s no money.”

Her granddaughter is in secondary school. “I can’t read or write well, but I tell my granddaughter she has to study hard because her mother is suffering so she can study,” she said. 

Teresa’s 30-year-old daughter has been in the U.S. for the last three and a half years. She picked fruit for the first year and a half and for the last two years has been milking cows on a dairy farm in Minnesota.

“When they go, it’s sad,” Teresa said. “You don’t know how long it will take them, when they’ll arrive, how they’ll be treated … I cried a lot.”

Even though she is proud of her children, she misses them, she said. “When they were growing up, at dinner time we always sat down together.”

And now, on top of the loneliness, there is more worry, she said. “With the president there, I start thinking of my kids and, my God, there they are and what if he throws them out? What if they’re mistreated? … There’s nothing to do but put ourselves in God’s hands, may he protect us.”

Hoping there aren’t mass deportations

At each stop on the Puentes/Bridges trip, people asked about Trump’s planned deportations.

Rosenow told several families that Brooke Rollins, Trump’s agriculture secretary, has said that deportations won’t hurt dairy farms. Rollins testified during her confirmation hearings that she supported Trump’s plan for mass deportations but that she would work with the administration to “make sure none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business.”

“I’m counting on that,” Rosenow said. During the trip, his wife called with another worry: Trump’s tariffs were reportedly about to wreak havoc with exports of butter to Canada and drive up the price of the peat moss they import to make the compost they sell on their farm.

At a stop outside the little town of Astacinga, the conversation again turned to deportation. Rosenow stopped to visit the family of his favorite employee, Roberto, 45, and Kevin, Roberto’s 21-year-old son, who came North a few years ago to work with his dad on the farm. 

In the kitchen, Rosenow told Roberto’s mother, Concepciona Acahua Macoixtle, 62, , with Falk translating, “Roberto is my best friend. He gets along with anybody. And he has become a better golfer than me.” The two men golf together every week during the season, and Roberto has become something of a local celebrity on the golf course in Buffalo County.

Rosenow got out his phone to show a picture of Roberto playing golf.

Roberto’s wife, Veronica, asked how her son Kevin was behaving. Assured by Rosenow that he was “a delight,” she then turned to her other worry. “Is there a lot of immigration enforcement up there?” she asked.

“There are a lot of rumors, but I have a lot of confidence in the secretary of agriculture,” Rosenow said, once again explaining that he’s relying on Rollins’ assurance that farms won’t go out of business because of immigration enforcement. 

“If not, tell my husband to come home,” Veronica said. “Or his boss should get him a visa.”

“I’d do it in a moment,” Rosenow said, as Falk translated.

Falk explained that six-month visas are for seasonal work and dairy farmers can’t apply for them for their workers. Roberto’s mother nodded. “You have to work every day.”

“Some people are getting grabbed by immigration,” she said. Restaurant workers from nearby Astacinga were deported to tent cities in the north of Mexico, she said, adding, “that’s why we’re worried about our children.”

Veronica’s son Aaron, 15, wanted to go up North, too, but Kevin calls and lectures him about staying in school, his mother told the group. Now he’s going to high school in Astacinga and will graduate in a couple of years, Veronica said. 

Concepciona’s grandchildren have vastly different lives from her own life growing up, or that of her children. Her mother died when she was 4 and she never went to school. Instead she tended the family’s sheep when she was young and met her husband at 18, when both were working in the fields cutting sugar cane.

When they were raising their children, Concepciona said, “We all lived together in one kitchen room. Sometimes there wasn’t enough food. They didn’t have shoes sometimes. They didn’t always have tortillas.”

As a teenager, Roberto went to work and took care of his little siblings, sending home money from jobs in Mexico City and later Kentucky, so they would have enough to eat. He first went to the U.S. when he was 16, but returned several times — the last time was when Meagan, 10, was born. He hasn’t been home since she was 3 months old.

“I told him to come home, but he doesn’t,” Concepciona said. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to. The problem is here there’s no money. There, he can earn money to help with his kids’ education. Ten years he’s been there.” She began to cry. 

“My mother- in-law has lost all five of her sons. They’re all up there,” said Veronica. 

During the years Roberto has spent in the U.S., he has built a home for his parents, and Veronica has overseen the excavation and building of their own two-story home with a carport, which looks like it was transplanted to the mountainside from a U.S. suburb. Brick pillars frame a heavy metal gate, behind which a manicured grass lawn is surrounded by a low rock wall and a garden full of fruit trees, palms and rose bushes. 

Veronica and Roberto also purchased more land nearby, where they keep a flock of sheep. With some of his earnings Roberto has helped his nieces go to college. One is finishing up studying to be a teacher and lives with Veronica, she said.

Meagan, a fifth grader, has always gotten good grades, Veronica said proudly. Meagan gave the U.S. visitors an impromptu performance of the Mexican national anthem in Nahuatl — she’d been practicing for a competition at her bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl school.

As the Puentes group got ready to leave, Concepciona said, “Tell my boys to take care. Ask when they are coming. They always say August, December. Then the next December comes and they don’t arrive.”

“The problem is the risk if they don’t have papers,” said Veronica, “so they can’t come back.”

This article is Part One in a series. In Part Two, the U.S.-born son of a deceased Mexican dairy worker meets his extended family in Mexico for the first time. 

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A Philadelphia poll worker demonstrates security steps for handling ballots before November’s presidential election. States have relied on federal partners to boost election security. (Photo by Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images)

The Trump administration has begun dismantling the nation’s defenses against foreign interference in voting, a sweeping retreat that has alarmed state and local election officials.

The administration is shuttering the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force and last week cut more than 100 positions at the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. President Donald Trump signed the law creating the agency in 2018. Among its goals is helping state and local officials protect voting systems.

Secretaries of state and municipal clerks fear those moves could expose voter registration databases and other critical election systems to hacking — and put the lives of election officials at risk.

In Pennsylvania, Republican Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt said states need federal help to safeguard elections from foreign and domestic bad actors.

“It is foolish and inefficient to think that states should each pursue this on their own,” he told Stateline. “The adversaries that we might encounter in Pennsylvania are very likely the same ones they’ll encounter in Michigan and Georgia and Arizona.”

Officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA, and other federal agencies were notably absent from the National Association of Secretaries of State winter meeting in Washington, D.C., earlier this month. Those same federal partners have for the past seven years provided hacking testing of election systems, evaluated the physical security of election offices, and conducted exercises to prepare local officials for Election Day crises, among other services for states that wanted them.

But the Trump administration thinks those services have gone too far.

In a Feb. 5 memo, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the administration is dismantling the FBI’s task force “to free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” The task force was launched in 2017 by then-FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Trump nominee.

In her confirmation hearing last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said CISA has “gotten far off-mission.” She added, “They’re using their resources in ways that was never intended.” While the agency should protect the nation’s critical infrastructure, its work combating disinformation was a step too far, she said.

This echoes the language from the conservative Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, which has driven much of the Trump administration’s policies. “The Left has weaponized [CISA] to censor speech and affect elections at the expense of securing the cyber domain and critical infrastructure,” it says.

But there is a direct correlation between pervasive election disinformation and political violence, election officials warn.

Federal officials led the investigations into the roughly 20 death threats that Colorado Democratic Secretary of State Jena Griswold has received over the past 18 months, Griswold said. Federal and Colorado officials also collaborated on social media disinformation and mass phishing scams.

“Trump is making it easier for foreign adversaries to attack our elections and our democracy,” Griswold said in an interview. “He incites all this violence, he has attacked our election system, and now he is using the federal government to weaken us.”

Colorado could turn to private vendors to, for example, probe systems to look for weaknesses, she said. But the state would be hard-pressed to duplicate the training, testing and intelligence of its federal partners.

Some election leaders aren’t worried, however.

“Kentucky has no scheduled elections in 2025, and we have no immediate concerns pending reorganization of this agency,” Republican Secretary of State Michael Adams told Stateline in an email.

Elections under attack

Since the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential campaign, the federal government has recognized that it overlooked security risks in the election system, said Derek Tisler, a counsel in the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center, a left-leaning pro-democracy institute.

Further, he said, the feds realized that election officials working in 10,000 local offices could not be frontline national security experts. On their own, local officials are incapable of addressing bigger security risks or spotting a coordinated attack across several states, Tisler said.

Much of the federal expertise and training came through CISA, Tisler said.

“Foreign interferers are not generally looking to interfere in Illinois’ elections or in Texas’ elections; they are looking to interfere in American elections,” he said. “A threat anywhere impacts all states. It’s important that information is not confined to state lines.”

During November’s presidential election, polling places in several states received bomb threats that were traced back to Russia. Ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington were lit on fire, and videos falsely depicting election workers destroying ballots circulated widely.

The fact that these attacks have not had a meaningful impact on the outcomes of elections may be due to the amount of preparation and training that came from federal assistance in recent years, said Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat.

Indeed, the right-leaning Foundation for Defense of Democracies praised the collaboration between federal and state and local partners on election security for dampening the impact of foreign interference in the presidential election, finding that adversaries did not “significantly” influence the results.

When Bellows took office in 2021, federal national security officials led state officials in emergency response training. After Bellows completed the training, she insisted that her state’s clerks, local emergency responders and law enforcement officers participate as well.

In addition, Maine coordinated with the FBI to provide de-escalation training to local clerks, to teach them how to prevent situations, such as a disruption from a belligerent voter, from getting out of hand. In 2022, CISA officials traveled to towns and cities across the state to assess the physical security of polling places and clerks’ offices.

Bellows said she’s most grateful for the federal help she got last year when she received a deluge of death threats, members of her family were doxed, and her home was swatted.

“I am deeply concerned that what is happening is actually gutting the election security infrastructure that exists and a tremendous amount of knowledge and expertise in the name of this political fight,” she told Stateline.

In Ingham County, Michigan, Clerk Barb Byrum last year invited two federal officials to come to her courthouse office southeast of Lansing to assess its physical security. Byrum got county funding to make improvements, including adding security cameras and a ballistic film on the windows of her office.

“The federal support is going to be missed,” she said. “It seems as though the Trump administration is doing everything it can to encourage foreign interference in our elections. We must remain vigilant.”

Scott McDonell, clerk for Dane County, Wisconsin, used to talk to Department of Homeland Security officials frequently to identify cybersecurity threats, including vulnerabilities in certain software or alerts about other attacks throughout the country. Losing that support could incentivize more interference, he said.

“I think it’s a terrible idea,” he said. “How can you expect someone like me, here in Dane County, to be able to deal with something like that?”

States fill the gap

Local election officials are nervous and uncertain about the federal election security cuts, said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, a nonprofit that works with state and local election officials to keep voting systems secure.

The threat landscape for elections is “extreme,” she said. And even though it’s not a major election year, quieter times are when election offices can prepare and perfect their practices, she said.

“It is a retreat and it’s a really ill-advised one,” she said. “It’s a little bit like saying the bank has a slow day on Tuesday, we’re going to let our security guards go home.”

With a federal exodus, there will be a real need for states to offer these sorts of programs and assistance, said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials, which trains and supports local officials.

“There’s going to be a big gap there for the states to try and fill,” she said. “Some of them might be sophisticated enough to be able to do some of it, but I think there’s going to be some real disparate application across the country of who’s going to be able to fill in those gaps.”

Bill Ekblad, Minnesota’s election security navigator, has leaned on the feds to learn the ropes of election security and potential threats, help him assist local election offices with better cyber practices and keep officials throughout the state updated with the latest phishing attempts.

He finds it disheartening to see the federal government stepping back, and worries that he won’t have access to intelligence about foreign threats. But after five years of working with the federal government, he is hopeful that his state has built resiliency.

“We have come a long way,” he said. “We will be able to move forward with or without the partnerships we’ve enjoyed in the past.”

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.

Charlotte Cravins, left, attends an event with her husband, Calvin Bell, and their children, infant son Landry Bell and daughter Lyric Bell. Landry was born with Down syndrome and is blind in one eye. Charlotte is worried that a lawsuit challenging part of a 50-year-old federal disability rights law could remove protections for children with disabilities, like Landry. (Courtesy of Charlotte Cravins)

A push by Republican attorneys general in 17 states to strike down part of a federal law that protects disabled people from discrimination has prompted an outcry from advocates, parents and some local officials.

The GOP-led lawsuit targets certain protections for transgender people. But some experts warn it has the potential to weaken federal protections for all people with disabilities.

Texas GOP Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the federal government in September over the Biden administration’s addition of a gender identity-related disorder to the disabilities protected under a section of a 1973 federal law.

Republican attorneys general from 16 other states joined the lawsuit: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia.

But the AGs face a growing public backlash that stems from conflicting messages about what the lawsuit would actually do.

“The disability community is outraged and scared,” said Charlotte Cravins, a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, attorney whose 1-year-old son has Down syndrome and is blind in one eye.

Cravins and other parents and advocates point to parts of the lawsuit in which the plaintiffs ask the court to find an entire section of the law unconstitutional. If the court agrees, they think it would allow schools, workplaces, hospitals and other entities to refuse to provide accommodations they’ve been required to provide for the past 50 years.

“It would affect so many people that every person in our state — really, in our country — should be concerned,” Cravins said. “If they can erase protections for disabled children, then who’s next?”

The provision in question, Section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act of 1973, prohibits entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on disability. For example, the law prohibits hospitals from denying organ transplants to people because they have a disability. It requires schools to allow deaf students to use speech-to-text technology. The law covers a wide range of disabilities, including vision and hearing impairments, autism, diabetes, Down syndrome, dyslexia and ADHD.

Last May, the Biden administration issued a rule that added to the covered disabilities “gender dysphoria,” the psychological distress that people may experience when their gender identity doesn’t match their sex assigned at birth. Gender dysphoria is defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

In recent days, national disability rights groups — including the American Council of the Blind, the National Down Syndrome Society, the National Association of the Deaf and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund — have encouraged the public to speak out, sparking a surge of activity on social media and calls to state lawmakers.

AGs respond

Despite the public backlash, some state AGs are digging in their heels.

Georgia Republican Attorney General Chris Carr insists the lawsuit wouldn’t affect existing disability protections. Instead, he said, it merely aims to reverse the Biden administration’s addition of gender dysphoria to the law’s protected disabilities.

“The constitutionality of 504 was never in question,” Carr said in a statement to Stateline. “We are fighting one woke policy added by Biden for virtue signaling.”

He said most Georgians don’t believe gender dysphoria should be treated as an eligible disability “as if it’s the same as Down syndrome or dyslexia or autism.”

Arkansas Republican Attorney General Tim Griffin issued a statement last week claiming that if the states win the lawsuit, “regulations would go back to what they were” before gender dysphoria was added to the law. He said that a ruling declaring Section 504 unconstitutional would only mean the federal government couldn’t revoke funding over a failure to comply with the part of the law protecting gender dysphoria.

But Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law expert and the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, wrote in an email that the lawsuit clearly asks the court to declare the entirety of Section 504 unconstitutional. He called the request “truly stunning.”

The lawsuit is currently on hold. Shortly after President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, the parties in the case agreed to pause litigation while the new administration reevaluates the federal government’s position. Status reports are due to a judge later this month. Some of the AGs involved in the lawsuit, including Georgia’s Carr and West Virginia Republican Attorney General J.B. McCuskey, have said they expect the Trump administration to reverse the Biden rule. That could cause the AGs’ lawsuit to be dropped.

Meanwhile, as public pressure escalates, some AGs are distancing themselves from the suit.

South Carolina Republican Attorney General Alan Wilson said in a statement last week that Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order stating that “it is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” resolved his concerns. “Our mission is complete,” Wilson said. Some advocates understood his statement to mean he might withdraw South Carolina from the lawsuit.

However, a spokesperson for his office told Stateline that South Carolina would not be withdrawing from the lawsuit, but would be filing a notice with the court this week to clarify that the state is not asking for Section 504 to be declared unconstitutional.

Utah Republican Attorney General Derek Brown said in a statement that Utah joined the lawsuit before he took office and that he doesn’t think Section 504 will be invalidated because “the Trump administration will soon withdraw the regulation” that added gender dysphoria to the list of disabilities.

The AGs argue that established federal law does not consider gender identity disorders to be disabilities. They say allowing the Biden rule to remain in place would let the government withhold federal funding from schools unless they allow transgender students to compete in sports or use locker rooms that match their gender identity.

Grassroots efforts

Cravins, the Louisiana attorney and mother, sent a letter this week to Louisiana Republican Attorney General Liz Murrill, asking her to drop Louisiana from the lawsuit.

Murrill issued a statement Wednesday expressing support for people with disabilities and saying her office is “actively seeking a resolution with the Trump administration” to withdraw the Biden rule while keeping the law’s previous protections intact.

Cravins said her son depends on Section 504 protections to access specialized therapies, and will rely on those protections even more as he approaches school age. Section 504 will help ensure he receives access to vision-related support, therapy and other accommodations in school.

Cravins believes the AGs that signed onto the lawsuit aren’t being honest about its potential impact to protections for all people with disabilities.

“For them to say one thing and the lawsuit to say another, I can’t imagine it’s anything other than them being disingenuous with their constituents,” she said.

Ryan Renaud, a school board representative for one of the largest public school districts in Alabama, said a concerned parent who also is an attorney contacted him last week, after reading a story about Alabama Republican Attorney General Steve Marshall joining the lawsuit. More calls soon followed.

“We’ve been hearing from dozens of parents in the last couple of days,” Renaud told Stateline. Without Section 504 protections, he said, students could lose access to a wide range of accommodations, from classroom aides to extra time to take tests.

The impacts could extend beyond what most people think of when they think of special education, he said.

“This includes students with ADHD, heart disease, depression, visual impairment, diabetes,” Renaud said. “Accommodations that come with those health concerns also fall under 504 plan protection.

“When a student doesn’t have those accommodations, they become less secure in class and teachers are less able to manage their classrooms.”

He’s also worried that the funding from the U.S. Department of Education that helps pay for those accommodations could vanish if federal law no longer requires them. Trump has vowed to dismantle the agency.

“We spend on average $30 million a year or more on special education, and more than a quarter of that is provided by the federal government,” he said. “If [accommodations] aren’t federally protected and the Department of Education doesn’t have the authority to disburse the funds, we have to assume we’d have to pick up that slack through local or state funding.

“And it’s hard to believe Alabama would cough up tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to supplement these costs.”

Last year, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 1.6 million students with disabilities were served under Section 504 nationwide during the 2020-2021 school year.

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.

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An Eau Claire County farm. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

Seven western Wisconsin Republican lawmakers did not appear at an event hosted by the Wisconsin Farmers Union in Chippewa Falls Friday as farmers from the area said they were concerned about the effect that President Donald Trump’s first month in office is having on their livelihoods. 

Madison-area U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Black Earth), state Sen. Jeff Smith (D-Eau Claire) and state Reps. Jodi Emerson (D-Eau Claire) and Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) were in attendance. 

U.S. Reps. Tom Tiffany and Derrick Van Orden, state Reps. Rob Summerfield (R-Bloomer), Treig Pronschinske (R-Mondovi) and Clint Moses (R-Menomonie) and state Sens. Jesse James (R-Thorp) and Rob Stafsholt (R-New Richmond) were all invited but did not attend or send a staff member. 

“All four of us want you to know that there are people in elected office who want to fight for you,” Phelps said. “Because I think there’s a lot of fear that comes from the fact that we’re seeing a lot of noise and action from the people who aren’t and some of the people that didn’t show up to this. So I hope that you will also ask questions of them when you get a chance.” 

Multiple times during the town hall, Pocan joked that Van Orden was “on vacation.” 

Emerson, whose district was recently redrawn to include many of the rural areas east of Eau Claire, told the Wisconsin Examiner she had just been at an event held by the Chippewa County Economic Development Corporation where a Van Orden staff member did attend, so she didn’t understand why they couldn’t hear about how Trump’s policies are harming local farmers. 

“I get that a member of Congress can’t be at every meeting all the time, all throughout their district,” Emerson said. With 19 counties in the 3rd District, “it’s a big area. But I hope that they’re hearing the stories of farmers and farm-adjacent businesses, even if they weren’t here. There’s something different to sit in this room and look out at all the farmers, and when one person’s talking, seeing the tears in everybody else’s eyes, and it wasn’t just the female farmers that were crying, the big tough guys, and I think that talks about how vulnerable they are right now, how scary it is for some of these folks.”

Carolyn Kaiser, a resident of the nearby town of Wheaton, said she’s never seen her congressional representative, Van Orden, out in the community. Despite Van Orden’s position on the House agriculture committee, Kaiser said her town needs help managing nitrates in the local water supply and financial support to rebuild crumbling rural roads that make it more difficult for farmers to transport their products.

“When people don’t come, it’s unfortunate,” Kaiser said. 

Emmet Fisher, who runs a small dairy farm in Hager City, said during the town hall that he was struggling with the freeze that’s been put on federal spending, which affected grants he was set to receive through the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Fisher told the Examiner his farm has participated in a USDA program to encourage better conservation practices on farms and that money has been frozen. He was also set to receive a rural energy assistance grant that would help him install solar panels on the farm — money that has also been held up.

The result, he said, is that he’s facing increased uncertainty in an already uncertain business.

“We get all our income from our farm, young family, young kids, a mortgage on the farm, and so, you know, things are kind of tight, and so we try to take advantage of anything that we can,” he said. “[The] uncertainty seems really unnecessary and unfortunate, and it’s very stressful. You know, basically, we have no idea what we should be planning for. The reality is just that in farming already, you can only plan for so much when the weather and ecology and biology matter so much, and now to have all of these other unknowns, it makes planning pretty much impossible.”

A number of crop farmers at the event said the looming threat of Trump imposing tariffs on Canadian imports is alarming because a large majority of potash — a nutrient mix used to fertilize crops — used in the United States comes from Canada. Les Danielson, a cash crop and dairy farmer in Cadott, said the tariffs are set to go into effect during planting season.

“How do you offer a price to a farmer? Is it gonna be $400 a ton, or is it gonna be $500 a ton?” he asked. “I’m not even thinking about the fall. I’m just thinking about the spring and the uncertainty. This isn’t cuts to the federal budget, this is just plain chaos and uncertainty that really benefits no one. And I know it’s kind of cool to think we’re just playing this big game of chicken. Everybody’s gonna blink. But when you’re a co-op, or when you’re a farmer trying to figure out how much you can buy, it’s not fine.”

A recent report by the University of Illinois found that a 25% tariff on Canadian imports — the amount proposed by Trump to go into effect in March — would increase fertilizer costs by $100 per ton for farmers.

Throughout the event, speakers said they were concerned that Trump’s efforts to deport workers who are in the United States without authorization  could destroy the local farm labor force, that cuts to programs such as SNAP (commonly known as food stamps) could cause kids to go hungry and prevent farmers from finding markets to sell their products, that cuts to Medicaid could take coverage away from a population of farmers that is aging and relies on government health insurance and that because of all the disruption, an already simmering mental health crisis in Wisconsin’s agricultural community — in rural parts of the state that have seen clinics and hospitals close or consolidate — could come to a boil.

“Rural families, we tend to really need BadgerCare. We need Medicaid. We need those programs, too,” Pam Goodman, a public health nurse and daughter of a farmer, said. “So if you’re talking about the loss of your farming income, that you’re not going to have cash flow, you’re already experiencing significant concerns and issues, and we need the state resources. We need those federal resources. I’ve got families that from young to old, are experiencing significant health issues. We’re not going to be able to go to the hospital. We’re not going to go to the clinic. We already traveled really long distances. We’re talking about the health of all of us, and that is, for me, from my perspective as a nurse, one of my biggest concerns, because it’s all very interrelated.”

Near the end of the event, Phelps said it’s important for farmers in the area to continue sharing how they’re being hurt by Trump’s actions, because that’s how they build political pressure.

“Who benefits from all the chaos and confusion and cuts? Nobody, roughly, but not literally, nobody,” he said. “Because I just want to point out that dividing people and making people confused and uncertain and vulnerable is Donald Trump’s strategy to consolidate his political power.”

“And the people that can withstand the types of cuts that we’re seeing are the people so wealthy that they can withstand them. So they’re in Donald Trump’s orbit, basically,” Phelps said, adding  that there are far more people who will be adversely affected by Trump’s policies than there are people who will benefit.

“And you know that we all do have differences with our neighbors, but we also have a lot of similarities with them, and being in that massive group of people that do not benefit from this kind of chaos and confusion is a pretty big similarity,” he continued. “And so hopefully these types of spaces where we’re sharing our stories and hearing from each other will help us build the kind of community that will result in the kind of political power that really does fight back against it.”

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Milwaukee's Hoan Bridge looking out toward Lake Michigan. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

Kayakers on Wisconsin’s Lake Superior coastline rely on data collected by buoys operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to determine if conditions are safe enough for a weekend paddle or if the swells and wind could spell danger on a lake famous for wrecking much larger watercraft. 

Surfers in Sheboygan use buoys on Lake Michigan to figure out if the city is living up to its name as the “Malibu of the Midwest” on a given day. Anglers on the shores and on the ice all over the lakes rely on the buoy data to track fish populations.

Freighters sailing from Duluth, Minnesota and Superior use NOAA data to track weather patterns and ice coverage. 

Wisconsin’s maritime economy provides nearly 50,000 jobs and nearly $3 billion to the state’s gross domestic product, according to a 2024 NOAA report, but in the first month of the administration of President Donald Trump, the agency is being threatened. 

The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences, UW-Madison’s Sea Grant and UW Extension’s National Estuarine Research Reserve use funds through NOAA grant programs to study the state’s two Great Lakes. 

Faculty at universities across the state receive NOAA money to study weather forecasting, severe droughts and precipitation on the Pacific Ocean. NOAA helps the state Department of Administration manage more than 1,000 miles of coastline and funds local efforts to control erosion and prevent flooding. A previous NOAA project worked with the state’s Native American tribes to study manoomin, also known as wild rice, to help maintain the plant that is sacred to the tribes and plays an important ecological role. 

All of that research could be at risk if cuts are made at NOAA. 

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — named for an internet meme of a shiba inu (a breed of Japanese hunting dog) first made popular more than a decade ago — has set its sights on NOAA. In early February, staffers with DOGE entered NOAA’s offices seeking access to its IT system, the Guardian reported. A week later, the outlet reported that scientists at the agency would need to gain approval from a Trump appointee before communicating with foreign nationals. The agency has been asked to identify climate change-related grant projects.

To run the agency, Trump has nominated Neil Jacobs as NOAA administrator. Jacobs was cited for misconduct after he and other officials put pressure on NOAA scientists to alter forecasts about 2019’s Hurricane Dorian in a scandal that became known as “Sharpiegate.” Trump has also nominated Taylor Jordan as the assistant Secretary of Commerce overseeing NOAA. Jordan previously worked as a lobbyist for private weather forecasting agencies that would benefit from the dismantling of NOAA — which runs the National Weather Service. 

A suggested Trump administration plan for NOAA was laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint. The plan calls for NOAA to “be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories,” because it has “become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” 

Sara Hudson, the city of Ashland’s director of parks and recreation, says the community is dependent on Lake Superior year round and funding from NOAA helps the city manage its coastline. She says the city has about $1.2 million in grant funding that could be affected by cuts at NOAA. The city’s total 2024-25 budget is about $2.4 million. 

“With the funding that Ashland has, we really don’t have a lot of access to be able to do coastal resiliency or coastal management projects,” she says. “So we rely on grants to be able to do extra.” Among the affected projects, she says, could be  coastal resiliency projects that help maintain public access to a waterfront trail along Lake Superior, projects to help improve water quality including the Bay City Creek project and work on invasive species and promoting native species within public lands.

Even if Trump and Musk are trying to erase climate change research from NOAA’s mandate, the effect of a warming climate could have dire consequences for Ashland’s lake-based economy, according to Hudson. Hundreds of businesses on Lake Superior can’t survive if the tourism season ends in the fall. 

“For a community that relies on winter and every year sees less winter, economically it could be devastating,” Hudson says. “We need to have tourism 12 months out of the year. And if our winters go away, that really, that’s going to be a pivot to us. But our winter … that’s the only way our businesses can stay alive here.” 

The Great Lakes provide drinking water for about 40 million people across the United States and Canada. Organizations like the National Estuarine Research Reserve are funded by NOAA to help make sure that water is healthy. 

“We’re doing things like tracking algae blooms and changes in water quality that are really important for tourism and fishing and drinking water,” Deanna Erickson, the research reserve’s director, says. “On Lake Superior we’re working in rural communities on flood emergencies and emergency management and coastal erosion; 70% of the reserve’s operational funding comes through NOAA, and that’s matched with state funds. So in Superior, Wisconsin, that’s, you know, a pretty big economic impact here we have about a million dollars in funding for our operations.”

Eric Peace, vice president of the Ohio-based Lake Carriers Association, says that cuts to NOAA could have drastic effects on Great Lakes shipping because the data collected by the agency is crucial to navigating the lakes safely.

“On Lake Michigan, those buoys are critical to navigation safety, because what they do is provide real time data on wind, waves, current water temperatures, etc,” he says. “And our captains use those extensively to avoid storms and to find places to transit and leave.” 

Further north on Lake Superior, real-time reports on water conditions are crucial because of how dangerous the lake can get.

“I was stationed on a buoy tender in Alaska, and I’d take the 30-footers that you get up there over the 10-footers you get on Lake Superior, because they’re so close together here,” says Peace, who spent more than 20 years in the U.S. Coast Guard. “They’re all wind-driven, and they’re dangerous. Couple that with icing and everything else, you have a recipe for disaster.”

The DOGE mandate for NOAA scientists to stop communicating with foreign nationals could have a significant impact on Great Lakes shipping because the agency coordinates with the Coast Guard and a Canadian agency to track ice conditions on the Great Lakes. 

“That is one area that would be detrimental,” Peace says. “We wouldn’t have that ice forecasting from the Canadians. We would have to assume control of that completely for our own sake.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin recently introduced a bipartisan bill with a group of senators from seven other Great Lakes states to increase funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. The initiative involves 12 federal agencies, including NOAA, to keep the lakes clean. In a statement, Baldwin said she’d work to fight against any efforts that would harm Wisconsin’s Great Lakes. 

“Republicans are slashing support for our veterans, cancer research, and now, they are coming after resources that keep our Great Lakes clean and open for business — all to find room in the budget to give their billionaire friends a tax break,” she said. “Wisconsin communities, farmers, and businesses rely on our Great Lakes, and I’ll stand up to any efforts that will hurt them and their way of life.”

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Elon Musk and Donald Trump are busy smashing the state. Wisconsinites will have a chance to weigh in on candidates who support and oppose the anti-government crusade on April 1. | Getty Images Creative

Wisconsinites voted for Donald Trump by a narrow margin in November. Does that mean a majority of voters here want to cancel farmers’ federal contracts, shut down Head Start centers across the state and turn loose Elon Musk to feed federal agencies into the woodchipper while hoovering up private citizens’ financial information?

The new Trump era is putting Republican nihilism to the test. In our closely divided swing state, the first official indication of whether Trump voters are developing buyers’ remorse will come, fittingly, on April Fool’s Day. 

In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, candidate Brad Schimel has received Elon Musk’s endorsement and is benefitting from a huge ad buy by Musk’s political action committee. And while some Republicans have expressed qualms about Trump and Musk’s assertions that they have unchecked power to ride roughshod over judges and the U.S. Constitution, Schimel has, notably, sided with Trump and Musk against the courts. 

Last month, Schimel took to Vicki McKenna’s rightwing talk radio show to denounce the prosecution and sentencing of the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol after Trump lost in 2020, saying juries in Washington, D.C., were too liberal to deliver a fair verdict. Recently, on the same talk radio program, he criticized federal judges for blocking the ransacking of federal agencies by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), accusing the judges of “acting corruptly” by daring to issue temporary restraining orders.

The race between Schimel and Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will determine the ideological balance of the Court and, it seems, whether a majority of justices believe in the integrity of the court system at all. 

Also on the April 1 ballot is the race for state schools superintendent, which pits a lobbyist for the private school voucher industry against a defender of public schools — an existential choice as the growth of schools vouchers is on track to bankrupt our state’s public school system and enrollment caps on voucher programs are set to come off next year.

The ideological struggle over the future of our state was on stark display this week as Gov. Tony Evers presented his budget plan — an expansive vision that uses the state surplus to boost funding for K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin, health care, clean water and rural infrastructure, and leaves a cushion to help protect communities against what Evers called the “needless chaos caused by the federal government” under Trump.

In a familiar ritual, Republican legislators immediately shot down Evers’ plan, denounced it as “reckless spending” and promised to throw it in the trash and replace it with a stripped-down alternative based on austerity and tax cuts.

“Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump and his agenda to cut spending and find inefficiency in government,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared.

But did they? 

It’s not clear that most Wisconsinites wanted what Trump and Musk are delivering — cuts to health care and veterans’ services, the claw-back of infrastructure projects, mass firings at the park service and the chaotic suspension of promised federal funds for child care and other essential services in Wisconsin.

For generations, Republicans have complained about “red tape” and “big government” and promised “freedom” and lower taxes to constituents who liked the sound of all that. Under Trump, we are seeing anti-government ideology reach its full, unchecked fruition. Trump’s No. 1 private donor, the richest man in the world, is laughing all the way to the bank. He’s using his access to trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds to cancel food programs for poor children and to bolster federal contracts that enrich himself. 

This, in the end, is what privatization is all about — taking the collective wealth of millions of people who contribute to maintaining a decent, healthy society and concentrating it in the hands of one very rich, self-interested man.

The long-term, existential struggle between private wealth and the public good in Wisconsin includes the fight over whether to fund public schools or give away money to subsidize the tuition of private school families. It includes whether to be the second-to-last state to finally offer 12 months of postpartum Medicaid coverage to new mothers — something even our Republican legislators support, minus Vos. The two sides of our divided government are locked in a battle over whether our universities, public parks, infrastructure, clean water and affordable housing are a boondoggle or something we ought to protect. 

Given what’s happening to our country, Wisconsinites will have to think hard about which side they’re on. 

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Entrance to Senate Chambers in the Wisconsin State Capitol. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

The state Senate Health Committee cleared three bills Thursday, two of them on bipartisan votes, advancing them to the full Senate for consideration.

SB 4 allows direct primary care doctors, who charge patients on a monthly subscription, to practice without being regulated as part of the insurance industry. 

The bill passed 3-2, with the Senate committee’s two Democrats, Sens. Jeff Smith and Dora Drake, voting against recommending it for passage.

Drake said she voted against the measure because it lacked non-discrimination language that had been included in a previous version of the bill.

The bill from the 2023-24 legislative session included a non-discrimination section listing a series of civil-rights protections for patients. One of those items, forbidding discrimination on the basis of “gender identity,” led two organizations, Wisconsin Family Action and the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, to oppose the legislation.

Although the legislation passed the Assembly on a voice vote in 2024 and was unanimously endorsed by both the Assembly and Senate health committees, it died after the state Senate failed to take it up.

The current bill states that direct primary care providers “may not decline to enter into or terminate a direct primary care agreement with a patient solely because of the patient’s health status.”

It has replaced language enumerating specific civil rights protections with a more general stipulation that it “shall not be construed to limit the application” of Wisconsin’s civil rights statute to a health care provider’s practice. The civil rights law bars discrimination based on race, sex and sexual orientation, but is silent on gender identity.

“As Chair of the Legislative Black Caucus, I refuse to support a new version of a bill that doesn’t provide protections for Wisconsinites that prevents discrimination from healthcare providers,” Drake told the Wisconsin Examiner via email.

The committee voted unanimously Thursday to recommend the other two bills.

SB 23 would make it possible for women who are covered by Medicaid in childbirth to maintain that coverage for a full year after the child is born. The postpartum Medicaid legislation has broad bipartisan support, but Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) has opposed extending the coverage, claiming it would expand “welfare.”

SB 14 requires health care providers to obtain a patient’s consent when they teach medical students how to do pelvic exams by having them practice on women under anesthesia. Authors of the bill and advocates have reported that some providers have a history of training students on the procedure with unconscious patients who have not been informed or given consent.

The committee also added a requirement that hospitals institute written policies for informed consent relating to pelvic exams under anesthesia. The amendment replaces language requiring an administrative rule implementing the requirement.

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Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde said Black History Month is about recognizing the history people should be learning year round. Screenshot via WisEye.

The Wisconsin Assembly unanimously passed a resolution Tuesday recognizing February as Black History Month without significant roadblocks or delays for the first time in many years. 

“I’m so glad that we are finally able to bring this bipartisan effort to the floor of the Assembly without all of the challenges that we’ve had before,” Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde (D-Milwaukee) said.

Black History Month resolutions have faced pushback from Republican lawmakers in previous years. Issues started in 2019 when the resolution included Colin Kapaernick, the Wisconsin-native former NFL player that knelt during the national anthem to protest police violence. In 2021, Republicans rejected a resolution due to the individuals included. A Republican resolution, which was written without the support of  the Legislative Black Caucus, was passed in 2022 without Democratic support. A resolution passed in 2023 declaring February Black History Month — but did not receive a vote until March, and no resolution passed in 2024.

Moore Omokunde said the month is about recognizing the Black history that people should learn year round, not just for one month.

The resolution acknowledges that enslaved Africans were first brought to Virginia over 400 years ago and acknowledges the history of Black History Month, which has its roots in Carter G. Woodson’s “Negro History Week” established in 1926. 

The resolution recognizes 14 Black Americans, including several Wisconsinites. They include Elisterine Clayton, a 100-year-old Milwaukee resident who helped build one of the longest-standing Black residential neighborhood, Halyard Park; Paul Higginbotham, the first African-American judge to serve on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals; Marcia Anderson, a retired senior officer of the United States Army Reserve from Beloit, Wisconsin, who was the first Black woman to become a major general; Anthony McGahee, a Milwaukee gospel musician and choir director, and Shakita LaGrant-McClain, the executive director of the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services.

An amendment to the resolution removed Samuel Coleman, who is currently serving as the assistant superintendent of instruction for the Oshkosh Area School District, from those being recognized. In 2022, Coleman was part of a controversy related to text messages he sent about white people while employed at another Wisconsin school district. The office of Rep. Kalan Haywood — who authored the amendment — hasn’t responded to a request for more information.

Rep. Sequanna Taylor (D-Milwaukee) said that Black history is American history. 

“It is woven into every fabric of this nation — building and shaping this nation, the economy of this nation and the progress of this nation,” Taylor said. “From the resilience of those who fought against oppression, to the brilliance of those who have shaped our industries, science and art, Black Americans have been at the heart of every chapter of this nation’s story.”

“[Black history] did not start with slavery and it does not end with the cutting of DEI,” Taylor said. 

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts have been targeted by the state and federal lawmakers over the last several years. While the new Trump administration issued a proclamation declaring February Black History Month, he also signed an executive order in January to end DEI efforts. The move led the Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs to remove web pages related to DEI. The U.S. Defense Department has also declared “identity months dead.” Republican lawmakers in Wisconsin have also been taking actions with the goal of eliminating DEI initiatives throughout the University of Wisconsin System and other state agencies. 

Taylor recognized her colleagues in the Legislative Black Caucus, including Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee), Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), Rep. Kalan Haywood (D-Milwaukee), Rep. Darrin Madison (D-Milwaukee) and Rep. Margaret Arney (D-Wauwatosa), for their work. 

“Black history is alive in the work we do today in the fight for equity in the demand for fair policies and the commitment to ensure that future generations inherit a nation that truly lives up to its promise of liberty and justice,” Taylor said.

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Rep. Benjamin Franklin speaks about his bill to require 70% of funding in schools go towards "classroom" expenses. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin Republicans in the state Assembly passed a package of education bills Wednesday to implement new standards for standardized test scores, school funding allocations, responding to curriculum inspection requests and for keeping cell phones out of schools. 

Republicans argued that the state needs to ensure that schools are meeting certain standards, especially as they’ve provided some state funding increases in recent years and as school enrollments have declined. While Wisconsin schools did receive an increase in the last state budget, many schools continue to struggle to meet costs as funding has failed to match the rate of inflation.

“We need to make sure that, as we are increasing funding for education, we are also doing a better job, ensuring that the standards and the expectations that parents and taxpayers have across the state are being met,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) said at a press conference. 

Vos called some school districts “disappointing”  and named Milwaukee Public Schools as an example. The district, which was  an ongoing target of Republican lawmakers throughout the debate, has experienced turmoil over the last few years with turnover in staff, a financial crisis after delays in delivering required documents to DPI and reading and math scores that show continued disparities between Black and white students.

“I’m a huge supporter of local control. There are some districts that are so broken and expect us to have to pay for it as taxpayers, either on the front end through funding the school district or on the back end with the bad decisions that are made where people make bad choices,” Vos said. “Having that statewide standards is good for Wisconsin while still maintaining the flexibility to try to get there.”

Democrats said Republicans’ focus was in the wrong place and that the proposed solutions would not help address the real challenges that schools are facing. 

Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) criticized Republicans for rejecting Gov. Tony Evers’ budget proposal that would invest heavily in Wisconsin K-12 education. 

Evers unveiled his complete state budget proposal Tuesday evening, calling for more than $3 billion in additional funding for K-12 schools, including to support operational costs, special education and mental health supports. 

“The level of investment from the Legislature is just not enough to provide these essential investments in our schools,” Neubauer said. “Here in the Capitol, the Legislature has failed our students … we just have not kept up our end of the bargain.” 

“Instead of bringing legislation to the floor to support our schools, teachers and students, the best the majority party can do is to fast-track a bill that would require cursive instruction,” Neubauer said. That bill — AB 3 — passed 51-46 with Reps. Joy Goeben (R-Hobart), Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers) and David Steffen (R-Howard) joining Democrats to vote against it.  

Test scores

Another bill focused on reversing changes to standards on state tests that were approved by the DPI last year. GOP lawmakers slammed State Superintendent Jill Underly, who is running for reelection against Republican-backed education consultant Brittany Kinser, for approving the changes in the first place.

“Something is wrong in our communication system. It is not a lack of resources. It’s a lack of willpower to do something about the problems that we know are obvious because it is the fact that we have kids who can’t read,” Vos said. He added that only lawmakers should be allowed to “dumb down” the state’s standards.

Vos said there was only one person — referencing Underly — that “needs to pay a price” and “hopefully she will in April.”

Wisconsin students take standardized tests each year including the Forward Exam for third graders through eighth graders and the ACT and PreACT Secure for high school students. 

Underly approved changes to the standards last year that included new terms — “developing,” “approaching,” “meeting” and “advanced” — to describe student achievement. Previously, the terms were “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” and “advanced.” The changes also included new cut scores — which are the test scores cutoffs needed to qualify to be placed in each performance level. 

Underly and DPI have defended the changes, saying they were necessary to more accurately measure achievement; that educators and other stakeholders worked together to create the new measures with Underly signing off; and that it’s too late to take the state back to 2019-20 standards.

Republican lawmakers said the changes “lowered” state standards and were an attempt to “cook the books.”

AB 1 directs DPI to use score ranges and qualitative terms used on school report cards for the 2019-2020 school year and to tie the Forward exam score ranges and pupil performance categories to those set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). 

“There’s no legislative oversight on the scoring and assessment of our kids, so this bill will establish that,” bill coauthor Rep. Robert Wittke (R-Caledonia) said at a press conference.

“We will be once again allowed to compare ourselves to other states — let us know who’s doing well, are we on pace with them or not,” Wittke said. “Then it provides legislative oversight, so the only time these scores can be adjusted or changed is when we actually legislate.” 

Rep. Angelina M. Cruz (D-Racine), who has worked as an educator for the last 20 years, said during floor debate that a variety of student assessments are used to measure students’ learning with each serving a “unique purpose” and reflecting the “expertise of professional educators.” She said that goes for the state tests as well and said the updates to standards weren’t made in a “vacuum,” noting that this isn’t the first time DPI has made changes and it shouldn’t be the last.

“Education is dynamic,” Cruz said. “The disconnect between the reality of classroom teaching and this body and the understanding of assessments has never been more clear… This bill is not about improving education. This bill is about playing political games.” 

Cruz said lawmakers would be better served fully funding the state’s public schools. 

During floor debate, Wittke said that Democrats were repeating political talking points by talking about increasing  funding for public schools. 

The bill passed 55-44 along party lines with Republicans for and Democrats against it.

Ban cell phones

Lawmakers also passed a bill that would mandate cell phone bans in schools statewide. 

Under AB 2, school boards must require districts to adopt cell phone ban policies in their schools during instructional time. Policies would need to be implemented by July 2026 and would need to include certain exceptions in emergencies, cases involving student’s health care, individualized education program (IEP) or 504 plan and for educational purposes.

Kitchens said it was a “modest” proposal and would help schools enforce policies if they already have them and get other school districts on the same page. 

“Part of that is putting them away when it’s time to do work,” Kitchens said, adding that the bill would provide a “unified” approach for the state. During the 40 minutes of debate on the bill, some lawmakers in the Assembly chamber could be seen with their phones out.

Of the 320 school districts that participated in DPI’s 2024-25 State Digital Learning survey approximately 90% of districts reported already having some sort of restrictive cell phone policy in place.

Rep. Robyn Vining (D-Wauwautosa) said she thinks the original intent of the bill was genuine in trying to address challenges posed by phones in classrooms. However, she noted that it wouldn’t apply to the state’s private and charter schools that participate in voucher programs. Vining said the bill was modeled after legislation in Indiana, but Wisconsin Republicans intentionally carved out the voucher schools.

“It’s not fair when the concerns of voucher lobbyists are considered valid by Republicans in the Legislature that while the same concerns are ignored when they come from public schools,” Vining said.

Kitchens said the issue shouldn’t be partisan and noted that Louisiana, a red state, and New York, a blue state, both have strict statewide cell phone ban policies.

The bill passed 53-45 with Rep. Rob Swearingen (R-Rhinelander) joining Democrats against. 

Materials inspections within 14 days

AB 5, which would require school districts to comply with requests within 14 days, passed 54-43, also on a party-line vote, with Republicans for and Democrats against. 

Parents can already submit open records requests to school districts to receive school materials. The bill adds  that entities should respond “as soon as practicable and without delay.” 

Rep. Barbara Dittrich (R-Oconomowoc) said during the press conference that the bill seeks to help  parents get information about materials more quickly. She noted that there are no time requirements included in state statute for responding to open records requests. 

“I’m old enough to remember a time in our Wisconsin schools where our schools were begging parents to become engaged and then there came a huge fracture when COVID-19 hit,” Dittrich said. Some parents, she said, aren’t having their requests fulfilled before their child is out of the class. “[The bill] works at bridging this gap between schools and families so they can work together for the benefit of our students.” 

This is the third time lawmakers have introduced a bill to implement a time frame for complying. In the 2021-23 session, the bill passed the Legislature and Evers vetoed it. Last session, the bill passed the Assembly and never received a vote in the Senate

Other laws in Wisconsin include one that requires a list of textbooks be filed with the school board clerk every year on an annual basis. Another state statute requires school boards to provide the complete human growth and development curriculum and all instructional materials for inspection to parents who request it.

Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison) said the bill is unnecessary given the current state laws. 

“It’s trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist,” Hong said. 

Requiring 70% of money to go to “classroom” expenses

AB 6 would require school boards in Wisconsin to spend a minimum of 70% of operating money on direct classroom expenditures and limit annual compensation increases for school administrators to the average percent increase provided to teachers in the school district. 

An amendment to the bill would clarify that “direct classroom expenditures” would not include costs for administration, food services, transportation, instructional support including media centers, teacher training and student support such as nurses and school counselors. Those costs would need to fall under the other 30% of spending. 

Rep. Benjamin Franklin (R-De Pere) said the state has “a system that fails to put the money in the classroom where the education is happening” and said the bill would implement “guardrails” for school districts to ensure money is going to classrooms and teachers. 

Rep. Joan Fitzgerald (D-Fort Atkinson) said she was voting against the bill — and others on the calendar — because they appeared to be written without “meaningful input” from teachers, administrators, superintendents, parents, students or community members. 

“I’m here to let you know that if you want support in the educational community for any education bill, you should do your homework,” Fitzgerald said, “including having conversations with the public and reaching across the aisle.” 

Fitzgerald said Franklin’s bill would take away local control from school districts and school boards and criticized the bill for including “vague” wording and “undefined terms,” saying the bills are unserious. 

“What about all the additional staff needed to meet the special needs of my students — people like speech pathologists, nurses, counselors? People I could not have done my job without,” Fitzgerald said. “That definition does include athletic programs…. Does it include bus transportation to get to games because I’ve heard that actual bus transportation is not included as a direct class transmission? Although I’ll admit I’m incredibly confused about that one, since I would not have had kids in my classroom in my rural district without bus transportation.” 

Rep. Christian Phelps (D-Eau Claire) called the proposal an “arbitrary, one size fits all budget crackdown that limits our ability to meet moral and constitutional obligations.” 

The bill passed 53-44 with only Republican support.

The Assembly also passed AB 4, which would require civics instruction in K-12 schools, in a 52-46 vote. Sortwell and Goeben voted against the bill with Democrats.

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Correction: This story has been update to correct the vote on AB 2 and a quote.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrest a man from Venezuela in Miami in February after a wire fraud conviction. As the Trump administration attacks local sanctuary policies, some states and local governments continue to do what little they can to protect some immigrants from deportation. (Courtesy of Miami ICE Enforcement & Removal Operations office)

Even as the Trump administration criticizes state and local sanctuary policies as an impediment to its deportation aims, officials touting the policies are finding there isn’t much they can do to prevent immigration arrests.

Some states and counties are nonetheless defending their sanctuary policies as a way to slow arrests, especially for purely immigration-related offenses, and to assure residents that local leaders are not taking part in the Trump administration’s deportation plans.

Localities in Connecticut, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.” California is also preparing to defend its state policies limiting cooperation with immigration authorities, based on a 2017 law that withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.

The laws under scrutiny generally limit cooperation with federal immigration authorities. The policies either prevent local officials from holding prisoners for immigration arrests or, alternatively, from notifying immigration authorities what time prisoners will be released, so federal agents can arrest them on immigration charges that could lead to deportation. There are generally exceptions for some serious crimes.

Chicago, Philadelphia and Seattle — all high-profile sanctuary locations — are among the cities that have seen Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests.

ICE can always find other ways to arrest a person, but it’s harder without local cooperation.

“You’re adding to the time and expense and resources ICE needs,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to immigration policy.

She noted a 2018 report from the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggesting that deportations fell in California after a 2013 law limited cooperation with ICE for minor and immigration crimes, though they later rose again.

“There is suggestive evidence that sanctuary policies reduce deportations but many reasons to also be skeptical of big effects,” the report concluded.

Most deportation arrests happen when ICE agents get fingerprint records from jails, whether run by city governments or independently elected sheriffs as they are in many counties, and identify people subject to court deportation orders. All jails regardless of sanctuary policy send the fingerprints for federal background checks during the booking process.

Still, federal officials complain that sanctuary policies can force them to arrest people on the street where it’s more dangerous and time-consuming than a transfer of custody inside a jail.

That happened recently in heavily Democratic Tompkins County in upstate New York, where the county and the city of Ithaca reaffirmed their sanctuary policies after criticism by the Trump administration.

A man who had been held in the county’s jail since 2023 was released on a judge’s order in late January, before ICE agents could arrive to arrest him for deportation. Several agencies, including state police, later arrested him in a parking lot in a show of force, according to local press accounts.

The 27-year-old man, a citizen of Mexico, had been identified for deportation in early January because he had returned to the United States after being deported seven times in 2016. He pleaded guilty to charges of assaulting a police officer and a jail guard and was sentenced to time served.

After the ICE arrest, acting U.S. Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove criticized the county, writing in a Jan. 30 statement: “We will use every tool at our disposal to prevent sanctuary city policies from impeding and obstructing lawful federal operations designed to make America safe again.”

Tompkins County Attorney Maury Josephson, in a statement to Stateline, called Bove’s statement “false and offensive.” Josephson wrote that the sheriff, Derek Osborne, had notified ICE about the prisoner’s release and that federal agents “had every opportunity to come to the jail to obtain the individual in question without any need for a pursuit or other incident.”

Many sanctuary policies are mostly symbolic, meant to assure residents that the city isn’t taking part in federal immigration enforcement. Many policies say city employees will not ask about immigration status when people seek services.

Some sanctuary policies can help indirectly fight deportations by providing legal help and advice for immigrants on how to respond to questions from federal agents, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, a supervisory policy and practice counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

“There have been some steps forward in creating an immigration public defender system, but it’s not available at the federal level yet,” Ibañez Whitlock said. That can make it tricky when an immigration prisoner is moved to another state for detention, and they could lose their legal representation, she said.

Sanctuary policies also aim to improve public safety by assuring immigrants it’s safe for them to report and help investigate crimes. Often the policies forbid asking questions about immigration status for people seeking services.

“For us it’s simple. We are striving to create a culture of trust and security within our communities so that our residents know that they can come to the county when they are in need or when they can be of help,” said Tony LoPresti, county counsel for Santa Clara County, California, during a news conference announcing the San Francisco lawsuit this month.

“That includes feeling safe coming to local law enforcement to report crimes or to participate in investigations without fearing that they or their loved ones face deportation,” LoPresti added.

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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.