People participate in a naturalization ceremony last year at Liberty State Park in Jersey City, N.J. The Trump administration is encouraging states to use an online search tool to verify the citizenship of registered voters, alarming some Democrats and privacy experts. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

BILOXI, Miss. — The Trump administration is developing a powerful data tool it claims will let states identify noncitizens registered to vote. But Democratic critics and data experts warn it could allow the federal government to vacuum up vast quantities of information on Americans for unclear purposes.

Some Democratic election officials and opponents of the effort fear President Donald Trump wants to build a federal database of voters to target political opponents or cherry-pick rare examples of noncitizen voters to fuel a sense of crisis. Republican election officials allied with the president counter that he’s helping states to maintain accurate voter rolls.

The Trump administration has rolled out changes to the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, tool at the same time the U.S. Department of Justice is asking states for copies of their voter rolls. The timing, combined with questions about what happens to voter data uploaded to the program, has alarmed critics.

Trump wants Congress to pass a national proof of citizenship voter registration requirement and in March tried to unilaterally impose one for federal elections through executive order. But with the legislation stalled and the order halted by the courts, the citizenship data tool may offer a backdoor way to accomplish the same goal.

SAVE was originally intended to help state and local officials verify the immigration status of individual noncitizens seeking government benefits. But U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, this spring refashioned it into a platform that can scan states’ voter rolls if election officials upload the data.

Justice Department demand for state voter lists underscores their importance

The changes to SAVE, rolled out over just a few months and with little public debate, are “tinkering with sort of the bones of democracy,” said John Davisson, senior counsel and director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research and advocacy group that argues privacy is a fundamental right.

“You’re talking about the voting process and who will be eligible to vote,” Davisson said. “And to take a system that is not designed for use in that process and repurpose it, really on the fly, without a formal comment process, without formal rulemaking, without congressional intervention — that’s pretty anomalous and pretty alarming.”

Previously, SAVE could only search one name at a time. Now it can conduct bulk searches, allowing state officials to potentially feed into it information on millions of registered voters. SAVE checks that information against a series of federal databases and reports back whether it can verify someone’s immigration status.

Since May, it also can draw upon Social Security data, transforming the program into a tool that can confirm citizenship because Social Security records for many, but not all, Americans include the information. NPR reported earlier on changes to SAVE.

“It is incredible what has been done, really since March,” Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray, a Republican who supports proof of citizenship requirements and the SAVE tool, told a gathering of state secretaries of state in Biloxi, Mississippi, last week.

Individuals registering to vote in federal elections must already sign a statement affirming they are citizens under penalty of perjury, and those who cast a ballot face criminal penalties and deportation. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

But as Trump has spread falsehoods about elections, Republicans have made purging noncitizens from voter rolls a central focus.

Democratic concerns were on display last week at the National Association of Secretaries of State conference, held at the Beau Rivage casino-resort in Biloxi. In interviews on the sidelines of the conference, Democratic secretaries of state voiced deep reservations — or outright opposition — about plugging their voter data into SAVE.

Maine Democratic Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said Aug. 6 that the federal government appeared to be trying to take over election administration. She formally rejected the Justice Department’s voter roll request two days later.

Bellows said the Department of Homeland Security told her in a recent phone call that it planned to retain SAVE data for 10 years for “audit purposes only.”

“Just like the [Justice Department] is asking us to hand over an electronic file of all the voters in our state, it seems like the Department of Homeland Security is through this backdoor system also asking us to share voter information about every voter in our state,” Bellows said.

At least one state appears to have granted the federal government sweeping authority over any voter data it provides to SAVE.

Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales announced in July he had reached an agreement with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to access the newly expanded system for voter list maintenance. Indiana’s agreement allows the federal agency to use information the state provides for any purpose permitted by law, including criminal prosecutions.

Morales, a Republican, said in a news release that SAVE represented “another step in safeguarding the rights” of eligible voters. His office didn’t respond to Stateline’s questions.

The Trump administration has ramped up efforts to encourage state election officials to use the expanded program. The White House hosted a bipartisan “fly in” event for state secretaries of state on July 29. Multiple secretaries of state told Stateline that USCIS Director Joseph Edlow, who was confirmed on July 15, spoke at the event.

“The president is very much keyed in on voter list maintenance,” Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a Republican, said in an interview — echoing other GOP secretaries of state who released statements praising the Trump administration after the meeting.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat who attended the meeting, said he questioned how the federal government would handle voter information provided to SAVE. He added that the Justice Department’s request for his state’s voter rolls raised his level of concern about how data would be used.

“When we disclose information, particularly personal identifying information, we need to have a handle on how it’s going to be used, by whom and under what circumstances,” Simon told Stateline.

The White House referred questions about SAVE and the event to the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS.

In response to questions from Stateline, USCIS didn’t directly answer whether the agency would share voter roll data with other parts of the federal government but confirmed it disposes of records after 10 years.

“The SAVE application is a critical tool for state and local governments to access information to safeguard the integrity of elections across the country. It’s no wonder many states have quickly adopted it, and we continue to promote the tool to other states and counties not using SAVE,” USCIS spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said in a statement.

“We look forward to continued optimization efforts and implementing more updates to SAVE.”

GOP pressure

Some Republican election officials and Trump allies have long wanted the federal government to take an expanded role in searching state voter rolls for noncitizens.

Last summer the Trump-aligned litigation group America First Legal, co-founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller, encouraged states to submit to the Department of Homeland Security the names of individuals for citizenship or immigration status verification.

Some states did just that. Texas, for example, asked USCIS to verify the citizenship of some voters in September, and Indiana asked the agency to verify 585,774 voters in October. The same month, 16 Republican state attorneys general signed a letter criticizing Homeland Security, then under the Biden administration, for failing to work with states on verification.

Trump’s DOJ wants states to turn over voter lists, election info

After Trump took office, GOP state officials kept up the pressure. Twenty-one Republican secretaries of state urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February to prioritize SAVE improvements.

On April 16, Indiana sued the department in federal court for not responding to its verification request last fall. USCIS announced an overhaul of SAVE less than a week later.

As the agency continues to remake SAVE, the tool will soon allow searches using the last four digits of a Social Security number, multiple state secretaries of state told Stateline. The agency confirmed the feature is under development and will be available soon but didn’t provide an exact date.

The change would mark another significant expansion of the program because most states collect the last four digits when individuals without a driver’s license register to vote.

Idaho Secretary of State Phil McGrane, a Republican, said SAVE represents a better way to verify citizenship than a state law requiring voters to produce documents. “I think there’s a real opportunity for us to do a lot of this through just sharing of information and I think that’s what we’re seeing happen,” McGrane said in an interview.

Unreliable data?

But some voting rights advocates and experts on government data caution against an overreliance on Social Security data.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, a progressive policy nonprofit, has noted that Social Security only began tracking the citizenship status of all applicants in 1978 — meaning the database doesn’t include comprehensive citizenship information for older Americans. Additionally, Social Security may not always have up-to-date information on the status of naturalized U.S. citizens.

The nonpartisan Institute for Responsive Government also warned in May that since SAVE hasn’t used Social Security numbers to verify citizenship in the past, its accuracy and effectiveness are unknown. The success of the expanded SAVE program may also partially depend on whether it has adequate staff and resources, it said.

U.S. House passes bill targeting voting by noncitizens, which is already against the law

A 2017 Government Accountability Office report found that between fiscal years 2012 and 2016, about 16% of the nearly 90 million SAVE searches required additional verification, which the institute says often translates into federal workers manually checking files. Now that SAVE allows bulk searches, the need for manual checking could rise dramatically.

Nick Doctor, director of implementation at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview that a tool confirming the eligibility of registered voters in a way that doesn’t burden individuals can be a good thing. But he emphasized that it depends in large measure on SAVE’s implementation.

“The changes that have been made to SAVE happened very quickly and, to my knowledge, we haven’t seen releases on the level of accuracy of that information,” Doctor said.

During interviews, Republican secretaries of state stressed that voters aren’t kicked off the rolls because SAVE can’t verify their citizenship. Instead, an inability to verify would likely trigger a follow-up process with the voter.

“Just because we get something back from the SAVE database, it’s not a cut and dry, especially on those they’re not sure about,” Hoskins, the Missouri secretary of state, said.

Still, Arizona illustrates why some Democrats worry about any large-scale effort to ask voters — especially longtime, older residents — to prove their citizenship. After the state discovered errors in how it tracked voter citizenship dating back years, election officials are contacting some 200,000 voters seeking proof of citizenship documentation.

Some have been casting ballots for decades without incident and many feel targeted, Arizona Democratic Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said during a presentation at the state secretaries of state conference. “They feel insulted when they get that letter,” Fontes said.

Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies elections, said Arizona may actually point to the potential usefulness of SAVE. If Arizona runs its voter roll through the program, a list of 200,000 voters needing citizenship verification would perhaps drop into the hundreds, he suggested.

“There’s a lot of good-government reasons to believe that something like this, governed properly and governed with fail-safe mechanisms, could have an upside,” Stewart said.

Connecticut Democratic Secretary of State Stephanie Thomas told Stateline that every secretary wants tools to keep voter lists as clean as possible. But the details are important.

When she hears of something new, Thomas said she asks whether it’s the best option available and whether “the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed.” She said she’s asked USCIS a series of questions about SAVE and is waiting on some responses.

“When it comes to voter lists,” Thomas said, “I don’t want Connecticut voters to be a guinea pig.”

Stateline reporter Jonathan Shorman can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org.

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

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Protesters gather in Milwaukee's Cathedral Square to march and rally as part of the No Kings Day protests nationwide. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Voting rights activists continue to be divided over gerrymandering. Here in Wisconsin, members of the Fair Maps Coalition, who just recently succeeded in getting representative voting maps for our state, are understandably alarmed by escalating threats to gerrymander the whole country, as Wisconsin Public Radio reports.

“I just hate it at its core,” Wisconsin League of Women Voters Executive Director Debra Cronmiller told WPR of the gerrymandering duel between Texas and California, as each state seeks to carve out more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“We can’t save democracy by suppressing voters, and this has to be an opportunity to think about a new process and standards, especially in Wisconsin,” iuscely Flores, Wisconsin Fair Maps organizing director, told WPR.

But the president and CEO of Common Cause, the national organization dedicated to voting rights and fair elections, told members last week that the group “won’t call for unilateral political disarmament in the face of authoritarianism.”

The Common Cause position is tricky. On the one hand the group reaffirms its commitment to nonpartisan redistricting commissions. On the other hand it gives its blessing to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to suspend exactly the sort of nonpartisan commission the group endorses — and which Wisconsin fair maps advocates have long been fighting for. Supposedly, suspending the commission is a temporary measure while Democrats in the legislature draw up gerrymandered districts in time for the midterms. After they do that, Common Cause, Newsom and various Democrats claim California can undo the gerrymander later and restart the fight for fair maps. Really?

“Independent redistricting commissions are one way — and by far the best way — to draw fair maps and achieve fair representation for every single American,” Virginia Kase Solomón, Common Cause president and CEO wrote in a letter to the group’s members. But, a follow-up email from Common Cause reiterated the group’s non-opposition to Newsom’s plan in California, saying, “As the nation’s leading anti-gerrymandering advocacy group, we understand that Trump and Republican leaders’ attempt to lock in unaccountable power poses a generational threat to our ability to decide our own futures.”

Maggie Daun brought up those same dire threats on her Civic Media radio show when she grilled me about my last column arguing that we can’t gerrymander our way back to democracy. What if this is the existential moment and Trump is about to send troops into cities across the U.S. and destroy democracy, Daun asked. I agree with her that we’re in an existential moment. But just because we want Democrats to do something to stop Trump, as so many people so passionately do, that doesn’t mean that gerrymandering to get a narrow Democratic majority in the House is the right thing to do. For one thing, a new House majority won’t be seated until 2027 and won’t fix the immediate crisis.

Trump is already sending troops into Democratic cities. And his plan to try more federal takeovers will likely unfold before the midterms. What we need right now is a massive popular movement to resist authoritarian overreach, local leaders who stand up to Trump, and courts that continue to hold the line on his administration’s assault on the rule of law.

The courts have played the biggest role in restraining Trump so far, issuing injunctions and blocking his orders Their power has been badly limited by the U.S. Supreme Court, which curtailed judges’ power to issue nationwide injunctions and greenlighted some egregious administrative actions. The current Supreme Court majority has also helped Trump’s larger project of dismantling democracy by gutting the Voting Rights Act and by allowing partisan gerrymandering — which delayed but ultimately did not derail Wisconsin’s efforts to get fair maps.

Common Cause has led the fight against both partisan gerrymandering and the destruction of voting rights. On Saturday, the group declared a National Day of Action, with rallies in communities across the country, including in Wisconsin, to resist Trump’s Texas gerrymandering scheme and his unprecedented deployment of federal troops to run roughshod over local communities. But the group’s message is somewhat muddled, mixing strong language about fairness and voting rights with tolerance for the prospect of blue-state counter-gerrymandering.

One good thing about the gerrymandering brushfire spreading across the nation is that it has provoked a bipartisan backlash. Republicans in New York and California, facing the prospect of being drawn out of their seats, have begun speaking out against the gerrymandering plan for Texas, Politico reports.

Some quick math suggests that Republicans are likely to win a nationwide redistricting war that pulls in Missouri, Indiana, Florida and other red states. But Republicans who are in a minority in California and New York are still worried about losing their seats. “Redistricting is not really an ideological exercise as much as a self-interest exercise,” California-based GOP strategist Rob Stutzman told Politico. Hence blue state Republican House members are calling for their colleagues to stand down in Texas and other red states, lest they lose their seats in the blue state counter-gerrymander. 

Instead of looking to gerrymandering, which is unfair, diminishes democracy and escalates hyper partisanship, opponents of the Trump administration need to keep building a big, pro-democracy movement that unites a majority of the country against Trump’s authoritarian overreach.

Wisconsin could lead the way. 

U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan, who has been holding town halls in Republican districts, reports being deluged with worried questions from both his own and his GOP colleagues’ constituents who don’t like the cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, and Social Security staffing in the unpopular “Big Beautiful Bill Act.” Most Americans don’t want to give away their health care, security and well-being so Elon Musk can get a tax cut.

Unfortunately, right-wing activists have played a long game, stacking the Supreme Court, blocking Democratic nominees, destroying the Voting Rights Act and putting the whole Heritage Foundation Project 2025 plan for authoritarianism in place. That won’t be undone in a single midterm election. But it is possible to leverage a broad-based populist movement of people who recognize it’s in their own interest to fight back. 

An absentee ballot drop box in Madison, where officials lost and failed to count nearly 200 absentee ballots in the 2024 presidential election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission voted 5-1 on Friday to institute its order against the city of Madison requiring that city officials make a number of changes to absentee ballot processes after the city lost and failed to count nearly 200 ballots during the 2024 presidential election. 

The Madison city clerk’s office told the elections commission in a memo Dec. 20 about the lost ballots from two Madison wards. A bag containing 68 unprocessed absentee ballots from two wards was found Nov. 12 in a tabulator bin, the memo stated. During reconciliation of ballots on Dec. 3, clerk employees found two sealed envelopes containing a total of 125 unprocessed absentee ballots from another ward. The discovery of the missing ballots was announced to the public Dec. 26. 

The missing ballots were not enough to change the result of any local, state or federal elections.

WEC launched an investigation into the error. In a report released last month, WEC found that “confluence of errors” and a “complete lack of leadership” in the city clerk’s office led to the ballots going missing. 

The investigation report also proposed a number of requirements for the city to improve its systems for tracking and counting absentee ballots. Those requirements constituted the order the commission approved on Friday. 

Among other things, the order requires the city to develop an internal plan delineating which employee is responsible for statutorily required tasks, print poll books no earlier than the Thursday before elections, change the absentee ballot processing system so bags and envelopes aren’t lost, update instructional materials for poll workers and complete a full inspection of all materials before the scheduled board of canvassers meeting after an election.

Commissioners followed through with enacting the order after interim City Clerk Michael Haas had sent a letter to the commission, requesting that the provisions of the order be made more broad and suggesting that the commission does not have the authority to enforce such changes to local election practices against just one municipality. 

“Individually-tailored orders for jurisdictions across the state also runs the risk of increasing, rather than decreasing, inconsistency of local election practices,” Haas wrote in an Aug. 6 letter to the commission. “If the Commission truly wishes to dictate the staffing, workflow, and procedures of municipal clerks at such a granular level, a regulatory guidance or rule-making that applies to all jurisdictions and that allows for thoughtful input by local election officials makes far more sense and is likely required.” 

In the letter, Haas wrote that the requirements of the WEC order were drafted in a vacuum from the city’s already existing election processes; that they give no end date or flexibility to election law changes made by the courts, Legislature or WEC itself; don’t address the logistic specifics of running an election in the state’s second largest city and don’t provide statutory reasons for the required changes. 

At the meeting Friday, Democratic Commissioner Mark Thomsen was the only member to vote against enacting the order. Thomsen argued that the order seemed “spiteful.” He said the city administered the 2025 spring election with no issues and that it still doesn’t have a permanent city clerk, so whoever is hired will be hamstrung by an order made because of actions they had nothing to do with. 

“I don’t think it’s fair to burden the new clerk with a set of orders that all the other clerks recognize no one else has to follow,” Thomsen said. “It is absolutely tragic that 193 people’s votes weren’t counted. They have separate legal remedies now. We have done what we needed to do. We’ve done an investigation, we’ve laid it out, and I do not think we should do a power grab and create burdens on the new clerk, whether or not we can exercise it.” 

But the supporters of the order said that not imposing it would mean letting the city off without being held accountable. Commission chair Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, noted that even though former Clerk Maribeth Witzel-Behl resigned after the incident, many staff involved in losing the ballots remain in the clerk’s office. 

“I think we need to order it also so that clerks across the state understand the level of seriousness that this commission takes with this,” Jacobs said. “The city needs to straighten out what happened here. And I don’t think there’s been sort of that reckoning yet.” 

Administrative rules 

The commission on Friday also reinstituted the administrative rulemaking process on a number of proposed rules that had been held up by a legislative committee. 

The Legislature’s Joint Committee for the Review of Administrative Rules (JCRAR) had previously suspended emergency rules written by WEC on a number of topics, including instructions for absentee voting and challenges to candidate ballot access. 

Last month, the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in Tony Evers v. Howard Marklein that JCRAR’s suspension of administrative rules amounted to an unconstitutional legislative veto. Under previous law, state agencies weren’t allowed to promulgate a permanent rule on a topic in which the committee had previously struck down an emergency rule. After the court’s ruling, WEC can once again start the rulemaking process. 

The commission voted to restart the process of establishing rules for challenging candidate nomination papers, challenging declarations of candidacy and mandating that local clerks use a uniform set of rules for absentee ballots.

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The Lyndon Baines Johnson Department of Education Building in Washington, D.C., pictured on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON —  A federal judge in Maryland has struck down the U.S. Education Department’s attempts to do away with diversity, equity and inclusion practices in schools.

The Thursday ruling marks a blow to President Donald Trump’s administration as it continues to take significant strides to try to crack down on DEI efforts across the federal government.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher found both an agency Dear Colleague letter threatening to yank federal funds for schools from K-12 through colleges and universities that use race-conscious practices in aspects of student life and a memo ordering state education leaders to certify compliance to be “unlawful,” vacating the two.

Gallagher’s ruling follows a lawsuit from the American Federation of Teachers union and its affiliate, AFT-Maryland, as well as the American Sociological Association and a public school district in Oregon.

She noted that both the letter and certification requirement are “unconstitutionally vague.”

Gallagher is one of three federal judges who blocked different parts of the agency’s initiatives back in April, which brought enforcement of the letter and the memo on certifying compliance to a halt.

“The administration is entitled to express its viewpoints and to promulgate policies aligned with those viewpoints,” wrote Gallagher, who was appointed by Trump. “But it must do so within the procedural bounds Congress has outlined. And it may not do so at the expense of constitutional rights.”

Feb. 14 letter to states

The department drew swift legal action after sending a Feb. 14 letter to school districts that threatened to rescind federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices in programming, admissions, scholarships and other aspects of student life.

The letter gave a sweeping interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023, which struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

The four-page letter raised a myriad of questions for schools over what exactly fell within the requirements. The department in March issued a Frequently Asked Questions document on the letter in an attempt to provide more guidance.

Adding fuel to the fire, the department in April gave state education leaders just days to certify all K-12 schools in their states were complying with the letter in order to keep receiving federal financial assistance.

Reaction from department, union

“While the Department is disappointed in the judge’s ruling, judicial action enjoining or setting aside this guidance has not stopped our ability to enforce Title VI protections for students at an unprecedented level,” a spokesperson for the department said in a statement shared with States Newsroom on Friday.

“The Department remains committed to its responsibility to uphold students’ anti-discrimination protections under the law,” the spokesperson added.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said “the court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” in a Thursday statement.

Weingarten added that “it would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”

Federal Bureau of Investigation and Metropolitan Police Department officers conduct a traffic stop near the U.S. Capitol on Aug. 14, 2025 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice will rewrite an order from Attorney General Pam Bondi that initially placed a Trump administration official in charge of the District of Columbia’s police force, after an emergency hearing late Friday afternoon on a lawsuit filed by the district.

Attorneys on behalf of the Justice Department told District of Columbia Judge Ana C. Reyes they would rewrite Section 1 of Bondi’s order by a deadline the judge set of 6:30 p.m. Eastern Friday.

In that section, Bondi’s late Thursday order named Terry Cole, administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, as head of the Metropolitan Police Department.

District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb called that move a “brazen usurpation of the district’s authority” in his suit filed early Friday against the Trump administration.

Reyes, who was nominated by former President Joe Biden, said if she did not receive the new order by the deadline, she would issue a temporary restraining order against the DOJ. She said she found that section of Bondi’s order “plainly contrary to statute” of the district’s Home Rule Act of 1973.

The exact changes to the order were not immediately available.

District filed suit Friday

Schwalb early Friday sued the Trump administration for taking control of the Metropolitan Police Department’s 3,400 officers.

The suit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia argued that President Donald Trump’s Monday executive order to federalize the district’s police force “far exceeded” the president’s authority under the Home Rule Act of 1973 that allows Washingtonians to elect their local leaders, but gives Congress control over local laws and the district’s budget.

Trump has warned he may pursue similar action in other Democratic-led cities that he sees as having “totally out of control” crime, though experts have questioned the legality and mayors already have raised objections.

“This is the gravest threat to Home Rule DC has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it,” Schwalb, a Democrat elected in 2022, wrote on social media. “The Administration’s actions are brazenly unlawful. They go well beyond the bounds of the President’s limited authority and instead seek a hostile takeover of MPD.”

District Mayor Muriel Bowser pushed back on Bondi’s order, and wrote on social media that “there is no statute that conveys the District’s personnel authority to a federal official.”

“Let us be clear about what the law requires during a Presidential declared emergency: it requires the mayor of Washington, DC to provide the services of the Metropolitan Police Department for federal purposes at the request of the President,” she said. “We have followed the law.”

The suit asks for a judge to vacate Bondi’s order and an order to prevent the Trump administration “from issuing any future orders or directives or taking any other action that attempts to place MPD under the control of anyone other than the Mayor and the Chief of Police, otherwise assert operational control over MPD, or otherwise attempt to direct local law enforcement activities.”

The suit does not challenge Trump’s decision to deploy 800 National Guard members to the district. Because the district, home to more than 700,000 residents, is not a state, the president has the sole authority over the National Guard members.

Carjacking preceded Trump order

Trump earlier this week declared a “crime emergency” after a former U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, official was injured on Aug. 3 in an attempted carjacking incident around 3 a.m. Eastern near the Logan Circle neighborhood. Two Maryland teenagers were arrested on charges of unarmed carjacking in connection with the incident.

Violent crime in the district is at a historic 30-year low.

The suit notes Trump’s previous comments about his plans for the district, from his time as a 2024 presidential candidate to his most recent remarks about taking over control of the district while at a February press conference.

“I think that we should govern the District of Columbia … I think that we should run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely flawless … And I think we should take over Washington, D.C. … We should govern D.C. The federal government should take over the governance of D.C.,” Trump said in the court document.

Advocates and local leaders have criticized the president’s decision, arguing that the move is nothing more than an extension of the administration’s immigration crackdown. Checkpoints have popped up all over the city in communities with a high immigrant population. 

Additionally, the district’s police chief Thursday issued a new order to allow local police to aid federal officials in immigration enforcement for immigrants not in police custody.

Trump praised Thursday’s order, calling it “a very positive thing,” especially at checkpoints in the district.

“When they stop people, they find they’re illegal, they report them, they give them to us,” he said.

Mural depicting workers painted on windows of the Madison-Kipp Corp. by Goodman Community Center students and Madison-Kipp employees with Dane Arts Mural Arts. (Photo by Erik Gunn /Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin’s jobs and employment numbers showed a slightly softening economy in July, following national trends, the state labor department reported Thursday.

“The Wisconsin labor market has cooled a bit along with the national economy. Unemployment remains historically low,” said Scott Hodek, section chief in the office of economic advisors for the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD), in a briefing on the July numbers.

Private-sector jobs dropped slightly in July from June, DWD reported. Employment and labor force participation edged down slightly, too, as did the state’s unemployment rate.

“What we’re seeing is that Wisconsin seems to be following the national trend,” Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner. While the economy is cooling down, “we’re actually still seeing historically low unemployment rates,” Hodek said. “So you’ve got kind of a mix of up and down indicators.”

He pointed to national economic uncertainty as well as the longstanding challenge of Wisconsinites aging out of the workforce faster than younger residents are entering it as likely contributors to the economic cooling. 

DWD pegged the number of Wisconsinites working in July at 3.05 million, a drop of 4,500 from June and down 32,500 from July 2024.

The number of people who were unemployed in July was projected at 98,600 — down 2,200 from June, but up 5,400 from July 2024. The unemployment rate for July was 3.1%.

The labor force shrank in July to just under 3.15 million, a decline of 6,700 from June and a decline of 27,000 from July 2024. The labor force is defined as people 16 or older who are working or seeking work, excluding people in the military or who are in institutions such as nursing homes or prisons.

Wisconsin’s labor force participation rate was 65% of the state’s population 16 or older in July — down 0.1% from June and down just under 1% from July a year ago. Labor force participation remains ahead of the U.S. as a whole, while unemployment is lower, DWD reported.

Employment and labor force participation numbers are projected from a monthly survey of households. A separate survey, polling employers, produces data on the number of jobs in the state.

Wisconsin counted just under 3.06 million nonfarm jobs — an increase of 1,800 over June and 20,200 over July a year ago. Private sector jobs in July totaled more than 2.6 million, a decrease of 3,800 from June but still 15,100 ahead of July 2024.

Construction jobs fell by 500 from June, Hodek said, but remained 3,100 ahead of July 2024. Manufacturing jobs fell by 500, and are down 1,800 from a year ago.

Rosier picture in Wisconsin than broader U.S.

Wisconsin’s jobs report Thursday lacked the drama of the national jobs numbers reported two weeks ago that prompted President Donald Trump to fire the nation’s chief statistician.

On Friday, Aug. 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the U.S. gained 73,000 jobs in July, below analysts’ estimates. The BLS also updated national job numbers for May and June, dramatically reducing both: in June, a gain of 14,000 jobs instead of previously reported 147,000, and in May, an increase of 19,000 instead of the previously reported 125,000.

The national unemployment rate of 4.2% was in line with economic forecasts, CNBC reported. Other indicators nationally added up to “a slow but persistent cooling trend,” the North America regional president at Manpower Group, Ger Doyle, told CNBC.

Trump took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to declare without evidence that the numbers were “RIGGED.” He summarily fired the director of the BLS, replacing her this week with an economist from the far-right Heritage Foundation who has called for a broad overhaul of the agency.

Hodek told the Wisconsin Examiner Thursday that DWD has not received any communications about changes in procedure from the BLS.

“We’ve certainly seen the news and we’re monitoring the situation, of course,” Hodek said. “But we do have confidence in our data and we can’t really speculate on what could possibly happen. We’ll just need to wait and see what the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does down the road.”

Hodek said that revisions of previous months’ reports are “a normal part of the data process.” The first round of data isn’t inaccurate, but “as you take more time, the data become more accurate,” he said.

“Ideally you want a combination of both —  something that kind of gives you the current edge of where you’re headed, and then as more and better data come in, you get a better sense of what has been happening,” Hodek said.

For example, a quarterly collection of information from the unemployment insurance system “actually covers most employers and it’s very solid data,” he said. “But it lags by half a year.”

Information from that report can be used to further refine the calculations and assumptions that go into the state’s monthly reports.

The monthly numbers for the nation as a whole and for each state go through different calculations and formulas, Hodek said, so it’s not possible to draw direct connections between the state jobs numbers and the national jobs numbers.

It’s also too soon to explain the seemingly dramatic differences between the national jobs picture and Wisconsin’s, he added: “We’ve only got a couple of data points where we saw those large revisions, so that doesn’t really make a trend necessarily yet.”

Hodek doesn’t think Wisconsin is somehow “diverging from the national economy,” however, he said. “In fact, it’s fairly unlikely in general, just because what happens to the national economy and the global economy is going to impact us as well. We tend to follow the national and global trends.”

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Gov. Tony Evers implementing pay raises for state employees that were approved in the state budget without additional approval from the Legislature’s Joint Committee for Employment Relations. Evers signed the budget, now 2025 Wisconsin Act 15, at 1:32 a.m. in his office Thursday, less than an hour after the Assembly passed it. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Gov. Tony Evers is implementing pay raises for state employees without additional approval from the Legislature’s Joint Committee for Employment Relations, citing a recent state Supreme Court ruling.

The state budget, which was passed by the Republican-led Legislature and signed by Evers last month, included about $385 million to provide state and University of Wisconsin employees with a 3% pay increase in the first year of the budget and a 2% increase in the second year.

“I fought hard in our bipartisan budget negotiations to secure much deserved pay increases for our talented state workers,” Evers wrote in a letter to state employees on Monday, adding that he was proud to sign the budget last month and it was important to him that state workers receive the wage adjustment as soon as possible.

Eligible employees will receive the 3% base pay adjustment to their current pay rate with their Sept. 4 paychecks, including a lump sum back pay from June 29. The second year of raises is supposed to be implemented June 28, 2026.

“The work that we do together every day on behalf of the people of Wisconsin is so important — perhaps never more so than it is today,” Evers wrote. “With Washington creating continued uncertainty through devastating cuts to investments and programs that so many across our state rely on, Wisconsinites will continue looking to us to lead, support them and build upon the work we’ve done together over the last six years. There is, as always, much hard work ahead of us. Having committed and exceptional partners like you in this good work will make all the difference.” 

The Joint Committee on Employment Relations has been tasked by state law with holding hearings on changes to state employee compensation and approving those changes. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) and Co-chairs of the Joint Committee of Employment Relations have not responded to requests for comment on Evers’ announcement. 

In a bulletin about the raises, the Department of Administration cited the recent Wisconsin Supreme Court ruling in the case Tony Evers v. Howard Marklein, which addressed the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program and the ability of the Joint Finance Committee to hold up already appropriated funds. The Evers administration asserted that the decision clarified its authority to implement the raises without the additional approval of the committee.

The Court ruled 6-1 in July 2024 that the ability for the committee to withhold funds was unconstitutional and a violation of the separation of powers. 

Justice Rebecca Bradley wrote for the majority that a statute that authorizes lawmakers to “exercise core powers of the executive branch violates the constitutional separation of powers and cannot be enforced under any circumstances.” 

“While the constitution gives the legislature the power to appropriate funds, the power to spend the funds the legislature has appropriated for a specific project belongs to the executive branch,” Bradley wrote. “While the legislature has the power to create an agency, define its powers, and appropriate funds to fulfill the purpose for which the legislature established it, the power to spend appropriated funds in accordance with the law enacted by the legislature lies solely within the core power of the executive to ensure the laws are faithfully executed. We conclude these statutes interfere with the executive branch’s core function to carry out the law by permitting a legislative committee, rather than an executive branch agency, to make spending decisions for which the legislature has already appropriated funds and defined the parameters by which those funds may be spent.”

The original lawsuit filed by Evers in October 2023 included the Knowles-Nelson program and two other issues: JOCER’s ability to withhold raises approved in the budget and the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules’s block on administrative rules related to conversion therapy. At the time, JOCER was withholding pay raises approved in the budget for University of Wisconsin employees, so the raises could be used as a bargaining chip in Republican lawmakers’ efforts to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the system. The pay raises, approved in the budget in July, were released by JOCER in December 2023. 

The majority decided in February 2024 that it would only take up the Knowles-Nelson issue and leave the other two “held in abeyance pending further order of the court.” Conservative justices were critical of the majority allowing original action in the case and separating the issues from each other at the time.

Justice Annette Zeigler wrote in her dissenting opinion in the case that taking all of the issues at once could have produced consistency. 

“Selecting an issue that only impacts the Republican-controlled legislature and the longstanding Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program should raise eyebrows,” Zeigler wrote. “Determining all issues at the same time could serve to hold my colleagues to application of the same principles in the same way, even when it comes to a Democratic-controlled branch of government. Unfortunately, we will wait to see if that consistency will be forthcoming, as the majority handpicked and now limits only the legislative branch’s longstanding, statutorily authorized practice.”

The Court dismissed the compensation and Joint Committee on Employment Relations issue in October 2024 when it decided to take up the conversion therapy and Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules issue. The Court issued a ruling in July limiting the committee’s ability to block administrative rules.

The University of Wisconsin system will also be implementing the general wage raises. 

“We are grateful to Governor Tony Evers and the Wisconsin State Legislature for their continued support of our workforce and recognition of the vital role our faculty and staff play in education, research, and public service,” UW President Jay Rothman wrote in a memo to employees on Monday. 

The implementation of the raises is not the first time the administration has moved ahead with releasing funds following the ruling. The administration announced funding for 12 Department of Natural Resources projects under the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program in October of 2024.

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Darryl Chavis, 62, served in the U.S. Army for two years as a watercraft operator. He stands outside the Borden Avenue Veterans Residence, a short-term housing facility in the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., where he lives. Chavis relies on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and is worried about new work requirements for the program, commonly known as food stamps. (Photo by Shalina Chatlani/Stateline)

NEW YORK — After a year in the U.S. Navy, Loceny Kamara said he was discharged in 2023, because while on base he had developed mental health issues, including severe anxiety and nightmares, and had fallen into alcoholism.

Kamara, 23, went to rehab and managed to get sober for some time while living with family in the Bronx, he said. But after he lost his job as a security guard in December, Kamara was kicked out of his home. Now he lives at a veterans homeless shelter in Long Island City, a neighborhood in Queens, New York, and he relies on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — commonly known as food stamps — and odd jobs to make ends meet.

Each month, nearly 42 million people receive SNAP benefits to help supplement their grocery budgets. Able-bodied SNAP recipients who are between 18 and 54 and don’t have children have always been required to work. Veterans, however, have been exempt from those rules — but that’s about to change.

The giant domestic policy measure that President Donald Trump signed on July 4 eliminates that exemption. Beginning in 2026, veterans will have to prove they are working, volunteering, participating in job training, or looking for work for at least 80 hours a month to keep their food stamps beyond three months, unless they qualify for another exemption, such as having certain disabilities.

Republicans in Congress and conservatives who helped formulate the law say these eligibility changes are necessary to stop people who could be working from abusing the system. But critics say the change fails to take into account the barriers many veterans face, and that the new work rules will cause thousands of veterans to go hungry.

“I’m pissed. I mean, I cannot get a job. Nowhere to live,” said Kamara. As he spoke, Kamara pointed to his collared shirt, noting that he had just dressed up to interview for a job as a security guard. He learned that morning he hadn’t gotten the job.

“I’ve been out of work for eight months,” Kamara told Stateline. “It’s hard to get a job right now for everybody.”

Veterans depend on SNAP

Nationally, around 1.2 million veterans with lower incomes, or about 8% of the total veteran population of 16.2 million, rely on food stamps for themselves and their families, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning research group.

An analysis by the group found veterans tend to have lower rates of employment because they are more likely to have health conditions, such as traumatic brain injuries, that make it difficult for them to work. They also tend to have less formal education, though many have specialized skills from their time in the military.

There has been a work requirement for most SNAP recipients since 1996. But Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the rules have “never really been enforced.” Rector argued that able-bodied people who have been exempt from the work requirement, such as veterans and homeless people, create an unnecessary burden on the system if they are capable of working but don’t.

“Most of the people that are in this category live in households with other people that have incomes, and so there really isn’t a chronic food shortage here,” Rector said in an interview. “We have tens of thousands of free food banks that people can go to. So it’s just a requirement to nudge these people in the proper direction, and it should no longer go unenforced.”

Darryl Chavis, 62, said that view ignores the difficulties that many veterans face. When Chavis left the U.S. Army at 21 after two years of service, he said, he was “severely depressed.”

“Nobody even came to help me,” said Chavis, who served as a watercraft operator, responsible for operating and maintaining tugboats, barges and other landing craft.

Chavis said he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, which has made it difficult for him to keep a job. He just moved back to New York from Virginia after leaving a relationship. He’s been at the housing shelter in Long Island City since January.

“What I’m trying to do is get settled in to, you know, stabilize into an apartment. I have the credentials to get a job. So it’s not like I’m not gonna look for a job. I have to work. I’m in transition, and the obstacles don’t make it easy,” Chavis said.

The new SNAP work rules apply to all able-bodied adults between 55 and 64 who don’t have dependents, and parents with children above the age of 14. Some groups, such as asylum-seekers and refugees, are no longer eligible for the program.

Barbara Guinn, commissioner of the New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, estimates that around 300,000 New Yorkers could lose SNAP benefits due to work requirements. Of those, around 22,000 are veterans, homeless or aging out of foster care, she said. Almost 3 million New Yorkers relied on SNAP as of March 2025.

Veterans in other states are in a similar situation. In California, an estimated 115,000 veterans receive SNAP benefits, according to a study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The number is nearly 100,000 in Florida and Texas, and 49,000 in Georgia.

Between 2015 and 2019 about 11% of veterans between the ages of 18 and 64 lived in food insecure households, meaning they had limited or uncertain access to food, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees SNAP.

“We know that SNAP is the best way to help address hunger. It gets benefits directly to individuals,” Guinn said. “There are other ways that people can get assistance if they need it, through food banks or other charitable organizations, but we do not think that those organizations will have the capacity to pick up the needs.”

A greater burden on states

In addition to the work rule changes, the new law reduces federal funding for SNAP by about $186 billion through 2034 — a cut of roughly 20%, according to the Congressional Budget Office, an independent research arm of Congress. The federal government expects the new work requirements to reduce SNAP spending by $69 billion as people who don’t comply are dropped from the rolls.

SNAP has historically been funded by the federal government, with states picking up part of the cost of administering the program. Under the new law, states will have to cover between 5% and 15% of SNAP costs starting in fiscal year 2028, depending on how accurately they distribute benefits to people who are eligible for the program.

“This has been a strategic agenda to dismantle SNAP and to blame states for doing so, because they knew they are making it so incredibly burdensome to run and operate and unaffordable,” said Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP deputy director at the Food Research & Action Center, a poverty and hunger advocacy group.

“States are going to have to cut something, because there’s no surplus. There are no unlimited resources that states may have in order to be able to offset the harm.”

Guinn said New York expects to see a new cost burden of at least $1.4 billion each year. In California, new state costs could total as much as $3.7 billion annually, according to the California Department of Social Services.

Kaitlynne Yancy, director of membership programs at Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, said many veterans with disabilities will not be able to fulfill the work requirements or find resources elsewhere. And it’s unclear whether states will be able to provide their own relief to people who are no longer exempted from work requirements or will be excluded from the program.

“It is a frustrating thing to see, especially for those that have been willing to put everything on the line and sacrifice everything for this country if their country called them to do so,” she said.

Yancy, 35, served in the U.S. Navy from 2010 to 2014. She began to use food stamps and the Medicaid program, the public health insurance program for people with lower incomes, as she navigated life’s challenges. They included going back to school to pursue her bachelor’s degree, becoming a single mother, and a leukemia diagnosis for one of her children. Frequent trips to the hospital made it hard for her to work steadily or attend school for 20 hours each week, she said.

Guinn said the new rules will create significant administrative challenges, too; even SNAP recipients who are working will struggle to prove it.

“Maybe they’re working one month, they have a job, and then their employer cuts their hours the next month,” Guinn told Stateline. “There are mechanisms for people to upload documentation as needed to demonstrate compliance with the program, but from an administrative standpoint, right now, we don’t have any super-high-tech automated way of doing this.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

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

Ryan Strnad would be the second Democratic candidate to officially enter the Democratic gubernatorial primary, which will likely be a crowded field. (Photo courtesy of candidate)

Ryan Strnad, who has worked for over 35 years as a beer vendor at the Milwaukee Brewers’ home stadium American Family Field, announced Thursday that he will officially enter the Democratic primary for governor next week.

Strnad’s campaign has been years in the making. He told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2023 (less than eight months after Evers started his second term) that he would be considering entering if Evers opted not to run for a third term. Last month Evers announced he won’t be running so he can spend more time with his family.

Strnad, who lives in Mukwonago, is the founder of Drinks In The Seats, a political action committee and lobbying group formed in 2016 to lobby on behalf of in-seat beer vendors. 

Strnad said in 2023 that his top priority if he ran for governor would be advocating for Wisconsin’s unions and working class. His campaign website now lists “improving the working class” as the first item on his plan for Wisconsin along with working on the environment with “common sense”, supporting the police and allowing “any pregnant mother/mother-to-be (or, whatever YOU are comfortable with saying) who wants an abortion [to] have an abortion.”

“I’m running for governor of Wisconsin because I feel obligated to lead our state!” Strnad said on his website. “Moving here to Muskego in 1975, I established roots that I am proud of. I may’ve even served YOU at the stadium where I’ve gotten politically involved and worked there since 1988. I also have jobs elsewhere. I am one of us! I ask for your vote.”

Strnad would be the second Democratic candidate to officially enter the primary, which will likely be a crowded field.

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez announced her campaign less than 24 hours after Evers announced his retirement. Other potential candidates include Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, state Sen. Kelda Roys and Attorney General Josh Kaul.

The primary is still about a year away on August 11, 2026.

Two Republican candidates, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann and Whitefish Bay manufacturer Bill Berrien, have entered the race so far. U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany has said he would make a decision before the end of September.

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Police officers set up a roadside checkpoint on 14th Street Northwest on Aug. 13, 2025 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — Local leaders and advocates Thursday said that President Donald Trump’s decision to seize the District of Columbia’s 3,400-member police force and deploy 800 National Guard members is a continuation of his administration’s immigration crackdown.

Since the president’s decision Monday to invoke the district’s Home Rule Act, checkpoints are being set up in busy neighborhoods, bulldozers are clearing out tents of people experiencing homelessness and Republican governors are volunteering their own National Guard members to bolster the president’s federalization of the district’s 68 square miles.

Videos of masked law enforcement officers making Washingtonians step out of their cars and conducting arrests have been posted on social media by journalists, drawing concern over civil liberties.

While Trump’s control of the district’s police force ends in 28 days, he’s signaled he wants Congress to extend his authority to deter the “crime emergency.”

Advocates questioned the situation. “There does appear to be evidence that non (Metropolitan Police Department) federal authorities may have exceeded the lawful bounds at some of those traffic stops … and there will be accountability if the law is violated,” said Norm Eisen, the executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, a litigation organization that has challenged many of the Trump administration’s actions, in a call with reporters.

Trump predicts enforcement ‘all over the country’

The checkpoints have drawn backlash from district residents and local elected leaders.

In a statement, district Councilmember Brianne Nadeau criticized the immigration enforcement at checkpoints.

“Last night what would have been a routine MPD traffic safety operation was co-opted by federal law enforcement agents,” she said. “Agents who are not trained in D.C. law. Agents who do not know our community. Agents who were not seeking to address traffic safety but rather were interrogating drivers on their immigration status.”

Trump Thursday said that law enforcement using the checkpoints as immigration enforcement was “a great step.”

“I think that’s going to happen all over the country,” the president told reporters at the White House after signing a proclamation celebrating Social Security‘s 90th birthday. “We want to stop crime.”

Violent crime in the district is at a historic 30-year low, according to the Department of Justice.

Eisen called the checkpoints unlawful.

“They’re using it as an immigration control checkpoint,” he said. “That is illegal.” 

Bulldozing camps for homeless people

Homeless camps across the district are also being cleared as part of the president’s directive.

Trump Wednesday signaled that he plans to send a request to Congress for “a relatively small amount of money” to make improvements to the district.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that if those people experiencing homelessness don’t agree to go to a shelter, they could face fines or jail.

“The homeless problem has ravaged the city,” Leavitt said. “Homeless individuals will be given the option to leave their encampment, to be taken to a homeless shelter, to be offered addiction or mental health services, and if they refuse, they will be susceptible to fines or to jail time.”

The district has faced a backlog in getting vouchers to those experiencing homelessness, according to Street Sense Media, a news outlet that focuses on reporting on homelessness in the district.

Local police to aid feds on immigration actions

The district’s police chief Thursday issued a new executive order allowing local police to aid federal officials in immigration enforcement for immigrants not in police custody.

The new order does not change the district’s law that prohibits local police from sharing information with federal immigration officials about people in police custody. It’s a policy for which Trump has criticized the city, calling it a “sanctuary city,” but the policy does not bar immigration enforcement.

Trump called Thursday’s executive order “a very positive thing,” especially at checkpoints in the district.

“When they stop people, they find they’re illegal, they report them, they give them to us,” he said.

Since taking office for a second term, the president has intertwined military involvement in immigration enforcement, such as sending thousands of troops to the southern border and deploying thousands of National Guard members to Los Angeles after protests sparked by the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

More National Guard movements possible

Additionally, the Trump administration is evaluating plans to establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of 600 National Guard members to remain on stand-by in order to be quickly deployed to any U.S. city undergoing a protest or other civil unrest within an hour, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

On Wednesday, in another new twist, Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee said he’s prepared to send his National Guard members to the district. Lee added that U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll told him that the military might request states  send troops to the district for law enforcement.

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 generally bars the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.

While the president has stated he also wants to send in National Guard members to other cities – Baltimore, Chicago, New York City and Oakland – all heavily Democratic cities led by Black mayors, like he has done with the district, it can’t be replicated, said Abbe Lowell, a high-profile defense attorney.

“One thing that people need to remember about his assault on the District of Columbia, it is a very unique legal framework because of the Home Rule Act that gives him some ability to do something which he does not have in other states and cities where the governors still have some or the primary control over things like the National Guard,” said Lowell, who was with Eisen on the call with reporters.

A trial is underway this week challenging Trump’s move to federalize California National Guard members, in a suit filed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, after an appeals court temporarily upheld Trump’s move.

‘Racial undertones’ cited by Baltimore mayor

Baltimore Mayor Brandon M. Scott said Trump’s singling out of those cities, including the district, can’t be ignored.

“Every city that he called out had a Black mayor, and we’re talking about Black-led cities,” he said on the call with Eisen and Lowell. “We cannot overstate the racial undertones here.”

Scott also criticized the Trump administration for pulling federal law enforcement officers – Drug Enforcement Agency, Homeland Security Investigations, FBI, Customs and Border Patrol – from their duties. Instead they are “patrolling neighbors of Washington DC, stopping residents and checking cars instead of doing their actual jobs,” Scott said.

“If the president really wants to help these cities continue to lower violence and crime, he could go back to sending agents to their actual agencies and having them help us work on gun trafficking, work on violent drug organizations, and not taking these agents off to work on this immigration brigade that he’s had them on,” Scott said.

He added that he’s working closely with Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore and “we’ll be prepared to take any legal and any other action that we need to take.”

Moore, who served in the U.S. Army, has criticized the president for calling in the National Guard to the district and raised concerns that service members do not have the same training as police officers.

Trump brushed those concerns off on Thursday.

“They’re trained in common sense,” the president said of National Guard members.

Emergencies

Eisen said Trump’s actions in the district are part of the president’s pattern of invoking “non-emergencies.”

On Inauguration Day, Trump declared a national emergency at the border, despite low levels of immigration.

In March, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law only used three times previously.

Trump’s decision to declare a “crime emergency” in the district earlier this week came after a former U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, official was injured in an attempted carjacking incident around 3 a.m. Eastern near the Logan Circle neighborhood. Two Maryland teenagers were arrested on charges of unarmed carjacking in connection with the incident.

“Well, what he’s doing in the District of Columbia, including illegal traffic stops, what he’s doing is of a piece with that dictatorial approach,” Eisen said of the president. 

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act on Aug. 14, 1935. (Photo by FPG/Archive Photos/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed a proclamation celebrating the 90th anniversary of Social Security on Thursday, though he offered no plans for avoiding insolvency and a steep drop-off in benefits within the next decade.

Trump, who campaigned on “saving” the income stabilization program for America’s seniors, said during an appearance in the Oval Office that Republicans would keep the program going.

But neither Trump, nor Republican leaders in Congress, have advanced legislation that would avoid a decrease in Social Security benefits in 2033, or begun to seriously address the issue.

“In the campaign I made a sacred pledge to our seniors that I would always protect Social Security and under this administration we’re keeping that promise and strengthening Social Security for generations to come,” Trump said. “You keep hearing stories that in six years, seven years, Social Security will be gone. And it will be if the Democrats ever get involved because they don’t know what they’re doing.

“But it’s going to be around a long time with us. Very much, you’ll be surprised to hear some of the numbers.”

‘One big, beautiful’ law speeds up fund depletion

The latest Social Security trustees report, released earlier this year, shows that without changes the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will no longer be able to pay full benefits starting in 2033. 

“At that time, the fund’s reserves will become depleted and continuing program income will be sufficient to pay 77 percent of total scheduled benefits,” the report states.

Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law will, however, speed up that timeline.

Karen Glenn, chief actuary for the Social Security Administration, wrote in a letter released earlier this month that the lower tax rates in the GOP law will reduce the amount of revenue flowing into the trust fund.

When combined with “increased program cost” associated with the new law, Glenn wrote “the reserve depletion date for the OASI Trust Fund is accelerated from the first quarter of 2033 to the fourth quarter of 2032.”

Bipartisanship needed

Republicans cannot restructure Social Security on their own and will need to negotiate with Democrats in the years to come if lawmakers want to avoid insolvency.

The budget reconciliation process, which GOP lawmakers used to pass their “big, beautiful bill,” cannot be used to address Social Security, making bipartisanship the only path to avoiding a decline in benefits for America’s retirees.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget wrote in a post published Thursday that “solutions are needed soon to prevent insolvency and the statutorily required benefit cut.”

Without a new law to address the financial struggles facing the program, CRFB wrote, a “typical couple retiring just after insolvency will face an $18,400 cut in annual benefits.”

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the law enacting Social Security on Aug. 14, 1935.

Gov. Tony Evers delivers his 2025 state budget address in February. The bipartisan budget Evers signed in July spends down much of Wisconsin's budget surplus. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin could be facing a more difficult budget than it has seen in recent years with recently approved spending and tax cuts consuming most of the state’s historic surplus, according to the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The research organization described the state’s most recent budget as an “all of the above” plan in its recent report. Mark Sommerhauser, communications director and policy researcher at the Wisconsin Policy Forum, said the previous budgets showed more restraint from policymakers when it came to spending and tax cuts. 

“There were some tax cuts, there were some spending increases, but certainly not of the magnitude that could have occurred,” Sommerhauser told the Wisconsin Examiner in an interview. “In this budget, we saw a lot more of both.”

Sommerhauser said it was “clearly a budget that was much more focused on the here and now than on where the state’s finances would be in two or four years.”

“There’s an argument that ‘hey, this money should be returned, either back to taxpayers or spent on programs that benefit our state’s residents, rather than just sitting in the general fund,” Sommerhauser added. “That’s what policymakers opted to do with this budget.”

The $111 billion state budget passed by the state Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Tony Evers in early July increased spending by 7.7% — an increase of $3.3 billion — allocating $46 billion to fund a number of priorities.

The budget also included more than $1 billion in tax cuts over the next two years. 

One major cut comes from a change to Wisconsin’s income tax brackets. The new budget expands the state’s second tax bracket, with a 4.4% tax rate, and shrinks the third bracket, which has a 5.3% rate. Wisconsin residents on average will see a $188 cut per filer — affecting more than 1.5 million tax returns. Sommerhauser described the change as a “modest but still notable income tax cut for almost everybody that has some degree of income tax liability, except those folks that have very, very little.” The change will cost the state about $320 million in each year of the budget.

The second major cut created an exemption from income taxes for the first $24,000 for single filers over 67 and $48,000 in retirement income for married filers over 67.

The new state spending in the budget covers an array of priorities including over $500 million for special education, over $80 million in state general purpose revenue for the University of Wisconsin system, over $380 million for wage increases for state employees and additional funding for child care.

Most Republican lawmakers voted for the budget apart from four Senate Republicans and one GOP Assembly member, celebrating the tax cuts as well as some of the investments in the budget and hailing it as a compromise. Most Democrats voted against the final proposal, saying it inadequately invested in education, child care and other priorities, though five Senate and seven Assembly Democrats joined Republicans in support.

With this budget, the state has now used most of the surplus that has formed the backdrop for the last few budgets. The surplus, Sommerhauser said, was mostly the result of federal pandemic aid and was also created in part by an increase in tax revenue, especially through the sales tax, as a result of inflation. At one point the surplus had grown to over $6 billion. 

“[A large surplus is] not business as usual in Wisconsin,” Sommerhauser said. “More often you see the opposite. You see shortfalls that lawmakers are having to scramble to figure out a way to bridge.”

Sommerhauser said that with the smaller reserves, the next budget is likely “going to be kind of coming back to Earth.”

By July 1 2027, Wisconsin’s general fund balance is projected to be $770.5 million — a drop of about $3.6 billion and the lowest balance since 2018. The state will also have $2.1 billion in its rainy day fund.

This leaves Wisconsin with a projected $2.8 billion in its reserves — about 11% of Wisconsin’s net general fund appropriations in fiscal year 2027, Sommerhauser said.

“That’s certainly not disastrous. It’s not cataclysmic at all. It is more than the state has had in reserve for many years prior to the pandemic,” Sommerhauser said. “Of course, it’s a lot less than the last couple of budgets here.”

Wisconsin isn’t the only state to be on this trajectory. At its annual summit in early August, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) gave an overview of state budgets and asked whether it is time for states to “tighten the belt.”

Erica MacKellar, program principal of NCSL’s Fiscal Affairs Program, said during the presentation that, overall, states ended fiscal year 2025 in a “fairly strong position.” Looking back to the pandemic, she said state revenues didn’t take as big a hit as they were initially expecting. 

“As states recovered, they unexpectedly saw these big revenue surpluses, and that was due to a number of factors, including the large amount of aid that the federal government sent to states,” MacKeller said. “Revenue growth jumped to around 15%, but states always knew that that level of growth was really unsustainable, and have been really planning for a return to normal of state revenue growth and a revenue slowdown that I think we’re seeing now.” 

MacKeller said that prior to the pandemic, state year-end balances as a percentage of state spending were about 10% on average — an increase from the low of about 4% during the Great Recession.

“In fiscal year 2023, after we saw those record surpluses, that percentage soared to over 30%, and now that number has started to come back down,” MacKeller said. “The preliminary average from our survey shows about 16[%] for fiscal year 2025, so that’s putting most states on pretty firm footing at this point.” 

Sommerhauser said the bigger issue now is that Wisconsin is spending more than it brings in through taxes — creating a projected structural deficit. He said it’s something policymakers will have to grapple with in the coming years.

Under the new budget, the state’s general fund will spend about $24.4 billion and bring in $23.1 billion in tax revenues in 2027. The projected gap “would be one of the largest of the past generation,” according to the Wisconsin Policy Forum.

The state could use the reserves for the additional spending, but it wouldn’t be a long-term solution, Sommerhauser said. 

“The state can do that on a one-time basis if it’s got a bunch of money in the bank, which it does right now,” Sommerhauser said. “The issue with that is that you can only spend that money in the bank one time.”

If spending and revenue remain the same, Wisconsin would have an imbalance of -$727 million and an imbalance of -$1.4 billion by the end of 2028-29, according to the Legislative Fiscal Bureau. 

Sommerhauser noted that unlike the federal government, Wisconsin can’t run a huge deficit year after year. The state constitution requires lawmakers pass and the governor sign a balanced budget.

“The state can do these things, whether it’s drawing money out of reserves or sometimes there are other little tricks that the state can kind of pull out of its hat on a one-time basis,” Sommerhauser said. But, he added, “if your ongoing revenues are significantly out of alignment with your ongoing tax revenues, you’re gonna have a headache to deal with every two years, and you’re setting yourself up to have some really challenging budgets that could eventually make you have to do something really, really painful — whether it’s a big tax increase or some sort of big spending cut.”

Sommerhauser said the Great Recession was the point in recent memory when the state dealt with the greatest budget shortfalls.

“There were some significant tax increases that were put into place in 2009, when we had Democratic controlled state government,” Sommerhauser said. During the 2009-2010 budget (the last time there was a Democratic trifecta), former Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature created a new tax bracket of 7.75% on married couples filing jointly with taxable income above $300,000 to help close the budget gap the state was facing. The state’s highest bracket is currently 7.65%.

“You had the big election in 2010 where everything flipped, and then you have Gov. [Scott] Walker and Act 10, and everything happening in 2011 which brought about some really large spending cuts in the state,” Sommerhauser said. At the time, Walker’s administration was projecting the state would have a $3.6 billion deficit and the Republican trifecta took the route of drastically cutting public employee benefits to address it.

“We obviously are hopeful that we’re not going to see a recession again anytime soon… but this is our best sort of attempt to give a sense of what the Legislature might be needing to grapple with in two years,” Sommerhauser said.

The partisan composition of Wisconsin’s state government could also look quite different by the next budget. 

Evers announced that he won’t be running for reelection just a few weeks after wrapping up the 2025-27 state budget, making the 2026 election the first open race since 2010.

The Republican and Democratic fields of candidates are still shaping up. Some of the announced candidates have made comments signaling what they would like to see from a budget. 

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, the first Democratic candidate in the race, has said she would invest additional state funding in Wisconsin’s schools. Republican Washington Co. Executive Josh Schoemann has said the recent budget spends too much and is taxing people too much. Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, who is still considering a run, noted the potential deficit on social media when he said that Wisconsin “must change course before we end up like MN and IL.” 

The state Senate and Assembly will also be up for grabs in 2026.

Sommerhauser said it’s likely the next governor and state Legislature could be dealing with a challenging state budget, though it’s still unclear how challenging.  

“If economic growth is really strong for the next two years, we could be in a position where we have a projected shortfall, but it’s quite manageable… That’s kind of the best case scenario,” Sommerhauser said. “Worst case scenario is if we would see a recession in the next couple of years, that could be setting us up for a very challenging budget.”

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Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson joins city health department officials on Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2025, to give updates about the flood recovery efforts. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Milwaukee County continues to process the aftermath of a historic flooding that swept through the area  last weekend. Although much of the flood water, which exceeded 10 inches in some areas, has receded, emergency shelters are still  providing services to people displaced by the extreme weather, and community clean-up efforts continue. 

At a press conference Wednesday, Mayor Cavalier Johnson said residents should call 211 to report property damage, which he called an important  step towards achieving an official disaster declaration, which in turn could provide additional resources. Johnson said local officials continue to work with state and federal partners to access resources from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and noted a recent visit to the city by Gov. Tony Evers. 

“We’re asking for the federal government to do their part and issue some relief to the folks here in Milwaukee with some assistance from FEMA,” Johnson said. The city continues to wait for President Donald Trump’s administration to respond to Milwaukee’s calls for support. Johnson encouraged residents to report downed trees, abandoned vehicles, standing water and to check on neighbors or loved ones. 

The mayor praised Milwaukeeans for “stepping up,” helping senior citizens to clear out basements and  clearing out storm drains. “We really appreciate the efforts of people all across our city who are stepping up to make this a safer place for everybody as we work to get through the aftermath of the storm,”  he said. “We’re a resilient city, we always have been, we always will be, and we will get through this together.”

Johnson was joined by Mike Totoraitis, commissioner of the Milwaukee Health Department. Totoraitis said that calling 211 “is your best connection to resources at this point,” noting that “there are some large wait times on 211 during those peak hours.” Like the mayor, Totoraitis said that calling 211 is also one of the best ways to essentially convince the federal government to send assistance. “We know that many people have lost water heaters, furnaces, furniture, personal effects, there is a lot of damage that has happened,” he said. “Drive through neighborhoods across the city and see just debris and items out on someone’s driveway. So this is a critical moment to get those damage reports in, and then we’re also using that to help prioritize where we’re going to bring additional resources.”

Working with the Red Cross and other partners, Totoraitis said that the city is deploying hundreds of cleaning kits and other supplies. Meanwhile, the health department is monitoring signs of disease. Totoraitis said residents should assume any standing water in the streets or in homes is contaminated with sewage and avoid it. 

The Red Cross has established two shelters, one on the near North Side and another on the South Side, to help people displaced by the flood. Dozens of people sought assistance from the shelters, a Red Cross worker told Wisconsin Examiner. The two locations have recently been consolidated into one shelter now operating out of Marshall High School, according to a Red Cross worker.

On Monday, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley thanked first responders, Evers, and the National Guard for assisting. “I know this is an incredibly challenging and devastating time for many of our residents, but I’m inspired seeing neighbors helping neighbors, businesses stepping up to support those in need, and the tireless dedication of our first responders and emergency management personnel,” said Crowley. “Milwaukee County is a strong and resilient community, and I know that by coming together, we will persevere.” On Tuesday, Crowley walked through storm-damaged neighborhoods near Brown Deer with officials from the county’s Office of Emergency Management.

On Wednesday, Wisconsin Policy Forum released a report warning that severe flooding could become more frequent. “Over the past 45 years Wisconsin has seen a dramatic increase in damage caused by flooding, as the climate has warmed, extreme rains have become more common, and urban development has continued,” the report states. “Increased flooding in turn has resulted in larger payouts on flood insurance claims, as well as increased federal and state payments for disaster recovery. With projections suggesting that continued climate change will further increase the likelihood of extreme rains, federal, state, and local governments will need to deal with the consequences.” 

The report shows that during the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s, flood insurance damage claims for property in Wisconsin exceeded $40 million. Severe floods that struck Milwaukee in 2008 caused nearly $50 million in flood insurance damage claims. “Current projections show that the frequency of heavy rain events and the potential for devastating floods will continue to grow over the coming decades,” the report states. “Property owners, along with state and local governments, will be on the hook for the costs of cleaning up and rebuilding after these floods occur. As costs grow, they may begin to stress state and local budgets, especially if state leaders decide to cover a growing share of the rebuilding costs. In addition, there are some questions about the federal government’s long-term commitment to covering these costs, which may push additional costs onto the state.” 

Taking care of each other

Many people are continuing to wrap their minds around the scale of the flood damage. When Evers visited Milwaukee County, he was joined by Rep. Robyn Vining (D-Wauwatosa) on a tour of  the area Vining represents. Wauwatosa produced some of the most dramatic images of flood damage, with most of Hart Park seemingly underwater and overflowing wetlands in the County Grounds natural area. 

Vining said in a statement that “the damage is serious, and the pain across the community is real. Let’s be good neighbors and take care of each other during this difficult time.” 

Anne Tuchelski, a 29-year-old lifelong resident of Milwaukee in the Bay View neighborhood, saw people stepping up to help one another as a summer’s-worth of rain fell in the middle of the night last weekend across Milwaukee. Tuchelski realized something was wrong after her neighborhood’s main intersection was completely flooded. “I’ve never seen it like this,” she told Wisconsin Examiner. “My gutters were just pouring out and just slamming on the pavement…I’ve never seen this before.” 

Tuchelski’s 85-year-old grandmother, who has also lived in Milwaukee for her whole life, had never seen such a storm before either. Tuchelski drove to her grandmother’s house in the middle of the night to check on her. The water was rising dramatically. 

“That was really the kicker, was that it was happening in the middle of the night,” she said. Driving down the darkened, flooded roadways, Tuchelski saw people stranded in their cars. From 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. she used her SUV to offer people rides and to push stalled vehicles out of the water, “helping wherever I could.”

Tuchelski recalled one woman whose car was stranded in floodwater near the freeway. She’d left home to pick up her son, and needed her car to go to work in the morning. Tuchelski tried to get her to understand that her vehicle was flooded, and that the tow truck she’d decided to wait for likely wouldn’t come because of the scale of the disaster. 

“It was just really heartbreaking to see her try to come to terms with the fact that the next day is going to change greatly,” Tuchelski said. She offered her a ride, but the woman refused. “It’s like she wasn’t grasping that nobody can come right now. Everybody’s overwhelmed, everybody’s doing their best, and the car’s gone. And you’re standing in the middle of the intersection at 3 o’clock in the morning. She just couldn’t grasp it, and I ran into multiple people like that who just could not grasp it.”

Another person Tuchelski encountered was in a U-Haul truck attempting to move their things, and seemingly unable to accept that it was all already gone or ruined. “I kept saying to her, ‘You have to leave it,’ and she’s like, ‘My stuff, my stuff,’ and I was like, ‘We can’t. It’s underwater.’ So it was just a repeated thing with people, where they just could not come to terms with leaving their belongings behind for their own survival, and their own well-being.” 

Tuchelski herself lost many family tapes, pictures and dresses in the flood. Tuchelski’s family has lived in Milwaukee for over a century. Her grandmother’s basement is still flooded, and so is Tuchelski’s aunt’s basement. “My grandmother’s home has raised five generations of family,” said Tuckelski. “And just to see things float by and be damaged, it was really heartbreaking … Things that make our family, and have recorded these moments, and have become important to us, just floating by.”

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People attend the WorldPride International Rally and March on Washington for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., in June. Conservative judges might allow lawmakers to reinstate the practice of conversion therapy, which aims to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ+ people. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)

Week after week, a teenage Brandon Long sat through counseling sessions that he said framed his identity as a failure.

Now an ordained minister in northern Kentucky, Long told Kentucky state lawmakers about the years he spent undergoing therapy designed to rid him of his “same-sex attraction.”

“Just imagine yourself being told, session after session, that if you remained as you were, you would be rejected,” he said.

Long testified in February before a Kentucky House committee against a Republican-sponsored bill that would cancel Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear’s 2024 executive order that banned a controversial practice known as “conversion therapy” for minors.

Conversion therapy is a catchall term for controversial efforts to change the sexual orientation or gender identity of LGBTQ+ people. Sometimes called “reparative therapy,” it can range from talk therapy and religious counseling to electrical shocks, pain-inducing aversion therapy and physical isolation.

The bill, Long told lawmakers, “creates a legal shield for conversion therapy, allowing parents to force their children into a practice condemned by every major medical and mental health organization worldwide.”

Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature passed the bill, then overrode the governor’s veto in March.

Conversion therapy has been denounced by major medical organizations including the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. They say it’s ineffective and harmful and puts LGBTQ+ people at risk for depression, substance use, suicide and other mental health issues.

More than half of states have banned or restricted the practice for underage patients since California became the first to do so in 2012, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit research organization that tracks LGBTQ+-related laws and policies.

But political currents are shifting. Conservative majorities in the courts, in state legislatures and at the federal level have reshaped the legal landscape, opening the door for Republican lawmakers and conservative Christian groups to reinstate a practice that has been roundly discredited by the medical community.

In March, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case challenging Colorado’s 2019 conversion therapy ban on freedom of speech grounds. The decision marks a change from 2017, when the court refused to hear a challenge to California’s ban, and 2023, when it declined to hear a challenge to Washington’s ban.

The high court’s decision, which isn’t expected until next year, could reverse — or solidify — conversion therapy bans across the country.

Last month, a Virginia court partially struck down the state’s 2020 law banning conversion therapy for minors, a win for conservative Christian organizations. GOP lawmakers in Michigan have introduced a bill to repeal the state’s ban. And Missouri‘s Republican attorney general has filed suit to overturn local conversion therapy bans.

On the flip side, in Wisconsin, the state Supreme Court cleared the way earlier this year for the state to permanently ban the practice.

‘The world has changed’

While organized attempts to “cure” homosexuality have been around for centuries, “ex-gay” groups that promised to change a person’s sexual orientation began gaining ground in the 1990s as policy debates arose over same-sex marriage and gay people serving in the military, said Dr. Jack Drescher, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He is also a clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia University whose research has focused on gender and sexuality.

But after Massachusetts legalized same-sex marriage in 2004 and more states followed, the influence of conversion therapy proponents waned.

As of this year, 23 states and Washington, D.C., prevent licensed health care providers from subjecting minors to conversion therapy, according to an analysis of state laws by the Movement Advancement Project. Four more states restrict the practice, such as by not allowing public funding to go toward conversion therapy services.

State laws typically levy fines or discipline the professional licenses of practitioners who try to engage minors in conversion therapy. They don’t necessarily prevent clergy or unlicensed counselors from attempting such counseling.

The bans are more of a public statement of acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, rather than a commonly used preventive measure, said Drescher.

“The bans are reinforcements of the belief that if homosexuality is not a mental disorder or disease, there’s no reason to pretend you can treat it, and anybody who tries is acting outside the mainstream of science,” Drescher told Stateline.

The American Medical Association has written model legislation for state lawmakers who want to ban conversion therapy, a reflection of the broad consensus in the medical community that homosexuality and gender nonconformity are not mental illnesses, said R.J. Mills, a representative from the American Medical Association, in a statement to Stateline.

In the past, some leading psychiatric and psychological associations were hesitant to support state restrictions because they saw the laws as intrusions into the doctor-patient or therapist-patient relationship, Drescher said.

Now, spurred by Trump administration policies that place new restrictions on LGBTQ+ people and the most conservative U.S. Supreme Court in generations, medical organizations are growing more vocal in their opposition to conversion therapy.

“The world has changed,” Drescher said. “Everybody understands what’s at stake now.”

Free speech argument

Conservative legal firms have filed lawsuits in states such as Colorado, Michigan and Virginia on behalf of Christian counselors who say the laws prevent them from practicing according to their faith-based values. They say the bans should be repealed so practitioners won’t face losing their careers over providing services informed by their faith.

A Virginia court last month oversaw a consent decree in which Virginia agreed to not fully enforce its 2020 conversion therapy ban and to allow counselors to engage in talk conversion therapy with minors. The plaintiffs in the case were John and Janet Raymond, state-licensed professional counselors in Virginia who were represented by the Founding Freedoms Law Center, an organization that takes on conservative legal causes.

The kind of talk therapy now allowed can involve conversation, prayer and sharing of written materials such as religious scriptures, said Josh Hetzler, the Raymonds’ attorney, during a public news conference following the court decision.

“With this court order, every counselor in Virginia will now be able to speak freely, truthfully and candidly with clients who are seeking to have those critical conversations about their identity, and to hear faith-based insights from trusted professionals,” he said.

Conservative legislators also are citing their Christian faith in their attempts to roll back state bans.

Michigan state Rep. Josh Schriver, a Republican, filed a package of bills last month aimed at repealing a handful of what he calls “anti-Christ laws,” including Michigan’s 2023 ban on conversion therapy for youth.

A legislative aide said Schriver wasn’t available for an interview, and instead referred Stateline to the recent Substack post he emailed to his constituents.

“As legislators, we’re duty-bound to remove statutes that overstep the authority given by our state and federal Constitutions,” Schriver said in the post.

Long, the Kentucky minister, said the bans are needed because “no one enters conversion therapy willingly.”

“The only reason a child would go through it is because a trusted authority in their life — a parent, a pastor or a therapist — has told them that they are broken and need to be fixed.”

At least five states have a law or policy prohibiting or deterring local-level ordinances that aim to protect youth from conversion therapy.

Some states without such laws are going after municipalities that have banned conversion therapy.

Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey in February sued Jackson County, Missouri, home to Kansas City, challenging the county’s 2023 ordinance and Kansas City’s 2019 ordinance, both of which ban licensed counselors from engaging in conversion therapy with minors.

“Our children have a right to therapy that allows for honest, unrestricted conversations, free from transgender indoctrination,” Bailey said in a statement in February. He called the ordinances “a dangerous overreach” that violate free speech and religious liberty rights.

A Republican loss

In at least one state, conservatives have hit a legal roadblock.

In Wisconsin, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ administration has been trying since 2020 to enact a statewide conversion therapy ban proposed by the state agency that oversees provider licensing.

But the ban has been blocked twice by a Republican-controlled legislative committee.

Evers’ administration sued.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with Evers last month, ruling that the state legislative committee was overreaching and couldn’t block the rule.

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

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

Micah Laureano with his mother, Phyllis, who filed a lawsuit after Micah's death | Photo courtesy Phyllis Laureno

Months after 19 year-old Micah Laureano was killed by his cellmate at Green Bay Correctional Institution, Laureano’s mother filed a lawsuit against officials in the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. 

On Friday, Secretary Jared Hoy and the warden of GBCI, Christopher Stevens, denied violating any of Laureano’s rights and engaging in any unlawful actions.

They denied that the plaintiff, Phyllis Laureano, “is entitled to any of the relief that she seeks” and called for the complaint to be dismissed. 

The lawsuit alleged that “defendants’ willful and deliberate indifference to Mr. Laureano’s safety resulted in him being murdered by his cellmate.” It alleged that “based on Defendants’ actions, Mr. Laureano suffered cruel and unusual punishment when Defendants failed to protect him from harm.”

The lawsuit alleged that “defendants failed to protect Mr. Laureano when they placed a particularly aggressive, violent, and discriminatory inmate with a history of severe physical assault and mental health issues” in a cell with him. 

In June, Jackson Vogel was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for Laureano’s death.

Vogel reportedly said he attacked Laureano because he was Black and gay, according to a report the Examiner received from the Brown County Sheriff’s Office. 

According to the report, Vogel had been issued conduct reports dated March 5 and 6, 2024, for language in inmate complaints and interview requests. 

The complaints reportedly contained “obscene, profane, abusive and threatening language” and swastika symbols. According to the report, Vogel wrote “‘you all need and deserve Death! Hail Hitler!’” and mentioned the Aryan Brotherhood and “‘White Power (WLM).’” 

The Post-Crescent reported that in May 2024, a judge and a prosecutor in Manitowoc County received death threats in the mail from Vogel, containing violent language detailing torture and cannibalism. 

In an article about Laureano’s death at GBCI in August, the Examiner reported that court records showed Vogel had been found guilty of attempted first-degree intentional homicide, and Laureano had been found guilty of taking and driving a vehicle without consent and as party to a crime for substantial battery intending bodily harm, robbery with use of force and first-degree recklessly endangering safety. 

A telephone scheduling conference will take place at 9:20 a.m. on Sept. 11. 

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Gov. Tony Evers speaks at a press conference about his budget proposal for the Department of Corrections. Evers vetoed a bill that would have deprived Wisconsinites who finished serving their time for felonies of voting rights if they hadn't paid all their court fees and other obligations.. Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner.

Gov. Tony Evers recently vetoed a Republican-sponsored bill, AB87/SB95, that would have suspended the right to vote for Wisconsinites convicted of a felony who have served their sentence until they fulfill outstanding court-order obligations, such as fines, costs, restitution or community service.

In Wisconsin, people who have served their criminal sentence for a felony, including incarceration and community service, parole, probation and extended supervision, are eligible to vote.

But the proposed legislation would have required any outstanding requirements – “fines, costs, fees, surcharges, and restitution [and] any court-ordered community service, imposed in connection with the crime” – to be addressed in full before voting rights were fully restored.

State Rep. Shae Sortwell, (R-Two Rivers) a sponsor of the bill, offered support in writing at the March 4, 2025 Assembly public hearing, saying the bill would “ensure justice is entirely served and full accountability is given to those that still owe a debt to their victims, especially those that are trafficked.” (The legislation also required restitution for victims of human trafficking as a condition.)

State Sen. Dan Feyen, (R- Fond Du Lac), a co-sponsor of the bill, said he supported the legislation “to make sure crime victims are justly compensated and the perpetrators of these crimes are held accountable for their action.”

However, in vetoing the proposed legislation, Evers said, “This bill would create additional barriers to make it harder for individuals who have completed their sentences to have their right to vote restored. My promise to Wisconsinites has always been that I will not sign legislation that makes it harder for eligible Wisconsinites to cast their ballot. I will continue to keep that promise.”

Mark Rice, Wisconsin transformational justice campaign coordinator at WISDOM, a faith-based organization that works to advance the rights of immigrants and formerly incarcerated people, said the issue is personal to him because he had his voting rights removed when he was sentenced for a felony.

“I couldn’t vote for several years after serving my prison sentence,” he said.

For those coming out of prison, said Rice, it is often difficult to secure employment and have the funds to pay off outstanding fees and restitution, and he doesn’t believe those struggling to integrate into society should face yet another obstacle to participate in civic life.

“We here at WISDOM have been organizing to expand voting rights for formerly incarcerated people for many years, and we thank Gov. Evers for vetoing a bill that would have amounted to voter suppression,” said Rice.

Marianne Oleson, operations director for Ex-incarcerated People Organizing (EXPO) of Wisconsin, also celebrated Evers’ veto.

“Governor Evers’ veto is a tremendous victory for EXPO, for the people we serve, and for democracy in Wisconsin,” Oleson said in a statement. “This bill would have imposed a modern-day poll tax, silencing thousands of Wisconsinites who have already completed their sentences simply because they could not afford to pay court costs or restitution.”

She added, “At EXPO, we believe the right to vote should never depend on the size of your bank account. Justice means restoring full citizenship and dignity to those who have paid their debt to society — not creating new barriers that keep them from participating in our democracy.”

The ACLU of Wisconsin has opposed the legislation since the March 4, 2025 public hearing.

“This proposal would create a modern-day poll tax in Wisconsin,” said the ACLU, and compared  the proposed legislation to a controversial Florida bill, SB 7066, that passed in 2019, which required “outstanding legal obligations” to be met before even allowing ex-felons the ability to register to vote.

The ACLU also warned that the state does not have a “centralized database” to accurately identify all outstanding obligations that would have to be met before voting is regained.

“This would make it nearly impossible for some individuals to determine what they owe, if anything, and whether they would be eligible to vote,” an  ACLU spokesperson said..

Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause of Wisconsin, an organization supporting open and responsive government, also supported Evers’ veto.

“This measure had as its goal to make it more difficult for long marginalized communities in Wisconsin who are disproportionately Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, as well as people living in poverty and those with disabilities, to be able to exercise their right to vote,” Heck said in a statement.

He added, “This legislation didn’t make whole people who have survived crime; it just would have weakened democracy and put the right to vote out of reach through a poll tax – an outrageous and deeply unfair price tag on the freedom to vote.”

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President Donald Trump holds up an executive order after signing it during an indoor inauguration parade at the Capital One Arena on Jan. 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C.  (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court on Wednesday overturned a lower court’s ruling that had required the Trump administration to spend foreign aid dollars approved by Congress.

But instead of addressing the central argument of the lawsuit — that a president cannot refuse to spend money approved by lawmakers, who hold the power of the purse — the Circuit Court in a potentially significant decision said the organizations that filed the case didn’t have the authority to do so.

Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson wrote in her 33-page opinion that only the comptroller general, who leads the Government Accountability Office, has the power to bring lawsuits when a president impounds, or refuses to spend, congressionally approved funds.  The GAO is an independent, non-partisan watchdog agency that works for Congress.

“Because the grantees lack a cause of action, we need not address on the merits whether the government violated the Constitution by infringing on the Congress’s spending power through alleged violations of the 2024 Appropriations Act, the ICA and the Anti-Deficiency Act,” Henderson wrote. The ICA is the Impoundment Control Act, which is the legal mechanism through which the president can delay or withhold funds.

Henderson was nominated to the Circuit Court in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, a few years after President Ronald Reagan nominated her as a federal district judge in 1986.

Henderson wrote that she and Judge Gregory G. Katsas, who was nominated by President Donald Trump, concluded “the district court abused its discretion in granting a preliminary injunction” for several reasons.

Both Republican and Democratic state attorneys general filed amicus briefs in the case, with Republicans siding with the Trump administration. The case originated when Trump signed an order on Inauguration Day freezing certain foreign aid spending.

Henderson wrote that “within weeks, the State Department and USAID suspended or terminated thousands of grant awards.”

‘It is our responsibility to check the president’

Judge Florence Y. Pan, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, issued a 46-page dissenting opinion, arguing the ruling from her two colleagues was “procedurally and substantively flawed.”

“It is our responsibility to check the President when he violates the law and exceeds his constitutional authority,” Pan wrote. “We fail to do that here.”

Pan wrote she disagreed with the majority’s opinion that Trump withholding certain foreign aid funding was “a mere violation of the Impoundment Control Act that should be addressed by the Comptroller General.”

“In this case, the President’s violation of the Impoundment Control Act is a sideshow,” Pan wrote. “That statute provided a mechanism for the President to lawfully attempt to impound the funds, and his failure to follow its prescribed procedures is evidence that he was, in fact, refusing to obligate the funds in defiance of Congress.”

Public media funding targeted

The Trump administration has used the Impoundment Control Act one time this year, when it requested Congress cancel $9.4 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and various foreign aid programs.

The House voted mostly along party lines to approve the full request in mid-June.

Senate Republicans approved the bill in July after preserving full funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.

House GOP lawmakers then cleared the bill for Trump’s signature just before a 45-day clock ran out.

Trump administration sees ‘big win’

Several members of the Trump administration, including Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought and Attorney General Pam Bondi, cheered the Circuit Court’s ruling in social media posts.

“In a 2-1 ruling, the DC Circuit lifted an injunction ordering President Trump to spend hard-earned taxpayer dollars on wasteful foreign aid projects,” Bondi wrote. “We will continue to successfully protect core Presidential authorities from judicial overreach.”

Vought wrote the ruling was a “Big win!”

An OMB spokesperson wrote in a statement the ruling represented a victory for the White House.

“Radical left dark-money groups have been using the court system to seize control of U.S. foreign policy,” the spokesperson wrote. “Today’s decision stops these private groups from maliciously interfering with the President’s ability to spend responsibly and administer foreign aid in a lawful manner and in alignment with his America First policies.”

Lauren Bateman, attorney at Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel on the suit, wrote in a statement that the court’s ruling represented “a significant setback for the rule of law and risks further erosion of basic separation of powers principles.

“We will seek further review from the court, and our lawsuit will continue regardless as we seek permanent relief from the Administration’s unlawful termination of the vast majority of foreign assistance. In the meantime, countless people will suffer disease, starvation, and death from the Administration’s unconscionable decision to withhold life-saving aid from the world’s most vulnerable people.”

A member of the National Guard arrives at the Guard’s headquarters at the D.C. Armory on Tuesday,  Aug. 12, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Donald Trump announced he is placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under federal control, and will deploy the National Guard to the District to assist in crime prevention in the nation’s capital. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s move to deploy 800 National Guard members in the District of Columbia over claims that crime is plaguing the city – despite historic lows –  follows his use of the military in his administration’s growing immigration crackdown.

“(D.C.’s) out of control, but we’re going to put it in control very quickly, like we did on the southern border,” Trump said at a Monday press conference where he was flanked by members of his Cabinet, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. He vowed to do the same in more cities governed by Democrats.

Trump’s return to the White House was led by a campaign promise of mass deportations, tying newly arrived immigrants at the southern border with high crime rates and the need to use troops to detain and remove those migrants.

Since Inauguration Day, the president has sent thousands of National Guard members to be stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border and has militarized strips of land along the border, putting migrants into contact with military personnel.

Trump’s deployment of the California National Guard in June in response to unrest over immigration raids was seen as a test case for use of the state-based military forces. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California wrote on X on Monday that Trump “was just getting warmed up in Los Angeles” with that order.

“He will gaslight his way into militarizing any city he wants in America,” Newsom said. “This is what dictators do.”

‘Quick Reaction Force’

Now the Trump administration is evaluating plans to establish a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of 600 National Guard members to remain on stand-by in order to be quickly deployed to any U.S. city undergoing a protest or other civil unrest within an hour, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.

The groups, who would be armed with riot gear and other weapons, would be split evenly between Alabama and Arizona, according to the Post.

The DOD proposal also calls for a rotation of service members from Army and Air Force National Guard units based in Alabama, Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee, according to the Post.

National Guard members are typically in reserve and are some of the first responders to natural disasters.

The Department of Defense and the National Guard did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment about the “Quick Reaction Force” plans. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Which cities are next?

At the Monday press conference, Trump specifically cited four cities that could see similar National Guard movements: Baltimore, Chicago, New York City and Oakland – all heavily Democratic cities led by Black mayors. Violent crime in all those cities has continued to trend downward, according to each city’s police database.

Baltimore County, Maryland, Cook County, Illinois, New York City and the entire state of California also all are on a new “sanctuary jurisdiction” list issued by the Department of Justice on Aug. 5. They are identified as “having policies, laws, or regulations that impede enforcement of federal immigration laws.”

But, unlike the district, where the president has control over the National Guard, state governors, under the law, have had control over their National Guard members.

Additionally, while Trump has seized control of the 3,400 officers in the District of Columbia Metropolitan Police Department for 29 days due to the district’s Home Rule Act, experts don’t see how that can legally be done with other local police departments.

“What they are doing in D.C. cannot be replicated outside of D.C. All of this is only possible because D.C. is not a state,” said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program. “There’s no playbook for them to do what they seem to want to do outside of D.C.”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt clarified Trump’s statements about sending in National Guard members into cities.

“The president is speaking about what he’d like to see take place in other cities across the country,” she said. “When the time comes we’ll talk about that. Starting with our nation’s capital is a great place to begin and it should serve as a model.”

Trump said he hoped other cities were “watching.”

“Maybe they’ll self clean up and maybe they’ll self do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all of the things that caused the problem,” the president said.

Nunn said that even if the president were to federalize a state’s National Guard, those members would be subject to the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which generally bars the use of the military for domestic law enforcement purposes.

“There is no statutory exception to the Posse Comitatus Act that allows the military to participate in local law enforcement,” Nunn said.

Los Angeles

A trial is underway this week challenging the president’s move to federalize California National Guard members, in a suit filed by Newsom, after an appeals court temporarily upheld Trump’s move.

The president deployed 4,000 members of the National Guard and 700 Marines to Los Angeles after protests erupted against aggressive immigration actions by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducting raids in Home Depot parking lots.

But the legal issue before a San Francisco court is not if the president’s actions were unlawful, but on the political question of who has authority over the National Guard.

Other governors in the states Trump mentioned as candidates for National Guard activation pushed back on the notion.

Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore, who served in the U.S. Army, said in a statement that the president’s decision to call in the National Guard to the District of Columbia “lacks seriousness and is deeply dangerous.”

Illinois Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker, wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that the president could not send in the National Guard to Chicago.

“Let’s not lie to the public, you and I both know you have no authority to take over Chicago,” he said.

The conflict between Trump and the Democrats comes at the same time Newsom has threatened to launch a redistricting of California’s congressional districts in order to nullify Texas’ attempt to redraw maps to add more Republican seats to the U.S. House.

And Pritzker is hosting in Illinois the Texas Democrats who left the state to prevent the state legislature from having a quorum after Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott called a special session for redistricting.

Military forces

Since taking office for his second term, the president has signed five executive orders that lay out the use of military forces within the U.S. borders and extend other executive powers to speed up Trump’s immigration crackdown.

More funding also soon will be at hand for Trump’s mass deportations. The massive tax and spending cut bill enacted in July has as its centerpiece $170 billion for the administration’s immigration crackdown. It bolsters border security, increases immigration detention capacity and adds fees to legal pathways for immigration, among other things. Thousands more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are slated to be hired.

Some Republican governors have agreed to deploy their own National Guard members to aid the Trump administration in immigration enforcement, such as in Iowa and Tennessee. The secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, sent National Guard to the southern border in Texas when she was governor of South Dakota.

Nunn said that while it’s not typically normal for states to use National Guard members for local policing there is some precedent, such as when New York had members stationed in the New York City subway.

“What is unprecedented is the federal government using military personnel for sort of crime prevention, for regular policing,” Nunn said.

Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

“I will say whether I’m glad to be here after the questions,” said Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) Chief Jeffrey Norman in a joking tone on Tuesday morning, during his opening remarks at a Milwaukee Press Club Newsmaker Luncheon. As he spoke, Norman glanced at the media panel, including David Clarey of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Jessica McBride of Wisconsin Right Now and Jenna Rae of TMJ4 News. 

As Norman predicted, the panelists proceeded to keep him on the defensive throughout the contentious luncheon. Before he was peppered with questions about safety in downtown Milwaukee, police surveillance and whether officers should return to what courts have ruled were racially discriminatory and unconstitutional stop and frisk practices, Norman presented his own perspective on public safety in Wisconsin’s largest city. 

“I always like to start off by saying that I am proud to be the leader of the Milwaukee Police Department,” said Norman, thanking the men and women of MPD “who protect our city through challenging times, through good times, 365 days a year, seven days a week — holidays included.” Norman also thanked the community for supporting MPD after the killing of Officer Kendall Corder, who was shot while responding to a call about a subject with a gun. 

Corner was one of at least two officers who have been shot this year. Norman said of the killings that it’s important for MPD officers to feel that “even though we have challenging times, we know that we have a community that’s behind us, and who understands the challenges that we’re going through, in regards to the work of public safety in our community.”

Tremaine Jones (who has pleaded not guilty) was arrested for the slaying with MPD compiling witness statements, and locating a backpack on-scene containing Jones’ social security card, employee I.D., birth certificate, debit cards, and a receipt for the lower receiver of the gun police say was used in the shooting. Since 2018, there have been six MPD officers killed in the line of duty. 

As Norman moved on to the latest crime statistics, he cautioned that “the numbers are numbers, they’re data sets, but they’re not the reality of what you feel from a personal feeling, your perspective…Never will I ever say that what you feel is not your reality, or the truth. And we have to work to continue to address those concerns.”

Citing the MPD’s mid-year crime statistics report, Norman told the audience at Milwaukee’s Newsroom Pub that there has been: 

• A 17% violent crime reduction
• 7% property crime reduction
• 11% reduction overall for serious crimes
  

“And let me put that in the proper context,” Norman said, “this is on top of reductions in 2024.” According to MPD’s crime statistics dashboard, since this time last year Milwaukee has seen an 18% decline in non-fatal shootings, a 44% decline in car jackings, a 24% decline in robberies, and another 21% decline in aggravated assaults. “Now, the elephant in the room, yes homicides are up,” said Norman. In 2024, there were 132 people who lost their lives to homicide incidents in Milwaukee. A little over half way through 2025, there have been 93 deaths.

 

 

At the time of the mid-year report, homicides were up 13%, though the most recent numbers on the online dashboard show a 9% increase. “I always say this, anything [more] than zero is unacceptable,” said Norman. The dashboard also shows a 32% increase in human trafficking since last year, and a 52% increase since 2023. Norman didn’t address this increase, and the panelists and audience members didn’t ask about it.

Norman focused on the homicide increase, highlighting what he called “the undercurrent of what these homicides are about” — inter-personal conflict and violence that escalates into harm or death. “Poor conflict resolution,” he said, “availability of firearms to our youth. These are things that we can work together to impact, to intervene, to intercede.” 

While MPD is adept at finding high-level offenders in the community, with the department boasting a nearly 80% clearance rate for solving homicides, Norman emphasized that “it’s not enough to have somebody in custody for such a horrible crime. It’s more important to prevent it.” Collaboration has been a key asset for MPD including working with community groups, elected officials and partnerships with other law enforcement agencies including the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office and State Patrol. “When we work together we are better, together, said Norman. “Leaning into the collaboration, leaning into the partnerships truly is where the rubber meets the road, so that we’re able to address when we have a flare-up of crime on Hampton Avenue, or during Cinco de Mayo, or during Juneteenth, or during Water Street, or during the Puerto Rican Fest.” Although Norman said that his own legacy has never motivated his service, he hopes to be remembered as a chief who was there, and who cared, he said, when the Milwaukee Bucks celebrated winning the NBA championship, during the  COVID-19 pandemic, the Republican National Convention and the historic floods just days ago. “He was there,” Norman said of himself. “He cared.” 

A grilling by the media panel 

The first media panel question came from Clarey of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about MPD’s use of surveillance technology. The department’s use of facial recognition software, drones and other technologies have raised concerns about privacy and due process. 

Norman said that some public safety investigations and interventions have been “wrapped up in a more quick and efficient manner by utilizing the technology.” He mentioned Flock cameras the department uses to monitor license plates and identify vehicles taken in car jackings. He also noted facial recognition technology used in repeat sexual assault and homicide cases. “These are what is going on with this particular technology,” said Norman. “I am very sensitive to the concerns about surveillance, abuse, but I say this, as any tool that can be utilized by law enforcement, has the ability to be abused. It’s about what are the bumper rails? What are the expectations? What is the oversight?” 

Norman said his department is committed to oversight and dialogue with the community about the technology. Yet, he also feels that the fears that he’s heard about surveillance technology are often “speculative.” By contrast, the chief said he could describe numerous concrete examples of carjacking suspects and people who committed violent crimes who were apprehended because of the technology. “That is what is going on,” said Norman, “and if there’s any tools that the Milwaukee Police Department can utilize to ensure that there is direct, serious and quick accountability, we shall use it.”

McBride, a journalism lecturer at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and contributor to the right-wing website Wisconsin Right Now, asked if Norman would support calling on the city to end its obligations under the Collins settlement, the result of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin, which found that MPD had utilized racially motivated and unconstitutional stop and frisk practices for decades. 

McBride said that she’s heard from officers who feel that the agreement, which mandated changes to MPD’s practices, has made it “difficult if not impossible” to do “proactive policing.” McBride cited a decline in “field interviews,” or officers talking to and gathering information from people, as well as traffic stops. She connected those changes to the rise of reckless driving in Milwaukee. Norman said that officials have focused on checks and balances to ensure that MPD is compliant, but that he also agrees that the Collins settlement should be “heavily modified.” 

The agreement carries “a number of administrative burdens,” Norman said, stressing that he wholly supports constitutional policing. “There is really no wiggle room,” said Norman. “At the end of a shift, reports need to be filed. Some of our officers have done two shifts. They’re tired…There’s a cost associated with this, that’s overtime being used.” Norman said that MPD no longer sees the sort of constitutional violations which led to the Collins settlement, and that the department has shown itself to be responsible, and that things will never “backslide” on his watch.

Rae of TMJ4 asked about an incident involving a car that crashed through a police barrier in downtown Milwaukee, severely injuring two women who were crossing the street. She pushed Norman to explain why “no detectives interviewed the victims or any of the bystanders to follow up on the investigation after that crash?” 

Norman said that the investigation went as far as it needed to go, and that it culminated in “accountability measures,” which included issuing citations. Rae, unsatisfied, pushed back saying Norman didn’t answer her question, but the chief reiterated that officers were on scene, interviews were done, and that nothing more was required. An awkward silence followed as the microphone passed back to Clarey, who asked about Norman’s support of city ordinances related to so-called “street takeovers”, where people noisily gather in intersections and do tricks with their cars. Later, Rae pressed Norman further on the car crash. He said he was unprepared to focus on the specific details she wanted him to discuss.

McBride asked Norman about his $65,000 raise, bringing his salary to $243,000, and added that MPD officers have gone without a raise for over two years. She asked Norman why he accepted the raise, whether he’d suspend his raise until other MPD officers receive one, and whether he supports officers getting back-pay from the city. Norman said that he earned his raise not only through his credentials, which include a law degree, but also through the amount of hours he puts in as chief.

“I sometimes work maybe 12-14 hours, work Saturdays and Sundays, I’m actually really never off,” said Norman. “It is important to understand that no one has given me anything for free, the work that I do is earned.” In 2022, CBS58 reported that over a dozen officers made more money than the chief due to overtime pay. 

Norman said he supports contract negotiations that could include back pay for officers, and that the process is in the hands of the Milwaukee Police Association and the mayor. McBride pressed again about how his raise hurts officer morale and whether he supports officers getting back pay. 

Norman was also asked about officers being sent away from their own districts to work downtown and whether “broken windows” policing — a strategy that favors tight control of even small infractions to create an overall climate of safety — should be brought back. McBride suggested he did not have “an articulable policing strategy.” 

Norman was asked how he defines reckless driving; how a driver could crash into people after driving through a police barrier and “not see a day in court”; why reckless drivers without insurance retain their vehicles; how MPD retains recruits; whether prosecutors and judges should mete out tougher charges and penalties; how the Black Lives Matter protests and media reporting of policing hurts the profession and how MPD has achieved declines in carjackings. He expressed disappointment that reporters were focusing on certain incidents rather than others — including a deceased 13-year-old who wasn’t claimed for over a week, another 13-year-old who shot and killed people with an extended magazine firearm and crime on the South Side. Norman said in those cases “I wish you had the type of reporting as you have right now.”

Norman responded to a question from Wisconsin Examiner about inter-personal violence in the community and whether arresting more people and bringing more serious charges is the most effective strategy. 

“When you’re talking about inter-personal conflict, how or why does it rise [to] a level of firearm violence is perplexing,” he said. “The other day we had a situation where a person was inappropriately touched. She sees the individual who inappropriately touched her, wants to confront that person, and [in] that particular confrontation someone dies, because a firearm was used.” It would have been better to call the police than to try to resolve things with a firearm, he said.  

Therapists and social scientists might have better answers to questions about violent behavior, he said. But, he added, he is committed to strengthening community partnerships with public health and safety teams, mental health specialists and other non-law-enforcement experts to try to resolve conflicts before they become violent. Many situations that escalate into homicides and firearm violence are “emotional,” he said. MPD embraces violence intervention and encourages people to be more introspective instead of  “going zero to 90.” 

“I do know that we’re not going to be able to arrest our way out of this,” Norman said of social conflict that can turn violent. Solving Milwaukee’s homicide cases is important but, he said, the community should ask, “How do we prevent it from happening, to where we don’t even have those numbers? That’s the real question.”

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Dozens of people packed into a room at Northwood Technical College in Ashland for the first day of hearings in a case challenging the DNR's decision to approve a permit for the reroute of the Line 5 oil pipeline. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

In more than five hours of public testimony on Tuesday in Ashland, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa’s case began against a planned extension of the Canadian energy company Enbridge’s Line 5 oil pipeline through northern Wisconsin. 

For decades, Line 5 has run from Canada across northern Wisconsin, through the Bad River reservation. In 2023 a federal judge ordered that the pipeline’s section on the reservation be shut down. Since 2020, Enbridge has been working on a plan to reroute the pipeline, which runs from far northwest Wisconsin 645 miles into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, under the Straits of Mackinac and across the U.S. border into Canada near Detroit. It transports about 23 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids daily.

The proposed new route would move the pipeline upstream of the reservation, which tribal members have argued doesn’t alleviate the environmental risks the pipeline poses to them. 

Tuesday’s hearing was the opening day of testimony in the tribe’s case against the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources’ decision to grant permits for the Line 5 reroute. The case was argued before the Wisconsin Department of Administration’s Division of Hearings and Appeals, which gives parties the ability to challenge regulatory decisions by state agencies. Four weeks of hearings are scheduled in both Ashland and Madison. The final decision by DHA can be appealed to a state circuit court. 

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is also weighing its own permit decision on the reroute. That decision is appealable through the federal court system. 

Before the hearing started Tuesday a line of people wound through the parking lot of Northwood Technical College. At the start of the day, the hearing room was packed, with an overflow crowd  forced to watch a livestream from an auxiliary room. 

Many of the people in attendance wore t-shirts stating “Support Line 5” or representing area unions. Tribal activists grumbled that Enbridge had chartered a bus to bring in supporters. 

The pipeline reroute has already sparked hours of public comment and thousands of written comments. The DNR’s initial permit decision drew more than 32,000 written comments and an Army Corps of Engineers hearing on its permit decision in May drew two days of additional public input. 

The day began with opening statements from the tribe’s attorneys, Clean Wisconsin — a non-profit environmental organization which has intervened in the case — and the DNR. 

DNR attorney Michael Kowalkowski said that the department is confident the project will not result in “adverse” effects to the environment or local water after one of the “most comprehensive environmental reviews” in agency history. 

But Stefanie Tsosie, an attorney for the tribe, said the proposed reroute “is not a solution.” She noted that the hearings were occurring as the wild rice harvesting season in the region begins. Wild rice is an important piece of the tribe’s culture and the wetland habitats the rice is a part of are a crucial layer of defense for the area’s waterways — including Lake Superior — against pollution from runoff and flooding. Tsosie said any errors in construction or accidents after the pipeline is operational could irreversibly damage the wild rice. 

“The band is here taking a stand,” Tsosie said, because if an oil spill occurs and the environment is harmed, “the band has nowhere else to go.”

Evan Feinauer, an attorney for Clean Wisconsin, said the project poses far too much environmental risk for the DNR’s permit approval to stand, adding that a “spill of any meaningful size would be catastrophic” to the Lake Superior watershed. 

While many opponents of Line 5 did testify, a large majority of the comments came from supporters of the project. Supporters of the project argued that they believe Enbridge’s plans do enough to protect the environment while providing an economic boost to the region and hundreds of construction jobs. 

Even though the pipeline carries oil and natural gas from Canada through the U.S. and back into Canada, many area residents testified that shutting down the pipeline could raise their own energy prices and make it harder to obtain the propane they use to heat their homes. 

The project “will generate direct economic activity, it will create 700 union construction jobs, stimulate local spending and provide contracts for businesses,” said Anna Rademacher, a representative of the regional economic development organization Area Partnership for Economic Expansion.

While the hearing Tuesday drew hours of public testimony, the meat of the case is yet to come with the parties bringing their arguments for and against the DNR’s permit decision in later court dates. 

After the hearing, Tsosie told the Wisconsin Examiner the hearings Tuesday were a good baseline before the substantive parts of the case are heard.

“Obviously this is still really a contentious issue,” she said. “There are people who we saw today speak very passionately about protecting the water resources and protecting the area, and we saw people who we’ve seen before talk about the economic impacts. But this proceeding, the contested case proceeding, we’re really looking at the permit details, we’re looking at the evidence, we’re looking at baseline data, and so I think this is a good setup, but we still have four weeks of the case left.”

The case is set to continue in Madison Sept. 3 with additional public testimony. The beginning of the parties’ arguments is scheduled to begin Sept. 4.