The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected an appeal from Wisconsin parents who wanted to challenge a school district’s guidance for supporting transgender students.
The justices, acting in a case from Eau Claire, left in place an appellate ruling dismissing the parents’ lawsuit.
Parents with children in Eau Claire public schools argued in a lawsuit that the school district’s policy violates constitutional protections for parental rights and religious freedom.
Sixteen Republican-led states had urged the court to take up the parents’ case.
Lower courts had found that the parents lacked the legal right, or standing. Among other reasons, the courts said no parent presented evidence that the policy affected them or their children.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals included two judges Republican Donald Trump appointed during his first term.
But Alito described the case as presenting “a question of great and growing national importance,” whether public school districts violate parents’ rights when they encourage students to transition or assist in the process without parental consent or knowledge.
“Administrative Guidance for Gender Identity Support” encourages transgender students to reach out to staff members with concerns and instructs employees to be careful who they talk to about a student’s gender identity, since not all students are “out” to their families.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
Democratic candidate Rebecca Cooke votes in Wisconsin's 3rd CD race | Photo by Frank Zufall
Democratic 3rd Congressional District candidate Rebecca Cooke held a short press conference at Spirit Lutheran Church in Eau Claire Tuesday morning after she cast her ballot.
The parking lot of the church was packed and Cooke was enthusiastic about turnout. “I think we’re going to see going to see some record turnout numbers here,” she said.
Several of young voters at the church said they had voted for Cooke. She was asked if the enthusiasm among younger voters was shared by older voters around the 3rd Congressional District.
“We’ve done a lot of work really … getting around all 19 counties throughout the congressional district, knocking on doors, communities the size of 300 people,” Cooke said. “So we’ve been doing the work outside of urban areas to really motivate people, show them that we’re willing to show up. There’s no community too small or too red that we’re not working to to get out the voting.”
Asked about critical issues in her 3rd CD race against incumbent Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, Cooke said: “I think the things that we focused on all the way along is increasing access to health care and making it more affordable, stopping wasteful spending, taking on the corporations that priced out consumers at the gas pump and at the grocery store and restoring reproductive freedoms — that’s something that I’m hearing about from people across the 3rd Congressional District.”
“The polling place was popping,” Cooke added. “I think people are energized to get out, to exercise their right to vote, but it’s still early, and so we’re going to be doing a lot of work throughout the day, really working to mobilize voters. We’re calling into the electorate, encouraging people to get out there if they don’t have a ride to the polls, helping them figure that out, and working to just, you know, pull out any barriers that might be keeping people from getting out to vote today.”
After voting in Eau Claire, Cooke said she was driving over to Menomonie to encourage students to vote at UW-Stout.
“There’s six UW campuses and universities in this district, and we have teams throughout the 3rd CD working to energize students in particular to get out to vote,” she said, “so I’ll be at UW Stout, then I’m going to hop on the phones and talk to people that we identified as undecided voters and encourage them to get out to vote for me, because it’s really going to come down to a small part of the electorate that’s going to be able to flip this seat.”
She was asked what is the key to appealing to undecided voters.
“When I’m talking to people, I encourage them and remind them that I’m a working-class candidate, that I grew up working class, that we need more regular voices like me in Congress, people that aren’t so far left or so far right, but really working to get things done for working families throughout the 3rd CD,” she said. “And I think when I talk to people about that, they’re excited to have a moderate voice to represent them in Congress.”
Several of those who voted at the church said they didn’t like the negativity of the campaign, especially remarks by Van Orden, who has taken to calling his opponent Rebecca “Crook.”
“Look, I’ve run a campaign that’s really authentic to myself, and I think Derrick Van Orden has sought to undermine that,” Cooke said, “But I think at the end of the day, people in the 3rd Congressional District know who I am, that I’m somebody that’s going to work to secure our border and make sure that our law enforcement has the resources that they need to keep our community safe. And when I’ve been out talking on doors, and some of our communication that we’ve also been putting up, I think that’s been really clear about where I stand on those issues.”
Concerning Van Orden’s charge that she supports “defunding the police,” Cooke responded, “I support funding police fully.”
Regarding why the two candidates never had a debate, and Van Orden’s criticism that she was avoiding him, Cooke responded: “There were opportunities for debates, but neither race could agree on a date that worked for everyone or a format that worked for everyone.”
Stephanie Hirsch remembers growing up in the western Wisconsin city of Eau Claire when the community welcomed newly arriving Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia.
So Hirsch, now the Eau Claire city manager, said she was surprised at the hostility, fear and anger she saw last fall, when residents learned several dozen refugees would start arriving legally in the community of about 70,000. Opponents spread misinformation — including on a billboard — about how many people were coming and from where, and people packed a city meeting to protest the resettlements.
“It’s very hard for me to understand that fear,” Hirsch said. “I completely disagree with being afraid of people from different cultures. In fact, I’m really excited about it.”
But the way lifelong Eau Claire resident Fred Kappus saw it, the city should have other priorities.
“We really should attend to the homelessness situation before we bring in people from elsewhere,” said Kappus, the vice chairman of the Eau Claire Republican Party.
The flaring tension over the resettlement of refugees in Eau Claire has been repeated in many other midsize communities across the U.S., and it served as a backdrop to a campaign rally Tuesday with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who has focused on immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric as he and former President Donald Trump campaign.
Vance argued Tuesday that illegal immigration has devastated parts of the country, including places like Wisconsin that are far from the U.S. border with Mexico. He blames Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for problems such as the flow of illegal drugs and says he and Trump will secure the border and “put Americans first.”
“Every community is a border state,” Vance said. “Every community is a border community.”
The Ohio senator also has continued to promote false claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting and eating pets as he tries to draw attention to Democratic presidential nominee Harris’ immigration policies. Officials have said there have been no credible or detailed reports about the claims.
Vance defended talking about the claims in Springfield when asked about it Tuesday.
“I haven’t made up anything,” Vance said. “I just listened to people who were telling me things.”
Vance said he wants to travel to Springfield and speak with people there, but that wouldn’t be in the city’s best interests right now.
Fight for a ‘blue wall’ state
Western Wisconsin is a target for both sides in one of the “blue wall” states, along with Pennsylvania and neighboring Michigan, that both parties say they need to win to secure the White House. Vance campaigned in Michigan earlier Tuesday before going to Wisconsin.
The city of Eau Claire — a regional economic hub about 90 miles east of Minneapolis — is reliably Democratic. But it is located in a county where margins of victory may make a difference in November. Biden carried the county by 11 points over Trump in 2020, when the Democrat won Wisconsin and the election. Trump lost the county by 7 points in 2016, but won Wisconsin that year.
Vance did not mention the resettlement in Eau Claire during his rally, but did talk about Trump’s plan to deport people living in the country illegally, drawing loud cheers from the crowd. He also said communities that are “overrun” by immigration have seen problems such as rising rents, increased car insurance costs and added pressure on health care and school systems.
The issue of immigration already has polarized people in Eau Claire and the surrounding area.
When news broke nearly a year ago that about 75 refugees who fled their countries due to war or persecution were headed to the region — representing about 0.10% of Eau Claire’s population — Republicans introduced bills at the state and federal level designed to give local communities more say.
A misleading billboard accused Eau Claire city leaders of using tax dollars to “traffic Somali refugees” and keeping the plan secret, though no one from Somalia was part of the resettlement effort. An overflow crowd at an Eau Claire County Board meeting opposed the resettlement, but the board rejected a resolution that would have paused the effort.
There was also initially a “total and complete lack of transparency” related to the resettlements and where the refugees were coming from, said Kappus, the Republican critic.
Hirsch, the city’s top official, says officials don’t need to hold a public hearing anytime someone moves into town.
“We have many thousands of people who move to Eau Claire on an annual basis,” she said. “There’s nothing unusual about having people move to Eau Claire.”
World Relief, a humanitarian aid group founded by the National Association of Evangelicals, settled 77 refugees in Eau Claire since February, about half from the African countries of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo and Central African Republic and others from Venezuela and Colombia, said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy. Five Somalis live in the nearby community of Barron, where family members had previously settled.
World Relief expects 100 to 125 more refugees in Eau Claire in the federal government’s budget year, starting Oct. 1, to arrive at about the same pace since the group began operations in the Wisconsin city in February.
Bill Berg, 73, who was born and raised in Eau Claire and lived most of his life there, said, “It’s a minority that disagrees with refugee resettlement.”
“It’s ‘the other,’” he said Tuesday when asked why he thought some were opposed. “It’s always ‘the other.’”
He described Eau Claire as a “welcoming community” and said he had no problem with the refugees.
“Half of my family are of other races, which I think is a good thing,” he said.
Refugee resettlement cap increased under Biden
World Relief, one of 10 nongovernmental organizations that works with the State Department and the U.N. refugee agency to bring refugees to the United States after extensive vetting, has been expanding after leaner times. Biden raised the cap on bringing refugees to 125,000 in the budget year ending Sept. 30 from 18,000 under Trump in 2020, the lowest since refugee resettlement began in 1980.
Just over 84,000 refugees came to the United States from Oct. 1 through Aug. 31, a pace that falls short of the 125,000 cap. Wisconsin took in 1,500 of them, about one-third from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is plagued by violent crime and civil unrest.
Eau Claire is one of several locations, along with Austin, Texas; Baltimore; and Scott County, Iowa, where World Relief grew over the last year, Soerens said. The group felt it succeeded in Appleton, Wisconsin — where it had settled refugees for more than a decade — and started looking for another Wisconsin city that offered jobs and a welcoming spirit. They spoke with police departments, school districts, potential employers and churches.
“The community that sort of rose to the top was Eau Claire, in part because the local government was eager,” Soerens said.
Hirsch was so confident that Eau Claire would be a good fit, she wrote the U.S. State Department last year that the county had an unemployment rate of 3.5%, with plenty of job opportunities and “a long history of welcoming refugees.”
But then the backlash hit.
Kappus, who lived his entire life in Eau Claire, thinks immigration is one of the top concerns of voters in western Wisconsin.
“Fentanyl is a problem here in west-central Wisconsin and Eau Claire,” Kappus said. “It all goes back to our open borders.”
World Relief, like other resettlement agencies, provides temporary aid that may include food, rent, clothing, furniture and help with school enrollment and job searches. That’s far different from Springfield, Ohio, where many Haitians are in the country under Temporary Protected Status, which spares people from being deported to countries that are considered unsafe due to natural disasters or civil strife. Refugees, unlike those on TPS, have a path to citizenship.
Eau Claire, the fastest-growing city in the northern half of Wisconsin, is attracting people from all over, including small towns and big cities, people escaping warmer climates and those from other countries, Hirsch said.
“We’re happy to have people come to the community whether they are refugees from the Congo or a candidate for vice president,” she said. “We want to be a community that’s welcoming.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
Vice President Kamala Harris declared herself and her new running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, “joyful warriors” against Donald Trump on Wednesday as they spent their first full day campaigning together across the Midwest. They got an unusual glimpse of how hotly contested the region would be when Harris overlapped on a Wisconsin tarmac with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance.
The Democrats visited Wisconsin and Michigan, hoping to shore up support among the younger, diverse, labor-friendly voters who were instrumental in helping President Joe Biden win the 2020 election.
Harris told the day’s first rally in Eau Claire, “As Tim Walz likes to point out, we are joyful warriors.” Contributing to that feeling, the Harris campaign said it had raised $36 million in the first 24 hours after she announced Walz as her running mate.
The vice president said the pair looks at the future with optimism, unlike Trump, the former president and Republican White House nominee, whom she accused of being stuck in the past and preferring a confrontational style of politics — even as she criticized her opponent herself.
“Someone who suggests we should terminate the Constitution of the United States should never again have the chance to sit behind the seal of the United States,” Harris said, her voice rising.
Dan Miller, from Pelican Lake, Wisconsin, who was among 12,000-plus Eau Claire rally attendees, said Biden “has been an incredible president, but he just isn’t the same messenger.”
“And sometimes you need a better messenger,” Miller said. “And that’s Kamala.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, addresses the crowd during a campaign visit Wednesday, Aug. 7, 2024, in Eau Claire, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Later, at an evening event in an airport hangar outside Detroit where the campaign announced a crowd of 15,000, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — herself frequently mentioned as a future presidential candidate — declared, “We need a strong woman in the White House and it’s about damn time.”
“This election’s going to be a fight,” Harris told the same event. “We like a good fight.”
The swing was especially important for Harris since Biden’s winning coalition from four years ago has shown signs of fraying over the summer — particularly in Michigan, which has emerged as a focal point of Democratic divisions over Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
With the president now out of the race, leaders of the Arab American community and key unions say they are encouraged by Harris’ running mate choice. Walz’s addition to the ticket has soothed some tensions, signaling to some leaders that Harris had heard concerns about another leading contender for the vice presidential slot, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, who they felt had gone too far in his support for Israel.
“The party is recognizing that there’s a coalition they have to rebuild,” said Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of the heavily Arab American community of Dearborn, Michigan. “Picking Walz is another sign of good faith.”
Lingering dissensions were nonetheless on display during Harris’ Michigan speech, when she was interrupted by protesters opposing Israel’s fighting with Hamas. At first, Harris said to those trying to disrupt her, “I am here because I believe in democracy and everybody’s voice matters.”
That was a response similar to Biden’s, who often said when interrupted at his rallies that protesters should be allowed to speak before being removed by security. Harris, however, then quickly pivoted to a tougher tack, continuing, “But I am speaking now.” That sparked cheers from most of the audience.
“If you want Donald Trump to win, then say that,” the vice president continued over the protesters. “Otherwise, I’m speaking.”
Those demonstrating were eventually led away, but not before a tense confrontation between Harris supporters and protesters who screamed at one another.
Trump, meanwhile, has emphasized appealing to Midwestern voters with his choice of Vance, an Ohio senator, as his running mate. Vance bracketed the Harris-Walz ticket with Michigan and Wisconsin appearances of his own Wednesday.
U.S. Sen. JD Vance of Ohio waves to the crowd after being nominated as the Republican vice presidential candidate during the Republican National Convention on July 15, 2024, at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Vance overlapped enough that while Harris was still greeting a group of Girl Scouts who came to see her arrive at Chippewa Valley Regional Airport in Wisconsin, Vance’s campaign plane landed nearby and was taxiing in the distance. Harris posed for a group picture with the girls around the same time Vance was deplaning, and he began walking over to Air Force Two, trailed by his security detail.
The vice president eventually climbed into her motorcade, and it pulled away before they could interact. Still, that the pair came so close to doing so was unusual given the carefully scripted nature of campaign schedules.
“I just wanted to check out my future plane,” Vance later told reporters, meaning that he’d travel on Air Force Two should he and Trump be elected in November. He also criticized Harris for not holding press conferences since she became a presidential candidate.
“If those people want to call me weird I call it a badge of honor,” Vance said, responding to a moniker Walz used to describe him that made the Minnesota governor notable online in the days before Harris tapped him as her running mate.
Walz had some critical words for Vance in both Wisconsin and Michigan but trained most of his sharpest words on Trump, saying the former president “mocks our laws, he sows chaos and division amongst the people, and that’s to say nothing of the job he did as president.”
Walz also stressed that he and Harris are promoting neighborliness and common community, even suggesting that his state’s football fans were happy for Detroit’s long-underperforming NFL team when it nearly made the most recent Super Bowl: “Vikings fans are proud of the Lions.”
The momentum could be pivotal in Detroit, which is nearly 80% Black, where leaders for months had warned administration officials that voter apathy could cost them in a city that’s typically a stronghold for their party.
Rev. Wendell Anthony, president of the NAACP Detroit branch, said the excitement in the city now is “mind-blowing.” He likened it to Barack Obama’s first presidential run in 2008, when voters waited in long lines to help elect the nation’s first Black president.
Some Democratic leaders in Michigan had grown concerned that choosing the wrong running mate could slow that momentum, however, and fracture a coalition that has only recently started to unify.
Arab American leaders, who hold significant influence in Michigan due to a large presence in metro Detroit, had been vocal in their opposition to Shapiro due to his past comments regarding the Israel-Hamas conflict.
Those leaders specifically pointed to a comment he made earlier this year regarding protests on university campuses, which they felt unfairly compared the actions of student protesters to those of white supremacists. Shapiro, who is Jewish, has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu while remaining a staunch supporter of Israel.
Osama Siblani, the publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab American News and a prominent leader in Michigan’s large Muslim community, was among those who met with White House adviser Tom Perez in Michigan last week. Perez has maintained contact with some Dearborn leaders since he and other top officials traveled there with Biden to mend ties with the community.
Siblani said he met with Perez for over an hour on July 29 and told him that if Harris chose Shapiro, it would “shut down” future conversations.
“Not picking Shapiro is a very good step. It cracks the door open a little more for us,” Siblani said.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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