Menards will pay $750,000 to the State of Wisconsin as part of a multistate consumer protection settlement, Attorney General Josh Kaul announced Wednesday.
The post Wisconsin DOJ settles consumer complaint with Menards appeared first on WPR.
For this week’s new release, we visit Cuba for a Latin twist on some holiday favorites. It comes from British horn player Sarah Willis, who in 2001 became the first woman to join the brass section of the Berlin Philharmonic.
The post WPR Music new album of the week: ‘Cuban Christmas’ from hornist Sarah Willis appeared first on WPR.
Carrie Eaton from the Madison Nordic Ski Club said it's a good time to be getting outside. She shared tips for taking advantage of the snowy weather with WPR's "Wisconsin Today."
The post How to enjoy Wisconsin’s winters outside, even in the dark appeared first on WPR.
On Wednesday, MPS Superintendent Brenda Cassellius and City of Milwaukee officials announced the school district’s lead stabilization work is complete.
The post Milwaukee Public Schools completes lead remediation work across district appeared first on WPR.
Wisconsin cities are coping with aggressive wild turkeys roaming their streets. DNR bird ecologist Taylor Finger spoke with WPR's Wisconsin Today.
The post More wild turkeys are venturing into Wisconsin’s urban areas, clashing with humans appeared first on WPR.
The founder of an avian rehabilitation facility in Antigo said it’s the worst year she’s ever seen for shootings of protected birds, including an American white pelican that’s currently undergoing treatment.
The post Wisconsin raptor rehab facility sees spike in illegal shootings of protected birds appeared first on WPR.
On the third day of the high-profile trial against Judge Hannah Dugan, jurors heard from Dugan's boss, Milwaukee County Chief Judge Carl Ashely.
The post Chief judge, public defender, court clerk among those to testify in day 3 of Dugan’s trial appeared first on WPR.
Tony, Ryan and Taylor discuss the most-read School Transportation News magazine articles from 2025, which focused on student safety, operational efficiency and technological advancement. STN also recognized outstanding individuals and teams in the industry through programs like Innovator of the Year, Garage Stars, Rising Stars and Transportation Director of the Year.
Read all our digital editions.
This episode is brought to you by Transfinder.
Stream, subscribe and download the School Transportation Nation podcast on Apple Podcasts, Deezer, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, RadioPublic, Spotify, Stitcher and YouTube.
The post (STN Podcast E287) 2025 in Review: Top STN Magazine Articles appeared first on School Transportation News.
STN EXPO East attendees are looking forward to an energizing new keynote speaker who will be featured during the conference coming up March in North Carolina.
Jim Knight is a best-selling author with a colorful background in “Rock ‘n Roll,” documenting his 21-year-long career as head of global training and development at Hard Rock International. Knight plans to use his business expertise to give STN EXPO East attendees strategies on revitalizing company and organization culture, developing leadership and maintaining excellent customer relations to achieve exceptional results.
On Saturday, March 28, Knight will act as a thought starter for the exclusive leadership sessions at the Transportation Director Summit held at Topgolf Charlotte Southwest. Drawing upon his career start in hospitality and extensive experience in organizational culture, he looks to inspire student transportation leaders with his “Leadership That Rocks” non-negotiable traits to develop a winning team. Regardless of an organization’s history or current culture status, Knight plans to provide concrete strategies for systemic changes.
On Monday, Knight will return to guide all conference attendees through his signature “Culture That Rocks: Set List on How to Amp Up the Company’s Culture (to Eleven) and Deliver Sustainable Results” keynote session.
Knight has been recognized by Training Magazine representing one of the top 125 training companies in the world. His work at Hard Rock International included facilitating corporate training, managing training materials (including creation of training videos), facilitating leadership transitions, and more. His best-seller “Culture That Rocks,” and unique presentation style have earned recognition in multiple national publications, including Forbes, Inc., Entrepreneur and Business News Daily.
In addition to Knight’s keynote session, attendees will have a wide variety of educational sessions, hands-on training and networking events over the course of the entire STN EXPO East conference to gain innovative solutions to transportation’s biggest challenges.
STN EXPO East will be held March 26- 31, 2026 at Embassy Suites by Hilton Charlotte Concord Golf Resort & Spa. Save $200 on main conference registration when registering by Dec. 19. at stnexpo.com/east.
Related: STN EXPO East Opens Online Registration for March 2026
Related: STN Launches Peer-to-Peer Mentorship Program at 2026 Conferences
Related: WATCH: STN EXPO East 2025
The post STN EXPO East Keynote Speaker to Outline Strategies for Creating Impactful Culture appeared first on School Transportation News.
Rep. Shelia Stubbs (D-Madison), who has long advocated for a bill to create a task force on to examine the issue of missing and murdered Black women and girls, read testimony on behalf of Tanesha Howard, the grieving mother of Joniah Walker. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
At a Tuesday hearing, Wisconsin Rep. Shelia Stubbs (D-Madison), who has long advocated creating a task force on missing and murdered Black women and girls, read testimony on behalf of Tanesha Howard, the grieving mother of Joniah Walker.
Walker went missing in 2022 at the age of 15 in Milwaukee and has not been found.
“They refused to issue an Amber Alert to allow the community to help search for her. They were telling me Joniah did not fit the requirement of anything,” Stubbs said. Howard sat next to her with her eyes closed. “What are the requirements to get help from your local police department when your Black… daughter [is] missing?”
SB 404, coauthored by Stubbs (D-Madison), Rep. Patrick Snyder (R-Weston) and Sens. Jesse James (R-Thorp) and LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee), would establish a 17-member task force to examine the issue of missing and murdered Black women and girls and produce a report.
“To help prevent other families from experiencing what my family and countless other families endured … this bill for missing and murdered African–American women and girls … needs to be passed into state law,” Stubbs read on behalf of Howard. “Help us. Find us. Give our families closure. We matter.”
This is the third legislative session in a row that Stubbs has introduced legislation to create the task force. She was inspired in part by the Department of Justice’s task force on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, which was established in 2020 by Attorney General Josh Kaul after the Legislature failed to pass a bill to create that task force. Kaul has said that the funds don’t exist to take a similar path with this task force.
Stubbs said during the hearing in the Senate Mental Health, Substance Abuse Prevention, Children & Families committee that the bill is “necessary to improve the mechanisms for preventing, investigating and healing for all forms of gender-based violence in our state, which impacts women and kids of all racial backgrounds, but which affect Black women and girls at the highest rate.”
Members of the task force would include four lawmakers and other stakeholders, including law enforcement representatives and representatives from advocacy or legal organizations that focus on Black women and girls.
The task force would be responsible for examining a number of issues related to the violence that Black women and girls face including systemic causes, the appropriate methods for tracking and collecting data, policing related to investigating and prosecuting crimes, measures that could reduce violence and ways to support victims and their families.
Under the bill, a final report would be due by 2027. It would need to recommend policies and practices that would be effective in reducing gender violence and increasing the safety of Black women and girls and help victims and communities to heal from violence.
Stubbs highlighted a 2022 report from the Guardian that found that in 2020 five Black women and girls were killed every day in the U.S. Wisconsin had the worst homicide rate for Black women and girls in the nation that year. Stubbs said data on the extent of the issue is incomplete, and the task force could help fill in the picture.
“We are lacking crucial data, especially in Wisconsin,” Stubbs said. “The data already gathered is insufficient and lacks critical detail to understand the circumstances of violence.”
Johnson said the bill is a “necessary step toward understanding why African-American women and girls are so vulnerable to violence and disappearance and where our public safety systems are falling short.”
Sheena Scarborough, mother of 19-year-old Sade Robinson, who was murdered last year, also testified at the hearing. Johnson noted that both mothers are from her district.
“I think that speaks volumes to how serious the issue is and how it impacts communities, not just in the city of Milwaukee but across the state, but disproportionately it affects African-American women, especially in the city of Milwaukee,” Johnson said.
The bill would provide one position in the Department of Justice to support the task force as well as $80,200 in 2025-26 and $99,500 in 2026-27 to fund it.
Last session, the bill passed the Assembly but never received a vote on the Senate floor. It received a public hearing but not without encountering roadblocks due to opposition from former Sen. Duey Stroebel (R-Saukville). Stroebel said he didn’t support the legislation because he didn’t support passing laws based on race or gender.
Snyder, who described himself as “the Republican who likes to do what is right” said the bill is “the right thing to do,” and expressed frustration with the bill getting hung up last session.
“I get really irritated when one person thinks that because they don’t like it, that they can kill it. That bugs me a lot,” Snyder said.
Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine) asked the lawmakers if there are other groups, noting Hmong and Indigenous groups, that face disproportionate amounts of violence and suggested changing the bill to include them.
“Instead of focusing on just one specific group… I would really love to see each one of these groups kind of meld together, so there’s representation so information can be shared,” Wanggaard said.
James, who is the only member of the Legislature actively serving in law enforcement, answered Wanggaard’s question by pulling from his own experience.
“Back at home, I mean, we have a high Hmong population. I don’t recall ever taking any cases involving any missing Hmong individuals to be honest with you. …I’ve had more white and African-American missing type cases,” James said. He said that a “caveat” to the issue is that “the data collection hasn’t always been prevalent and adequate… especially if we have agencies where they’re not even taking cases on missing persons, that data is not going to be collected.”
“My concern is that if they’re targeting young women — just young women in general, I’m not concerned what race they are — if they’re targeting these young women, is there a connection between some of the missing… say on the Menominee reservation as opposed to Milwaukee County,” Wanggaard said. “I’m just thinking about getting the most information to as many people as we can to help the process.”
Supporters of the bill addressed questions about why it was important to have a task force specifically focused on Black women and girls.
Madison Police Chief John Patterson was asked whether he saw any value in creating one big task force.
“We shouldn’t be afraid to be surgical at times when it comes to disparities that we’ve identified in our system and, certainly, I believe this is one,” Patterson said. “In my almost three decades, I can tell you work that started off being very focused and surgical in nature to try to address a disparate impact in our community has led to greater communication, greater collaboration across all communities.”
Barbara Sella, executive director of the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, said it’s “so important to understand dynamics within communities and different communities have different dynamics.”
“To just say, well let’s include everybody — could make the task almost impossible… It’s really important to have a laser focus,” Sella said.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Student protesters shout during a “Hands Off Our Schools” rally in front of the U.S. Department of Education’s Washington, D.C., headquarters in April. Students from several colleges and universities gathered to protest President Donald Trump’s efforts to dismantle the department. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Democrats on Tuesday blasted ongoing efforts from President Donald Trump’s administration to dismantle the Department of Education, including plans to shift several of its responsibilities to other Cabinet-level agencies.
Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono hosted a forum on the issue with several Democratic colleagues. The lawmakers, joined by education leaders, advocates and leading labor union voices, said the restructuring would lead to a loss of expertise, create more bureaucracy and weaken support for students and families.
The administration announced six agreements in November with the departments of Labor, Interior, Health and Human Services and State as part of a larger effort from the administration to dismantle the 46-year-old Education Department.
Trump has sought to axe the agency in his quest to send education “back to the states” and tapped Education Secretary Linda McMahon to fulfill that mission. Much of the funding and oversight of schools already occurs at the state and local levels.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed the transfers as “illegal” because of federal laws assigning specific responsibilities to the Education Department.
“Congress already passed the laws on this,” she said. “Every one of the programs that’s moving out of the Department of Education specifically says we have allocated the money for a program in the Department of Education, not in whatever random other place Secretary McMahon decides to put it.”
The Massachusetts Democrat said that if the transfers go through, “we’ve got now four federal agencies that have no experience with education suddenly in charge of more than 50 different educational programs, including ones that fund literacy, education for veterans, kids in rural school districts — you name it, it’s moving somewhere else.”
Even before the announcements of interagency agreements, the Education Department had seen several changes since Trump took office, including layoffs of hundreds of employees that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in July could temporarily proceed.
In a late Tuesday statement to States Newsroom, department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said the transfers were part of a wider effort to initiate a sorely needed overhaul of the federal education bureaucracy.
“The opposition is protecting a system that produces dismal results for our students,” she said. “The Trump Administration demands better than the status quo.”
Under one of the agreements, the Education Department said the Labor Department would take on a “greater role” in administering elementary and secondary education programs currently managed under the Education Department’s Office of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Rachel Gittleman, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, which represents Education Department workers, said “nobody wins, the least of all, students and educators,” when the Labor Department takes on massive education programs, noting the current workforce at Education has the right experience.
“Our staff have decades of experience with the complicated programs we’re talking about today,” Gittleman said. “These moves will cause nothing but chaos and harm for the people they’re intended to help.”
In general, the agreements “swap a highly efficient system for a chaotic, underfunded one spread across multiple agencies,” Gittleman said.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, also rebuked the administration’s efforts to gut the agency.
“What is happening here is not simply the dismantlement of the Department of Education,” she said. “It is taking away — it is abandoning the federal role in education.”
Weingarten, who leads one of the largest teachers unions in the country, added that “we should be, as a nation, expanding the federal role in public education, not supplanting states.”
Angélica Infante-Green, Rhode Island’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education, said the administration’s attempts to gut the agency are “already putting our nation’s education system and our students at a disadvantage.”
Communication from the Department of Education “lacks detail,” she added.
“We get these one or two sentences with edicts that often conflict with state and federal law. What do we do? The chaos has resulted in protracted legal battles across the country, raising serious constitutional questions,” she said.
At the top of her remarks, Infante-Green also expressed her condolences for the victims, their families and the entire Brown University community after two students were killed and nine others were injured in a shooting on campus over the weekend.
The federal courthouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
Testimony from federal agents continued into the second day of Milwaukee Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan’s federal trial, where Dugan faces charges of obstructing immigration officers and concealing a man they were trying to arrest outside her courtroom in April. Prosecutors repeatedly asked agents about Dugan’s tone when she spoke with them, which they described as upset, angry, direct and stern. A colleague of Dugan’s, Judge Kristela Cervera, who was with Dugan when she confronted agents in the hallway outside her courtroom, also testified that Dugan’s demeanor during the encounter made her uncomfortable.
On Tuesday, FBI agent Jeffrey Baker testified about his encounter with Dugan as part of the six-man arrest team that entered the Milwaukee County Courthouse in April in search of Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican-born man who was in the country without legal authorization.
During Baker’s testimony, details emerged about a woman the agents encountered in the hallway whom they believed was a public defender and who noticed them and began taking pictures of the agents before Dugan arrived and spoke with them. Images of a Signal Chat used by the arrest team which had been named the “Frozen Water Group,” a reference to ICE, revealed that agents texted that the woman had “been around for more than one of these before.” Another message stated “she was talking sh*t about us with another attorney about how we are not very covert.”
The prior arrests the agents were referring to had occurred at the courthouse from late March to early April, fueling concern among Milwaukee County judges about how to ensure the courthouse remained a safe and orderly place to conduct business. Testimony and text messages suggest that the prior arrests had all been made by the same team Dugan spoke with on April 18.
Defense attorneys highlighted the agent’s choice of profile images for the “Frozen Water Group” chat. One agent had chosen an image of a skull over a pill bottle crossed by two syringes with a thin blue line flag in the background. Brian Ayers, a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent, who said that this was his account in the Signal chat, testified Tuesday that the logo belonged to the DEA opioid task force. Another showed a man licking the barrel of a handgun. Ayers testified that he followed Flores-Ruiz down the hall, and rode the elevator down with him and his lawyer without revealing that he was a federal agent.
FBI agents Phillip Jackling, Customs and Border Protection agent Joseph Zurao, and ICE deportation officer Joseph Vasconcellos, who were all part of that Signal chat, described Dugan coming out to ask whether they were there to attend court hearings, and pointing them down the hall to Chief Judge Carl Ashley’s office. Jackling described Dugan as “very direct, and she seemed upset,” and said that leaving the rest of the arrest team in the hall “caused me to have a little bit of uncertainty about what was going to happen next.” Zurao said that Dugan told the agents to “get out” or “leave”.
Vasconcellos said that he was unnerved by the attorney photographing them, and that because he’d been stabbed, shot, and suffered nerve damage in his neck over the course of his career, he had concerns that their plan to use the courthouse as a “safe place” to arrest people had gone south. “I was honestly concerned that we had had our pictures taken and the staff knew who we were,” Vasconcellos testified. He’d texted in the group chat, speaking of the public defender photographing them, “this is going to be a pain in the d-ck.”
Vasconcellos described Dugan as “very stern and upset,” and said when Dugan told them to leave the hall and go to Ashley’s office, “I told her no.” Vasconcellos eventually went into the chief judge’s office, where he and other agents waited to get connected to Ashley over the phone. Ashley discussed the courthouse draft policy governing immigration enforcement in and around the building at length with the agents. When Vasconcellos left Ashley’s office, the rest of the arrest team had already followed Flores-Ruiz outside and arrested him.
Vasconcellos testified that he was aware that judges could speak sternly and that he was not familiar with Dugan and didn’t know if that tone was normal for her. Defense attorneys highlighted that only DEA Special Agent Ayers told FBI investigators that he heard Dugan yelling at the team, something none of the other task force agents described in their testimony. Ayers also refuted testimony from Zuaro, who claimed to have told Ayers to “get your ass out in the hallway in case he comes out,” an assertion that was not documented in reports and interviews conducted by investigators. Nile Hendrix-Whitmore, a victim witness advocate with the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office, also testified that she did not hear any yelling or arguing when Dugan spoke with the agents.
Later in the day, Judge Cervera took the stand. Cervera recalled that she had a busy schedule on April 18, and had arrived to court early to begin working on her cases. She’d left the building to move her car and as she walked back she ran into Dugan who was presumably doing the same. Not long after she arrived back to her courtroom, Cervera testified that Dugan came in and beckoned her over. “I thought something bad had happened,” said Cervera. “It was embarrassing to be summoned in that way.”
Cervera testified that Dugan gave the impression that “it was urgent” and that Dugan “seemed irritated.” When Cervera began to remove her robes, she testified that Dugan told her to keep them on, which she did because Dugan was a more senior judge. “I didn’t want to walk into the hallway with my robe,” Cervera testified, though she said she didn’t tell Dugan that she was uncomfortable.
When the two approached the agents and Dugan asked whether they had a judicial warrant, Cervera said that “her irritation seemed to progress into anger.” Cervera said that Dugan was “expressing her views to the officer” and that she thought Dugan “could have been a little more diplomatic.” Nevertheless, Cervera testified that the interaction was “pretty straightforward and quick,” and that she had her own questions about the kind of warrant the agents had. Dugan told them that a judicial warrant signed by a judge, not an administrative warrant signed by an ICE officer, would be needed, Cervera testified.
Cervera escorted the agents to Ashley’s office and recalled looking back and not seeing Dugan follow them. “I felt abandoned,” she said on the stand. “I thought she left me.” As Cervera looked over the warrant herself, she noticed other agents coming into the hall leading to the chief judge’s office. When Cervera took a short cut through Dugan’s court to get back to her own room, Cervera noticed that Dugan was hearing cases. “I was irritated at that point,” she said, repeating that she felt “abandoned” by her fellow judge.
Bits and pieces of what happened then made it to Cervera, including Flores-Ruiz being arrested outside, and attorneys pumping their fists telling her, “You go, Judge,” and saying, “Judge, you’re ‘goated’ now,” a reference to the term “Greatest Of All Time.” Cervera testified that one attorney, the same who took pictures of agents in the hall, told her, “We knew what you guys were trying to do.” The next day, she heard that the FBI would be getting involved. “I was shocked” and “mortified,” she testified. “Judges shouldn’t be helping defendants avoid arrest.”
Sometime after April 18, Cervera recalled running into Dugan in an elevator. “I didn’t want to run into her at this point,” Cervera testified. Dugan allegedly told Cervera that she was “in the dog house with Carl,” referring to the chief judge. “She seemed eager to tell me about what happened on Friday,” Cervera said.
Defense attorneys questioned Cervera about whether she knew ICE agents were waiting outside her courtroom as well, which she denied. When she got home on April 18, she Googled Vasconcellos’ name, and warned her sister — who is also an attorney who had cases with clients at the Milwaukee courthouse coming up — that ICE was more active in the building. Defense attorneys noted that when she was called to a grand jury, Cervera did not reveal that she had warned her sister about the federal operations.
Cervera said on the stand that she was talking to her sister about what appeared to be “sweeping arrests” happening around the country, and that she’d never heard of ICE arrests at the courthouse prior to March. Multiple members of the arrest team testified that they had only been transferred to ICE Emergency Removal Operations (ERO) duties in early 2025, after President Donald Trump took office.
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio speak to reporters on Dec. 16, 2025, following a closed-door briefing with all senators about U.S. military action in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — U.S. senators left a closed-door meeting Tuesday with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio split over the Trump administration’s strikes on alleged drug-running vessels near Venezuela, particularly an early September follow-up strike that killed two survivors clinging to boat wreckage.
Hegseth and Rubio delivered the all-member briefings to Senate and House lawmakers on Capitol Hill as the death toll from U.S. military strikes on alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean has surpassed 90, and as U.S. Navy ships are amassed off the coast of Venezuela.
Controversy over the possibility of war crimes during the Sept. 2 follow-on strike that killed shipwrecked survivors drew attention after The Washington Post reported details last month, calling into question Hegseth’s orders.
Hegseth told reporters Tuesday he briefed members on a “highly successful mission to counter designated terrorist organizations, cartels, bringing weapons — weapons, meaning drugs — to the American people and poisoning the American people for far too long. So we’re proud of what we’re doing.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters Hegseth again refused to show unedited footage, which Schumer described as “deeply troubling,” of a second strike on Sept. 2 that killed two people who survived the initial strike.
“The administration came to this briefing empty handed,” Schumer, D-N.Y., said.
“If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean? Every senator is entitled to see it. There is no problem with (revealing) sources and methods” because the senators will view it in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secure area of the Capitol where classified information is generally shared.
Schumer added that an “appropriate version” of the video should be disclosed to the public.
Senate Republicans downplayed loud concerns from Democrats, pointing to former President Barack Obama’s numerous counterterrorism drone strikes in the Middle East.
“We’ve been using the same technique for 24 years, and nothing has changed except the hemisphere,” said Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Okla.
Hegseth told reporters the unedited video will be shown to members of the Senate and House committees on the Armed Services Wednesday, alongside Admiral Frank Bradley, commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, who oversaw the strikes.
Hegseth did not address why the department declined to show the unedited video to all 100 senators.
He did say, “Of course, we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.”
Several Democratic senators have called for the video to be publicly released.
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said he was told during the meeting that the video won’t be released because of “classification concerns.”
“It is hard to square the widespread, routine, prompt posting of detailed videos of every strike, with a concern that posting a portion of the video of the first strike would violate a variety of classification concerns,” Coons said.
Coons added “it’s increasingly important that the national security team of the Trump administration increasingly respect and recognize the role and power of Congress.”
He highlighted a provision in Congress’s annual defense authorization bill that compels Hegseth to release the video or lose 25% of his travel budget. The massive defense bill is expected to pass this week.
U.S. Southern Command posted a video on social media Monday night of the military’s latest strikes on three boats “operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations in international waters” in the eastern Pacific. The strikes killed eight people, according to the post.
President Donald Trump has officially promoted his military actions in the Caribbean as a fight against drug trafficking and overdose deaths in the United States, particularly from illicit fentanyl.
On Monday Trump issued an order declaring the powerful synthetic opioid as a “Weapon of Mass Destruction.”
The smuggling routes for illicit fentanyl and the chemicals used to make it follow the path from China to Mexico to the U.S., and is highlighted as such in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s 2025 National Drug Threat Assessment.
The administration has designated several drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, including “Cartel de los Soles,” an alleged Venezuelan group that the Department of State described as spearheaded by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
Trump has hinted at a land invasion of the South American country.
When asked by States Newsroom on Tuesday whether Hegseth addressed during the meeting what type of drugs were alleged to be in the targeted boats, Mullin and Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, said cocaine.
“We’ve always heard it’s mainly cocaine. It doesn’t matter. It’s drugs,” Mullin said.
Sullivan said “it’s the same groups” smuggling the cocaine as the ones smuggling fentanyl.
Cocaine mixed with illicit fentanyl has become “an increasing public safety concern” over the last eight years, according to the National Drug Threat Assessment.
Overall, all U.S. drug overdose deaths have decreased in recent years, according to the assessment and latest data published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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