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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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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People arriving at one of Milwaukee's drop-off centers with all manner of debris from the August 2025 floods. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

A line of cars filled with mattresses, downed tree limbs, chairs, dressers, and rugs could be seen outside a Milwaukee Department of Public Works (DPW) drop-off center on Lincoln Avenue Monday morning. Inside, long dumpsters were being filled with the ruined remains cleared out of roadways and people’s homes after flood waters blanketed swaths of Milwaukee County on Aug. 9 and 10. 

Mayor Cavalier Johnson joined DPW Commissioner Jerrell Kruschke at the dump site to provide updates about the flood response Monday. “Some of these stories that we’re hearing are truly, remarkably sad,” said Johnson, recalling that the first message he received was from his uncle, whose basement was filled with water. From the North Side to the South Side, west towards Wauwatosa and east towards Lake Michigan, the flood quickly engulfed roadways and homes. 

“So my thoughts are with everybody, everybody who is dealing with issues trying to clear out a basement, folks that are enduring power outages, trying to sort out, figure out what to do with the car that has been flooded through,” said Johnson. “We’re working through the process of obtaining some disaster declarations so we can bring the appropriate aid to those citizens who have been affected by the downpour.”

Gov. Tony Evers has activated the Wisconsin National Guard to assist efforts in Milwaukee County. It’s unclear at this time what role, if any, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) will have in Milwaukee, as the level of damage needs to meet a certain threshold in order for the agency to be activated. The agency has also been threatened with funding cuts and possible shutdown by the Trump administration. 

Johnson stressed that the weekend storm, which dropped over 10 inches of rain in some areas, was extremely rare. Timmerman Airfield recorded over 14 inches of rainfall. “I think I said the other day that last time something like this happened was about a decade or so ago,” the mayor said. “I certainly hope that a storm like this is not visited upon this city for at least another millennium,” he continued, referring to the weekend storm being called a “thousand year flood.” Kruschke echoed the mayor’s comments about the rarity of the massive flooding over the weekend. Johnson said he’d heard on the news that it dropped essentially “a summer’s-worth of rain” in a single storm. 

Yet research on climate change has long-predicted that Wisconsin would experience increased rain, more intense storms, and greater risks of flooding. In late 2020, a report from UW-Madison and state health workers warned that climate change in Wisconsin would mean more rainfall over fewer days, which would likely cause flooding. The report noted that the weather changes could have a cascade of health effects including heat stroke from increased heat (which also fuels more powerful storms), asthma and insect-borne diseases. In 2021, severe storms downed hundreds of trees in Milwaukee County. The following summer, communities across Wisconsin experienced heat waves, heavy rainfall, high winds and tornadoes over a couple of days, during which time people died from heat stroke, or after being swept away in flood waters during heavy rainfall. By 2022, global CO2 levels exceeded 400 parts per million, a red line which scientists warned would spur even worse effects.

Answering a question from Wisconsin Examiner about the climate trends, Kruschke said that heavy rainfalls have been documented for a long time, and that DPW is relying on historical data. Kruschke said that the city was not prepared for the volume of rain that fell so quickly. As for whether the city can adapt to future weather patterns, Mayor Johnson said, “I’ve been thinking about this since this storm happened.” 

Johnson praised the DPW’s work with the Milwaukee Metro Sewerage District (MMSD) to create infrastructure to capture rainfall when it hits the ground. “So when you look at our construction projects in the city of Milwaukee, when you see bioswales in the street, that’s to make sure that we keep rain out of sewers. That’s to make sure that we keep rain out of people’s basements. When you see MMSD working to make improvements at the parks in order to capture more rainwater there, that’s in order to make sure that we plan for events like this. When folks are going out to install rain barrels in their neighborhood, that’s in order to make sure that we stop things like this. When you have folks out in the city, like they were during this flood event, making sure that the sewer grates are clear so that water is better able to get into the sewers and not in people’s basements, all of these things play a role, and all of these things make a difference.” 

Johnson said the city will continue investing in “green infrastructure” from roadway design to the creation of outdoor classrooms that, in addition to providing experiential learning to K-12 students, also capture rain. “There’s a lot of work that’s going into this,” said Johnson. “I just imagine what this would’ve turned out if we hadn’t done that work over the past number of years. I mean, who knows how many hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of gallons of storm water that we were able to capture that didn’t end up in the streets, that didn’t end up in people’s basements.”

The city and county are continuing to assess the full scale of the damage, including how many homes have been affected and people displaced. Monday morning, the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office stated in response to an inquiry from  the Wisconsin Examiner that there had been no deaths directly linked to the flooding. However, the Milwaukee Police Department’s Harbor Patrol did find a 49-year-old Native American man, identified as Juan Carlos Sierra Campos, who drowned in Lake Michigan on Sunday morning. An investigation is ongoing. 

Kruschke said the public works department  will continue working normal hours (7 a.m. to 3 p.m.), and operate special trash disposal procedures for people clearing out damaged or ruined property. Fees will be waived for city drop-off centers, with the centers operating free of charge until Aug. 17. Drop-off centers will also be open Mondays, when they would normally be closed. The drop-off centers are located at 3878 W. Lincoln Ave. and 6600 N. Industrial Road. 

A small number of street sweepers are out on the roadways, and some communities  are deploying dump trucks and other vehicles to assist. DPW is also offering special pick-ups for storm-damaged material. Among the items that will not be accepted are  explosive or flammable products, propane tanks, large gas appliances, fluorescent light bulbs, wet or oil-based paint and material or vehicles from contractors or businesses.

Libraries, including the West Allis Library, are offering WiFi and computers for people unable to use their own. Cars that were swept away or abandoned during the floods may have been towed to alternate locations so as to not overwhelm the city’s usual tow yards. The city does not have a count of the number of cars towed or abandoned. Overnight parking enforcement will be suspended Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights.

Residents are encouraged to avoid wading through flooded areas or standing water. The possibility of contaminated water or hidden debris makes wading unsafe. The Red Cross has also opened two shelters for people who have been displaced by the flooding. The shelters are located at the Washington Park Senior Center (4420 W Vliet St.) and at Holler Park (5151 S. 6th St.). 

People gather near the bridges in the Wauwatosa village to observe the still rushing flooded river and storm damage. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Neighborhoods across Milwaukee County are continuing to recover from record-shattering flooding over the weekend. Inundated basements, entire portions of Wauwatosa seemingly underwater, people fleeing the Wisconsin State Fair which shut down early amid rising floodwater and reports of cars literally floating away down roadways all followed the torrential downpour which began Aug. 9. 

The National Weather Service recorded 5.74 inches of rain Saturday, eclipsing the  previous single-day record for Milwaukee of 1.64 inches of rain. Meteorologists say that Saturday was Milwaukee’s second wettest day in 154 years of record keeping. Additional rainfall brought the total up to nearly 7 inches, with some areas expected to get over 10 inches of rain. Researchers have long-warned that increased and more intense rain and flooding would be among the ways climate change would manifest in Wisconsin. 

Casey Serrano, a resident of Milwaukee’s North Side left the home she shares with her boyfriend around 8 p.m. Saturday about an hour after the rain started. When she returned around 1 a.m., she saw water in the basement “coming out of our main sewer drain that was covering maybe a quarter to a third of our basement, maybe an inch deep.” During the night, the water rose to nearly 2 feet of “brown runoff from the street,” she said.

Serrano woke up to find there was no  power in her home. “Our immediate street is not flooded, and did not flood last night,” she told Wisconsin Examiner. “But the streets surrounding us flooded pretty heavily.” When she went out on  Silver Spring Drive to get supplies, she saw “within like a 20-block radius of our house there were cars that had clearly floated down Silver Spring.”  

“Thousands in Milwaukee are facing flooding after last night’s storms,” Mayor Cavalier Johnson wrote on X. “Avoid flooded roads — moving water is dangerous. City crews and first responders are working nonstop. Neighbors are stepping up to help neighbors.” The mayor posted that the city was coordinating with Gov. Tony Evers and Milwaukee County on emergency aid and shelters. “Milwaukee is strong,” Mayor Johnson posted. “Together, we’ll get through this.” 

Across Milwaukee County, emergency responders were overwhelmed as the flooding created a cascade of issues with natural gas, debris and power outages. “Very busy night for [Milwaukee Fire Department] & many other FD’s!”, Milwaukee Fire Department Chief Aaron Lipski posted on X. “Over 600 responses between 8pm-7am: numerous fires, water rescues, & many other weather-related emergencies.” 

 

Video shared with Wisconsin Examiner by Casey Serrano, a City of Milwaukee resident who experienced severe basement flooding after the storms on August 9th and 10th, 2025.

 

Online videos showed  cars trapped on flooded roadways and highways. People attending one of the final days of the Wisconsin State Fair were filmed wading through water to leave the fairgrounds. Around 10 p.m. on Sunday the sky began to light up with a new wave of lightning, heralding more rain. Over 18,000 people reportedly lost power during the storms. 

“Flooding is still an active emergency situation across Milwaukee County, and we are expecting more rain today and into this evening,” Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said in a press statement Sunday. “I strongly urge our residents to stay cautious, stay informed, and refrain from traveling. Check  in on your neighbors and loved ones, especially older adults, and seek out emergency assistance if needed. I am thankful for our first responders, law enforcement partners, social services workers, and neighbors who are lending a helping hand during a challenging time. We will get through this together, Milwaukee.”

Local officials are warning residents not to walk into floodwater, as it may be contaminated or be near downed electrical wires. In some areas, the water had strong currents capable of sweeping people away. Those cleaning up debris are encouraged to wear gloves and proper protection, and residents are encouraged to limit water usage (such as by holding off on washing dishes or doing laundry) to reduce the risk of wastewater backing up into basements. 

The suburban city of Wauwatosa produced some of the most dramatic images of flooding throughout the county. According to the Wauwatosa Police Department (WPD), over 500 calls were received by their dispatch center with issues ranging from flooded out basements to blocked storm drains to traffic incidents due to standing water. WPD says there have been no reports of serious injuries, though several major roadways and intersections remain affected and impassable. 

Hart Park, near the Wauwatosa Village, is closed, and police are encouraging people to avoid the area. Sunday afternoon, many people were seen walking through the village area and parts of Hart Park to observe storm damage. Large debris was strewn along the railroad tracks, and reports indicate that the Menomonee River flowing through Hart Park rose from a little over 1 foot high to over 14 feet in a matter of hours. Sunday afternoon the water level was still high, with rushing water ripping through the park continuing to damage green spaces and concrete bike paths. Wauwatosa squad cars used loudspeakers to declare the area closed due to a state of emergency. 

 

Video posted to social media of the flooding in Wauwatosa by Bobby Pantuso, including drone footage by Pantuso (shared with permission).

 

Traffic control issues were also reported by the Waukesha Police Department, with the Fox River also under close observation. Waukesha Sheriff’s Department spokesperson Capt. Nicholas Wenzel said in an email statement that the department was “dealing with flooding across the county,” and that no injuries or missing persons had been reported.

For Serrano, the flood is an unprecedented experience. She anticipates costly repairs, including ripping out wood paneling in her house. 

Serrano is also concerned about what the flooding means for the city. “I think that my main concern is that the city is completely unprepared to deal with this, and I think it’s really willful on their part to be honest,” she said. Serrano, who used to work  for the city’s sewage department creating and analyzing data maps, thinks city budget and staffing cuts have adversely affected emergency preparedness. She blames Act 10, which has limited public employees’ collective bargaining rights since 2011, arguing that it  has contributed to staffing shortages and out-dated technology for city departments most responsible for preventing floods, and dealing with their aftermath. 

 

 

Act 12, which mandates that staffing and funding are maintained for the Milwaukee Police Department, also exacerbated the imbalance between police and  other departments including  Public Works, she said. 

“At any point, the Common Council could stand up for residents of this city — especially residents of the North Side,” Serrano said,  “and say we’re not going to deal with this anymore. We are going to fully fund these departments so that they have the right materials and the right resources to fully staff themselves, to fully hire.” 

 

 

 

Lincoln Hills, a detention facility the state has ordered closed by 2021. (Photo courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Corrections)

Rian Nyblom, 18, was sentenced to five years in prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges stemming from the death of a staff member at Wisconsin’s infamous juvenile prison, the Lincoln Hills School for Boys. Nyblom pleaded guilty in April to two counts of being party to a crime of battery by a prisoner, a deal which reduced felony murder charges, and dropped an additional battery charge, against the teen, the AP reported. 

Prosecutors say that in June 2024, tensions arose between a then- 16-year-old Lincoln Hills resident and a female guard who the teen felt was abusing her power. The 16-year-old threw a cup of what he believed was soap on her, and proceeded to punch her repeatedly. When the teen ran out into the courtyard 49-year-old staff member Corey Proulx followed. After Proulx scuffled with  the teen, he sustained a head injury after falling to the pavement. Proulx died a day later. 

Nyblom allegedly told investigators that he knew of the 16-year-old’s issues with the female guard. Shortly before the fighting began Nyblom retrieved extra soup and conditioner, he told investigators, and gave it to the 16-year-old. Nyblom said he hadn’t witnessed the attack on the female guard, but did see the teen hit Proulx. 

Nyblom was sentenced to five years in prison, with 405 days counted as time served. He was transferred to the Lincoln County Jail last year. The 18-year-old had been sent to Lincoln Hills after being charged with misdemeanor criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct. To those charges, AP reported, Nyblom pleaded no contest and was found guilty in May. 

The teen to whom Nyblom supplied the soup and conditioner, who is now 17, faces one count of first-degree reckless homicide, and two counts of battery by a prisoner, and is charged as an adult. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect, with a trial expected to begin in February. It’s possible that the teen’s lawyers will attempt to move the case back to juvenile court.

As of Aug. 1, there were 80 boys in Lincoln Hills, four girls in the Copper Lake School, and 26 youth at the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Facility, according to the Department of Corrections’ latest population report. That’s slightly up from the 78 boys held at Lincoln Hills in late April. The higher population number at the juvenile prison was noted by the Lincoln Hills’ court-ordered monitor around that same time. The monitor also highlighted enduring staffing vacancies and, in the past, had complained about staff treating students poorly, even exhibiting racist behaviors. 

In August 2024, following Proulx’s death, Republican lawmakers wrote letters to DOC Sec. Jared Hoy saying that Lincoln Hills had become less safe, and blamed the consent decree for limiting the ability of staff to use force against juvenile residents.

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A Flock camera on the Lac Courte Orielles Reservation in Saywer County. | Photo by Frank Zufall/Wisconsin Examiner

Across Wisconsin, a vast camera network is tirelessly photographing and identifying vehicles and license plates, storing that information on a central platform that can be searched at will by law enforcement. With just a few keystrokes, including a reason for the search, officers in local departments across the state can uncover where a vehicle has been and who it belongs to. The network, known as Flock, logs these searches, a feature Flock Safety’s CEO says “underscores accountability” and allows for increased oversight. Still, residents and advocates have raised questions about who is using Flock and why.   

Analyzing Flock audit data, Wisconsin Examiner found that no less than 221 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies used Flock from Jan. 1 to May 31. Although officers logged reasons like drugs, shootings, or traffic violations, many also entered vague reasons such as “investigation” or no clear reason at all. 

Wisconsin Examiner obtained the audit data through open records requests to the Wauwatosa Police Department (WPD). The data was then analyzed using computer coding programs. 

 

 

While favored by many law enforcement agencies nationwide, Flock cameras have also attracted controversy. CEO and Flock co-founder Garrett Langley stressed the importance of audits in an extensive June 2025 statement. “As the Founder and CEO of Flock Safety, I take nothing more seriously than the values we built this company upon — to give cities tools to uphold public safety, while enabling accountability and transparency,” Langley wrote. “I spend time with my team thinking about these issues every single day: how to build our search interface, audit records, compliance tools, and data policies to allow individual agencies to police in the best way for their community — not as prescribed by us, a private technology company, but by the elected officials and individuals the tools actually serve. Public safety does not need to come at the expense of community values.”

The statement was released as Flock faced controversy over the platform’s alleged use for immigration and abortion-related surveillance. According to investigative reports by 404 Media, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers have used local law enforcement to access the nationwide AI-enabled camera network to track immigrants, and a Texas sheriff’s office conducted a Flock search with the reason for the search recorded as “had an abortion, search for female”. Langley denounced the abortion report as “misinformation” and “unequivocally false,” citing law enforcement statements and internal checks by Flock. 

Although Wisconsin Examiner’s analysis found that 11 of Wisconsin’s 13 county sheriffs which partner with ICE through the federal 287(g) program appeared in the Flock audit data, it’s unclear thus far whether any of those agencies used Flock for immigration-related reasons. 

“Once this level of surveillance is normalized, it becomes incredibly hard to roll back,” Jon McCray Jones, policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin said in a statement to Wisconsin Examiner. “Today it’s license plates — tomorrow it could be forced search and seizure or checkpoints on the road. We need to draw the line somewhere. Flock cameras track the movement of millions of cars, often without a warrant or your knowledge. That’s a profound erosion of your right to move freely and privately in your own community. Flock cameras aren’t targeted at individuals but mass surveils the movement of all residents.”

Flock use in the Badger State 

A breadcrumb trail is left behind whenever Flock is used. “Everytime a search is run on the Flock System, that search and search reason is preserved permanently in the audit trail of every agency whose camera was included in the search,” Langley wrote. “Those searches are viewable in an agency’s ‘network audit’ and available for regular oversight: to command staff, to elected officials, to communities. This is part of our commitment to transparency and accountability from the beginning of the design process.”

According to an Examiner analysis, the top Wisconsin-based law enforcement agency was the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD). When the agency first established a contract with Flock, a spokesperson told Wisconsin Examiner, it was attached to MPD’s intelligence-focused fusion center known as the Southeastern Threat Analysis Center (STAC). Fusion centers were formed to bridge intelligence gaps between agencies after the 9/11 attacks, and consolidate resources across local, state, military and private sector entities. STAC partners with the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and shares information between local police departments across eight counties in southeastern Wisconsin. Although the Flock contract was later modified to cover the entire police department the name “milwaukee wi pd – STAC” remained in the dashboard. 

 

 

Nearly 40,000 searches originating from MPD alone appeared in network audit data from the Wauwatosa Police Department. 

After MPD, the second most frequent user of Flock in Wisconsin was the Brown County Sheriff’s Office, with just over 13,000 searches between Jan. 1 and May 28. West Allis PD and the Fond Du Lac County Sheriff’s Office each conducted nearly 12,000 searches. Wauwatosa  PD, was the fifth highest user of Flock with10,372 searches. 

A Milwaukee PD spokesperson said it makes sense that the department, including STAC, are Wisconsin’s biggest user of Flock. “Milwaukee is the largest city in the state, and the eight county area of operations also falls under STAC.” 

McCray Jones feels there needs to be more oversight. “That’s not happening now,” he said. Local elected officials and the public deserve to know how this data is being used, stored and shared — especially with their data being shared with an oppositional federal government who will weaponize this information against our community members.”

Fears about federal law enforcement rose dramatically this year after high-profile immigration-related arrests in Milwaukee, including of a man who was falsely accused of writing a letter threatening President Donald Trump and Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan, who was arrested for not cooperating with immigration officers who came to her court room to arrest a man who was appearing before her.

In May, Wisconsin Examiner reported that STAC used Flock for a “classified” investigation, which MPD said was not immigration-related. Residents have called for independent oversight of police surveillance. In late July, Michigan Advance reported that the Grand Rapids PD used Flock to monitor protesters who participated in pro-Palestine, LGBTQ+ and anti-Trump protests, although the department denied using Flock to surveil protesters.

McCray Jones called the spread of Flock cameras in Wisconsin “concerning, especially with the sprawling violation of civil liberties, rights and privacy by the federal government.” He specifically cited “ICE obtaining side-door access to the Flock network through local law enforcement for immigration enforcement.” 

“We have not seen a complete list of Wisconsin police agencies with access to Flock,” he added, “and that is concerning considering the long history of surveillance being disproportionately targeted at the most marginalized of communities, especially when layered on top of existing disparities in traffic stops and interactions with law enforcement suffered by Black and brown communities in the state.”

The term “wanted” was MPD’s top reason for using Flock in the data the Examiner reviewed.  An MPD spokesperson explained that the term  “wanted” “does not mean that a warrant has been issued for a person. ‘Wanted’ refers to people, vehicles, investigative leads related to an investigation. This also includes investigative purposes that are not criminal in nature to include missing critical persons and Amber alerts.”

 

 

“Robbery” and “Shooting” were MPD’s second and third most frequent reasons for using Flock. Other categories included “res,” which could be an abbreviation for  Reckless Endangering Safety and drug dealing. “Homicide” ranked as MPD’s ninth most frequent reason. Among all 221 Wisconsin agencies using Flock, violent crimes do not appear among the top 10 reasons for searches. MPD’s spokesperson said this aspect of the Examiner’s audit data review was misleading. “I would say that the vast amount of usage would be related to violent crime,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement. “This would include homicides, shootings, armed robberies, carjackings, batteries, and sexual assaults.” Although the reason column is intended to document the purpose of a Flock search, information in that column was often not detailed enough to determine whether violence was involved. 

 

 

The discrepancy between the reasons for using Flock cited in the audit data and law enforcement claims about using Flock to fight violent crime raise doubts, says McCray Jones. “This directly contradicts how agencies like MPD have sold this technology to the public,” he told Wisconsin Examiner. “They say it’s about violent crime — but in practice, that doesn’t appear to be the case. It also begs the question of what is the technology and data being used for? If this tool is mostly being used for minor offenses or vague investigations, then we’re creating a mass surveillance infrastructure to enforce petty infractions — usually disproportionately against Black, brown, and poor residents. Is it being used to track protesters and dissidents?”

 

 

MPD’s fifth most frequent Flock search term, with over 1,000 searches, was simply “investigation” with no other context. MPD’s spokesperson said that this “denotes that the search was related to a legitimate investigative purpose.” 

“Investigation” was also the most frequent reason Flock was used by Wisconsin law enforcement agencies. Unlike entries including  “stolen,” “drugs,” “warrant” or “homicide,” it’s unclear what the “investigation” entries meant. The audit data included categories for case numbers and licence plates, but these were redacted upon release to protect ongoing investigations and citizen privacy.

Wauwatosa PD led all 221 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies in using only “investigation” to denote the reason for Flock searches. More than 1,900 searches by WPD used that term. WPD’s next most frequent reason was “stolen” with  871 searches. Spokesperson Det. Lt. Joseph Roy, Ph.D, said WPD Flock use is guided by a formal written policy. 

“The system is a critical investigative and public safety tool that supports a wide range of legitimate law enforcement functions, from stolen vehicle recovery to identifying suspects in violent crime investigations,” said Roy. “While officers are expected to document their searches clearly, the department continues to refine training and oversight to ensure transparency, consistency, and proper use of the system.” 

MPD’s spokesperson said that “the system requires a generic input to conduct a search and will include a case number. We require monthly audits to ensure that the system is utilized for legitimate investigative purposes.”

Vague reasons for tapping into a powerful network

Not every agency in Wisconsin uses Flock  under a specific policy. Capt. John Rousseau, spokesperson for the Brown County Sheriff’s Office, told Wisconsin Examiner that the office does not have a Flock-specific policy. “We have policies and audits that dictate our use of law enforcement databases and tools generally, but not platform specific,” Capt. John Rousseau said in a statement. 

Brown County’s Sheriff’s Office, Wisconsin’s second most frequent Flock searcher, added, “We conduct regular training on all law enforcement tools, Flock included.” Wisconsin Examiner’s audit analysis found that “1410” was Brown County’s top reason for using Flock. This was a badge number, the captain explained.

The Examiner’s analysis “is not capturing Flock usage completely,” he said. “It is aggregating the reason code, but we primarily use specific case numbers in our search. That would be the largest category of our usage, but it will not be captured in your analysis.”

Flock’s system always records a search reason, and provides a dropdown menu of search terms, as well as a case number category. “Agencies should prescribe, in their [License Plate Reader] policies, how users should populate that search field,” the company’s CEO wrote in a statement.

 

 

Clear reasons for using Flock were sometimes lacking in the audit analysis. West Allis PD led all of Wisconsin in using only a dot in the reason field when recording Flock use. Just over 1,200 searches were conducted using the dot. Only six other agencies used a dot to indicate the reason for Flock use, including the police departments of Waukesha, Ripon, Elm Grove, MPD, and the sheriffs of Columbia and Portage counties. MPD – STAC and Portage County’s uses of this reason code was so infrequent that they barely appeared when graphed. 

 

 

The dot was also West Allis’s top overall reason for using Flock. Others included “sus,” “investigation,” “stolen” and “theft,” as well as “mvth,” “pd”, “dea,”, “s,” and others which the police department did not define when asked, nor did it explain why the dot  was so often favored by its officers. 

West Allis PD Deputy Chief Robert Fletcher said in a statement that the department’s officers “receive training on the proper use of law enforcement databases.” 

“This training includes training that the use of law enforcement databases, whether FLOCK, department records or information received through NCIC database can only be queried and used for law enforcement purposes,” Fletcher said.

Fletcher added, “Any allegation that a department member is obtaining information for a non-law enforcement purpose would be investigated by a member of the WAPD Command Staff and corrective action would be taken by the WAPD if warranted.” 

 

 

WAPD’s policy states that personnel “must have an articulable law enforcement reason to access and/or perform any query in the Flock system,” and that regular audits may be performed to ensure the system is being used correctly. 

Waukesha PD, the state’s second biggest user of the dot — also the department’s top reason for using Flock — suggested that this use was improper. Capt. Dan Baumann told Wisconsin Examiner that, when it came to this vague use for Flock, “we isolated this to a specific officer and have readdressed the [Standard Operating Procedure] and have provided that officer with extra training…This is being addressed through training with the officer. The Flock administrator ran an audit specific to your request and isolated this to only one officer. This has been corrected.” 

Waukesha PD’s Flock policy states that officers should “enter the primary reason” for conducting a plate search “i.e. burglary suspect, robbery suspect, vehicle pursuit,” when an incident report number is unavailable. The Columbia County Sheriffs Office, Wisconsin’s third biggest user of the dot as a reason for its Flock use, didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.

Debating the merits

McCray Jones found the Flock audit searches using only “investigation” or “.” to be “incredibly concerning.” 

“Vague entries like ‘investigation’ or a period provide no meaningful oversight and violate the spirit of transparency and democracy. This kind of documentation undermines any public trust or accountability,” he said.

But police departments using Flock stressed its versatility and usefulness in netting investigative leads. “Flock has proven instrumental in criminal investigations and does help increase public safety,” MPD’s spokesperson told Wisconsin Examiner, adding that the platform has aided  investigations of  car theft, homicides and kidnappings. 

 

 

Capt. Rousseau of the Brown County Sheriffs Office said, “We use Flock during a host of public safety activities that can range from locating missing/endangered people to wanted persons,” as well as looking for criminal suspects. “In one example, we investigated a fatal hit and run car crash where a pedestrian was killed and the vehicle fled the area,” said Rousseau. “Analysis of Flock data identified the suspect vehicle and allowed investigators to follow up on the information. That’s a significant example, but we also use Flock daily to identify and locate persons that have outstanding warrants for their arrest, known drug trafficking suspects, and many other uses.”

Capt. Bauman of the Waukesha PD said, “Our agency’s deployment of FLOCK reflects a commitment to public safety that is deliberate and respectful of civil liberties. We believe that transparency, policy integrity, and community engagement are essential in maintaining trust while responsibly leveraging technology to protect the community.”

Regarding the Examiner’s analysis of Flock audit data, McCray Jones said, “What stands out is how many agencies are using this tool with little to no transparency around the justification for its use. That kind of vagueness makes it difficult to know whether Flock is being used in ways that respect people’s rights or whether it’s enabling a dragnet approach to surveillance. We need guardrails, third-party audits, and standardized reporting across jurisdictions. It’s not enough to trust that agencies will use Flock responsibly — we need mechanisms to ensure they are.” 

The ACLU and local activist groups have pushed for Community Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinances, which can be passed at the local level and would require public hearings and annual reports on surveillance technology. “Given the lack of safeguards and history of abuse, we believe there should be a moratorium on expanding Flock use until real oversight structures are in place — if ever,” said McCray Jones. 

With concerns around surveillance, however, Capt. Rousseau cautioned that “there may be a fundamental misunderstanding about what Flock is and isn’t.” He explained in a statement that, “Flock is not facial recognition. It does not track any personally identifiable information. It is not used for traffic enforcement. Flock cameras perform the same actions that an officer could do if we were to assign a police officer to sit at an intersection recording license plates. We don’t have the resources for that kind of a deployment, so we supplement it with technology. Cameras are used everywhere.” 

Wisconsin Examiner’s analysis found that  “traffic enforcement” was the top reason entered by the Fond Du Lac County Sheriff’s Office for its Flock use. Fond Du Lac didn’t respond to a request for comment. Fond Du Lac County also led the state in using Flock for school-related reasons, followed by sheriffs of Kenosha counties, Milwaukee PD, the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Office, and others. Most of those uses involved school bus violations or complaints, such as cars passing in front of a school bus. Several searches were also for school-related threats.

Rousseau said that Flock must be considered in a societal context where cameras are everywhere. “A police officer wears a body camera inside of a patrol car that’s equipped with a camera driving down a highway that’s covered in cameras conducting traffic stops on cars that also may have dash cameras. Flock is but one of a handful of law enforcement tools that we use on a daily basis to improve public safety through the proactive and efficient delivery of law enforcement services. Proper data safeguards are in place to protect against abuse.”

McCray Jones agrees there are cameras everywhere, but says  no surveillance network should be underestimated. “Surveillance creep is real — and Flock is just one piece,” he told Wisconsin Examiner. “Communities need to decide if this technology has any place in public safety, and if so, under what strict and democratically accountable conditions. The public should demand hearings, insist on transparency and support local ordinances that put the community — not private corporations or law enforcement — in the driver’s seat.”

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The Waukesha County Sheriff Department, one of the agencies that participate in the 287(g) program. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

The number of Wisconsin county sheriff’s offices participating in a collaborative program with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has jumped from nine to 12 this year, with other forms of cooperation with ICE growing across the state, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin. 

The report shows more sheriff offices joining the 287(g) program over the last three years. The program carves out dedicated immigration operations within the sheriff’s offices, shares data with ICE and increases local participation in ICE detention requests. 

The ACLU report, released Tuesday, is an update from its 2022 report on Wisconsin’s “Jail-to-deportation pipeline.” 

“Immigrants have been an important part of the fabric of Wisconsin for many years,” said Tim Muth, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Wisconsin, in a statement released by the ACLU, along with the updated report. “They are a part of our families. They are our coworkers, friends, and neighbors, and the public should know what their local law enforcement agencies are doing.”

In 2022, there were eight law enforcement across the state participating in the 287(g). The program allows ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) to partner with state and local law enforcement agencies, who are empowered to dedicate their own resources to pursuing people living without legal immigration paperwork in the United States. 

“ICE recognizes the importance of its relationships with law enforcement partners to carry out its critical mission,” states a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) webpage. 

Agencies can participate in 287(g) under a few different models including a “jail enforcement” model that focuses on people without legal immigration status already in local jails on other criminal charges, a “task force” model that gives local law enforcement officers limited authority to enforce immigration law and a warrant service program which allows local law enforcement to serve administrative warrants to people without legal status within county jails.

The participants in 287(g) include the sheriff’s offices of Brown, Fond du Lac, Kewaunee, Manitowoc, Marquette, Outagamie, Sheboygan, Washington, Waukesha (which is listed twice on the DHS website’s “pending agencies” portion), Waupaca, Wood, and Winnebago counties. 

Six of those sheriffs (Kewaunee, Outagamie, Washington, Waupaca, Winnebago, and Wood counties) joined the program between from March to June of this year. The rest began participating in 287(g) in 2020, according to the ACLU report,

While some law enforcement agencies have joined the program, others have distanced themselves from immigration enforcement. The Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office does not participate in the 287(g) program, and both that office and the Dane County Sheriff limit or prohibit their participation in immigration activities. The Milwaukee Police Department (MPD) also has policies limiting its own involvement in immigration enforcement in the interest of preserving a trusting and cooperative relationship with the community, the policies state.

“The expansion of these agreements enables ICE to further embed its enforcement presence within local jurisdictions, often circumventing community-driven policies against immigration enforcement,” the report states. “These partnerships not only divert local resources from community safety initiatives but also significantly heighten the risk of racial profiling and erode trust between law enforcement and immigrant communities.”

The ACLU has also found that between 2021 and 2024, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections (DOC), along with 29 counties, received over $7 million in federal funds through the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP). The ACLU states that the funds were “in exchange” for data sharing with ICE. Wisconsin Examiner reached out to DOC, the story will be updated with any reply from the the state agency regarding data sharing.

That data is just part of a growing immigration enforcement and detention network across the state. From Oct. 2021 to June 2025, according to the report, ICE sent over 3,300 immigration detainers to Wisconsin. These are situations in which ICE requests that a local jail hold individuals for up to 48 hours beyond their scheduled release, the ACLU report states. “Although these detainers are often not accompanied by a warrant signed by a neutral judicial official and lack authority under Wisconsin law,” it explains, “most sheriffs across the state continue to honor them.”

Although over 3,300 individuals have been held between Oct. 2021 and June 2025, the biggest jump in detainer requests occurred this year. Between Jan. 1 and June 10, there were 1,065 ICE detainers in Wisconsin. By comparison there were 942 ICE detainers during all of 2024, 853 detainers during a 12-month period between October 2022 and September 2023 and 474 in the 12 months before that. 

“These numbers demonstrate that even without a judge-signed warrant, ICE continues to issue these ‘requests,’ and a significant number of Wisconsin jails continue to comply,” the ACLU’s report states. “This practice is problematic as federal deportation proceedings are civil, not criminal, matters and Wisconsin law does not provide legal authority for law enforcement to act on civil immigration detainers.”

Some sheriff offices are even taking it a step further than 287(g) and SCAAP. New financial agreements have also been arranged with counties such as Brown, Sauk and Ozaukee. In Brown County, the sheriff maintains a $90,000 contract for detention and transportation services, carrying a $70.00 per detainee, per day reimbursement, and another $36.00 per hour, with mileage and funding, for transportation services. Sauk County receives a $106.00 per-diem rate for housing ICE detainees, and Ozaukee County gave ICE the ability to purchase cell space in its jail by building off an existing contract with the U.S. Marshall Service. The ACLU calls this a “concerning trend” of local sheriffs “not only passively complying with ICE requests” but also “actively entering into benefiting from direct financial arrangements to house and transport immigrants for ICE removal activities.”

The report also highlights recent legislation which would require more cooperation with ICE. Republican lawmakers have introduced bills that would compel sheriffs to work with ICE regardless of their own priorities, mandate citizenship investigations of jail detainees, mandate compliance with detainer requests, and other policies.

To counter these advancements, the ACLU is calling on community members to reach out to their local sheriffs and police chiefs to learn more about where they stand on ICE cooperation, push agencies to prioritize community trust over obedience, and engage with lawmakers on the proposed bills. 

“These cozy relationships between ICE and many sheriffs are disrupting our communities and funneling immigrant community members into the federal deportation machine,” said Muth.

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Nasal Narcan, used to reverse an overdose, stock the inside of Milwaukee County's first harm reduction vending machine. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley is proposing to utilize over $9 million in opioid settlement funds to support seven initiatives aimed at expanding treatment and reducing opioid use disorder. Crowley said in a statement that his administration “continues to deploy opioid settlement dollars across Milwaukee County.” 

“These upstream investments are proving to be effective,” Crowley said, “but we know there’s more work to do in expanding substance use prevention, harm reduction, treatment, and recovery efforts.” 

The Milwaukee County Board Committee on Finance unanimously approved Crowley’s proposal during a meeting Thursday. Next week, the full county board will vote on whether to approve the plan. The projects, proposed for the 2026-28 fiscal years, include providing outreach to older adults with disabilities through door-to-door canvasing and  funding community-based organizations which partner with the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). Providing more staffing to the medical examiner’s office, funding residential room and board programs for people struggling with addiction and enhancing the county’s publicly available data analysis of the overdose crisis are among the other proposed initiatives. 

“Through these proven initiatives and by working together, we will keep leading the way to change the lives of individuals affected by substance use disorder and reduce the likelihood of overdose-related fatalities in our community — because lives depend on it,” Crowley said in a statement. 

Shakita LaGrant-McClain, executive director of DHHS, said the funding will allow the department to “continue the life-saving work that began with the initial round of opioid settlement funds…We are seeing promising trends and look forward to continuing our prevention, harm reduction, treatment and recovery work, including ensuring residents have access to harm reduction supplies, targeted community outreach, and collaboration with community partners.”

A publicly available dashboard illustrates the toll the overdose epidemic has taken on Milwaukee County. It provides information on both fatal and non-fatal overdoses, which communities are most impacted, how much anti-overdose Naloxone has been utilized, and more. Across Milwaukee County, over 4,500 people have lost their lives to an overdose between 2016 and 2024. The deaths peaked in 2022, which saw 674 people lose their lives to an overdose. Non-fatal overdoses are even more common; more than 5,400 occurred during 2022. There have been 1,061 non-fatal overdoses so far this year and 124 people have died of an overdose in 2025. 

The data shows that so far this year, 14% of fatal overdoses have been people between 55-59 years old and 11% were  60-64. People aged 35-39 made up 13% of the fatal overdoses this year. The lowest percentages came from young people 15-29 years old, and much older people aged 75-85 years or more. 

Over 18 years, Milwaukee County will receive a total of $111 million in opioid settlement funds. So far, $34 million has been allocated across three cohorts of funded projects focused on breaking cycles of addiction, advancing racial equality and improving community health.

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Then-Detective Joseph Mensah testifies before the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety in 2025. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Detective Joseph Mensah, a  Waukesha County Sheriff’s detective who attracted protests and controversy for his involvement in three fatal shootings over a five year period while employed at the Wauwatosa Police Department (WPD) will resign from the Sheriff’s office. Mensah, hired to the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department in 2021, issued a resignation letter on July 17. In a resignation letter, Mensah said he plans to leave the law enforcement profession all together. 

A version of the letter was posted on social media by Jessica McBride, a contributor to the right-wing media outlet Wisconsin Right Now. Mensah’s resignation will be effective on July 31, according to the letter.

A Waukesha County Sheriffs Department spokesperson sent a slightly different version of the letter to Wisconsin Examiner upon request. “After much consideration, I feel it would be in the best interest of the Sheriffs Department, the community, my family, and my own personal well-being, that I transition out of the law enforcement profession,” Mensah wrote in the letter. “Words can not express how grateful I am that you, Sheriff Severson, along with Inspector Gumm, Deputy Inspector, the command staff, and the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department accepted me and brought me into your family when I needed you most. I am beyond grateful and thankful, that I had the opportunity to serve alongside the men and women of this agency. If there is anything I can do to assist with this process, please let me know.”

Mensah was hired by the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department after resigning from WPD in 2020, following months of protests. After he was  hired by WPD in 2015, Mensah was involved in three fatal shootings. In his first year on the job Mensah shot 29-year-old Antonio Gonzales, who was wielding a sword when officers arrived at his home. Less than a year later, Mensah fatally shot 25-year-old Jay Anderson Jr., who was sleeping in his car in a county park. Mensah said that Anderson lunged for a handgun that sat beside him on the front passenger seat. Four years later in early 2020, Mensah killed 17-year-old Alvin Cole, who was fleeing Mayfair Mall with his friends after being involved in a fight, and brandishing a handgun. Mensah said that Cole attempted to shoot him during the chase. 

The Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office declined to charge Mensah in any of those shootings, stating that his actions were either justified or privileged. 

Residents and elected officials in Wauwatosa called for criminal charges against Mensah for the three shootings. When the district attorney declined to issue charges in the Cole shooting, protests ensued and a curfew was declared in Wauwatosa with  protesters confronted by militarized law enforcement.

An independent investigation found that Mensah violated department policies when he gave radio interviews in which  he discussed the Cole shooting, which was still under investigation at the time, and gave misleading information about his fatal shootings, according to the report, authored by attorney Steven Biskupic. 

Mensah’s three shootings in Wauwatosa also became the subject of several lawsuits. In 2021, a John Doe hearing was called to review the Anderson shooting, after which a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge ruled that probable cause existed to charge Mensah with a crime. Special prosecutors appointed to the case, however, declined to pursue charges. 

In 2025, Mensah testified before state legislative committees to advocate for prohibitions against the use of the John Doe law to review fatal shootings by police. Mensah told Wisconsin Examiner that he’d sought a promotion to lieutenant while at the sheriff’s department, but was unsuccessful. 

Another federal civil lawsuit involving the Cole shooting was brought to trial, and a judge found that Mensah and other officers provided contradictory statements. Wisconsin Examiner also found that Mensah and other officers violated policies related to police shooting investigations in the Milwaukee area. The Cole trial in 2025 ended in a hung jury, with a retrial scheduled for early September. 

In a statement to Wisconsin Examiner, a spokesperson for the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department said that agency staff “support Detective Mensah and wish him the best.” 

Attorney Kimberley Motley, who has represented the families of those killed by Mensah and the protesters who supported them, said in a statement to Wisconsin Examiner that the Cole family “is looking forward to the trial that is set in September against Joseph Mensah. Both the Alvin Cole and Jay Anderson family continue to focus on fighting for justice on behalf of their loved ones.”

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Advocates, Gov. Tony Evers and Republican lawmakers have conflicting views about the Department of Corrections funding in the 2025-27 state budget. (Photo by Caspar Benson/Getty Images)

For criminal justice advocates in Wisconsin, the new state budget leaves much to be desired. Although the $111 billion two-year budget signed by Gov. Tony Evers earlier this month will help eventually close the beleaguered Lincoln Hills juvenile prison, some feel that it missed opportunities to reform the state’s justice system. 

“Wisconsin’s elected officials, including Gov. Evers and state legislators, have once again failed to take meaningful action to overhaul the state’s broken and inhumane carceral system,” Mark Rice, statewide coordinator for WISDOM’s Transformative Justice Campaign, wrote in a statement released July 11. “The recently passed state budget ignores the deep harm caused by mass incarceration and falls far short of what is needed to address the humanitarian crisis unfolding inside Wisconsin’s prisons.”

Evers’ original budget proposal released in February contained a number of proposals that were removed or reduced by the Legislature’s Republican-led Joint Finance Committee, including $8.9 million to support alternatives to revocation. Another pitch by Evers for $4 million to fund community reentry centers was cut in half by Joint Finance. His proposed $3.19 million in supportive housing service beds for people under DOC supervision was removed. Over $1 million in funding for six positions on the DOC’s Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance team was also removed by JFC. 

Evers proposed a total increase of $519 million to the  Department of Corrections budget over the next two years.  The final budget deal instead increased the DOC budget by $461 million over the two-year period. 

The budget’s capital projects plan, passed by the Legislature and signed by Evers, allocated $225 million to the Department of Corrections (DOC), as well as another $15 million towards construction planning for facilities, with the goal of closing the Green Bay Correctional Institution by 2029. 

Evers used his partial veto to strike the 2029 deadline for closing Green Bay. “We need more compromise on that,” said Evers, who added that he supports closing the prison, one of Wisconsin’s oldest, but called the timeline unrealistic: “Saying we’re going to do Green Bay by ‘29 doesn’t mean a damn thing.” In his veto message, Evers said that he objected to the Legislature “assigning a date” to close the Green Bay prison “while providing virtually no real, meaningful, or concrete plan to do so.” 

“I support closing Green Bay Correctional Institution,” Evers wrote. “Indeed, my administration spent years working on a comprehensive corrections reform plan to be able to close Green Bay Correctional Institution quickly, safely, and cost efficiently, which was included in the biennial budget I introduced months ago. I proposed a ‘domino’ series of facility changes, improvements, and modernization efforts across Wisconsin’s correctional institutions while improving public safety by expanding workforce training opportunities to reduce the likelihood that people might reoffend after they are released. Under that plan, Green Bay Correctional Institution would be closed in 2029. Instead, the Legislature sent this budget with the same deadline and no plan of which to speak.”

The fight to close old and blighted prisons

Lincoln Hills, Wisconsin’s notoriously troubled juvenile prison, which still houses 79 boys according to the DOC’s most recent population report, blew years past its own closure deadline. Now, the budget provides $130.7 million to build a new Type 1 juvenile facility in Dane County to help facilitate the closure of Lincoln Hills. Plans for a second Type 1 facility in Milwaukee County ran into roadblocks from local resistance and political disagreements in the Capitol, though the facility’s completion is still planned. 

Green Bay’s prison was originally built in 1898. Plaques embedded in its outer wall commemorate that the wall was “erected by inmates” in 1921. Over 1,100 people are incarcerated in the prison, which is designed to hold only 749, according to the DOC’s most recent weekly population report. In late June, prison reform advocates from JOSHUA, a local affiliate of WISDOM, held a monthly vigil and prayer service outside the prison, where people are held in “disciplinary separation” for the longest periods in any of DOC’s adult facilities. Protesters  included people whose loved ones have died inside the prison, some by suicide due to a lack of mental health support. In late August, 19-year-old Michah Laureano died in the prison after he was attacked by his cell mate. 

Although the budget aims to close Green Bay, how that will be accomplished remains hazy. Rice wrote that the budget “includes no plan” to close the prison, “despite overwhelming evidence that the facility is beyond repair.” Instead, Rice wrote in a statement that “some legislators continue to push for more studies and planning tactics that will only delay justice while people continue to suffer and die behind bars. This is unacceptable.”

That sentiment was echoed by the Ladies of SCI, an advocacy group formed by women with loved ones at the Stanley Correctional Institution. Although the group appreciated that closing Green Bay was part of the budget discussion, “we also agree that does not mean much without funding an actual plan,” the group wrote in an email to Wisconsin Examiner. “The [Joint Finance Committee] committed that the plan presented by [DOC] Secretary [Jared] Hoy’s team in the Governor’s initial budget was ‘just an idea’ and yet, the JFC also just put an ‘idea’ in the budget. Yes, they put in dollars for a plan to be developed, but this has already been done several times over.” 

Studies for closing Green Bay, Waupun, and other old and blighted facilities have been recommended as far back as 1965, Ladies of SCI wrote in the statement. “Here we are, 60 years later, STILL discussing it. The most recent study was done in 2020 and called out almost $1 billion in projects to increase capacity across our facilities to just handle that population level…We are well above that population level today.”

The group asks, “Is $15 million actually enough to finally get tangible actions to deal with our Corrections crisis? We’d like to know what the magic combination of dollars and opinions are needed to finally address issues that have been identified over and over.” Ladies of SCI said “setting aside money for yet another study and plan development is rinse and repeat of history…The bottom line is our state’s prison population is too big for what we currently have.”

Rice concurred, writing in his own statement that prisons like Green Bay, Waupun (the state’s oldest prison where multiple deaths have occurred in recent years), and the Milwaukee Secure Detention Facility (MSDF) “are notorious for inhumane conditions and should have been shut down years ago.” Rice added that “there is no justification for continuing to pour hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into maintaining or expanding a failed prison system.” 

Instead, he believes that the state should commit to reducing the prison population by expanding treatment alternatives to incarceration, commuting “excessive and unjust sentences,” granting “fair access to parole and early release,” and stopping the practice of locking people up for “technical or convictionless revocations.” 

When Evers wrote his message vetoing the deadline for closing Green Bay, there were 362 people working at the prison and more than 1,100 incarcerated adults. “As of this writing, Wisconsin has the capacity to house 17,638 individuals at its correctional institutions but there are 23,275 people living in [DOC] institutions across Wisconsin;” Evers wrote, “the Legislature provides no steps whatsoever to stabilize the state’s skyrocketing prison population.” 

Referring to the saga of Lincoln Hills, Evers added, “Wisconsin already has about a decade’s worth of painful experience learning how well it works in practice to set unrealistic, artificial timelines and due dates for closing prison facilities without a complete and thorough plan for implementation. It would be foolish and dangerous to attempt to take a similar approach with a maximum-security institution like Green Bay Correctional Institution.”

Alternatives to incarceration 

Just over one-third of the 2,727 new prison admissions statewide between January and April were people sent back to prison for issues like violating the rules of community supervision, and without a new crime committed or sentence issued, according to the DOC’s dashboard. Over the same period of time, there were more than 63,435 people on community supervision, probation, or parole.

Sean Wilson, senior director of organizing and partnerships at Dream.org, criticized the cuts to proposals to expand alternatives to incarceration, “clean-slate” legislation and expungement reforms that were left out of the final budget deal. “I think that there continues to be a lack of re-entry investments, which should be pretty high on the list,” Wilson told Wisconsin Examiner. For years, criminal justice advocates have pushed for support for housing, access to mental health care and jobs, “those things were not included in the budget.” 

With less than 3,000 people housed between Green Bay, Waupun, and MSDF, Rice feels that “these prisons could be emptied and closed within months” and that “doing so would not only alleviate human suffering but it would also free up critical resources” which “must be reinvested in the communities most harmed by incarceration.” From providing living-wage jobs and stable housing to creating educational opportunities and violence prevention, Rice wrote in his statement, “that is how we build true public safety.”

Wilson declared that “the biggest elephant in the room” was that “there’s no real movement on closing outdated prisons or reducing the DOC’s footprint.” He stressed that “we are beyond design capacity…with 5,000 additional bodies [beyond the number] this system was designed for.” Without a concrete roadmap and deadline, he says the budget commitment to closing the Green Bay prison doesn’t mean much.  

Over 20 years ago, Wilson spent time in the Green Bay prison, which he remembers as “a dilapidated hellhole…It was a trauma pressure cooker in my opinion.” 

“But the fact that they’re talking about just studying it, that really made me livid as someone who spent time in that facility, and is currently in communication with many individuals who are still housed there today,” he added.

Wilson said he doesn’t see focused funding to reduce racial disparities in incarceration, nor is there funding to support people who have been directly impacted by the criminal justice system and are trying to lead a reform effort. “I think if you look at the movement at large for the last 20 years, it’s been led by directly impacted leadership,” said Wilson. “Because we believe in the words of Glenn Martin that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution.” People with personal experience need to be brought to the table to offer both critiques and solutions, he said. 

Ladies of SCI called the building plans in the budget “just one of the steps our lawmakers must take to address things,” and pointed to separate legislation introduced by Republican Senator Andre Jacque (R-DePere) and Rep. Paul Tittl (R-Manitowoc), which the group believed would have put needed investments into rehabilitation “instead of warehousing people in our crumbling facilities.”

Evers said the budget was an exercise of compromise and cooperation. “We need to work together,” he said after signing the budget less than an hour after the Assembly passed it.  “Compare that to what’s going on in Washington, D.C., and it’s significantly different, so I’m very proud to sign it,” Evers said of the bipartisan compromise. In order to retain $1 billion per year in federal Medicaid matching funds, legislators on both sides of the aisle worked to finalize the bill before the federal reconciliation bill was signed by President Donald Trump.

Another one of Evers’ partial vetoes stirred discussion around juvenile incarceration. The Senate version of  the budget specified that state juvenile correctional facilities would operate at a rate of $912,000 in 2025-26 per kid, per year, before increasing to over $1 million per kid per year for 2026-27. Evers’ partial vetoes lowered the rates to $182,865 per kid in 2025-26, and $275,670 per kid in the following years.

Over the last decade the cost of housing for each young person in youth corrections in Wisconsin has quadrupled from $303 per day in 2014 to $1,268 per day in 2024, largely due to a lower population of incarcerated youth and higher staffing needs. In his veto message, Evers objected to the Legislature’s plan to continue expanding the costs of the existing youth incarceration system during a time of “uncertainty,” and delays in closing youth prisons.  

Sen. Van Wanggaard (R-Racine) criticized Evers for using a veto to cut housing expenditures for juvenile offenders. “Evers’ veto of this provision is unsustainable and he knows it,” said Wanggaard. “The statutory daily rate is not a number that we come up with out of thin air. It’s simple math – the total cost to operate our juvenile facilities divided by the average population.” 

Wanggaard added that “up until now, a county sending a juvenile to a state facility paid for those costs…Governor Evers just decided unilaterally to turn it on its head and have the state pick up the vast majority of costs. It flips the entire funding of juvenile corrections without debate or discussion. It’s irresponsible.” Wanggaard also said that Evers’ refusal to utilize the expansion of the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center to house more youth offenders is driving costs higher. Children can only be placed in Mendota when it’s clinically appropriate, however. The facility was never intended to replace Lincoln Hills, or augment bed space for incarcerated kids. 

In his veto message, Evers explained why he shifted the cost burden from local communities to the state, writing that he objected “to establishing a daily rate that is unaffordable to counties.” He continued that, “I have heard loud and clear from counties that the current daily rate is burdensome and will detrimentally impact public safety. Unbelievably, despite that clear message from the counties, the Legislature has chosen to increase that rate by over $1,000 per day. This increase and funding model is untenable, and counties have expressed that this unaffordable increase will have serious and detrimental effects on other county services.” Evers urged the Legislature to “revisit this issue in separate legislation and appropriate those additional GPR funds to the department.”

Criminal justice advocates around the state say viable solutions must go beyond incarceration. Lincoln Hills continues to be under a court-ordered monitor due to a successful lawsuit that brought attention to the harms done to both incarcerated youth and reports of abuse within the facility. Waupun’s prison has yet to recover from a string of deaths which ultimately led to charges against the prison’s warden and several staff. Green Bay is also notorious for inhumane conditions and deaths behind bars. 

“We don’t need more studies, we need action,” said Wilson. 

When he was incarcerated at Green Bay between the years 2000 and 2005, he added, “I watched people get battered by each other. I saw individuals get beaten by staff. I see the paint peeling, the walls are sweating. The prison cells are outdated. You’re talking about a facility that was built in the 1800’s…And you’re putting people in this facility in 2025 and you are expecting them to come home sane. You are expecting them to navigate this space in a rational way. You expect them to interact with one another in a humane way when you are housing them, or caging them, as if they were animals. Wisconsin should stop wasting taxpayer money by keeping people in cages that should’ve been shuttered decades ago!” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution on Thursday, calling on the Milwaukee County Sheriffs Office (MCSO) to work with the community to create a regulatory framework for the use of facial recognition technology. MCSO is currently exploring an agreement with Biometrica, a data company that provides facial recognition technology to local police departments. 

“Facial recognition technology has been proven to disproportionately affect communities of color and young women,” said Sup. Juan Miguel Martinez. “The more facial recognition technology, the more people are able to criminalize people executing their First Amendment rights. I feel this is an issue not left or right.” Miguel Martinez also expressed concerns about the use of facial recognition technology to aid immigration enforcement or to surveil protests. 

Privacy concerns have been heightened during the Trump administration’s surge in immigration enforcement and crackdowns on dissent. In Milwaukee, several people were arrested by federal agents after attending regular hearings at the county courthouse. In April, Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested and accused of obstructing federal agents after she directed a man sought by immigration officers out a side door in her courtroom that led into a public hallway. 

MCSO leaders said they aim to use the technology to identify people after violent crime incidents. 

Nevertheless, members of the public and some elected officials raised concerns about the technology.  The resolution contains language stating  that facial recognition technology can be inaccurate and could negatively affect certain groups including people of color, LGBTQ people, activists, immigrants and people seeking reproductive health care. 

The resolution states that the county board supports pausing any future acquisition of facial recognition until regulatory policies can be developed. It also calls on the county’s Information Management Services Division, Corporation Council and MCSO to collaborate with “relevant stakeholders” including privacy and free speech advocates, in developing that policy framework. Out of this collaborative effort will eventually emerge recommendations to the county board as to whether facial recognition technology:

• Should be prohibited or strictly limited without the informed knowledge and consent of the individual being scanned, except under narrowly defined circumstances, such as during active criminal investigations, 
• Whether the types of data collected by the technology should be defined and limited, as well as strict retention periods for data, 
• Prohibit facial recognition data from being shared with third parties, unless authorized through a rigorous, transparent approval process which itself would be subject to oversight, 
• And whether departments using facial recognition should be required to submit annual reports detailing its use, including metrics of deployment, effectiveness, and analysis on the impact on communities of color, immigrants and other vulnerable groups.  

The resolution passed by the county board calls for a final recommendation to be established no later than May 2026. By December 2025 the county board expects a status update, according to the resolution. 

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Like the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD), the sheriff's office is considering acquiring facial recognition applications from the company Biometrica, but civil liberties advocates are raising concerns about the technology. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin is calling on the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office to reconsider plans to adopt the use of facial recognition technology. Like the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD), the sheriff’s office is considering acquiring facial recognition technology from the company Biometrica. The company has offered MPD free access in exchange for 2.5 million images, jail records, and other related data of people who have passed through Milwaukee’s criminal justice system, including many who presumably haven’t been convicted of a crime. 

“Given all the public opposition we’ve seen to the Milwaukee Police Department’s push to expand their use of facial recognition, the news of the Sheriffs office’s interest in acquiring this technology is deeply concerning,” Amanda Merkwae, advocacy director for the ACLU of Wisconsin, wrote in a statement for an ACLU press release. “Law enforcement’s use of facial recognition software poses a number of serious threats to civil rights and civil liberties, making it dangerous both when it fails and when it functions.” 

Just days ago, Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball revealed that her office was looking into adopting facial recognition software. Ball told county supervisors during a June 17 meeting of the Judiciary, Law Enforcement, and General Services Committee Urban Milwaukee reported, that she was assessing a data-sharing agreement for the technology. MCSO did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Like MPD, the sheriff’s office is exploring an agreement with Biometrica, a company which has pushed back against concerns about privacy and the use of its surveillance tools. Biometrica offers a third-party facial recognition algorithm to agencies like the Milwaukee police and the sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office states that rather than using the technology for untargeted surveillance, it aims to use facial recognition software to identify people once investigators have an image of a criminal suspect. Ball says that facial recognition would never be the sole basis for an arrest or charges, Urban Milwaukee reported.

On Thursday, the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors will vote on a resolution requiring the creation of a regulatory process for adopting facial recognition technology. Both at the county and city government meetings, however, law enforcement agencies have been met with public skepticism about their exploration of facial recognition technologies. 

Tension bubbled up during a hearing before the Milwaukee Equal Rights Commission last week. Police department Inspector Paul Lough  said that facial recognition could provide important leads for investigations similar to those derived from confidential informants and information databases used to run names. During the hearing, MPD officials presented examples of cases in which facial recognition technology helped solve crimes. “Whether or not they would’ve…may or may not have been solved without the use of facial rec., it’s hard to say,” said Lough. “Some probably would have been, some might still be open. But the important part of it is that all of the ones that we’re going to go over are very predatory in nature where there’s exigent circumstances to solve them quickly.”

MPD Capt. James Hutchinson went over two investigations from March 2024 which utilized facial recognition technology. One involved a drive-by shooting, where a passing car opened fire on a pedestrian, who died on the scene. Hutchinson explained that MPD obtained images from surveillance cameras, which were then sent to partner agencies with the ability to run facial recognition requests. Within 16 hours, the police captain told the commission, a potential suspect had been identified. 

“We don’t know who they are when we get those pictures back, but we have ways of vetting that information, confirming the identification provided to us,” said Hutchinson. “And that’s what we did in this case.” Unique tattoos helped narrow the search to a man who was wearing a GPS bracelet. When officers went to conduct an arrest, they found two alleged shooters, their guns and the car they are believed to have used. Hutchinson said that a trial is pending for both suspects arrested in that case. 

Facial recognition was also used in a sexual assault case, which occurred two days before the shooting. A victim had been followed home in the rain by a man offering her his umbrella, and asking for money. He mentioned that he’d already tried asking for money at a nearby gas station. As they walked, he held a gun to her head and forced her into a garage where he assaulted her. Officers were able to locate the garage with the victim’s help using Google Maps, and later the gas station the man had mentioned before. Surveillance camera photos potentially capturing the man were sent to other agencies for facial recognition assistance, which came back with images of a man who was on probation for sexual assault. He was identified both by the probation agent and the victim, and was sentenced to 20 years of incarceration. 

MPD listed 13 additional cases where it used facial recognition, including a string of taco truck robberies on Milwaukee’s South Side involving a group of masked assailants. Although they appeared careful to cover their faces, one suspect let his mask down briefly, which was seen by a camera, and sent to a partner agency for identification. In that case, three to four potential suspects were identified by the technology, each with a certain percentage of certainty such as 97%, 95% and so on. After further investigation, detectives identified those responsible for the taco truck robberies as people flagged by the  facial recognition search with the lowest percentage of certainty.

During public testimony, several people expressed concerns about the accuracy of facial recognition technology. Facial recognition software has been shown to have trouble identifying non-white faces, and is prone to errors particularly when identifying people of color. Some feared that defendants might have trouble learning how facial recognition was used in their cases, and felt that police oversight was lacking. Others pointed to the 2.5 million images MPD would give to Biometrica in exchange for the software licenses, and argued that such a move would only further harm community trust in the police. Because the images include mugshots, it’s possible that people whose images were included in that transaction will not be convicted of a crime after being  arrested or detained at the jail for a period of time. Other questions included  what access federal agencies, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), would have to MPD’s facial recognition system. 

“As we recently found, MPD has been using facial recognition technology on the faces of Milwaukeeans for years, without being transparent with the public or the FPC,” Krissie Fung, a member of the Milwaukee Turners and Milwaukee’s Fire and Police Commission (FPC), said during public testimony. “Because there’s no standard operating procedure to provide guidelines around their process, relying on MPD to follow their own gentlemen’s agreements and internal process is just not how oversight works.” 

Fung also said MPD Chief Jeffrey Norman acknowledged when he was reappointed that there is no way to guarantee the safety of the data and faces of Milwaukeeans, and that the data would be going to a third-party company the city does not oversee and which uses algorithms the city will not be able to  access. “MPD’s proposal is to trade 2.5 million mugshots in exchange for this license which, by the way, includes my mugshot,” said Fung. “I believe that there are serious legal concerns that have not yet played out in the courts, and that would open us up to significant lawsuits.”

“I cannot help but wonder if the reason Biometrica is so thirsty to trade 2.5 million ‘jail records or mugshots’ in exchange for free access to this technology, is that they assume that those jail records are Black faces, and they clearly need more Black faces to train their inaccurate algorithm,” Fung added. “But we don’t need to let them get those Black faces from Milwaukee.”

“I don’t know a single person in this city that trusts the police,” said Ron Jansen, who has testified about law enforcement at previous city and county meetings. “So the last thing Milwaukee needs to do is hand this department a tool that creates even greater opportunity to harm the people of this city.” 

“This is not free,” Jansen added.  “… the cost is 2.5 million mugshots of residents, non-residents, whatever. Anybody who’s been through the system here in Milwaukee…2.5 million human beings…Human beings, maybe half of which or more, were never convicted of a crime. This includes people who were wrongfully arrested, or accused, or just anyone who was ever booked into their custody. And while I was writing this, I thought, ‘that also includes people who’ve already been victimized by this department.’ People who have been beaten by the police. People who have been wrongfully accused by the police. This is your biological data, my biological data, everyone’s biological data, and it is being sold to a private company without your consent, all so that they can expand their surveillance network.” 

Jansen asserted that the millions of images could include protesters, teachers, even state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee), who was wrongfully arrested by MPD during a curfew. “His arrest record is likely in there,” said Jansen. He also raised the 2025 case of officer Juwon Madlock, who used his access to police databases to pass intelligence about confidential informants and the home addresses of  targets to gangs searching out rivals. “If this is already happening, imagine what will happen when their abilities get expanded,” said Jansen. 

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Yessenia Ruano as she prepares to self-deport to El Salvador (Photo courtesy of Voces de la Frontera)

A Milwaukee teacher’s aide has decided to self-deport back to El Salvador, following moves by the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to remove her from the country. Yessenia Ruano, who worked at the Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes bilingual school in Milwaukee, is the mother of 10-year-old twin girls. Although the girls were born in the United States, Ruano took her daughters with her back to El Salvador on Tuesday, choosing to self-deport and keep her family intact rather than being forcibly removed by ICE. 

On Friday, federal immigration officials denied Ruano’s request for an emergency stay, which would have halted the government’s attempts to remove her while her visa application was considered, WPR reported. Ruano’s attorney Marc Chirstopher said that ICE gave a one-sentence rationale for denying the stay. 

Christopher said that ICE officials claimed that Ruano “did not warrant a favorable exercise of discretion.” 

“Quite frankly, if she doesn’t warrant it, I don’t know who does.” Christopher said. Ruano did not have a criminal record. She crossed the southern border in 2011 to escape gang violence after local gang members murdered her brother. Christopher added that “she’s very involved in the community,” as  a teacher’s aide for kindergarten teachers, owns  her own house and  pays taxes into a safety net system she is not eligible to access. 

 “I am extremely disappointed in ICE’s decision to deny an emergency stay for my constituent Yessenia Ruano,” U.S. Rep.  Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) said in a statement. “It is outright cruel to force a human trafficking victim to return to the place she was fleeing from.” Ruano was applying for  a T-visa, which confers legal status on  victims of human trafficking. “T-visas are meant for people like Yessenia, but sadly, she wasn’t even given the chance to have her case heard,” said Moore. “Yessenia is a wonderful person and her and [her] children’s removal from Milwaukee will be a loss to our community.”

Ruano received a letter telling her  to self-deport on June 3, spurring condemnation from Milwaukee residents, immigrant rights advocates and elected leaders. At the time, Ruano’s attorneys said that it appeared that ICE was abandoning policies of waiting for T and U visas — which protect victims of trafficking and crime victims who are cooperating with law enforcement— to be processed. 

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley wrote on the social media website X that “deporting valued members of our community who are raising and educating our kids, assisting law enforcement in their important work, and giving back to our neighborhoods should alarm us all. It is wrong and unjust.” Crowley added that “these individuals are victims of a broken immigration system. The Trump Administration told the country they were only going after ‘the worst of the worst’. But time and time again, we see them targeting the very people who contribute the most — our neighbors, coworkers, our friends.” The county executive warned that “I am deeply alarmed that our country continues to turn its back on our most vulnerable. By not standing up and protecting our neighbors, we’re not just failing them — we’re failing our entire community. Due process is under attack, and that should concern all of us in Wisconsin and across the country.”

During a May 30 hearing, ICE officials told Ruano to self-deport by June 3. During that hearing her attorneys filed for an emergency stay, beginning a wait-period of several weeks until a decision was finally made, WPR reported. Attorney Christopher said that few emergency stays are being granted under the second Trump administration. 

Earlier this month, the Milwaukee Common Council released a statement opposing Ruano’s impending deportation, and held 14 minutes of silence to honor her 14 years in the United States. “Yessenia has developed roots here,” the council stated. “She is a wife with two Milwaukee-born daughters. She is an educator. She is a volunteer. She is a contributing member of our society. All of us should be outraged by this decision and what it means for Yessenia and her family, and other immigrants who could be facing similar fates.” 

“If there is one thing this case has made crystal clear,” the statement continued,  “it’s that the immigration laws and systems in our country are broken, and the administration at the federal level is more concerned with scapegoating hard working immigrants than fixing the process so it is fair and works for everyone.”

Before Christopher took on  Ruano as a client about two months ago, Ruano had paid over $14,000 in legal fees to file the T-visa application to a different team of Ohio-based attorneys. 

“From what I’ve been seeing consistently through other cases and hearing from other attorneys, they’re not granting hardly any stays for anyone really,” said Christopher. “I am more than positive that she would have been able to remain in the U.S. while the T-visa was pending…under previous administrations.” 

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Thousands of protesters gathered at the Wisconsin State Capitol to protest President Donald Trump on Saturday. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

People across Wisconsin joined “No Kings” day protests held in cities across the U.S. Saturday, with thousands of protesters marching in the streets of Madison and Milwaukee. 

The protests took place on the same day as a military parade held in Washington D.C. on President Donald Trump’s birthday and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army and in the wake of the Trump administration’s escalated response to protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions in Los Angeles. 

‘We will fight joyfully’: Thousands march through downtown Madison to protest Trump 

Thousands of people crowded into downtown Madison Saturday afternoon joining the nationwide “No Kings” protests against the administration of President Donald Trump. 

Protesters waved American flags right side up and upside down (a traditional signal of distress), as well as LGBTQ pride flags, Mexican flags and Ukrainian flags. Signs called for equality, criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement and  compared Trump to dictators of the past. The crowd included trapeze artists, people in drag, Madison protest regulars the “Raging Grannies,” a 15-foot Statue of Liberty puppet and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Georgia). 

The protest started on UW-Madison’s east Campus Mall, where the Women’s March hosted a “kick out the clowns” event. There, Madison resident Amanda G., who declined to give her last name, did hand stands on the grass next to a sign stating “hand stand against facism.” 

“When people engage in a struggle against facism, you need calm, focus and concentration,” she said, adding that those same qualities  are required for holding a hand stand as long as she could. 

A nearby group of protesters performed a skit featuring giant paper mache heads of Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin debating how to start a dictatorship before they were surrounded by about 15 dancers dressed like the Statue of Liberty. 

When  the protesters began marching from the campus toward the Capitol,  hundreds of people were still flowing in the opposite direction  down State Street.  The combined crowd came together and headed  up the street towards the Capitol as onlookers cheered from the sidewalks. 

Madison police observed the marchers as they gathered at the Capitol from a rooftop across the street.

Cindy Reilly, a Sun Prairie resident who had joined the crowd on the mall, watched and chanted from the patio of a State Street bar. Reilly said the budget bill currently being moved through Congress by Republicans was her biggest reason for protesting on Saturday, saying Republicans are defunding programs that help people who are struggling while funding rich people.

“It’s important for people to tell Trump and Republicans we don’t like what they’re doing,” she said. 

When the crowd reached the Capitol square, Nick Ramos, executive director of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, emceed a series of performances and speeches.

“We will fight joyfully, we will fight peacefully, in these streets for our democracy” Ramos said.

Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock, who was in Wisconsin to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s annual convention in the Wisconsin Dells this weekend, spoke from the protest stage and  highlighted the assassination of a Minnesota Democratic lawmaker Saturday morning, the deployment of U.S. troops against protesters in Los Angeles and the detainment of U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) at a Department of Homeland Security press conference this week. 

Warnock said that he often talks about the value of nonviolent protests, but it’s not protesters who are being violent. 

“I have said that to the activists,” Warnock said. “But somebody needs to say that to the Trump administration.” 

Throughout the first six months of the Trump administration, people have regularly called for more forceful opposition from elected Democrats. Warnock acknowledged those calls, while saying it will take work from people inside and outside the halls of power to fight Trump’s unpopular policies. 

“People like you are asking people in positions like mine to speak up,” Warnock said. “I’m going to do that, but we must work on the outside and the inside.” 

Protests wrap around multiple city blocks in Milwaukee 

More than  12,000 people  marched in the No Kings Day protest in Milwaukee, packing  Cathedral Square Saturday afternoon. Elderly people and military veterans, parents with young children and Milwaukee residents of all ages  turned out to denounce what some event speakers described as a fascist and authoritarian Trump administration. 

Most of the crowd gathered on  the grass at the center of the square in front of  a large stage while others stood off to the side in the shade. Law enforcement kept a low key profile during the protest, helping direct traffic and watching from rooftops. Several drones flew over the crowd throughout the protest, including some which legal observers believed were operated by law enforcement due to their size, complexity and because they seemed to land on the rooftops occupied by police.

For nearly an hour, the crowd listened to a procession of speakers including  local activists, community organizers and a retired U.S. attorney. Speakers expressed the grievances of the chanting, cheering crowd about the military parade being held in Washington, D.C.,  the deployment of active duty U.S.troops on American soil, immigration raids  and attacks on the judicial system including the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan, as well as threatened cuts to reproductive and gender affirming health care, attacks on workers rights, and the ongoing mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza. The crowd observed a moment of silence for Minnesota Democratic legislative leader Melissa Hortman who was the victim of a targeted assassination Saturday in what appeared to be a politically motivated attack.  

The protest march proceeded  east towards Lake Michigan and  past Museum Center Park, winding back into the downtown area to pass the federal courthouse, and restaurant-lined streets before returning to Cathedral Square. 

The march stretched for several city blocks. There was no evidence of property destruction or clashes with police , and counter protesters were nowhere in sight. 

This article has been edited to correct the first name of Sen. Raphael Warnock.

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Christine Neumann-Ortiz (left) stands with Anna Morales, daughter of Ramon Morales Reyes'. (Photo courtesy of Voces de la Frontera)

Ramón Morales Reyes, a 54-year-old Mexican-born man living in Milwaukee who was framed for writing a letter threatening President Donald Trump, has been granted a $7,500 bond by an immigration judge. The news came early Tuesday morning, as immigrant rights advocates from Voces de la Frontera held a press conference to call on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to clear Morales Reyes’ name, and issue a retraction of a press release denouncing him for threatening the president’s life. 

Morales Reyes’ daughter Anna joined Voces executive director Christine Neumann-Ortiz on the press call and became emotional at the news of her father’s release. “I’m so very grateful, thank you so much,” said Anna, who spoke during the virtual press conference but did not appear on camera. Since DHS Secretary Kristi Noem issued a press statement describing Morales Reyes as an “illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump,” his family has received online harassment and death threats. 

“I’ve always been my dad’s little girl who grew up with a hardworking dad that always was making sure his family has food on the table, having a roof over our heads,” said Anna Morales. “He loved to take us to the park every weekend and go for walks as a family.” She recalled cookouts with her dad, who worked as a dishwasher in Milwaukee for the last nine years. Morales lamented that her father is now facing the threat of deportation based on false accusations.  “He is not a criminal. He is a hardworking man, a provider, and most importantly a father who holds family together,” she said.  “Without my dad, me and my siblings wouldn’t be where we are today — his sacrifice and his drive to give us a better life.”  

“If he were taken from us, it wouldn’t just be a financial loss, it would be an emotional one that we honestly don’t know how to recover from,” she added. “My siblings and I rely on him not just for the roof over our heads or food on the table, but for his presence, his advice, and the way he keeps our family united.” 

“My dad is not a threat to anyone. He is a good man who got caught up in a terrible situation.” 

Despite the decision to release Morales Reyes, after the real author of the letter threatening Trump confessed that he had tried to frame Morales Reyes to prevent him from testifying against him in a criminal trial, the Department of Homeland Security has not removed a press release from its website accusing Morales Reyes of being the author of the letter.

In a statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin responded to Morales Reyes’ release on bond, saying,  “while this criminal illegal alien is no longer under investigation for threats against the President, he is in the country illegally with previous arrests for felony hit and run, criminal damage to property, and disorderly conduct with domestic abuse. The Trump administration is committed to restoring the rule of law and fulfilling the President’s mandate to deport illegal aliens. DHS will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of illegal aliens who have no right to be in this country.” In 1996, Morales Reyes was arrested for a hit and run and property damage, but was not charged. In another 1996 incident he was ticketed for disorderly conduct and criminal damage after a dispute with his wife in which no one was injured, NPR reported. 

“It’s a disgrace that we have a government that is promoting false information of a very serious nature against a man who is a victim of a crime, and has been falsely accused,” Neumann-Ortiz told Wisconsin Examiner.

Morales Reyes’ family does not feel safe, Neumann-Ortiz said. “This just shows that this administration is not interested in safety. They’re interested in this propaganda campaign to demonize immigrants, and to do with them whatever they will, to accuse them of anything and put them in jail and throw away the key.”

Just before the bond hearing, attorney Cane Oulahan, who represented Morales Reyes during immigration proceedings, said that he was hoping for a “just result, which would be for Ramón to get out on a fair bond and rejoin his family, so they can start to heal from all the trauma they’ve been through.” Oulahan thanked Anna Morales for her bravery in coming forward with a statement Tuesday morning. The attorney said that factors which the judge would consider, including danger to the community and flight risk, were low for Morales Reyes. “I think it’s clear that Ramón is not a dangerous person at all,” said Oulahan. “It’s been over 30 years since he’s had any minor incidents, he’s a responsible husband and father, hard worker, someone who contributes to our community.” 

Oulahan said that Morales Reyes had no reason to be considered a flight risk. “He’s got every interest in staying here,” said Oulahan. “I mean, he’s been here almost 40 years. He has family here, this is his home, and he’s actively cooperating in a U-Visa investigation still, and so he has every reason to show up for his hearings.” A U-Visa is a form of immigration relief intended to encourage crime victims to cooperate with law enforcement investigations and court proceedings, while also providing a path to permanent residency. 

Neumann-Ortiz said in a statement that the bond decision was “a meaningful victory not only for Ramón and his family but for our entire community.” The decision she added, “reflects the courage and strength of community organizing, solidarity, and collective action. We thank all who stood with Ramón, and we urge continued support as the process ahead remains long and challenging. We also continue to demand that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) fully clear Ramón’s name and correct the false allegations against him.”

Morales Reyes was the victim of an attempted armed robbery in September 2023. The man accused of the attempted robbery, Demetric Scott, told investigators that he penned a letter claiming to be Morales Reyes and threatening to use a large caliber rifle to assassinate Trump. Scott believed that the letter would result in Morales Reyes’ deportation, and prevent him from testifying against Scott in court. 

Morales Reyes was born in a rural part of Mexico where he received very little formal education. He cannot speak English, and cannot read or write proficiently. The letter penned by Scott and later elevated by Noem’s press release was neatly written in fluent English. CNN reported that after he was arrested by immigration agents, Morales Reyes was questioned by detectives from the Milwaukee Police Department (MPD), who had already suspected that someone was setting him up to be deported. 

Scott claimed that he carried out the plan to get Morales Reyes deported on his own, without any assistance. He has now  been charged with identity theft and felony witness intimidation. Because Scott admitted to forging the letter, Oulahan said that he didn’t expect the letter to be relevant to the judge during Morales Reyes’ bond hearing. 

A staff member for U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) read a letter from Moore during the virtual press conference. Morales Reyes lives in  Moore’s district  and Moore  visited him in the Dodge County Jail. Moore has issued a letter requesting DHS to retract the accusations against Morales Reyes and remove Noem’s statement claiming that he threatened to assassinate Trump from the DHS website. 

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

Another potential riot at the Milwaukee County Jail was quelled by guards in April, Wisconsin Examiner has learned through open records requests. On April 12, correctional officers were notified of a “mass refusal,” with jail residents refusing to enter their cells. One occupant was placed on administrative segregation for attempting to incite a riot, according to emails obtained by Wisconsin Examiner. 

This marks the second known instance this year that unrest has occurred within the jail. Emails sent by Sgt. Tiawana Thompson indicate that at about 12:30 pm on April 12, Officer Brenden Zollicoffer radioed the jail’s master control to report the mass refusal. According to the email exchange, Thompson arrived with Officer Billy Howled and saw that additional Milwaukee County Sheriff Office (MCSO) personnel were already responding to POD 5D, where the refusal was occurring. 

“I noticed occupants either running to their cells, laying down, or standing at their cells,” Thompson wrote in the email, adding that personnel advised that occupant Corey Kirkwood had “incited a riot by closing all cell doors not allowing inmates to get into their cells.” Kirkwood, who was charged in January with sexual assault and trafficking of a minor, was one of several jail residents who appear to have been transferred to other parts of the facility after the April unrest. 

Thompson’s email also reported that “due to this action, occupant Kirkwood will be placed on administrative segregation (Ad-seg), pending discipline as well as being an ongoing investigation.” Another officer was tasked with completing a rules violation report, the email stated.

The Milwaukee sheriff did not respond to questions about the incident and whether Kirkwood remains in administrative segregation, or how he was able to control whether cell doors were open or closed. 

Ten days after the mass refusal, MCSO Correctional Captain Kerry Turner emailed Sgt. Thompson and asked whether paperwork for those moved to administrative segregation had been finished. Turner asked, “Also, have all violations been completed and signed off on by a supervisor? Have the occupants all received a copy of their violation? Please let me know the status of these concerns of mine.” 

It’s unclear what triggered this particular mass refusal incident. Another potential riot was quelled by jail staff in mid-February after one jail occupant, 49-year-old Keenan Brown, allegedly attempted to incite a riot by “shouting to the entire housing unit that the inmates needed to stick up for themselves and that they would not be taken seriously until they started assaulting staff.” Jail staff had learned that Brown used his jail-issued tablet to contact his mother, urging her to reach out to Fox6. When jail staff talked to Brown, he said jail residents weren’t being let out of their cells enough, and that their rights were being violated. At least 20 people were transferred to other parts of the jail after that incident as well. 

During the late summer of 2023, nearly 30 jail residents were charged with disorderly conduct after they barricaded themselves in a library area and refused to return to their cells. The mass action was done to protest “dissatisfaction with their gymnasium time coming to an end and expressing that, generally, they wanted more ‘open’ recreational time,” according to an MCSO press release issued weeks after the unrest occurred. 

The jail has come under increasing scrutiny under multiple sheriffs in recent years. Over a 14-month period from 2022 to 2023, six people died in custody at the jail. In late May, 33-year-old Gabriel Muniz-Jimenez became the second person to die in 2025.  A third party audit detected severe problems with the physical condition of the jail’s booking areas, housing units, use of force policies and practices for monitoring people placed on suicide watch. A recent review by the auditor, the Texas-based company Creative Corrections, found the jail to be in compliance with 71.2% of  proposed corrective actions, with another 28.8% being in partial compliance.

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