A woman is detained by federal agents after exiting a hearing in immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on Sept. 3, 2025, in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday agreed to hear a lawsuit from the immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera against the authority of the state’s county sheriffs to hold people in county jails based on detainers from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

The lawsuit from Voces will be immediately heard by the Supreme Court as an original action, meaning it won’t begin at the circuit court level and work its way up to the Supreme Court. The case comes as jurisdictions across the country wrestle with the effects of the Trump administration’s increased immigration enforcement and the level to which local law enforcement should participate.  

Courts in New York, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Montana have previously ruled that state law bars local law enforcement officers from complying with federal immigration detainers. A state law in Illinois prohibits local cooperation with federal immigration agents. 

Here in Wisconsin, more than a dozen county sheriffs offices have signed 287(g) agreements with ICE that grant sheriff’s deputies some immigration enforcement authority, including the ability to question people in custody about their immigration status and hold people in jail under federal detainers. 

The Dodge County sheriff maintains an agreement with the federal government to hold many types of federal detainees in the department’s jail — including immigrants. That agreement includes sheriff’s deputies transporting detained migrants to and from a controversial ICE facility in Broadview, Ill. 

Some departments in the state, including Madison and Milwaukee, have explicitly said they won’t cooperate with federal immigration efforts. 

Voces’ lawsuit argues that state law does not give Wisconsin law enforcement officers the authority to conduct civil immigration enforcement. 

In accepting the case, the Court said it would consider whether Wisconsin sheriffs have the authority to arrest people as part of a civil immigration enforcement action and how 287(g) agreements affect the application of state law. 

Departing from usual practice in which state Supreme Court decisions to accept cases are unsigned, conservative Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley dissented from the decision to hear the case. 

In a written opinion, conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn wrote Supreme Court rules state it takes four justices to agree to accept an original action and that normally these decisions are unsigned to prevent observers from inferring if the justices hold pre-established views on an issue. He added that just because some justices publicly dissented, that does not reveal how every justice voted in the decision to accept the case. 

“The public may begin to infer that if a justice does not publicly dissent to an order granting review in a case, that justice has joined the order taking the case,” he wrote. “That assumption would be unwarranted. Even if some of my colleagues publicly record their dissent, as in this case, that does not necessarily reveal which justices voted for or against the petition in closed conference. A grant order simply means the requisite number of justices voted to grant a petition — in this case, four —nothing more.”

Under Wednesday’s order, Voces has 30 days to file a brief in the case.