Kilmar Abrego Garcia stands outside U.S. District Court in Greenbelt with his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, left, and Lydia Walther-Rodriguez with CASA, after a federal judge ruled earlier this month he was allowed to remain free. (File photo by William J. Ford/Maryland Matters)

A federal judge in Tennessee is ordering federal prosecutors to turn over some documents to lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia as they try to show his indictment on human smuggling charges was the product of vindictive prosecution.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw’s nine-page ruling — issued under seal Dec. 3, but unsealed at noon Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Nashville — said a “subset” of more than 3,000 government documents he reviewed appear to undercut the government’s defense against vindictive prosecution.

“Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences,” Crenshaw wrote.

The order is a partial victory for Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran native who lives in Maryland, where he was stopped by immigration agents in March and deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. His removal came without due process and despite an earlier court order that prohibited  immigration officials from deporting Abrego Garcia to his home country, for fear of violence.

A series of court battles ended with the U.S. Supreme Court in April ordering Abrego Garcia be returned to the United States. He was finally brought back to the U.S. in June, where he faced new charges of human smuggling, stemming from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee where he was let go without a citation.

Abrego Garcia argues that the smuggling charge was concocted years after the fact to punish him for embarrassing the administration in court, and should be thrown out.

The charges of “conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain” and “unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain” are tied to a 2022 traffic stop in Putnam County, Tennessee, where he was pulled over for speeding. There were nine passengers in the back of his car.

Abrego Garcia was not arrested. No ticket was issued.

But three years later, as he was winning his case to be returned to the U.S., federal prosecutors were revisiting that traffic stop. A Homeland Security agent told a federal judge earlier this year that he was told on April 28 of this year to investigate the traffic stop.

Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty to the charges, that his attorneys have claimed were filed as retaliation against their client. They claim senior officials in the Justice Department pushed for the indictment, citing television interviews where Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the investigation began after “a judge in Maryland … questioned” the government and accused it of “doing something wrong,” according to Crenshaw’s order.

The government denies involvement by higher-ups, saying the decision to prosecute Abrego Garcia was made solely by Robert McGuire, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee.

Crenshaw’s order includes a timeline of events. In it are several communications between McGuire and D.C.-based U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh that began on April 27, one day before a federal agent was assigned to investigate the 2022 traffic stop.

In an April 30 exchange, Singh writes that Abrego’s case is “a top priority.” McGuire writes “we want the high command looped in.”

In a May 15 email, McGuire writes about the pending indictment.

“Ultimately, I would hope to have ODAG [Office of the Deputy Attorney General] eyes on it as we move towards a decision about whether this matter is going to ultimately be charged,” he wrote, according to Crenshaw’s order.

McGuire adds: “While ultimately, the office’s decision to charge will land on me. I think it makes sense to get the benefit of all of your brains and talent in this process and as we consider this case. I have not received specific direction from ODAG other than I have heard anecdotally that the DAG and PDAG would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.”

Singh is updated about the indictment over the next week, according to Crenshaw’s timeline.

“These documents show that McGuire did not act alone and to the extent McGuire had input on the decision to prosecute, he shared it with Singh and others,” Crenshaw wrote.

Abrego’s attorneys successfully made a case before Crenshaw that prosecutors had acted vindictively. They sought the release of documents through discovery. Federal prosecutors balked and withheld those documents, citing privilege.

Crenshaw, in his now-unsealed order, said allowing the privilege assertion to trump due process protections would undermine rulings by other federal courts.

“The Court recognizes the government’s assertion of privileges, but Abrego’s due process right to a non-vindictive prosecution outweighs the blanket evidentiary privileges asserted by the government,” Crenshaw wrote. “If the work product, attorney-client, and deliberative process privileges asserted by the government precluded all discovery in the context of a vindictiveness motion, defendants would never be able to answer the question ‘what motivated the government’s prosecution?'”

Democratic and Republican candidates for governor appeared for a joint forum in early November. Shown are, from left, Matt Smith of WISN-12, Francesca Hong, Sara Rodriguez, Kelda Roys, David Crowley and Missy Hughes, all Democrats, and Josh Schoemann, a Republican. Republican Tom Tiffany did not participate. Since that event two more Democrats have entered the contest, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former cabinent member Joel Brennan. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

A popular two-term governor decides to retire, and triggers a flood of prospective replacements. Democrats vow to flip the Republican-majority Legislature. A state Supreme Court race blows the doors off spending records, and another one is waiting in the wings.

Each of those could be considered a big story by itself in Wisconsin, but they’re all part of this year’s single biggest story in government and politics. And that story — that it was a really big year for Wisconsin politics — wasn’t just about 2025: It set the stage for 2026.

The  three-stories-in-one about Wisconsin politics are just the beginning of the news that flooded our pages in 2025. Wisconsin Examiner’s five-person staff published 550 stories in 2025, a total that includes opinion columns by Editor Ruth Conniff, but doesn’t include briefs that also appeared under the bylines of Conniff, Erik Gunn, Isiah Holmes, Henry Redman, Baylor Spears and Criminal Justice Fellows Andrew Kennard and Frank Zufall.

Herewith, then, our list of 10 big stories that the Wisconsin Examiner covered over the course of the last year.

1. Wisconsin politics goes into overdrive

Democratic Gov. Tony Evers put an end to the last Wisconsin governor’s quest for a third term when he defeated Republican Scott Walker in 2018. Midway through his own second term, Evers surprised many by deciding to call it quits when his current  term ends rather than run again.

The decision created the first open race for governor in more than a decade and opened the floodgates, with a bevy of Democrats entering the fray. By contrast, the Republican field was down to two at year’s end, with one early contender dropping out after the entry of Congressman Tom Tiffany.

In the Wisconsin Legislature, Democrats, having narrowed the Republicans’ majority in 2024 thanks to new maps that undid the state’s 15 years of GOP gerrymandering, launched twin efforts to flip both the Assembly and the Senate in 2026. Republicans vowed to maintain their majority in both houses.

The new Senate and Assembly maps were made possible after the 2023 state Supreme Court election flipped the seven-member Court’s ideological majority from conservative to liberal. With the balance of the Court  at stake again after liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley retired in 2025, Democrats went all out, electing Dane County Judge Susan Crawford to the nominally nonpartisan Court and handily overcoming the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk who spent millions  supporting Crawford’s opponent, former state Attorney General Brad Schimel. The contest set both state and national records for campaign spending in a U.S. judicial election, and maintained the one-vote liberal majority. Now supporters of the current Court majority have their eyes on extending that ideological advantage in 2026. 

Chris Taylor, currently a District IV appeals court judge and a former Democratic state representative, is running to succeed sharply conservative Rebecca Bradley. Bradley opted not to seek a new term on the Court, and conservative Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar has announced plans to seek the post.

2. A  bipartisan state budget splits both parties

Evers went into the 2025-27 state budget process with an ambitious list of goals. Lengthy negotiations between the Democratic governor and Republican lawmakers produced a deal. While the final result fell well short of his original vision, Evers claimed victory nevertheless, with gains on paper for child care funding and for public school special education funding.

Both, however, left their strongest advocates disappointed, and by the end of the year, the special education funding did not live up to the promises made when the budget was signed.

3. Public school troubles

The budget’s lack of additional school aid for regular classes was especially upsetting to public school advocates, and was exacerbated by the state’s expanding school choice systems that use tax dollars to pay for private schools and charter schools outside the common public schools. It also underscored the extent to which local communities have been voting to raise their own property taxes to support their school systems.

The defeat of some school referendum requests further accentuated the sense of crisis, while Republican lawmakers called for new restrictions on the referendum process. And in the state’s largest system, Milwaukee Public Schools, an audit called for sweeping changes in response to a range of challenges, from declining enrollments and staff turnover to the continuing pressure of having to fund the parallel voucher and charter systems.

Throughout the year, the state Department of Public Instruction came under intense scrutiny from Republican lawmakers over policies ranging from school performance evaluations to the handling of sexual abuse complaints against school employees.

4. Federal fallout from a new administration

With the inauguration of President Donald Trump to a second term in the White House, the fallout from new federal actions reached Wisconsin in a myriad of ways. The giant legislation to cut taxes (mostly for the wealthy) and spending (much of it for health care) that Trump signed in July was one cause, setting the stage for future cuts to Medicaid and to health care under the Affordable Care Act, while also imposing new restrictions on programs aimed at reducing hunger.

But there were other reductions as well, some coming from the actions of the “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE that Trump authorized, and others from unilateral — and often legally challenged — actions by the administration itself. Clean energy and climate change projects, scientific research, education assistance, help with removing lead from public schools, community service, child care, economic policies, numerous federal agencies and the federal workforce itself along with countless other federal initiatives were swept up in the administration’s first year.

The record-long federal shutdown — when Congress failed to agree on a temporary spending plan and the GOP majority refused to extend extra tax breaks for Affordable Care Act health plans into 2026 — added to the chaos, with a temporary halt to the federal SNAP food assistance program.

Wisconsinites joined people from across the country in the recurring protests that started just weeks into the Trump presidency, culminating in the Oct. 18 “No Kings” rallies from coast to coast that some analysts identified as the largest mass protest ever in the United States.

5. Immigration arrests spark turmoil

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown reverberated in Wisconsin from Inauguration Day. At the start of this term, Editor Ruth Conniff traveled to Mexico, documenting the longstanding relationships Wisconsin farmers have had with migrants who provide 70% of the labor that the state’s dairy industry has relied on.

Republican lawmakers called for cementing the state’s relationship with the newly unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — agency , while the Evers administration resisted those calls. Individual counties signed on to assist ICE, sometimes facing opposition, but while Wisconsin was less in the national spotlight than other states, it wasn’t immune to periodic episodes of immigration enforcement.

Visa cancellations caught up students from overseas, and migrant arrests rose across the state. Immigration enforcement officers focused on the Milwaukee County Courthouse in their search for immigrants to take into custody, prompting criticism from advocates who warned the result would drive migrants underground rather than encouraging them to show up for court dates as witnesses, plaintiffs or defendants.

After a four-day trial in December, Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was convicted on a felony charge of obstruction but acquitted of a misdemeanor charge of concealing a man who had appeared in her courtroom in April and was targeted by immigration officials. The case had national repercussions as the Trump administration targets judges it sees as opponents to its policies.

6. Environment: Data centers, stewardship and PFAS conflicts

In Wisconsin a statewide — indeed, nationwide — the rush to embrace massive data centers to serve emerging artificial intelligence-based technology sparked widespread debate over water use, electricity demands and power generation.

Meanwhile, a longstanding and widely popular land preservation program — the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship fund — hovered on the verge of collapse as Republican lawmakers demanded the power to veto stewardship decisions after a state Supreme Court ruling in 2024 removed the Legislature from the process.

After a running battle against rerouting an Enbridge oil pipeline, the Army Corps of Engineers approved permits for the project over the strenuous objections of opponents, only to be sued by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.

A standoff between the Evers administration and the Legislature’s Republican leaders over how to address PFAS “forever chemicals” was eased by a state Supreme Court ruling allowing the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to apply Wisconsin’s spills law to PFAS contamination, along with a bipartisan bill that would require the DNR to notify local and tribal officials about groundwater PFAS contamination.

7.  Law enforcement: Investigating themselves, surveillance of the public

A lengthy investigation by Isiah Holmes of the Wisconsin Examiner in partnership with Type Investigations documented how the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team, assigned to probe death investigations for people killed by metro Milwaukee police officers, use protocols that grant officers privileges not afforded to the general public.

Among many other issues involving policing and law enforcement in Wisconsin, police surveillance was a recurring matter, with debates arising over facial recognition technology, department interest in expanding phone-tracking resources and increasing attention to how police agencies make use of widespread surveillance cameras.

8. Prison reform struggles

Evers’ budget proposal included a sweeping plan for prison reform, but the  result was more limited, leaving advocates dissatisfied. One concrete element is the start of a project to close the Green Bay Correctional Institution, a longtime objective, but divisions remain between the governor and GOP lawmakers about the details.

9. Voting rights debates revive 2020 election denial

With the return of President Donald Trump to the White House, the conspiracy theories that were amplified after his reelection loss in November 2020 got a new burst of energy. The Wisconsin Elections Commission twice rejected an administration demand for the personal identifying information of Wisconsin voters.

Trump issued a largely symbolic pardon of the Republicans who signed certificates falsely stating he won the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, while a Dane County judge kept alive a criminal case against three men charged with orchestrating the fake elector scheme.

Although bipartisan lawmakers in the Assembly sought common ground over absentee ballot drop boxes and a measure to allow election clerks to begin counting absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day, their efforts stalled.

10. Flooding and disasters

August flooding in Southeast Wisconsin that followed torrential storms and was centered on the metro Milwaukee area left behind devastation, damaging nearly 2,000 homes and some $34 million worth of public infrastructure.

The Trump administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency approved $30 million in initial relief to support the victims of flood damage, but the administration denied a subsequent request for aid to mitigate future disasters.

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