A Flock camera outside of Washington Park in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
The Milwaukee County Board voted to remove Flock cameras from its parks Thursday night. Passed unanimously, the resolution also permits the county to replace the controversial cameras with more conventional security cameras. It’s not clear how the new cameras would be paid for.
Supv. Justin Bielinski, who authored the resolution, said he’s excited to remove Flock cameras from Milwaukee County parks. The cameras must be removed by the end of the year.
Flock cameras are equipped with AI-powered automatic license plate reader technology. When a car passes in view, the camera takes a picture of the car and its license plate. The images are then stored in a database which can be searched at will by law enforcement agencies with their own Flock contracts. The searches can be done without a warrant, and allow officers to enter a license plate or vehicle description to determine where a vehicle has been.
Law enforcement agencies say the cameras are invaluable tools for detecting and stopping crime. Numerous law enforcement agencies in Milwaukee County use Flock including the Milwaukee Police Department and the sheriff’s office. In a presentation to a county board committee earlier this week, the sheriff’s office credited the cameras with contributing to a 43% decline in certain crimes around county parks between 2023 and 2026.
Privacy advocates, concerned citizens and elected officials have increasingly soured on the cameras. Cases of officers using the cameras to surveil protesters, pursue women suspected of seeking out-of-state abortions and keeping tabs on current or estranged romantic partners have made national news. In Wisconsin, three police officers and one sheriff’s deputy in Milwaukee, Menasha and Kenosha counties have faced charges of misconduct in public office due to their use of Flock to unlawfully monitor people.
Milwaukee County Executive and Democratic candidate for governor David Crowley proposed removing funding for Flock in the 2027 budget.
The sheriff’s office said that without a replacement technology, crime would increase in the 11 parks where the cameras have been installed. It’s estimated that replacing the cameras could cost as much as $140,000. In 2025, the Examiner found that at least 221 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies used Flock during that year. Several communities around the state have removed their Flock cameras since then.
Officers from the Tennessee Highway Patrol and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security at a traffic stop in Memphis in October, 2025. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)
WASHINGTON — This summer, arrests of immigrants in the United States soared to the highest levels since President Donald Trump returned to office.
An unprecedented increase in cooperation between local and state law enforcement and federal immigration officers through collaborations known as 287(g) agreements helped drive numbers up.
The agreements allow state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce parts of federal immigration law and have become an arm of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Republicans in Congress have provided billions in federal funding for local departments that accept the agreements, creating a deluge of new partners.
Theresa Cardinal Brown, a senior Department of Homeland Security official during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said the billions in new funding has helped the program grow.
“Mostly, 287(g) agreements were voluntary, and the costs were borne by the state and local government to train their own people,” she said. “Now, the federal government has money to pay them, and so that’s encouraging more states and localities to do it because it’s a budget plus-up.”
In June, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement recorded roughly 43,000 immigration arrests, followed by 49,000 in July and nearly 51,000 in August. ICE does not distinguish between arrests initially made by local law enforcement or federal officials.
Those three months also saw the most new 287(g) agreements signed since Trump took office, according to a States Newsroom analysis of government data.
“ICE has increased efforts with state and local law enforcement to assist federal immigration officers in our efforts to make America safe again,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in a statement to States Newsroom.
But those efforts have generated protests in some of the communities where they’ve appeared.
Democrats in Maryland and Maine passed laws restricting cooperation between local police and ICE. The Maryland measure’s supporters said it would reduce distrust of police.
The president’s signature 2025 domestic policy bill, the “One, Big Beautiful” Act, set aside about $4 billion for state and local governments to conduct immigration enforcement, including 287(g) programs. The Secure America Act passed in June allocated more than $31 billion to implement those agreements as well.
Both packages were passed by Republicans through a legislative maneuver known as reconciliation that did not need Democratic votes.
The funds incentivized massive growth.
Before Trump took office in January 2025, the federal government had agreements with 135 state and local police departments. As of Oct. 1, those agreements skyrocketed to 2,608, according to DHS data.
Local departments or state agencies in 38 states have 287(g) agreements, with the highest numbers in Texas and Florida, where there are state laws requiring local law enforcement to partake in the program.
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday the Florida Highway Patrol was eligible for $26 million in reimbursements from the federal government for arrests from April through June.
“My educated guess would be that a large number of the arrests and detentions that we’ve seen increasing in recent months in the summer were because there was an increase in 287(g) agreements in Texas and Florida, but other parts of the country as well,” said Ariel G. Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies global migration.
ICE does not always specify when an immigration arrest is made through the partnership program, but the Deportation Data Project, a project of the University of California schools in Berkeley and Los Angeles that analyzes government immigration enforcement data, has attributed at least 6,150 arrests in July, about 12.5% of all arrests for that month.
Only 12 states have no such agreements. They are California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington state.
The partnership program was created in a 1996 law, but not actively used until the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It first received federal appropriations in 2006.
Three types of partnerships operate within the program.
The loosest type of agreement is the jail enforcement model, where deputized officers can inquire about the immigration status of people arrested on state or local charges, as well as hold a noncitizen for ICE to pick up for up to 48 hours.
In another model, the warrants service officer model, ICE trains, certifies and allows state and local law enforcement to issue administrative warrants, which are not signed by a judge, but by an ICE official requesting the arrest of a noncitizen. Local law enforcement officers under this model do not inquire about immigration status.
The task force model, which involves the greatest immigration enforcement by local officers, allows for immigration officials to deputize local officers to partake in immigration duties such as asking about immigration status or even detaining people and transferring them to ICE.
As part of its immigration crackdown, the second Trump administration revived the task force model after the Obama administration discontinued it in 2012 over concerns of racial profiling.
It has seen the largest increase under Trump, Ruiz Soto said.
More than 71% of 287(g) agreements now use the task force model, according to Titus Consulting, a firm that tracks the agreements. About 7% use the jail enforcement model and more than 21% use the warrant model.
The task force model is “hands down,” the most effective method in arresting noncitizens, said Todd Bensmen, a senior research fellow for the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
“If they’re not deputized under that, they just come into contact with people that are fully … deportable, and then just leave them be,” he said of local law enforcement. “They can just arrest them on the spot and call ICE, and that way you have a really dramatic force multiplier and ICE doesn’t have to do anything but come and pick them up.”
In 2006, the Bush administration took an interest in exploring 287(g) programs, specifically the jail enforcement model because it was easy for ICE to identify people who are subject to an immigration arrest, said Brown.
“If your job is to find people, wow, that’s the easiest thing to do,” she said of the jail model.
Brown said that spurred the idea for the Secure Communities program. Under the program, the FBI automatically sent fingerprints of a person booked in custody to DHS to check against its immigration database. If the person was a noncitizen who was unauthorized in the U.S., then ICE was notified.
The program was voluntary, but there was pushback from immigration advocates during the Obama administration, Brown said.
“There was a concern that this was mixing criminal enforcement and immigration enforcement in ways they weren’t meant to, (and) it was creating fear among immigration communities of reporting crimes for fear that they would be arrested,” she said.
The Obama administration pulled back and redirected the Secure Communities program to a federal government model.
“They turned it from like a community-by-community rollout to just a federal-to-federal information sharing agreement that remains in place today,” she said.
Brown said the difference now is that some communities have decided when ICE is notified, if at all, and whether or not to honor detainers, which are requests from ICE to hold an immigrant until federal immigration officers arrive.
Local governments that have not wanted to participate in federal immigration enforcement have been dubbed sanctuary cities.
The Trump administration has threatened to pull federal funding from those cities that don’t want to aid in immigration enforcement and has offered an influx of cash to states and local governments that have agreed to participate.
The Republican Congress has funded the program for the next three years, Ruiz Soto noted.
“It would then come to … what a future administration or a future Congress would do to continue expanding this or not fulfill them anymore,” he said. “But clearly right now ICE has significant funding to last for 287(g) and much more other enforcement in the near future.”
Oracle is looking to Wisconsin’s only operating nuclear plant to power its Ozaukee County data center.
We Energies announced an agreement with the cloud computing giant on Friday that would allow Oracle to “subscribe” to between 10% and 20% of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant’s electricity generation. That electricity would help meet the energy needs of Project Lighthouse, the data center campus in Port Washington that Oracle is co-developing with artificial intelligence firm OpenAI.
The agreement still requires approval by Wisconsin’s Public Service Commission. If it is approved, We Energies spokesman Brendan Conway said it could spare the utility’s other customers roughly $300 million in fuel costs over the next five years.
The 60-year-old Point Beach plant in Manitowoc County is the state’s largest generator, but the electricity it produces is more expensive than alternatives. We Energies spends about twice as much on fuel as its sibling utility, Wisconsin Public Service Company (PSC). The cost of nuclear fuel for Point Beach accounts for much of the difference.
We Energies owned the facility until 2007, when it sold Point Beach to independent energy infrastructure giant NextEra Energy but continued purchasing most of the plant’s electricity output. The utility’s current purchase agreement expires in 2033, but We Energies recently signed on to continue buying roughly 86% of the plant’s electricity for another 20-year term.
Meanwhile, We Energies filed a separate application with the PSC on Friday seeking approval to build a new natural gas power plant on the site of the Fox Energy Center in Outagamie County. The proposed plant would more than double the site’s electricity output.
Disclosure: The OpenAI Foundation recently awarded a grant to Wisconsin Watch but has no control over its editorial decisions. We will update our funding page to reflect the grant. A list of donors and funders through 2025, as well as our donation acceptance policies, can be found here.
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This article was produced in partnership with the nonprofit journalism publication Bolts, which covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments.
Half an hour into a packed June candidate forum in Baraboo, the moderator turned to the issue looming over the race for Sauk County sheriff: immigration enforcement.
“As chief law enforcement officer of Sauk County, how will you separate the demands of ICE from your duty to uphold the law and protect the residents of Sauk County?” Baraboo Optimist Club President Joseph Viney asked.
The six candidates at the front of the public library conference room offered well-rehearsed responses.
Three months and a primary later, one Republican and one Democrat remain, with the question still central to the race ahead of the Nov. 3 election.
“People are fired up and they’re frustrated with ICE in general from a national perspective, and it does have local consequences,” Ryan Jesberger, the Democratic nominee, told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts.
ICE agents haven’t turned up in large numbers in the largely rural south-central Wisconsin county to check homes, jobsites and cars for undocumented immigrants. Unlike in neighboring Illinois and Minnesota, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has relied on jails and prisons to make most of its arrests in Wisconsin since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025.
Sauk County is no exception. ICE has recorded about 100 arrests in the county during that period, almost all through custody transfers at the local jail. An agreement between the sheriff’s office and federal authorities makes a small portion of those arrests possible by allowing county jail supervisors to play a limited role in immigration enforcement.
The Sauk County Sheriff’s Office is one of 20 county law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin that cooperate with ICE through 287(g) agreements: voluntary partnerships allowing designated local officers to carry out some immigration enforcement tasks. Voters in two of those counties — Sauk and Winnebago counties, 90 miles apart — will have a say in the future of their sheriffs’ ICE partnerships this fall. Trump won both counties by less than 5 percentage points in 2024.
The Trump administration has tapped local law enforcement agencies across the country for help in its immigration enforcement push, often in the form of 287(g) agreements. Those arrangements are drawing pushback from immigrant rights organizations and, in some cases, shaking up local elections.
Sheriffs are “the most important state(-level) race for immigration purposes,” said Hannah Schwarz, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Wisconsin. The civil liberties organization opposes local law enforcement cooperation with ICE.
Sauk and Winnebago county voters will now choose between Republicans promising to stay the course and Democrats campaigning to dial back cooperation with immigration authorities. Both Democrats promise to quit the 287(g) program as soon as they take office.
But the partisan split conceals a more complicated policy landscape in Sauk County, where both candidates in the race favor keeping in place a contract that allows ICE to rent out space in the local jail to detain immigrants.
Sauk County sits on the edge of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, a region of sandstone bluffs and organic farms that has veered toward Republicans over the past three presidential elections after more than a decade of favoring Democrats.
Baraboo, the county seat, peters out into cornfields within city limits. Wisconsin Dells, the Midwest’s waterpark capital, spills across the county’s northern boundary. The city’s resorts hire foreign workers on temporary visas ahead of the summer rush; other immigrants, many without visas, milk cows on the county’s dairy farms.
Signed by Sheriff Richard “Chip” Meister in November 2025, Sauk County’s 287(g) agreement enables the county’s six jail supervisors to execute immigration warrants on people in county custody — a task ICE officers would otherwise perform. Executing an immigration warrant transfers them to ICE custody.
The Sauk arrangement “streamline(s) our existing relationship with ICE,” Meister wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch and Bolts.
But Meister is set to retire this year after 16 years, leaving the future of this arrangement uncertain. He endorsed Capt. Matt Burch, a Republican, ahead of the August primary; Burch won the primary by a wide margin.
He takes a position similar to Meister’s.
“Our focus remains strictly on removing individuals who commit serious crimes rather than targeting members of our community solely based on their immigration status,” Burch wrote in an email. He does not, however, plan to extend the office’s partnership with ICE beyond the county jail. “Our authority applies exclusively to individuals who are already in our custody for violating local or state laws.”
About half of people transferred from the Sauk County Jail to ICE during Trump’s second term had prior criminal convictions, a Wisconsin Watch and Bolts analysis shows; the other half had pending criminal charges. At least 8% of those transferred to ICE custody inside the jail had a prior conviction for driving while intoxicated — by far the most common conviction among Sauk County arrestees.
Jesberger, the Democratic candidate running against Burch and a University of Wisconsin-Madison police lieutenant, promises to end the county’s 287(g) agreement “on day one.”
“It’s not an anti-ICE or pro-ICE view,” he said. “We’re not talking (about) not doing any interaction,” he added, but instead about scaling back the county’s role. Jesberger also argues the 287(g) agreement sidesteps a contentious and unresolved question about the limits of local law enforcement’s arrest powers.
Law enforcement agencies with or without 287(g) agreements can choose to honor ICE “detainer” requests, which can entail holding people in jail up to 48 hours past their scheduled release to give immigration agents time to take them into custody.
The ACLU of Wisconsin petitioned the state Supreme Court in September 2025 to take up a lawsuit claiming five Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices — including Sauk County’s — violate state law by honoring the requests. The lawsuit argues that jailing someone beyond the person’s scheduled release date on an ICE detainer qualifies as an arrest and that state law does not authorize law enforcement to make arrests solely on the agency’s administrative warrants.
The lawsuit is currently caught in a jurisdictional tug-of-war.
Jesberger shares the ACLU’s view on detainers, which he called “request(s) to take an action we are not authorized to take.”
“It’s easy to say we should just hold onto someone,” he wrote in an email. “The problem is that under Wisconsin Law, there is no legal authority to conduct an arrest on this civil detainer.”
Jesberger would, however, honor warrants signed by a judge.
A 287(g) agreement enabling jail supervisors to serve immigration warrants is not the same as honoring ICE detainers, he added, but it still blurs jurisdictional lines. “Entering into the agreement to act as federal agents,” he said, “is going around state law.”
Jesberger also argues that even the county’s current agreement can strain sheriff’s office resources.
“Our deputies are busy enough doing things for the citizens of Sauk County,” he said, “so adding roles and responsibilities and, frankly, liability on top of all that is a concern of mine.”
Alongside its participation in the 287(g) program, Sauk County built on its partnership with ICE last year when it extended a long-standing agreement to hold federal detainees to include people held on immigration grounds.
The county’s original agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service dates back more than two decades. The sheriff’s office modified that agreement in April 2025 to also include ICE. More than 200 ICE detainees have since passed through Sauk County, most of whom entered ICE custody either at the jail or in other Wisconsin correctional facilities.
ICE reimburses the county $106 per day for housing a person in removal proceedings, plus $38.45 per hour for staff time spent transporting ICE detainees. That contract yielded more than $150,000 for the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office between January and June – less than 1% of the office’s annual budget, and about 15% of what Burch calls its “flexible” budget, or the portion not already devoted to wages and benefits.
“That money is important to us,” Burch said at the June forum.
Jesberger also promises to maintain the county’s contract to provide jail space for ICE detainees, though he pushes back on Burch’s focus on the revenue it yields, calling on law enforcement to “stop talking about human beings as numbers or revenue generation.”
Instead, he sees the housing contract as a way to protect immigrants’ due process rights while they await rulings in their removal cases.
Aside from offering Wisconsin-based attorneys easier access to their clients, Jesberger argues that a responsibly managed contract can ensure people in custody “are treated with respect and dignity, are not laying on a concrete floor with a foil blanket in overcrowded cells (and) are not being shipped out of state to detention facilities with inhumane conditions.”
Some Wisconsin immigration attorneys and immigrant rights advocates aren’t sold on that pitch. “Any amount of custody is an incentive for ICE to continue” its crackdown, said Aissa Olivarez of the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison.
Schwarz of the ACLU of Wisconsin agrees, saying that housing contracts like Sauk County’s make it easier — and cheaper — for the agency to scale up its operations.
Cooperating with ICE in any capacity has a “chilling effect” on immigrant communities, Milwaukee-based immigration attorney Marc Christopher said, and can make immigrants less likely to contact law enforcement in an emergency.
But Christopher also noted that Sauk County is far easier to reach than the larger detention facilities in Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana and Texas where many Wisconsin arrestees land while awaiting outcomes in their removal cases. “I can meet with them in person,” he said. “Their families know where they are, and their families can meet with them.”
Jesberger and Burch have no debates scheduled ahead of Election Day, but a local coalition that opposes all cooperation with federal immigration authorities is planning an Oct. 3 event featuring the ACLU of Wisconsin and immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera.
Eastern Wisconsin’s Winnebago County is more than twice as populous as Sauk County. Sheriff John Matz entered its 287(g) agreement — also a warrant service model — in March 2025.
ICE has recorded roughly 25 arrests in the county since last January, almost all inside its jail. Capt. Darin Rice, the Republican running to replace the retiring Matz, says that low number is no reason to end the agreement.
“I do believe that it needs to continue,” he told a packed audience in an Oshkosh City Hall conference room in September. Still, he underscored that he isn’t interested in “street-level enforcement” or renting jail beds to ICE.
Rice is running against his colleague, Patrol Officer Jason Rippl.
Rippl, the Democratic candidate, has broader 287(g) qualms than Jesberger.
“I feel like the 287(g) agreement may open the door for additional involvement with (ICE),” he told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts, “and I think that by any modern law enforcement standards, we’ve seen pretty clearly that their tactics are sloppy.”
He promises to void the county’s 287(g) agreement on his first day in office, which he argues would free up time to “clean up our own backyard” by digging out of a backlog of warrants unrelated to immigration.
Rippl said he would honor warrants signed by a judge, but he doesn’t “feel it is the responsibility of local jails” to hold inmates beyond their release date based solely on a non-binding ICE request.
Though Winnebago County isn’t named in the ACLU lawsuit, a ruling could affect any Wisconsin county’s ability to honor ICE detainer requests. Sheriffs could also refuse to honor detainers absent a court ruling, as some have done elsewhere.
The early attention on Winnebago County’s relationship with ICE may be shifting to law enforcement’s use of surveillance technology. Both Rice and Rippl said they had reservations about the handling of sensitive data from the license plate cameras, citing the well-documented recent history of the technology’s misuse.
The Winnebago County sheriff’s office decided in early September to suspend its partnership with Flock, the embattled tech company that has built up an extensive camera network nationwide and has drawn increasingly bipartisan backlash this year.
Sauk County’s sheriff’s office continues to operate Flock cameras, introduced as part of a pilot project last year. Burch, the GOP nominee for sheriff, called the program a “pet project” and credits the cameras for solving several high-stakes cases. Other law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin have, like Winnebago County, ended their contracts with Flock.
“We had a lot of pushback early on to the 287(g) program,” Rice told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts. “That’s now taken a back seat to Flock cameras.”
Rippl agreed that Flock is “certainly the more prevalent conversation topic” in his conversations with constituents, though he does not believe it has “overshadowed” the 287(g) debate.
Ongoing controversies over ICE’s use of Flock camera data link the two issues.
404 Media revealed last year that local law enforcement agencies across the country have queried data from Flock cameras on ICE’s behalf, including some in states with strict restrictions on local cooperation with ICE. Wisconsin has no such restrictions.
The Sauk and Winnebago County sheriffs did not reply to a request for comment on how often their Flock cameras have been used for immigration enforcement. In Verona, a Madison suburb with a population roughly one tenth of Winnebago County’s, public records revealed hundreds of searches tied to ICE last year.
Correction: This story has been updated to note that Ryan Jesberger is a University of Wisconsin–Madison police lieutenant. A previous version incorrectly reported that he was a former lieutenant.
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Two Wisconsin sheriff races test the future of local ICE cooperation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
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Wisconsin Republican U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil leaves the office of House Speaker Mike Johnson in November, 2025. Steil, who has nearly doubled his net worth since he was first elected to Congres, is running as a watchdog on congressional stock trading. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil’s investments helped make him millionaire, nearly doubling his net worth from $812,000 to nearly $1.9 million since he went to Congress, Wisconsin Watch reports. According to the financial data tracking platform Unusual Whales, Steil’s stock portfolio was the fourth most profitable among members of Congress in 2025, outperforming the S&P 500 by 62.5%. Yet Steil is running as a watchdog on congressional stock trading.
“You deserve a Congress you can trust, that’s working for you. … I’m leading the charge to ban members of Congress from trading stocks,” Steil says in a campaign ad now running in Wisconsin’s suddenly competitive 1st Congressional District.
The ad refers to Steil’s Stop Insider Trading Act, which failed in the Senate this week. Steil blamed Democrats for blocking his attempt at “ethics reform” and vowed to keep fighting. But Wisconsin’s Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin called the bill a “sham,” pointing out that there are much stronger bills that, unlike Steil’s, require members to divest their stock holdings.
Steil’s bill allows members of Congress to keep and sell stocks. It places no restrictions on their purchases of cryptocurrency holdings, betting in prediction markets or trades in industry-specific mutual funds or private stock offerings from corporations.
These giant loopholes drew the attention of Steil’s colleague U.S. Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado, who grilled Steil on the shortcomings in his bill during a House Rules Committee hearing on July 20.
“There are many bills that have been introduced … that would ensure that the sale and the purchase of stocks is banned, and this bill does not do that,” Neguse pointed out. He and Steil debated whether a disclosure rule in Steil’s bill is a sufficient safeguard (Neguse didn’t think so), and why the bill didn’t cover prediction markets.
The Senate unanimously passed a ban on members and staff participating in prediction markets, just one week after a U.S. special forces soldier was charged with using classified information to bet on the capture of the Venezuelan president. Members of Congress have access to all kinds of sensitive information they could use for personal gain by placing bets on wars, economic crises or elections, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer warned. Why can’t the House pass the same ban, Neguse asked. Steil replied that he has been working on a separate bill concerning prediction markets, which are a “new and novel technology.”
“It took the Senate a day!” Neguse shot back. “It’s a one-page resolution. It literally is a paragraph. It just says members of the Senate are banned from participating in prediction markets.” Neguse suggested that the House adopt the Senate’s language and pass the same resolution immediately.
Instead, Steil has crafted a narrow bill that imposes fines on members and their families if they bet on specific government policy matters that come to their attention through their congressional work. Like his narrow stock-trading bill, which avoids making members give up lucrative investments, the Stop Lawmakers from Predicting Act takes a permissive view of members interested in playing in prediction markets unless there is a specific, demonstrable conflict of interest that a member’s colleagues on the House ethics panel deem worthy of a fine.
At best, that’s a different goal than the “Congress you can trust” Steil talks about in his campaign ad. Instead of protecting the public from corrupt public officials who seek to profit from their privileged perch, Steil is intent on not making things too uncomfortable for his fellow members sitting on cushy portfolios.
It says a lot that Steil’s prediction market bill and his Stop Insider Trading Act both have the full support of President Donald Trump. As Baldwin points out, Trump is exempt from Steil’s proposed restrictions on stock trading, even though Trump made 21,000 stock trades and added $2.2 billion to his personal wealth in just the first year of his second term.
This is the real hole in Steil’s claim to be an ethics watchdog in Congress. His compromised reform proposals don’t come close to making up for the heavy lifting he has been doing in office carrying water for Trump. He has been a chief enabler for a president who is setting new records for unethical behavior as he uses his office to enrich himself. Along with his weak efforts at “ethics reform,” Steil has been pushing new voting restrictions dear to Trump’s heart. His proposed national Voter ID Act is even more restrictive than Wisconsin’s toughest-in-the-nation voter ID law, barring the use of student IDs to vote and potentially disenfranchising millions of eligible voters who don’t meet the requirements.
Steil does not present as a rage-filled MAGA warrior. Like his mentor, former House Speaker Paul Ryan, he has repeatedly won reelection by comfortable margins while projecting a friendly, thoughtful image in his home district, even as his work in Washington diverges from his constituents’ interests. But as crises pile up, it’s getting harder to put a pleasant gloss on loyalty to an administration that is rapaciously devouring the nation’s wealth while trying to disenfranchise its citizens.
Wisconsin’s 1st CD has attracted national attention recently as the political landscape gets tougher for Republicans even in solidly red House districts. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee added Steil’s reelection race to its Red to Blue list and an internal DCCC poll conducted Sept. 21-23 — with a margin of error of 4.4% — found the race is a dead heat between Steil and his challenger, former VA hospital nurse Mitchell Berman, with the two candidates tied 48-48 among likely voters, a plurality of whom identified as Republicans.
A new Berman campaign ad, paid for in part by the DCCC, which now sees Steil as a target, emphasizes Steil’s stock portfolio. In it, Berman declares, “Public service shouldn’t be about getting rich.” Steil couldn’t have said it better himself.
Participants take part in an HIV/AIDS awareness event held by Big Bend Cares in Tallahassee, Florida. Nearly 100 community-based organizations in 31 states have lost HIV-related funding after federal officials decided not to renew their grants and instead directed money to state and local health agencies. (Photo by Bob O’Lary/Courtesy of Big Bend Cares)
Nearly 100 community-based organizations have lost their federal HIV-prevention grants this week as the Trump administration redirects dollars to state and local health departments.
The funding change represents a departure from the decades-old national HIV prevention strategy favored by most public health organizations.
President Donald Trump launched the Ending the HIV/AIDS Epidemic Initiative during his first term in office. Since 2021, the program has disbursed a total of nearly $240 million to 96 community-based organizations in 31 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Those groups have used the money to pay for testing and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), a medication that people at high risk for HIV can take for protection during sex or injection drug use. Preventing new HIV infections and preserving access to treatment for those who have HIV helps prevent further transmission of the virus.
By prioritizing areas with the highest number of HIV diagnoses, the initiative sought to reduce HIV incidence by 75% in five years and by 90% by 2030. It continued under the Biden administration.
But now the Trump administration has shifted course.
Instead of granting money directly to community-based organizations, the administration is offering one-time grants to state and local health departments. It is encouraging the jurisdictions with the most HIV diagnoses to funnel at least 25% of the money to community groups, but there is no requirement that they do so. Health departments in areas with fewer diagnoses are being encouraged to send 10% of their money to community groups.
The state and local health agencies are required to spend whatever dollars they don’t pass on to community groups on HIV surveillance and PrEP access.
When the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the availability of the original grants in 2020, it noted that since the late 1980s, it had partnered with community-based organizations to fight the spread of HIV because of “their accessibility, history and credibility in the community,” especially among Black and Hispanic people, gay and bisexual men and people who inject drugs.
“CDC has done this for a very long time, specifically because they know that community-based organizations are important players in the community,” said Lindsey Dawson, associate director for HIV policy at KFF, a nonprofit health research group.
“They’re a voice in the community that people trust, and these programs really are able to reach people who are at greatest vulnerability to HIV in a way that the state or federal or local government (would) not be able to do.”
When asked for an explanation of the change, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services referred Stateline to the Office of Management and Budget. Neither OMB nor the White House press office responded to multiple requests for comment.
The National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors told Stateline that under the new grant program, the federal government will disburse approximately $90 million to state health departments through May 2027. Though that amount is nearly twice as much as the roughly $48 million per year that was handed out under the old grant program, community-based organizations are going to see less money, public health experts say.
In August, KFF estimated that overall, community-based organizations would need about 35% of the new money to match what they were getting before. The National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors estimates that percentage to be closer to 50%.
In Texas, health officials said the state plans to send about 23%, or about $1.2 million, of its $5.24 million grant to community-based organizations.
Jeffrey Campbell, chief executive officer of Allies in Hope — formerly called AIDS Foundation Houston — told Stateline that he expects his federal funding to be cut by $441,000, which could force him to lay off at least three staff members.
Under the old grant structure, half of all funding had been channeled to organizations in the South, which accounts for more than half of the nation’s HIV diagnoses.
But already, one organization in that region has announced it will have to shut down as a result of the funding change: PowerHouse Charlotte in North Carolina announced in August that it will close. For 16 years, that organization has provided free HIV and STD screenings, prevention services and community resources geared toward gay Black men.
In at least two states, Minnesota and Oregon, state health agencies wouldn’t be able to match the amount of money their community-based organizations were getting under the old system even if they gave 100% of their state grants to those groups, according to KFF.
“These community-based organizations are on the ground doing the work with the populations that need it,” said Carl Schmid, executive director at the HIV+Hepatitis Policy Institute, a public health nonprofit that tracks policies related to HIV prevention.
“Some states may have relationships with some of the existing grantees and may be fine, but others, they may not. And so there’s definitely going to be a lapse of funding.”
Emily Schreiber, senior director of policy at the National Alliance of State and Territorial AIDS Directors, said that under the new rules, states don’t have much time to establish new contracts with community-based organizations.
“(States) are trying to turn around things as fast as possible. But simply there (was) not enough time to get that funding through the contracting process and all of that by September 30th, which was really unfortunate,” she said.
“It’s not easy for a health department to create a whole new contracting process overnight. Even in the best-case scenario, this is not a perfect solution.”
Many health departments take between 45 and 90 days to scale new contracts and grants, said Toni Young, executive director and founder of Community Education Group, a nonprofit offering HIV community engagement, testing and outreach across rural West Virginia and the broader Appalachian region.
“We don’t have an infrastructure in many rural communities to address HIV,” she said.
Another challenge for community-based organizations is that because they won’t be getting money directly from the federal government, they will no longer be eligible for discounted drugs under the federal 340B program.
“When you took away this grant, you also took away their 340B status, which is the reason some have had to potentially close or at least stop this entire side of operations,” said Maximillian Boykin, manager of the Save HIV Funding Campaign.
“It leaves a lot of these places very fragile.”
Stateline reporter Nada Hassanein can be reached at nhassanein@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A new poll from The 19th and YouGov sheds light on how young men and women are shaped by certain historical moments and tend to diverge on issues of gender and reproductive rights. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
Editor’s note: This story is part of Gen Z at the Ballot Box, a collaboration between States Newsroom and The 19th.
Brenna Vandergeest was a teenager when her grandmother told her about Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that ended the federal right to an abortion. She said it lit a fire in her, one that has shaped her politics.
“I think that really flipped a switch in my head because knowing as a woman that rights that had been protected for years and years have now been overturned — it really made me upset,” Vandergeest said. “It really drove my view on reproductive rights because I do believe that only a woman should have a say over her body, and it shouldn’t be up to the government.”
Now a senior at Neumann University, a small private Catholic school in Pennsylvania, the 21-year-old said she would describe herself as a progressive liberal with Democrat-leaning views who is most passionate about reproductive rights, healthcare and how the government responds to addiction and recovery.
Every generation has an ideological gender gap — and Gen Z is no different. A new poll from The 19th and YouGov sheds light on how young men and women are shaped by certain historical moments and tend to diverge on issues of gender and reproductive rights. Gen Z women are more likely than Gen Z men to consider themselves feminist, identify as liberal and Democrat, support abortion access, and believe society should not return to traditional gender norms, according to the new poll.
The 19th/YouGov poll was conducted online from Sept. 18-24 among 2,357 adults, including an oversampling of 18- to 29-year-olds. The margin of error for the overall sample is ±2.5 points.
Gen Z women are more likely to say they’re Democrats, 37% to 21% of men. Among Gen Z men, about 38% are Republican and 27% political independents. For Gen Z women, 29% are Republicans and 21% are independents.
The poll also found that 38% of Gen Z women and 28% of Gen Z men describe themselves as liberal; 26% of Gen Z women and 34% of Gen Z men identify as conservative.
Claire Gothreau, an assistant professor of political science at Lebanon Valley College, said the ideological gender gap is not unique to Gen Z. Women have tended to identify as more liberal and Democratic than men for decades, and a greater proportion of women than men have voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election since 1980, she said.
“What does appear especially interesting about Gen Z is the combination of ideology, gender identity, feminism and political participation,” Gothreau said. “Young women have come of age politically during a period in which issues related to gender and reproductive rights have been really prominent. The #MeToo movement, the first Trump presidency and the Dobbs decision all occurred during the formative political years of Gen Z women.”
The #MeToo movement, founded in 2006 by activist Tarana Burke, brought a reckoning for powerful men at its public peak in 2017 and 2018. The movement led to changes in laws and policies to address abuse, but it also drew a cultural backlash that contributed to President Donald Trump’s second term. The president, who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual misconduct, was found liable of sexual abuse in May 2023.
While the majority of Gen Zers say abortion should be always or mostly legal, women were more likely to say so than men, 69% to 51%. Almost half of men versus 31% of women say it should be mostly or always illegal.
Paige McCord-Hyman, a 20-year-old junior at Neumann University, said she identifies as a Democrat with progressive views. The issue she’s most passionate about is also reproductive rights. When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, McCord-Hyman said her mother was experiencing pregnancy complications at the time, taking a toll on her mom and the rest of the family.
“It’s not that every woman should get an abortion,” McCord-Hyman said. “Whatever your religious views are, whatever your moral views are — that’s perfectly fine. But I feel like the Dobbs decision was taking away the choice. It wasn’t even in the cards anymore, and I feel like that’s not something that a man should have any say over. And even taking gender out of it, nobody should have a say in what I choose to do with my body.”
According to the poll, 43% of Gen Z women and 51% of Gen Z men think society would benefit from a return to traditional gender roles.
Roy Dawes, an associate professor of political science at Gettysburg College, said that while young women have been quickly adopting anti-patriarchal attitudes, some young men have started to feel alienated. And these men are finding community online, he added.
“Young men are desiring a return to more traditional roles,” Dawes said. “Social media algorithms exacerbate this by segregating young men and women, with young men highly susceptible to online influencers with anti-feminist and often misogynistic messages.”
Dawes also pointed out that young women are outpacing their men counterparts in academic and professional achievement, which also contributes to Gen Z men’s feeling of social and economic stagnation.
“These factors have combined to have an impact on the context of the heterosexual dating world with an increase in remaining single and a decrease in more traditional marriage and reproductive patterns,” Dawes said.
Tyler Daniel, a visiting assistant professor of political science at Roanoke College, said social media, algorithms and YouTube specifically have created deeply divided political echo chambers for Gen Z, the generation that grew up on the Internet.
“It would be an oversimplification to say that social media algorithms are the sole driving force behind the gender divide, but they present a fascinating first look into how cultural narratives shaped by social media are significantly impacting the generation aptly understood to be the social media generation,” Daniel said.
When it comes to feminism, 49% of Gen Z women and 20% of Gen Z men consider themselves feminists, the poll found.
Vandergeest, who considers herself a feminist, said she notices a lot of toxic masculinity on social media in particular. The men in her classes at her university are typically more respectful in person, she said.
“But I have seen a lot online that males are looking for more of a traditional view of a woman, meaning a housewife with no job, no college — just bear the kids and make dinner,” Vandergeest said.
Vandergeest said she thinks this desire is just a modern backlash to feminism.
“I think that men think that feminism is something that they should be threatened by, but it’s not,” Vandergeest said. “Feminism is something where we just want to be equal. It was never that we wanted to be better than the men. We want to have the same rights, and I think that scares people and causes them to be more hateful, have more traditional views and have that incel look on women.”
In her book, “The Politics of Gen Z,” political scientist Melissa Deckman found that young women are more likely to identify as feminists. They are also more likely to participate in politics — voting, protesting, organizing and donating, according to Deckman.
Vandergeest said women in her generation are driven by the desire for equality, from the Civil Rights Movement to women’s rights and reproductive rights, and they are starting to pay attention thanks to the plethora of information available on social media.
“I think going down the line we need more people, especially women, to be in politics,” Vandergeest said. “So I do plan to run once I graduate for some political position, and I think that others should follow in our footsteps. I think our generation needs to be the stepping stone for the generations under us. They need to see what it’s really like to have rights and fight for them.”
This story was originally produced by News From The States, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Sign for the Wisconsin Elections Comission. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)
The Wisconsin Elections Commission met Thursday to assess its preparations for the midterm elections in November, review reports on allegations of voter fraud and determine the outcome of two complaints against election officials.
The commission met as concerns continue to swirl around Wisconsin and the country over the possibility that President Donald Trump and his Republican allies will work to undermine confidence in the results of the election.
In the meeting, WEC Administrator Meagan Wolfe gave the agency’s pre-election readiness report in which she outlined the ways the commission works to keep the state’s voter rolls accurate, train election officials, ensure the election’s security and answer any questions that come from local officials or voters.
One of the most frequent complaints about the election system made by conspiracy theorists is that Wisconsin’s voter registration database includes the information of “inactive” voters who have moved, died or been convicted of a felony. The critics argue that leaving these files in the database makes it easier for fraud to occur.
The report states that WEC and local election officials have reviewed or updated nearly 500,000 voter files ahead of the election to make sure that only eligible voters cast votes in November.
“And in total, since the last general election, our municipal clerks have updated or deactivated over a half a million records, and so I think that’s really, really important to highlight how much work goes into maintaining Wisconsin’s voter registration list all day, every day to ensure that anybody that’s lawfully registered will show up on the registration list,” Wolfe said. “They’ll show up on the polls when they go to vote on Election Day, and anybody who is not eligible, so anybody who maybe has been convicted of a felony or is otherwise not eligible, is removed from the list or their record is updated.”
Commission Chair Don Millis, a Republican, said that leaving the inactive voter files in the database actually protects against fraud.
“Basically, you have one database with 7 million records, and there’s a very good reason why we keep records of inactive voter records, deceased voters, because if you got rid of those, you would lose one of your best tools to combat election fraud,” Millis said.
Wolfe also said that in an effort to provide as much information as possible to voters and clerks, the WEC office is set to open at 5 a.m. in the weeks ahead of the election.
Commissioner Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said she appreciates the sacrifice from WEC staff to help people, but that the agency’s 30-person staff is not large enough to handle the demands of the public.
“We have put in a request for our budget for many more positions because the work we’re doing has expanded dramatically,” Jacobs said. “It shouldn’t be something where people are sacrificing as much as they are. And I want to express my admiration for our staff’s devotion to this work and commitment to it. And also say that our need for additional staff is real. It’s profound. And I hope if any legislators are out there listening, that you treat our budget request for more personnel with great attention, and hopefully give us those staff positions.”
Commission staff also presented the results of the agency’s regular reports on felons who have voted and reported election fraud.
As is generally the case, neither report shows widespread levels of election fraud at the level Republicans have regularly alleged in recent years.
The report shows that since the 2020 general election, nearly 22 million votes have been cast in Wisconsin. Only 445 of those votes, 0.002%, were matched to voters with felony convictions and an even smaller number of those instances were actually referred to prosecutors and charged.
The commission’s annual report on voter fraud found that in the elections since November 2025, municipal clerks have referred 53 cases of election fraud to local prosecutors. The WEC report, agency staff said, could be an undercount because it’s dependent on clerks reporting the referrals to WEC when they happen.
Most of the referrals, 44 of them, were made because the “election day registration” postcard delivered to a person’s address after they register at the polls was returned undeliverable.
The commission also voted on Thursday that there is no probable cause to further investigate a voter’s complaint that the city of Milwaukee violated state law by sorting absentee ballots at its central count location behind a curtain.
The complaint alleged that city staff were conducting “observable” election activities behind the curtain at the city’s central count location during the November 2024 and April 2025 elections. The commission’s discussion of the complaint reopened long-running arguments between commission members — most notably from Republican Robert Spindell, who has long been the WEC member most friendly to election conspiracy theories.
Spindell argued that people continuing to have doubts about Wisconsin’s elections is evidence that Wisconsin’s elections aren’t run competently or transparently enough.
“Let’s stop having these problems that we have, where 45% of the citizens of Wisconsin feel that there’s something wrong with this thing,” Spindell said. “I’m sure Mayor [Cavalier] Johnson does not like the bad publicity that comes out regarding the lack of transparency. There’s no reason why that black curtain is up. There’s no reason why all these actions are being blocked if there’s nothing nefarious going on.”
Jacobs pointed out that the complaint included several blatantly false statements.
“Bob, I’m concerned by your comments because I know you’ve been to Central Count. I know you have seen ballots being opened in the machines. I know you have seen the tables. I know you have seen the poll workers calling out names. I know you have seen all this,” Jacobs said. “And this complaint was by someone who swore under penalty of perjury that those things were happening behind this curtain. This man brought a lie to us, a lie, because he’s so invested in putting forward this conspiracy theory of secret things going on behind black curtains that he’s willing to lie on these documents to us. You and I both know, we’re both there, you and I both know that’s not true and he lies to this commission with the hopes of diminishing the work being done in the city of Milwaukee and I think you should be as offended as I am by that, because I’m pretty darn offended.”
Mark Thomsen, another Democratic member of the commission, said that it’s Spindell’s repeated indulgence of conspiracy theories that has allowed distrust of the system to continue.
“For you to turn this discussion about a complaint and a recommendation into the politics of the election, I think that hurts us more than anything,” Thomsen said. “I think that promotes mistrust, and … years and years of this is like it’s like Chinese torture, Bob. I mean, it’s enough.”
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