(The Center Square) – The city of Milwaukee had 17 employees receive more than $200,000 in compensation in 2014, and the city’s mayor, police and fire chiefs were not among them.
(The Center Square) – The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan, according to a social media post from FBI Director Kash Patel.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
The FBI on Friday arrested a Milwaukee judge accused of helping a man evade immigration authorities, escalating a clash between the Trump administration and local authorities over the Republican president’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is accused of escorting the man and his lawyer out of her courtroom through the jury door last week after learning that immigration authorities were seeking his arrest. The man was taken into custody outside the courthouse after agents chased him on foot.
President Donald Trump’s administration has accused state and local officials of interfering with his immigration enforcement priorities. The arrest also comes amid a growing battle between the administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters.
Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, in a statement on the arrest, accused the Trump administration of repeatedly using “dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine our judiciary at every level.”
“I have deep respect for the rule of law, our nation’s judiciary, the importance of judges making decisions impartially without fear or favor, and the efforts of law enforcement to hold people accountable if they commit a crime,” Evers said. “I will continue to put my faith in our justice system as this situation plays out in the court of law.”
Dugan was taken into custody by the FBI on Friday morning on the courthouse grounds, according to U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson Brady McCarron. She appeared briefly in federal court in Milwaukee later Friday before being released from custody. She faces charges of “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest” and obstructing or impeding a proceeding.
“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” her attorney, Craig Mastantuono, said during the hearing. He declined to comment to an Associated Press reporter following her court appearance.
Court papers suggest Dugan was alerted to the presence of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the courthouse by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that they appeared to be in the hallway.
The FBI affidavit describes Dugan as “visibly angry” over the arrival of immigration agents in the courthouse and says that she pronounced the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers. It says she and another judge later approached members of the arrest team inside the courthouse, displaying what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor.”
After a back-and-forth with officers over the warrant for the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, she demanded that the arrest team speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom, the affidavit says.
After directing the arrest team to the chief judge’s office, investigators say, Dugan returned to the courtroom and was heard saying words to the effect of “wait, come with me” before ushering Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer through a jury door into a non-public area of the courthouse. The action was unusual, the affidavit says, because “only deputies, juries, court staff, and in-custody defendants being escorted by deputies used the back jury door. Defense attorneys and defendants who were not in custody never used the jury door.”
A sign that remained posted on Dugan’s courtroom door Friday advised that if any attorney or other court official “knows or believes that a person feels unsafe coming to the courthouse to courtroom 615,” they should notify the clerk and request an appearance via Zoom.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said the man was facing domestic violence charges and victims were sitting in the courtroom with state prosecutors when the judge helped him escape immigration arrest.
The judge “put the lives of our law enforcement officers at risk. She put the lives of citizens at risk. A street chase — it’s absurd that that had to happen,” Bondi said on Fox News Channel.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat who represents Wisconsin, called the arrest of a sitting judge a “gravely serious and drastic move” that “threatens to breach” the separation of power between the executive and judicial branches.
“Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a Democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by,” Baldwin said in an emailed statement. “By relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders, and arresting a sitting judge, this President is putting those basic Democratic values that Wisconsinites hold dear on the line.”
The case is similar to one brought during the first Trump administration against a Massachusetts judge, who was accused of helping a man sneak out a back door of a courthouse to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent.
That prosecution sparked outrage from many in the legal community, who slammed the case as politically motivated. Prosecutors dropped the case against Newton District Judge Shelley Joseph in 2022 under the Democratic Biden administration after she agreed to refer herself to a state agency that investigates allegations of misconduct by members of the bench.
The Justice Department had previously signaled that it was going to crack down on local officials who thwart federal immigration efforts.
The department in January ordered prosecutors to investigate for potential criminal charges any state and local officials who obstruct or impede federal functions. As potential avenues for prosecution, a memo cited a conspiracy offense as well as a law prohibiting the harboring of people in the country illegally.
Dugan was elected in 2016 to the county court Branch 31. She also has served in the court’s probate and civil divisions, according to her judicial candidate biography.
Before being elected to public office, Dugan practiced at Legal Action of Wisconsin and the Legal Aid Society. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1981 with a bachelor of arts degree and earned her Juris Doctorate in 1987 from the school.
Reading Time: 5minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
Reporter Natalie Yahr spoke to Matt Kures, who researches state labor and demographic trends as a community development specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension.
The current labor market is good for people who have a job right now, but challenging for those looking for a job, Kures says.
Wisconsin’s working-age population is projected to keep declining into 2030, before leveling off in the subsequent decade, fueling challenges for certain industries.
Industries with particularly large shares of older workers include: real estate, transportation, warehousing, wholesale trade, manufacturing and public administration.
Wisconsin Watch is starting a new beat called pathways to success, exploring what Wisconsin residents will need in order to build and keep thriving careers in the future economy — and what’s standing in their way.
To learn more about the jobs Wisconsin will most need to fill in the coming years, we spoke to Matt Kures, who researches state labor and demographic trends as a community development specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What numbers do you think best tell the story of Wisconsin’s labor market and what’s coming?
Unemployment rates are still near historic lows, but despite that, we’re still not seeing a large number of people being hired. The hiring rate has slowed down. We’ve also seen fewer people being laid off. So more businesses are actually retaining employees that maybe they wouldn’t have otherwise. There’s still some hangover from the pandemic and ability to hire people, so they’re a little bit hesitant to let them go.
The number of job openings has ticked down as well. We’re still seeing some uncertainty from a lot of businesses in terms of what’s going to happen with inflation, interest rates, tariffs and just the broader U.S. economy.
Those numbers put together tell of a labor market that’s good for people who have a job right now, but maybe a little bit challenging for people looking for a job.
And how about when it comes to long-standing trends in Wisconsin’s labor market or demographics? Are there numbers you like to bring up that you think people don’t tend to know?
If you look at the working-age population declining from 2020 to 2030, and then kind of leveling off from 2030 to 2040, we’re just not going to have strong growth in the number of individuals who are working age in the state. That’s mostly true across the state, although there are some counties that will be projected to grow, like Dane and Eau Claire.
And then also, the combination of individuals of retirement age or nearing retirement age that are going to either leave the labor force or change the types of work they’re doing. If we look at the manufacturing sector, for instance, we have almost 131,000 individuals in that industry who are aged 55 or older, or almost 28% of that industry. So in those large employment sectors in the state, how do we think about replacing the workforce or augmenting the workforce going forward due to retirements or just shifting abilities due to the aging population?
How are the challenges or opportunities different in different parts of the state, say in urban areas versus more rural areas?
Certainly many of the non-metro areas do have an older population and will continue to have an older population going forward, so they will most likely face some of the bigger challenges in terms of some of the population shifts by age group. In some of those areas too, you have some of the bigger challenges in developing housing … to try and attract a new labor force. So those challenges are a bit twofold.
Matt Kures, community development specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Division of Extension, is shown in his office building April 18, 2025, in Madison, Wis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Would you describe Wisconsin as having a labor shortage?
The labor shortage is probably not as significant as it was, say, two or three years ago. But with our structural population distribution in terms of our age groups, we’re going to face challenges going forward. We’re going to have fewer individuals of working age.
What are your thoughts on how Wisconsin could fix that?
There’s a lot of strategies out there, and not one is going to be the sole key to solving labor problems going forward. Those strategies include thinking about ways to attract new individuals to our communities, creating quality places that people want to reside in, thinking about housing availability and affordability, and creating ecosystems where people can start a business.
So those are community-based strategies that people or communities can think about. But it’s also going to require improving productivity, and that could be through AI, automation, other capital investments and equipment, and thinking about new production techniques.
Can you tell me about some of the fastest-graying industries in Wisconsin, the ones where the most workers are aging out?
So we can look at this in two different ways: by numbers or percent. Some industries, on a percentage basis, have a very high share of individuals who are aging out of the workforce, but some of those are not the largest sectors in the state of Wisconsin.
For instance, in agriculture and natural resources, 31% of employees (covered by unemployment insurance laws) are age 55 or older, but there’s only about 8,400 of them. (Federal agriculture census data shows around 65,000 Wisconsin farmers in that age group, most of whom are not covered by unemployment insurance laws.)
But if you look at real estate, transportation, warehousing, wholesale trade, manufacturing and public administration, those are some of the biggest industries that have the highest share of individuals aged 55 or older, with manufacturing certainly being the largest in terms of total numbers with an estimated 131,000 employees aged 55 or older. That’s not surprising given that it’s a very large employment sector in the state.
You can also look at, say, health care and social assistance. They’re below the state average for their share of individuals aged 55 and older, but there’s almost 99,000 of them in that age category. So that’s an industry sector that, as we age as a state, will probably face even greater labor demands.
Of those graying industries, are there any that you’re particularly worried about?
I don’t know if “worried” is the term I would use because different industries will respond in different ways. For instance, manufacturing can probably rely a bit more on things like automation, while other industries might be able to have some of their jobs done remotely. But health care and manufacturing are two very large cornerstones of our economy, and they are going to face challenges with labor availability going forward.
When you say remotely, you mean they might use workers in other states?
Yes. But in an industry like health care, for the most part, that’s probably not going to be an option.
Can you tell me about a few of the fastest-growing industries in Wisconsin?
To be honest, I haven’t looked at any of the recent numbers on a sector-by-sector basis. I can say that health care and social assistance has been one of the largest growing sectors in the state, and that’s also true nationally.
Regardless of the industry, we’re seeing growth in demand for digital skills across all industry sectors. Especially in professional and technical services, we’re seeing a higher demand for digital skills, but across all industries, a lot of job postings require some sort of knowledge in terms of digital skills, which may be anything from software development all the way down to just being able to work with social media or operate word processing.
Anything else you want to talk about?
Thinking about the aging workforce, there are a lot of opportunities for businesses to make sure they capture and transfer a lot of the knowledge that those individuals may have gained over their careers. As new employees or younger employees come into those firms, are there opportunities to match up younger and pre-retirement workers to share all that knowledge and make sure that it benefits the organization going forward?
Also, with the aging workforce, are there opportunities to help those who may want to change their occupation or career trajectory going forward? Maybe they’ve done construction labor for a long time and now they want to try something different because they just physically can’t meet the demands anymore. There are a lot of opportunities.We can take advantage of the knowledge, skills and abilities that those individuals have or may want to have going forward.
Have a question about jobs or job training in Wisconsin? Or want to tell a reporter about your struggle to find the right job or the right workers? Email reporter Natalie Yahr nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org or call or text 608-616-0752.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Some visa terminations have been restored at Universities of Wisconsin campuses following a sweeping walk back by President Donald Trump's administration Friday.
Federal law enforcement’s arrest of a Milwaukee County judge in her courthouse Friday left some Wisconsin officials worried about attacks on the independence of the judiciary and others saying the charges show no one is above the law.
According to the NFL, 205,000 fans attended the first night of the three-day NFL draft in Green Bay. Business was great near the stadium, but was slower downtown.
As Wisconsin’s planting season gets underway, cuts at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and fluctuating tariffs on foreign trading partners are creating a new level of uncertainty for farmers.
Protesters gather outside of the Federal Building in Milwaukee to denounce the arrest of Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
After the arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan by federal agents Friday morning, the city’s political and activist communities responded forcefully, protesting against the arrest across the city.
Dugan was charged with obstruction of justice and harboring an individual after a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents showed up outside of her courtroom last week to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery.
The criminal complaint against Durgan alleges she broke the law by allowing Flores-Ruiz to use a side door in her courtroom to exit without going past the agents. The agents saw him leave and later apprehended him on foot.
While a larger protest took place outside of the federal courthouse in downtown Milwaukee, local resident Jeneca Wolski stood alone outside of the county courthouse where Dugan was arrested.
“[I’m] just a local citizen who is horrified that we are finding ourselves in this position right now,” Wolski told the Wisconsin Examiner. “We’re sliding downhill so fast. I don’t want to be looked back on by history as part of it. We have to do everything we can to kick and fight and scream to save our democracy right now.”
At a press conference, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley accused the administration of President Donald Trump of acting to intimidate “anyone who opposes these policies.” Crowley added that Dugan was arrested by a “large, performative showing” of federal agents in the county courthouse.
“We have an obligation to administer our courts in a safe, efficient manner that delivers due process for anyone,” Crowley said. “The Trump administration’s actions are clearly preventing us from doing so by intimidating judges and eroding public faith in our judicial system.”
People gathered outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee Friday afternoon to protest Dugan’s arrest. At the rally, Christine Neumann Ortiz, executive director of immigrant rights group Voces De La Frontera, told the Wisconsin Examiner the Trump administration was trying to undermine efforts to oppose its immigration policies.
“They basically want to be unleashed to do whatever they want to commit these raids in courtrooms across the country,” she said. “They don’t want any resistance from judges or from the community standing up for people’s due process rights or limiting their policies of mass deportation and racism.”
Seven of the city of Milwaukee’s legislative representatives said in a joint statement that Dugan’s arrest and ICE operating inside the courthouse will “lead to a breakdown of civil society.”
“The County Courthouse is a sanctuary for justice and peace where the accused come forward willingly in a fair and unbiased process,” said the lawmakers, Sens. Chris Larson and Tim Carpenter and Reps. Christine Sinicki, Darrin Madison, Supreme Moore Omokunde, Angelito Tenorio and Sequanna Taylor. “Arresting people out of a courtroom will lead to a breakdown of civil society. We do not support the presence of ICE in places where it will lead to intimidation against witnesses and victims of crimes, denying everyone involved the justice they deserve.”
U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned how Dugan’s arrest makes the country safer.
“The Trump Administration continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse,” Durbin said. “When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States. How does this make America any safer? How does arresting a sitting judge make America any safer? It is imperative that Judge Dugan is afforded due process and the presumption of innocence, as required by our Constitution and her fundamental rights as an American.”
State Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein (D-Middleton) and Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, criticized the arrest in a joint statement.
“Today’s arrest of a sitting judge, at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, is a frightening escalation of the Trump Administration’s attacks on America’s judicial system,” they said. “This is part of a pattern by this Administration – defying court orders, flouting the democratic system of checks and balances, ignoring the right to due process, and threatening judicial independence – that alarms us as legislators and as residents of this great state and this great country. We will follow this case closely. We will continue to stand up to lawless and unconstitutional actions. And, we will always fight for a bedrock principle of American democracy: equal justice under the law.”
The Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an activist group, was planning protests Friday afternoon outside the federal courthouse and Saturday outside the FBI’s Milwaukee field office. In a statement, the group said the arrest was a “heinous attack.”
“They are seeking to send a clear message: either you play along with Trump’s agenda, or pay the consequences,” the group said. “During this period of racist and political repression, we must stand together to denounce today’s actions by the FBI. What happened to Dugan is not new. The FBI and other agencies have been emboldened in recent months, snatching people off the streets, separating families, terrorizing communities, breaking doors down of pro-Palestine activists, and contributing to the unjust deportation of immigrants who don’t have criminal records. What is new is that they have gone after a judge.”
U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — A handful of Democratic U.S. senators sounded the alarm Friday after federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on charges she obstructed immigration officials from detaining a man in her courtroom, saying the arrest marked a new low in President Donald Trump’s treatment of the law.
Some congressional Democrats framed the FBI’s Friday morning arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan as a grave threat to the U.S. system of government, saying it was part of Trump’s effort to expand his own power and undermine the judiciary, with which the administration has become increasingly noncompliant.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the judge’s arrest on social media late Friday afternoon as a “dangerous escalation.”
“There are no kings in America. Trump and (Attorney General Pam) Bondi can’t just decide to arrest sitting judges at will and threaten judges into submission,” wrote Schumer, a New York Democrat.
Trump administration officials, including Bondi, defended the arrest as legitimate. The FBI had been investigating Dugan after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers sought to detain an immigrant without legal authority to be in the country who was in her courtroom on a misdemeanor charge.
Bondi wrote on social media just after noon Eastern, “I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan — a county judge in Milwaukee — for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov. No one is above the law.”
Democrats object
Democrats in Washington who sounded their objections to the arrest Friday argued it subverted separation of powers.
Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, said Trump “continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse.”
In a statement, Durbin added that local courtrooms should be off limits to immigration enforcement agents.
“When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States,” Durbin wrote.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who represents Wisconsin, issued a statement shortly after news of the arrest, calling it “a gravely serious and drastic move.”
“In the United States we have a system of checks and balances and separation of powers for damn good reasons,” Baldwin said.
“The Trump Administration just arrested a sitting judge,” Arizona’s Ruben Gallego said in a social media post. “This is what happens in authoritarian countries. Stand up now — or lose the power to do so later. The administration must drop all charges and respect separation of powers.”
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, was more careful in his criticism but said Trump is “constantly challenging” separation of powers laid out in the Constitution.
“I don’t know what happened in Wisconsin, but amplifying this arrest as the Attorney General and FBI Director have done looks like part of a larger intimidation campaign against judges,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in a statement.
In a since-deleted post on Bluesky, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey accused Trump of “using immigrants to justify an all-out assault on our democracy and rule of law.
“After openly defying a Supreme Court order, calling for judges to be impeached, and bullying and belittling judges, today his FBI director took the extreme step of ordering a sitting judge arrested,” Booker wrote, referring to the high court’s order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is being held in El Salvador.
Spokespeople for Booker did not respond to a late Friday inquiry about why the post was taken down.
Trump officials back up arrest
Administration officials boasted online following the arrest.
FBI Director Kash Patel deleted a post on X in which he wrote Dugan “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery.
Trump posted a screenshot on his social media site from the conservative activist account “Libs of TikTok” that featured a photo of Dugan and celebrated her arrest.
White House Border Czar Tom Homan said that Dugan crossed a line in her opposition to the administration’s agenda.
“People can choose to support illegal immigration and not assist ICE in removing criminal illegal aliens from our communities, BUT DON’T CROSS THAT LINE,” he wrote on X. “If you actively impede our enforcement efforts or if you knowingly harbor or conceal illegal aliens from ICE you will be prosecuted. These actions are felonies. More to come…”
Trump vs. courts
Trump and administration officials have publicly attacked judges online, including calling for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia after he ordered immigration officials to halt deportation flights to El Salvador.
The administration allowed the flights to reach Central America, and is now at risk of being held in criminal contempt of court as a legal fight plays out.
The president’s verbal attacks on Boasberg prompted a rare rebuke from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-March.
And the administration has seemingly refused to do anything to facilitate the return of Maryland resident Abrego Garcia from a notorious El Salvador mega-prison, despite a Supreme Court order.
The Milwaukee County Courthouse. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan on Friday, accusing her of obstructing an immigration enforcement action last week.
Dugan was arrested at 8:30 a.m. at the county courthouse, according to the U.S. Marshal’s Service. She was scheduled to make an initial appearance in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Dries at 10:30 on Friday. According to a criminal complaint, she’s been charged with obstructing or impeding before a department or agency of the United States and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest.
Online court records show that the government did not request that Dugan be held in detention and that she was released on an O/R bond, meaning she was released from custody without having to post bail and signed an agreement that she’d appear in court when required.
The agency’s director, Kash Patel, wrote on the social media platform X that Dugan had “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. In the now-deleted post, Patel accused Dugan of creating “increased danger to the public.”
Flores-Ruiz appeared in Dugan’s courtroom on April 18 for a pre-trial conference on charges of misdemeanor domestic battery. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents appeared outside Dugan’s courtroom, she led Flores-Ruiz and an attorney out a side door and down a private hallway.
ICE agents later apprehended Flores-Ruiz on foot. This is the third time since March that immigration agents have appeared at the Milwaukee County courthouse to conduct arrests — a tactic that local officials have said threatens to undermine the work of the local justice system by making immigrants fearful of coming to the courthouse to testify in court.
In an initial statement, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said he was aware of Dugan’s arrest and that the legal process should be allowed to play out.
“Like any individual in this country, I believe she is entitled to due process,” Crowley said. “We should let the facts come to light and the legal process play out.”
But later, he accused the FBI of politicizing the arrest to punish perceived enemies.
“It is clear that the FBI is politicizing this situation to make an example of her and others across the country who oppose their attack on the judicial system and our nation’s immigration laws,” he said. “FBI Director Kash Patel issued a public statement on X, which he hurriedly deleted, making unsubstantiated claims about Judge Dugan’s case before charges were officially filed and she could have her moment in court. Director Patel’s statement shows that Trump’s FBI is more concerned about weaponizing federal law enforcement, punishing people without due process, and intimidating anyone who opposes those policies, than they are with seeking justice.”
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said the administration of President Donald Trump is attacking democratic values.
“In the United States, we have a system of checks and balances and separations of power for damn good reasons,” she said. “The President’s administration arresting a sitting judge is a gravely serious and drastic move, and it threatens to breach those very separations of power. Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a Democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by. By relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders, and arresting a sitting judge, this President is putting those basic Democratic values that Wisconsinites hold dear on the line. While details of this exact case remain minimal, this action fits into the deeply concerning pattern of this President’s lawless behavior and undermining courts and Congress’s checks on his power.”
Gov. Tony Evers said the arrest was another example of the Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary.
“Unfortunately, we have seen in recent months the president and the Trump Administration repeatedly use dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine our judiciary at every level, including flat-out disobeying the highest court in the land and threatening to impeach and remove judges who do not rule in their favor,” he said. “I have deep respect for the rule of law, our nation’s judiciary, the importance of judges making decisions impartially without fear or favor, and the efforts of law enforcement to hold people accountable if they commit a crime. I will continue to put my faith in our justice system as this situation plays out in the court of law.”
U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) said the arrest was “shocking.”
“This Administration’s willingness to weaponize federal law enforcement is shocking and this arrest has all the hallmarks of overreach,” Moore said. “Federal law enforcement coming into a community and arresting a judge is a serious matter and would require a high legal bar. I will be following this case closely and facts will come out, however, I am very alarmed at the increasingly lawless actions of the Trump Administration, and in particular ICE, who have been defying courts and acting with disregard for the Constitution.”
The ACLU of Wisconsin wrote on social media that ICE making arrests at courthouses interferes with the work of local justice officials.
“Judges have a duty to maintain order in their courtrooms and ensure the fair administration of justice, and federal law does not require state judges to act as agents of federal immigration enforcement,” the organization said. “Everyone is due their day in court, and when ICE starts showing up to courts looking to make arrests, it risks interfering with those rights. In recent weeks, the administration has attacked the integrity of our judicial system, refused to comply with a Supreme Court order, and arrested a judge for using her authority to protect the fair administration of justice.”
Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) listen to community members at an April 24 roundtable in Richland Center. (Hery Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
RICHLAND CENTER — In a 90-minute roundtable meeting at the Richland Center community center Thursday, President Donald Trump’s name was mentioned just twice. But community leaders highlighted how his administration’s policies are already wreaking havoc on the county with the sixth highest poverty rate in the state.
About 15 area leaders representing small business owners, farmers, schools, hospitals and community advocacy groups met Thursday with state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) and Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez. Throughout the event, the attendees discussed how the policies and plans of Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to cut or diminish Medicaid, Social Security and education funding while instituting widespread tariffs on imported goods from countries around the world and making it harder for migrant workers to obtain visas could decimate their region.
“None of this is right. Where I’m at that age in my life where I don’t get more thoughtful, I get more pissed,” Brett White, executive director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program, said. “And because this is all not necessary, this is completely unnecessary, which means that it’s intentional.”
The group noted repeatedly that a cut to programs in one area had a ripple effect across every other community institution.
White, and Chris Frakes, the organization’s senior director, said that the cuts to Head Start early childhood education programming that have already come and are set to deepen under Trump are their biggest worry.
There are currently about 70 kids in Richland County enrolled in Southwest CAP’s Head Start program, according to Frakes. If those programs are lost, poor kids in Richland County will never catch up, she said.
“Because we know if you enter kindergarten already behind, there’s virtually no chance to catch up by third grade,” Frakes said. “If you’re not on grade level reading in third grade, we know your life prospects go down dramatically, right? So Head Start fills this critical, vital need to get those kiddos onto par with their middle class peers when they hit kindergarten, so that they are ready to learn, and their families have the sort of surrounding supports, whether that’s food, whether that’s access to transportation, for medical care.”
If Head Start gets cut, the children who are affected will eventually reach Aaron Mithum, the middle and high school principal for the Kickapoo Area School District. Mithum says the district is “waiting for the other shoe to drop” on the future of the approximately $800,000 it gets annually from the federal government as Trump seeks to shut down the U.S. Department of Education.
If Head Start leaves poor kids behind before they turn five, by the time they reach Mithum at a middle school that’s also struggling financially, there won’t be many options.
“We’re getting them when they get into pre K or kindergarten, and now we’re trying to go from there, and now, all of a sudden, they don’t have any of that foundational aspect,” Mithum said. “It’s a building block, trickle effect, and not in a positive way. So now it’s that much harder for us to do what [Head Start wasn’t] able to do, and it continues to go up. And it’s just really hard to think about, what does that look like? What does that look like to be a parent with a special ed kid who needs speech services or reading services, or whatever. And the answer is, sorry, not our problem.”
While the child care and education system of a community that’s already seen the closure of its local University of Wisconsin campus faces the prospect of being unable to keep poor kids from falling behind, the area’s food system is also being hit.
Retaliatory tariffs on the area’s wheat, corn and soybean farmers are hurting their ability to find international markets for their products while tariffs imposed by Trump have made fertilizer and machinery more expensive, said Sally Leong, Wisconsin Farmers Union member and former professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison.
Those struggles are continuing to push up the price of food, causing local families to rely on food pantries more than used to, according to Jackie Anderson, executive director of Feeding Wisconsin.
Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) paused funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which Anderson said has amounted to about a 30% cut to what food banks are able to buy. USDA has also ended a program that connected local farms with food pantries to supply fresh produce.
“Food banks are really looking at the bottom line and saying, like, ‘How are we going to be able to get that amount of food here?’” Anderson said.
The tariffs are also affecting the companies providing jobs in the area. Marty Richards, the county tourism director, said that Rockwell Automation has delayed and cancelled orders because of Trump’s tariffs. Meanwhile it’s getting harder to find local workers and Trump’s restrictive immigration policies have made it nearly impossible to hire migrant workers. Richards said the company has had a hard time getting workers from its plant in Mexico to come to the U.S. even temporarily for technical training
Teri Richards, board member of the Greater Richland Area Chamber of Commerce, said the county desperately needs more people and she doesn’t know where to find them.
“We’re obviously not having enough babies. We’re struggling to get that immigrant population and we can’t keep stealing from each other,” she said. “So it’s time to go into Chicago or Milwaukee, to even get a few of those folks moved out here? I don’t know.”
With fewer people moving in and federal policies discouraging investment from the business community and cutting funds from schools and child care, the community is also facing the management of an aging population. About 30% of the population is older than 60 and 14% is disabled, according to Roxanne Klubertanz, manager of Richland County’s Aging and Disability Resource Center (ADRC).
That aging population means the community is only going to become more reliant on federal programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Currently, the ADRC helps people in the community apply for Medicaid to pay for the services that will help them stay in their homes for as long as possible or move to an assisted living facility — currently a cost of about $3,800 per month, she said.
Republicans in Congress are currently weighing a budget proposal that would slash Medicaid funding. Klubertanz said without the program people won’t be able to access those services and will ultimately get sicker and require a placement in a nursing home — a cost of about $10,000 per month.
“So if that funding, that Medicaid funding, goes away, what’s going to happen?” she said. “Maybe right away, you’re going to see some decreases, but people are going to get sicker and need more services, and then they have to pay for that nursing home placement, which is almost three times the cost. So if you’re trying to fix something today, you have to think about what it’s gonna be like in five years. You’ve gotta have that long range thinking.”
Education Secretary Linda McMahon testifies during her Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Feb. 13, 2025. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration Thursday to pause enforcement of a new U.S. Education Department ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices.
The order came as another federal judge in New Hampshire issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the Trump administration from yanking federal funding from many schools.
The New Hampshire order, though, only applied to schools that employ members of the National Education Association — the country’s largest labor union, which brought the case challenging the ban — or the Center for Black Educator Development.
The rulings used different legal logic but arrived at the same conclusion: The administration’s ban on race-conscious practices is not valid.
In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher said she ruled not on the merits of the policy, but the way the Trump administration developed it.
“This Court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue here are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But this Court is constitutionally required to closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires,” she wrote. “The government did not.”
Gallagher’s order pauses the enforcement of a Feb. 14 letter to school districts from Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, that threatened to rescind federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices in programming, admissions, scholarships and other aspects of student life.
In New Hampshire, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty wrote that “the loss of federal funding would cripple the operations of many educational institutions.”
McCafferty’s order has a nationwide effect, but McCafferty limited it to schools that employ NEA members, rejecting the union’s attempt to completely halt the policies outlined in the letter.
Teachers unions sued
The Feb. 14 letter drew swift legal action, and the National Education Association brought the suit in New Hampshire against the administration alongside the Center for Black Educator Development.
The American Federation of Teachers — one of the largest teachers unions in the country — filed a complaint in February alongside its affiliate, AFT-Maryland. The American Sociological Association and a public school district in Oregon also sued over the letter.
“Today the court confirmed the importance of our job as educators to foster opportunity, dignity, and engagement,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement after the Maryland ruling.
“The court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” she added. “It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”
NEA also celebrated the preliminary injunction granted in its case Thursday, and the union’s president, Becky Pringle, said in a statement “today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.”
The statement said President Donald Trump, billionaire head of the U.S. DOGE Service Elon Musk and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were responsible for an “attack” on public education.
“The fact is that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Linda McMahon are using politically motivated attacks and harmful and vague directives to stifle speech and erase critical lessons to attack public education, as they work to dismantle public schools,” Pringle said. “This is why educators, parents, and community leaders are organizing, mobilizing, and using every tool available to protect our students and their futures.”
The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Letter raised questions
In the February letter, Trainor offered a wide-ranging interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.
Trainor wrote that though the ruling “addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly.”
The four-page letter raised a slew of questions for schools across pre-K through college over what fell within the requirements, and the department later released a Frequently Asked Questions document on the letter in an attempt to provide more guidance.
Earlier this month, the Education Department gave state education leaders just days to certify all K-12 schools in their states were complying with the letter in order to keep receiving federal financial assistance. The department and the groups suing in the New Hampshire case later reached an agreement that paused enforcement.
Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley came to Wisconsin this week as he travels the country warning about the danger of cuts to the administration. | Photo courtesy Maryland's Executive Office of the Governor.
Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and Social Security commissioner under President Joe Biden, was rushing around Wisconsin Thursday, conducting a flurry of local media interviews before speaking at an evening town hall in Racine.
“I’ve found myself doing a lot of town halls,” O’Malley said, speaking on his phone from the passenger seat of a car as he hurried to a local TV station.
On Wednesday, he was in Kansas City, Missouri, talking to constituents of Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Before that he traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the invitation of a grassroots group to speak to a big crowd of people worried about threatened cuts to benefits for seniors.
In Racine on Thursday night he joined a town hall hosted by the progressive coalition group Opportunity Wisconsin. U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents the 1st District, was invited, but did not attend.
“Having served in the agency so recently, as its last confirmed commissioner, I just feel a responsibility to speak up,” O’Malley said of his detour from private life to travel the country criticizing President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for cutting Social Security staff and closing offices.
“The only thing that’s going to stop the driving of Social Security into system collapse is the American people rising up,” he added.
When he came into the Social Security Administration in 2023, O’Malley said, a decade of staff reductions had reduced the agency’s workforce to a 50-year low, just as the Baby Boom generation was causing a spike in the number of retirees it was serving. As a result, “every line of service was headed in the wrong direction.”
“The agency needed to turn things around, and to their credit they did it,” he said. O’Malley is full of praise for the federal workers he supervised, who reduced call wait times from 42 and a half minutes on average to 12.8 minutes, along with other improvements. “It’s one of the most highly skilled executive services I’ve ever worked with,” he said, including when he served as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland. The “obsessive compulsive” culture of the agency, as O’Malley affectionately terms it, has meant that over the last 90 years, no one missed a check.
Then came Trump and Musk, who “unleashed a reign of terror on those employees” — “the same people who got us through COVID without ever missing a payment.”
Mass firings, a hostile work environment, and the huge waste of taxpayer money as employees were paid to walk out the door appalled O’Malley.
Instead of rooting out “waste fraud and abuse,” Musk’s DOGE cut the IT department in half, undoing the work O’Malley and his colleagues had done to improve service at the agency.
As Trump and Musk drive out the people who know how the system works, intermittent IT outages have become a problem. The website for Social Security accounts has gone down. Wait times are skyrocketing. And as the problems get worse, O’Malley said, “ultimately, it will interrupt benefits.”
“I don’t know when it will happen,” he said, “but when it breaks, it will break.”
What is the point of this wanton destruction?
“I don’t know what the end game is,” O’Malley said.
Members of Congress in both political parties have told him they think Trump and Musk have set their sights on the $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund in order to make tax cuts for the superwealthy permanent.
Then there’s Musk’s nihilistic ideology, captured in his assertion that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.”
“There’s no more empathetic program than Social Security,” says O’Malley. “It guarantees widows and orphans and people who are disabled don’t live in poverty. Maybe Musk thinks those are useless members of society who don’t help build his immense wealth. I don’t know.”
Whatever their motives, O’Malley is certain that Musk and Trump must be stopped from a campaign that will end in enormous damage to Americans.
O’Malley’s message is the opposite of Musk’s — far from being riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, the Social Security administration is a model. Fraud affects less than one-half of 1% of Social Security funds. And far from being wasteful, the program spends 1.2% of its budget on overhead, meaning it could be seen as the most efficient insurance company in the world. Private health insurance companies have notoriously high administrative costs.
Other “Big Lies” O’Malley is out to bust include the whopper that immigrants without legal status are draining resources from the system. In fact, they pay about $26 billion in Social Security tax withholdings to fund benefits they themselves can never access,according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Nor are dead people drawing Social Security benefits. “There is no zombie apocalypse,” says O’Malley. Facts and figures supporting the efficiency of Social Security are laid out in plain language on his website, winbackourcountry.com.
The good news is that people are beginning to push back on the idea that Social Security is riddled with abuse and should be made more “efficient.”
“Congress people are getting a heck of a lot more calls now than they did two months ago,” O’Malley said, “whether it’s from people experiencing long wait times, or having trouble accessing the benefits they’ve worked their whole lives to earn, or who are just seeing what’s happening on the news.”
That pressure is absolutely necessary if we are going to prevent the raiding and destruction of a New Deal program that has served so many people so well for generations.
Login
