Michigan Democratic U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, left, speaks at a press conference hosted by immigrant youth, allies and advocates outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2024. (Photo by Shauneen Miranda/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — With a little over a week before the end of President Joe Biden’s term, his administration extended humanitarian protections for nationals from four countries Friday before President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised an immigration crackdown, returns to the White House.
Roughly 1 million people have TPS, which allows them to live and work in the U.S. because their home country is deemed too dangerous to return to for reasons including war, environmental disasters or violence. It’s up to an administration to determine whether or not to renew a status. TPS does not lead to a long-term path to citizenship.
Immigration advocates have pushed the Biden administration to extend TPS status before a second Trump administration. The former president has expressed his intent to not only enact mass deportations, but to scale back humanitarian programs.
During Trump’s first term, he tried to end TPS designation for migrants from Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.
Sarah Baus of Charleston, South Carolina, left, holds a sign that reads "Keep TikTok" as she and other content creators Sallye Miley of Jackson, Mississippi, middle, and Callie Goodwin of Columbia, South Carolina, stand outside the U.S. Supreme Court Building on Jan. 10, 2025, as the court hears oral arguments on whether to overturn or delay a law that could lead to a ban of TikTok in the United States. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
U.S. Supreme Court justices on Friday questioned why they should intervene to block a law forcing the sale of TikTok in nine days, saying the short-form video platform’s Chinese parent company does not enjoy First Amendment rights.
Lawyers for TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and a group of the platform’s users faced sharp questions from justices on both sides of the court’s ideological split about how any party other than ByteDance would have its rights restricted.
Under the bipartisan law passed by Congress and signed into law by President Joe Biden, ByteDance must divest TikTok by Jan. 19 or the wildly popular platform will be banned from app stores in the United States.
ByteDance holds the intellectual property rights to the algorithm that powers what content TikTok users see. If severed from the parent company, as required by the law, TikTok would lose access to the proprietary algorithm, which the company argued was a form of speech.
But the justices suggested only ByteDance — which, as a foreign company, they said, does not have the presumption of First Amendment rights — would be the only party directly harmed by the law.
The law targets ownership and potential control of the platform, including access to user data, by the Chinese Communist Party, Chief Justice John Roberts said. The law designates the Chinese government a foreign adversary.
“Congress doesn’t care about what’s on TikTok, they don’t care about the expression,” Roberts, a member of the court’s conservative majority, said. “That’s shown by the remedy: They’re not saying, ‘TikTok has to stop.’ They’re saying, ‘The Chinese have to stop controlling TikTok,’ so it’s not a direct burden on the expression at all.”
Lawmakers when the law was debated said the platform was dangerous because ByteDance is subject to Chinese national security laws that can compel companies to hand over data at any time.
“Are we supposed to ignore the fact that the ultimate parent is, in fact, subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?” Roberts said.
Justice Elena Kagan, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, also noted the law would mainly affect ByteDance, not its U.S.-based subsidiary. Separated from its Chinese parent company, TikTok would be free to pursue its own algorithm to compete with Meta’s Instagram and other video-based social media, she said.
“The statute only says to this foreign company, ‘Divest or else,’ and leaves TikTok with the ability to do what every other actor in the United States can do, which is go find the best available algorithm,” Kagan said.
National security vs. free speech
Noel Francisco, who represented TikTok and ByteDance, argued that the law’s true aim was to stop “manipulation of content” by the Chinese government, which he said amounted to censorship in violation of the Constitution.
“The government’s real target, rather, is the speech itself, it’s fear that Americans, even if fully informed, could be persuaded by Chinese misinformation,” Francisco said. “That, however, is a decision that the First Amendment leaves to the people.”
The law burdens TikTok’s speech, Francisco said, “shutting down one of the largest speech platforms in America” that boasts about 170 million U.S. users.
He asked the court to analyze if that burden on speech was “content-based,” which he reasoned it was, noting the government’s national security argument speculated that TikTok could be used to misinform Americans.
The singling out of TikTok presents a particular problem, he said.
The law “says there’s one speaker we’re particularly concerned about, and we’re going to hammer home on that one speaker,” he said. “One of the reasons they’re targeting that speaker is because they’re worried about the future content on that platform — that it could, in the future, somehow be critical of the United States or undermine democracy.”
Jeffrey Fisher, an attorney for TikTok creators, said a law to prevent content manipulation — the government’s argument that TikTok users were vulnerable to being force-fed content approved by China — was not permitted by the First Amendment.
“That argument is that our national security is implicated if the content on TikTok is anti-democracy, undermines trust in our leaders — they use various phrases like that in their brief,” Fisher said. “That is an impermissible government interest that taints the entire act. … Once you have an impermissible motive like that, the law is unconstitutional.”
TikTok lawyers react
Lawyers for TikTok and several creators expressed confidence in their case following the arguments.
“We thought that the argument went very well, the justices are extremely engaged. They fully understand the importance of this case, not only for the American citizens of this country, but for First Amendment law, generally, the rights of everybody,” Francisco said at the National Press Club Friday afternoon.
Francisco also defended the ownership makeup of ByteDance as a company incorporated in the Cayman Islands that “is not owned by China” — though 21% is owned by a Chinese national who lives in Singapore, he said. Francisco also said TikTok’s source code for the algorithm is stored on servers in Virginia.
Three TikTok users shared stories about the livelihoods they’ve built through their presence on the platform.
Chloe Joy Sexton of Memphis, Tennessee, said TikTok allowed her to jump-start her baking business after a job loss and difficult family circumstances.
“I have now shipped thousands of cookies all over the world and even published a cookbook. As a small business without a lot of capital, I rely almost entirely on TikTok to market my products. To say TikTok changed my life is an understatement,” Sexton said.
Cows at a Dunn County dairy farm. (Photo by Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)
A Polk County judge on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby, challenging an ordinance enacted by the town of Eureka regulating how factory farms, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), operate.
Under the ordinance, CAFOs must establish plans for how they will deal with manure disposal, air pollution, road use and other effects of a large farm’s operations, before being allowed to open or expand within the town. Similar ordinances have been passed in eight towns and three counties — including the Pierce County town of Maiden Rock, which passed its ordinance last month.
While many of the state’s largest factory farms operate on the eastern side of the state in and around Kewaunee County, communities across western Wisconsin have been fighting the expansion of farming operations in the Driftless Region because of the effect CAFOs can have on smaller farms in the community, water quality and the environment.
“WMC’s lawsuit against Eureka is part of a three-prong strategy by this industry with one goal — no regulation,” Lisa Doerr, a Polk County farmer who helped develop Eureka’s ordinance, said in a statement. “They use lawsuits to intimidate local officials who pass legal ordinances. At the same time, they have a lawsuit challenging any state authority. Finally, their Madison lobbyists are pushing state legislators to ban all local control.”
WMC has filed a number of lawsuits in recent years challenging state authority to protect water quality. A lawsuit filed by the group in Calumet County challenged the state Department of Natural Resources’ authority to require CAFOs to obtain permits regulating their effect on local water supplies. A circuit court judge ruled against that effort last year; the ruling is pending in the state Court of Appeals.
Next week, the state Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case from WMC challenging the DNR’s ability to use the state’s toxic spills law to force polluters to clean up PFAS contamination.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump appears remotely for a sentencing hearing in front of New York State Judge Juan Merchan at Manhattan Criminal Court on Jan. 10, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Brendan McDermid-Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump was sentenced Friday in his New York hush money case just days before his inauguration, making him the only past and future U.S. president with a criminal record.
Trump has faced four criminal prosecutions but the New York state case was the sole one that went to trial. A jury convicted him in May on 34 felonies for falsifying invoices, checks and ledger entries that amounted to a $130,000 reimbursement to his lawyer for paying off a porn star ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
New York Justice Juan Merchan sentenced the president-elect to an “unconditional discharge,” handing down no jail time or fines but cementing a mark on Trump’s record 10 days before he takes the oath of office to become the 47th president.
Speaking during the virtual proceeding from his Mar-a-Lago residence, Trump said he was “totally innocent” and defended the description of his payments to his lawyer in business records as “legal expenses.” As he has in the past, he accused the federal government of being involved in the New York state case.
“It’s been a political witch hunt that was done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election, and obviously that didn’t work. And the people of our country got to see first hand because they watched the case in your courtroom,” the president-elect said, according to audio published by C-SPAN. Cameras were not allowed in the courtroom during the trial or sentencing.
The courtroom contains limited space for the public and journalists.
Merchan called the case “extraordinary” but said “The same burden of proof was applied and a jury made up of ordinary citizens delivered a verdict.”
After Merchan explained the sentence, he told Trump, “Sir, I wish you Godspeed as you pursue your second term in office.”
Trump was represented Friday morning, and at trial, by his personal lawyer Todd Blanche, whom he’s chosen to be the nation’s next deputy attorney general, the No. 2 position at the U.S. Justice Department.
Trump last-minute attempt
Following months of delays, the sentencing went forth despite Trump’s eleventh-hour request that the U.S. Supreme Court halt the proceeding. The justices denied Trump’s application late Thursday, though the order noted that Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would have granted it.
ABC News reported Thursday that Trump had spoken with Alito by phone just hours before submitting the application to the court’s emergency docket. Alito told the network that the two did not speak about the application.
The sentencing, lasting less than 30 minutes, was a brief disruption in Trump’s barreling preparations for his second presidency. The president-elect was set to host members of the House Freedom Caucus, a contingent of far-right House Republicans, at his Florida property later on Friday. Trump huddled with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill Wednesday and with Republican governors on Thursday.
Trump slammed his sentence on his Truth Social platform as a “scam,” “hoax” and “despicable charade” that he will appeal, a process that will likely drag on for years in New York.
“The real Jury, the American People, have spoken, by Re-Electing me with an overwhelming MANDATE in one of the most consequential Elections in History,” Trump wrote.
The 12 jurors in New York that convicted Trump were also U.S. citizens, or “American people,” as required by law.
Immunity argument
Trump had challenged his New York conviction on the grounds that last summer the Supreme Court ruled that former presidents enjoy criminal immunity for official acts while in office, and presumptive immunity for acts on the perimeter of their formal duties.
Merchan ultimately denied Trump’s immunity argument, saying that the trial and evidence “related entirely to unofficial conduct entitled to no immunity protection.”
Trump has also been occupied with another legal battle in recent days as he cheered a court order to block the release of Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s final report detailing federal criminal charges against Trump for mishandling and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate after he left office, and for scheming to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.
Smith ended both cases following Trump’s election victory, as the Justice Department has a long-standing protocol against prosecuting sitting presidents.
A federal appeals court Friday denied requests to block the report in full, leaving only protections for the portion of the report dealing with the classified documents case following an appeal by Trump’s two co-defendants in the case.
People gather in New Orleans for Transgender Day of Visibility on March 31, 2023. (Greg LaRose | Louisiana Illuminator)
A federal district court judge in Kentucky has struck down President Joe Biden’s effort to protect transgender students and make other changes to Title IX, ruling the U.S. Department of Education violated teachers’ rights by requiring them to use transgender students’ names and pronouns.
The ruling issued Thursday, which applies nationwide, came as a major blow to the Biden administration in its final days and to LGBTQ+ advocates. It comes less than two weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office, when the rule was likely to face more scrutiny from a candidate who took aim at transgender people in a culture-war focused campaign.
The Biden administration rule was released last April and aimed to protect LGBTQ+ students in K-12 schools, colleges and universities. The rule also conferred protections for pregnant students. The update to Title IX, the federal law that forbids sex-based discrimination in education, was expanded to include gender identity and sexual orientation.
In his opinion, Chief Judge Danny Reeves of the Eastern District of Kentucky wrote that the education department could not expand Title IX to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity. Reeves was nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush.
Gender identity refers to the gender that an individual identifies as, regardless of their sex assigned at birth.
“The entire point of Title IX is to prevent discrimination based on sex — throwing gender identity into the mix eviscerates the statute and renders it largely meaningless,” Reeves wrote.
Louisiana was among the states that sued the Biden administration over the rule. Its case was pending in the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals at the time of the ruling in Kentucky, which came in the case Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti brought.
“Louisiana is honored to have litigated this issue alongside Tennessee and our sister States,” Attorney General Liz Murrill said in a statement to the Illuminator. “This is a great day for America!”
Gov. Jeff Landry also praised the decision in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Biden’s attempt to rewrite Title IX is dead!,” Landry posted from his personal account. “It’s a shame this even had to go to court, but pleased to see this win for women and girls across our Nation.”
Prior to Thursday’s decision, the rule had been temporarily blocked in nearly half of U.S. states, including Louisiana and Tennessee, as litigation played out.
While Reeves’ opinion references a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that limits the regulatory authority of federal agencies, it also notably rejects the rule on First Amendment grounds.
“The First Amendment does not permit the government to chill speech or compel affirmance of a belief with which the speaker disagrees in this manner,” Reeves said, referring to sections of the law that could be interpreted as defining deadnaming and misgendering of students as harassment.
Deadnaming is when someone uses a transgender or nonbinary person’s birth name or “dead name” against their wishes. Misgendering occurs when someone refers to an individual by a gender they do not identify as.
Louisiana Illuminator is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Greg LaRose for questions: info@lailluminator.com.
Donald Trump walks to speak to the media after being found guilty following his hush money trial at Manhattan Criminal Court on May 30, 2024, in New York City. Trump, the president-elect, is set to be sentenced on Friday, Jan. 10. (Seth Wenig-Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court late Thursday denied President-elect Donald Trump’s eleventh-hour attempt to stop his sentencing in his New York hush money trial from going forward Friday morning.
Trump appealed to the court’s emergency docket late Tuesday to intervene in his forthcoming sentencing for 34 felony convictions, arguing that presidential immunity should protect him in the days before he takes the oath of office, and, as he has in the past, that evidence introduced at trial violated the immunity doctrine.
The court denied Trump’s request, in part, because his concerns over evidence introduced in state trial court can be dealt with on a state-level appeal, and because the burden the sentencing will place on him as a president-elect amounts to “a brief virtual hearing,” according to an unsigned order entered on the docket Thursday evening.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh “would grant the application,” according to the order.
Trump spoke by phone with Alito just hours before Trump submitted his request to the court, ABC News first reported early Thursday. Alito told the network the two spoke about a different topic.
New York Justice Juan Merchan scheduled Trump’s sentencing for 10 a.m. Friday, making clear that he would not seek jail time or fines for the president-elect. Rather, Trump will receive an “unconditional discharge,” meaning he’ll retain a criminal record in New York but face no other punishment. Merchan also agreed to give Trump the option for a virtual sentencing.
Immunity ruling
A jury convicted Trump in May after a weeks-long trial focusing on his bookkeeping maneuvers to hide a $130,000 payment made by his personal lawyer ahead of the 2016 presidential election to silence a porn star about a past sexual encounter. The conviction cemented Trump’s place in history as the first American president to become a convicted felon.
Trump fought the conviction after a Supreme Court ruling last summer that former presidents enjoy immunity from criminal prosecution for official duties, and presumptive immunity for duties on the outer limits of the office.
Merchan last month denied Trump’s motion to dismiss the case based on presidential immunity, writing that the evidence introduced was “related entirely to unofficial conduct entitled to no immunity protection.”
Manhattan DA slams Trump’s request
In his response to Trump’s request to the Supreme Court, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg argued the high court lacks jurisdiction because Trump has not exhausted his appeals at the state level. Jurisdiction aside, he argued, neither of Trump’s claims “comes close to justifying a stay of the forthcoming sentencing.”
In the application to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, Trump’s lawyers argued that New York state committed a “grave error” in holding that a president-elect is not protected by immunity.
Bragg called this argument “extraordinary” and “unsupported by any decision from any court.”
“It is axiomatic that there is only one President at a time. Non-employees of the government do not exercise any official function that would be impaired by the conclusion of a criminal case against a private citizen for private conduct,” Bragg wrote.
He also wrote that the trial court has taken “extraordinary steps to minimize any burdens” on Trump. Bragg wrote that Trump “has provided no record support for his claim that his duties as President-elect foreclose him from virtually attending a sentencing that will likely take no more than an hour.”
“The current schedule is also entirely a function of defendant’s repeated requests to adjourn a sentencing date that was originally set for July 11, 2024,” Bragg wrote.
Trump’s lawyers rebutted Bragg in a reply Thursday, saying that the Manhattan district attorney “downplays the importance of the Presidential transition and the need for an energetic executive.”
Trump reaction
In a post on his online platform Truth Social Thursday night, Trump criticized Merchan as “highly political and corrupt” and said he plans to continue to fight the conviction.
“For the sake and sanctity of the Presidency, I will be appealing this case, and am confident that JUSTICE WILL PREVAIL. The pathetic, dying remnants of the Witch Hunts against me will not distract us as we unite and, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!,” he wrote.
A Wisconsin barn in winter. | Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner
President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to deport millions of undocumented immigrants shortly after he takes office on Jan. 20 has triggered a flood of calls to advocates and local officials in Wisconsin.
“There is palpable fear and anxiety with our clients,” said Carmel Capati, managing immigration attorney for the Catholic Multicultural Center in Madison. Capati and another immigration attorney, Aissa Olivares of Dane County’s Community Immigration Law Center, gave a presentation during a Dec. 27 community forum on immigrant rights organized by former state Rep. Samba Baldeh (D-Madison).
Former state Rep. Samba Baldeh | official photo
“As we anticipate a change of national leadership, immigrant communities across our state are fearful of what may be coming,” Baldeh said.“It is essential that we as elected officials address that fear, stand up for the rule of law, and advocate for human rights-based policies that acknowledge the contributions of immigrants — who are our neighbors, co-workers, and friends.”
“There is still a lot of uncertainty,” Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said during the forum, which was held on Zoom. “No one knows what’s going to happen.” But, Barrett assured participants, “We will not be proactively involved in any sort of round-ups, any sort of immigration enforcement.”
During their presentation, the immigration attorneys addressed the concerns of university students, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, refugees and people from countries eligible for Temporary Protected Status during the administration of President Joe Biden — a status they said they expect Trump to revoke. Wisconsin’s immigrant residents should apply for benefits still available to them under the Biden administration, the lawyers said, to get their identity documents in order, and to make an emergency plan in case they are detained, including designating someone to pick up their children from school.
“It’s very important that we do avoid situations where we might be subject to arrest,” said Olivares. “And if unknown people are knocking on your door, don’t open the door.”
‘How in the hell will we continue to be the Dairy State?’
Nowhere would mass deportation have a bigger impact than on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, where an estimated 70% of the workforce is made up of immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central America. Because Congress has never created a year-round visa for low-skilled farm workers, almost all of Wisconsin’s immigrant dairy workers are undocumented. Without them, experts say, the whole industry would collapse.
At a Jan. 3 press conference in the Capitol, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers called the threat of mass deportation “illogical,” and said “we will do everything in our power to prevent it.”
Gov. Tony Evers at his Jan 3 press conference in the State Capitol. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
“The bottom line is, in Wisconsin, 70% of our farms … 70% of the people may be part of the federal government’s idea to move them elsewhere, out of our country,” Evers said. “Think about that. How in the hell will we continue to be the Dairy State with no one to milk the cows and do the other important work?”
Yet, despite the existential threat posed to dairy workers and Wisconsin’s marquee industry by Trump’s proposed roundups, during a recent reporting trip to rural Buffalo County — a heavy dairy producing area in Western Wisconsin — workers, farmers and local law enforcement officials told the Examiner they were not scrambling to prepare for raids.
“What are we going to do? We can’t do anything,” said a dairy worker from Mexico who goes by the nickname Junior and who works for Buffalo County dairy farmer John Rosenow. “We can’t hide. All we do is work, go home, go back to work, back home, back to work.”
“We all came here not for fun but out of necessity,” he added, speaking about the estimated 10,000 immigrant dairy workers in Wisconsin.
Junior, 19, has been working on Rosenow’s farm for the last year and a half, sending home money to help support his 3-year-old daughter. Like many of his co-workers, he came north to milk cows because the average wage for dairy workers, at $11 per hour, is far more than he could earn in Mexico, where a factory job pays the U.S. equivalent of just $20 per week. For decades, Mexican workers on Rosenow’s farm and other farms in the area have saved enough money to build houses, start businesses, and put their children through school back in Mexico.
The risks these workers have taken to come here include walking across the desert at night, evading kidnappers, and nearly suffocating while being smuggled in the trunk of a car. It can take a full year of work, rising at 4 a.m. to milk cows and shovel out barns, just to pay off a typical $12,000 debt to smugglers for a border crossing. Compared to all of that, workers say anti-immigrant political rhetoric does not seem like the biggest threat many of them face — especially those from Mexico who came to Wisconsin to build a better life, not, like many asylum-seekers, to flee violent persecution in their home country.
“I haven’t heard any workers ask about what might happen in the new administration,” said translator Mercedes Falk, who travels among about 20 farms in the Buffalo County area, interpreting for farmers and workers. “Farmers and workers are continuing to work side by side because they know that they are the ones that will make sure the cows are taken care of and the farms run smoothly. I think they both have been doing the work for so long that they understand that no one else is going to step in to do the work if it’s not them.”
“In our area, which is typical of most any dairy farm area in the country, most all farms with over 100 cows have immigrants working for them,” Rosenow said.
John Rosenow tours a house one of the workers on his farm is sending home money to build in Veracruz, Mexico, during a Puentes/Bridges trip in 2019. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
Rosenow, an outspoken advocate for his workers, helped found the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, which takes dairy farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota on an annual trip to rural Mexico, to see the homes and businesses their workers are building with the money they earn in the U.S. Falk, the translator, leads these trips.
“Trump says Mexico is not sending us their best,” Rosenow said during one such trip in 2019. “These Mexican towns are sending us their best when they send their young men up north.” His former workers, he said, have returned home to become leaders in their communities, local employers, and important supporters of two economies — in Wisconsin and in Mexico.
Mexican workers sent home $51.6 billion from U.S. jobs to help the Mexican economy in 2021, accounting for 4% of Mexico’s GDP (oil and gas only accounts for 3.3% of GDP for this petroleum producing country).
But while former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called those workers “living heroes,” Trump has called them criminals and rapists and promised to send them all home.
In rural Wisconsin, which voted heavily for Trump, some farmers who support Trump have told the Examiner they don’t believe he intends to deport their hardworking employees — that his real targets are criminals. But Trump made all undocumented immigrants a priority for deportation in his first term, unlike Biden, whose immigration policy has focused on deporting those who committed crimes or posed a threat to national security.
Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner
Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, whose district ecompasses a large swath of Western Wisconsin, including Buffalo County, sits on the House Agriculture Committee. Van Orden made cracking down on “criminal illegal aliens” a centerpiece of his 2024 reelection campaign. At a press conference in September, he highlighted a violent attack on a woman by a Venezuelan immigrant to denounce U.S. immigration policy. Van Orden acknowledged at that event that dairy farmers in his district rely on immigrant labor, but then went on to praise the H2A seasonal farmwork visa, which is not applicable to dairy farm work.
“I’m 100% behind making sure that we get as many people into the country lawfully to help support our industries,” Van Orden said. “I’m absolutely, adamantly opposed to letting a single known criminal enter this country, because this is what happens.”
Campaign rhetoric about crimes committed by immigrants runs counter to studies that show lower crime rates among immigrants in the U.S. than among U.S.-born residents.
During Evers’ press conference earlier this month, a reporter pressed the governor on whether he believed undocumented immigrants who commit crimes should be deported.
“What crime, speeding?” Evers asked. “Violent crimes,” the reporter clarified.
“It shouldn’t be treated any differently,” Evers said. Both immigrants and U.S. citizens should be prosecuted and put in prison if they were guilty of crimes, he added. “Serving that time is equally important for someone that is documented and someone that is not.”
The view from Buffalo County
In Buffalo County, local law enforcement officers told the Examiner they have not seen more crime among the immigrant population than among U.S. born residents of the area. Instead, police say, they can often be the victims.
Recently, Buffalo County Deputy Sheriff Aarik Lackershire got a call from Rosenow’s dairy farm. A worker there had asked Rosenow to lend him $1,500 to pay off a U.S. official who was demanding money and telling the worker he had to pay or be prosecuted for a crime.
Rosenow suspected his employee, Junior, was being scammed. Instead of loaning him the money, he called the sheriff. Lackershire arrived on the farm, Rosenow recalled, “with coke-bottle glasses, wearing full riot gear — leather, with a gun on his belt … I swear he was 18 at the most.”
A cow peers out of the milking parlor on Rosenow’s farm. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
Relations between local law enforcement and the immigrant workers on Wisconsin dairy farms have become strained in recent years because of workers’ fear of deportation. During the first Trump administration, high-profile raids and a hostile political climate caused some workers to return to their home countries while others simply stopped going out. Many live on the farms where they work and avoid contact with the police. Rosenow has fewer than a dozen employees and most of them, young men and a few women, came up from Mexico without their families and live in a barracks on the farm to save money and send more home.
Lackershire did not come to Rosenow’s farm to arrest Junior. Instead, the deputy spent a long time talking to him in Rosenow’s office, next to the milking parlor, listening carefully and explaining to Junior that he had been the victim of a scam.
“He obviously wanted to help,” said Rosenow. “The next day I was in Alma, so I stopped at the sheriff’s office to thank them for doing such a great job.”
Immigrants are required by law to attest that they are authorized to work in the United States, and employers must review their documents “to determine whether they reasonably appear to be genuine and relate to the employee” — a standard which does not put a heavy onus on employers to carefully scrutinize the documents. Employers of must keep an employment eligibility verification form — From I-9 — on file for each employee for three years.
In addition, the IRS allows immigrants who don’t have a Social Security number to file taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Number (ITN) — a resource advocates have encouraged undocumented workers to use to claim tax credits and other benefits for their families, and to establish their work history for possible future use in obtaining legal immigration status.
For years, dairy farmers have lobbied Congress to create a visa for year-round agricultural workers, expanding on the H-2A agricultural visa program which can only be used by seasonal workers. In 2021, the House passed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act with broad bipartisan support. Among other provisions, it created a visa for immigrant workers who stay in the U.S. year-round. (All of Wisconsin’s Republican House members voted against the bill and all Wisconsin Democrats voted for it.) Sponsors of the Senate version of the bill — Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colorado) and Sen. Mike Crapo (R-Idaho) struggled to get agreement on controversial provisions. Among the sticking points was an expansion of labor protections opposed by the American Farm Bureau Federation that would have allowed farmworkers to sue their employers.
Farmers and workers in rural Wisconsin say they hope the national anti-immigrant climate will blow over, and that they can’t afford to abandon an economic relationship both groups depend on for their livelihoods. Throughout rural Wisconsin, immigrant workers and the state’s U.S.-born residents continue to coexist and, in many cases, try to help each other, as Lackershire did for Junior.
‘They don’t know who they can trust’
At first, when Lackershire showed up at Rosenow’s farm, Junior was reluctant to talk. “It’s a person you don’t know, and you’re telling him things — you feel nervous,” he said in an interview later, in Spanish, recalling the scene. But Lackershire spent a lot of time listening patiently to Junior’s story, with the assistance of Falk, the interpreter, whom Rosenow called and put on speaker phone. Lackershire explained to Junior that the person who called him demanding payment could not have been a U.S. official, since the call came from outside the United States.
Deputy Aarik Lackershire | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
“After that he warmed up a little bit,” Lackershire recalled in an interview, sitting at the dining room table at his home in Durand. It was a convoluted extortion scam involving three different callers, one posing as a woman with a sick child who needed help, one as a law enforcement officer, and one as a friend of Junior’s from Mexico. Lackershire said he’s encountered many similar scams, but this was “probably the most layered one I’ve dealt with.”
“He’s telling me about three different people, three different stories, and none of it’s making sense,” Lackershire recalled. “Wow. So that was an obstacle. And obviously, doing all this through translators, some stuff gets lost in translation.”
Falk said she was impressed with Lackershire’s patience. “I never got a sense of any ounce of frustration from him even though it was a long interaction at 9 p.m.,” she said. The whole experience, she added, “gave me a newfound appreciation for humanity and how empowering it is to connect on a human level in spite of speaking different languages and being from different cultures.”
Scammers target people of all backgrounds, Lackershire said. But immigrants are particularly vulnerable and, in his experience, are more frequently shaken down for large sums of money.
“It seems like they take more advantage of immigrants because they don’t know the legal system of the U.S.,” Lackershire said.
“This group of people obviously has a fear of being sent back to where they came from,” he added. “They don’t know who they can trust.”
That lack of trust makes it harder for law enforcement to do its job.
“We have to go to every 911 call, and we’ve had hang-ups at worker barracks at 4 in the morning,” Lackershire said. “And obviously going around knocking on doors as a police officer at 4 in the morning on a primarily illegal population stirs everybody up and they get nervous. The intention is to see if somebody needs help, and a lot of people aren’t even willing to talk.”
Over time, Lackershire feels he has gained the confidence of people who used to avoid him. Some will now translate for him on occasion. Lackershire himself grew up in the area and went to school with the children of immigrant farm workers. “They are just trying to support their families, which I respect,” he said.
‘We treat the immigrant workers and nonimmigrant workers the same’
When, in October 2023, Minnesota stopped requiring proof of legal residency to get a driver’s license, Lackershire began carrying around handouts from a Minnesota immigrant rights group to give to the unlicensed immigrant drivers he pulls over, encouraging them to get a Minnesota license. (The Wisconsin Legislature changed state law in 2007 to bar undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses.)
Lackershire said he sees a lot of immigrant drivers in Wisconsin who have registered and insured their vehicles in Minnesota, “trying to do the best they can.” But he still hands out a lot of tickets in Wisconsin for driving without a license. “That’s not something we typically make an arrest for; that’s usually a traffic ticket,” he said. But after they get too many tickets, unlicensed drivers in Wisconsin are treated as though their licenses have been revoked, Lackershire explained, “and then it’s a driving after revocation. And that’s actually a criminal charge.” Criminal charges can trigger an immigration hold and deportation proceedings.
Voces de la Frontera and allied organizations held a lobby day at the Capitol during the Day Without Latinos and Essential Workers general strike in 2022. | Photo | Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner
Currently 19 states and the District of Columbia allow unauthorized immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. In Minnesota, applicants must pass a driving test, have insurance and a Minnesota address where they can receive their license in the mail, but they do not have to provide proof of residency, according to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety.
Having a lot of unlicensed drivers on the road creates a public safety hazard.
Lackershire’s boss, Buffalo County Sheriff Mike Osmond, said in a phone interview that he and his deputies often come upon abandoned cars that are registered to people with no driver’s license and left in a ditch after a crash. “If they are immigrant workers, they tend to not stick around,” he said.
“We treat the immigrant workers and nonimmigrant workers the same,” Osmond added. “If you’re the victim of a crime, I want our deputies to spend time and educate you. We’re not out there looking for immigrant workers.”
As for the possibility that his department might be asked to help with mass deportations, Osmond said he’s not worried. “I guess I’ll figure it out when it happens, if it happens,” he said. He’s not prepared to say what his department policy will be on cooperating with federal immigration agents.
“In my entire career I don’t know I’ve ever had a request from a federal agency to help with immigration, except once when there was an ICE hold on someone in the jail,” he said. That was during the first Trump administration.
“If President-elect Donald Trump was sitting in the passenger seat of my truck right now, I’d tell him to deport the people out of the jails and prisons — these are folks who’ve come here and committed a crime.”
‘I have a lot of goals, a lot of dreams’
Falk teaches a regular Monday night English class on Rosenow’s farm.
Mercedes Falk teaches an English class to workers on John Rosenow’s farm. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner
On a recent December evening, she greeted Junior as he came out of Rosenow’s milking parlor, as three people in their early twenties — two young men and one young woman — arrived for class. The three students laughed and teased each other as they took turns translating the sentences Falk wrote on a white board.
Junior, standing off to the side, said he had taken Lackershire’s advice and blocked the people who scammed him. He was glad he’d only given them $600.
Junior’s father also clocked out of the milking parlor while the English class was going on. He had been on the farm for the last four years, he said, and was planning to go home to Mexico next year.
“It’s always next year,” one of Falk’s students said, laughing. His father, who also works on the farm and sends home money to the rest of the family, says the same thing every year, he added.
As for Junior, “I just have a couple of years left. That’s enough for me, then I’ll go back,” he said.
In that time, he hopes he’ll have enough money to build a house. “I have a lot of goals,” he said, “a lot of dreams.”
This is the first installment in an Examiner series on immigration in Wisconsin.
(The Center Square) – Wisconsin’s Department of Workforce Development said it recovered nearly $1 million in recovered wages and penalties owed to workers in 2024.
(The Center Square) – Nearly $39 million in federal funding will be going to Amtrak’s Borealis Service, which runs through Wisconsin on the route between Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota.
Wisconsin taxpayers paid $1.6 million to Planned Parenthood and others who sued over a 2013 state law that was ruled an unconstitutional restriction on abortion access.
In a new attack, the Wisconsin Democratic Party blamed conservative Brad Schimel for the costs, but he didn’t become state attorney general until 2015.
Schimel faces liberal Susan Crawford in the April 1 state Supreme Court election.
The law would have required doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of where an abortion was done.
After Planned Parenthood sued, federal judge William Conley in Madison temporarily blocked the law, then in 2015 ruled it unconstitutional.
Schimel appealed, arguing the restriction was reasonable. A three-judge federal appeals court in Chicago upheld Conley. Schimel asked the U.S. Supreme Court to take the case, but it refused.
More than a year after ending its decade-long affiliation with the Milwaukee Education Partnership, Milwaukee Public Schools is still trying to recoup money from the organization for work it never performed.
MPS sent an invoice to Milwaukee Education Partnership on Dec. 19, 2023, for $64,170. The district sent four follow-up invoices to the organization before turning the matter over to Kohn Law Firm in May 2024, according to records obtained by WPR.
The school district is still awaiting payment from the now-defunct organization, which was led by Gerard Randall, a top Wisconsin GOP official who helped secure the Republican National Convention for Milwaukee.
Randall did not respond to requests for comment from WPR.
School board member Missy Zombor said the money Randall owes to MPS could be used to serve students.
“That’s potentially an educator in front of a student,” Zombor said. “I mean, $64,000 is not a small amount of money, so not being able to recoup those funds impacts students directly.”
During its relationship with MPS, Milwaukee Education Partnership received nearly $1.3 million in no-bid district contracts, promising to improve student achievement in the district.
In 2022, the partnership received $64,170. That money was for the group’s Milwaukee Connects program, which aims to “enhance the pipeline of graduates from Milwaukee to Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” according to the contract.
The contract required the partnership to provide 10 graduating MPS students with semester-long paid internships to include professional mentoring, housing and transportation between Oct. 1, 2022, and Sept. 30, 2023.
In an email exchange last year with WPR, Randall said “a cohort is being developed for the semester beginning January 2024.”
He would not answer further questions.
The students were never provided mentoring or internships, but Randall did receive the payment, according to documents obtained by WPR.
Milwaukee Education Partnership was also listing several high-profile officials in tax filings as board officers without their knowledge.
They included Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jill Underly, former Milwaukee Public Schools Superintendent Keith Posley, former Milwaukee Area Technical College President Vicki Martin and University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone.
After being elected to the MPS board in 2023, Zombor began examining various MPS no-bid contracts. When she visited the Milwaukee Education Partnership website, she found it featured years-old financial reports and listed names of people no longer associated with the group.
Zombor began asking questions, which ultimately led to Posley suspending the district’s relationship with Milwaukee Education Partnership in November 2023.
Zombor says she would like MPS to explore its options for awarding contracts.
“It feels like this contract was potentially for a fictitious nonprofit,” Zombor said. “We have to trust that when vendors or partners come to MPS that they’re being honest about the services they provide. But I think we have to continue to enhance the accountability of the procurement process so that we can safeguard public money.”
It’s a known risk for the municipal clerks who run Wisconsin elections: Starting at 7 a.m. on Election Day, they have around 16 hours to finish counting every vote, or they may start facing accusations of a fraudulent late-night “ballot dump.”
Those baseless allegations, which sometimes go viral, have plagued election officials across the state but especially in Milwaukee, where counting often finishes in the early morning hours after Election Day. Republican candidates have repeatedly cast suspicion on the timing of results in the largely Democratic city to explain away their statewide losses.
Currently, there’s little election officials can do to finish counting ballots sooner. Under state law, clerks must wait until the morning of Election Day to begin processing ballots and counting votes, even if they received those ballots weeks earlier.
Election officials are considering two strategies to change that. Both would require approval in the majority-Republican Legislature. At least one of them is highly likely to get signed into law in 2025.
One proposed measure would significantly simplify early in-person voting procedures. Currently, people who vote early in person receive and fill out absentee ballots, which get set aside in envelopes and aren’t processed or tabulated until Election Day. The proposal clerks are considering, which is similar to a measure that received some legislative support several years ago, would allow early voters instead to put their ballots right into a tabulator.
The other measure, which has been repeatedly pitched and then rejected in one or both legislative chambers, would allow election officials to get a one-day head start and begin processing absentee ballots on the Monday before the election. This past session, the proposal passed the Assembly but stalled in the Senate.
Early voting, without the envelopes
The direct early voting measure appears unlikely to pass the Legislature in its current form. But experts say it would make elections more efficient and reduce the number of errors that the more complex process of casting and processing absentee ballots causes voters and election officials to make.
Currently, 47 states offer some form of early in-person voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Thirteen states, including Wisconsin, have in-person absentee voting, seven states have primarily mail voting with some early voting options, and 27 states have early in-person voting.
In Wisconsin, voters cast early in-person ballots at polling sites, but under state law, each ballot goes in an absentee ballot envelope that has to be signed by the voter and filled out with a witness’ address and signature, almost as if they were voting by mail. The envelopes and ballots can’t be processed until Election Day, when poll workers have to verify that each ballot is properly signed and witnessed before counting it.
Processing these ballots as absentee ballots is time-consuming and invites errors, said Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law, who advocates for reducing the number of steps involved for voters and election officials.
The complications of the current early voting system became evident this year, when delays in the system used to print labels on absentee ballot envelopes, typically before voters fill out their ballot, forced voters to wait in long lines. That problem wouldn’t have come up if the early voting system had not relied on absentee ballot procedures.
But even when it moves smoothly, the early voting system with absentee ballots requires extra work. For example, election workers typically serve as witnesses for absentee voters, signing and filling out their information for each voter. That requires an additional worker in many voting precincts.
Municipal clerks are discussing a proposal that would allow voters to cast ballots in person at their clerks’ offices as early as two weeks before the election, but to skip most of the absentee process — no witnesses, no signatures, no envelopes. Those voters would have to apply for an absentee ballot at the clerk’s office, but otherwise the process would be similar to voting on Election Day.
The ballots would be scanned by tabulators used specifically for early in-person voting, said Janesville Clerk Lorena Stottler, who’s also a co-chair of the Wisconsin Municipal Clerks Association’s legislative committee. Officials would wait until Election Day to generate the total number of votes from those ballots.
The proposal would reduce costs on multiple levels, Stottler said, since there wouldn’t be any absentee ballot envelopes, and fewer staff would be required in the early voting period and on Election Day to process absentee ballots. It would also lower the administrative costs of sorting absentee envelopes alphabetically and by ward, she said.
To ensure a high level of security, the proposal would require municipalities opting into the program to maintain a chain of custody, put cameras on the voting machines, and ensure that the tabulator saves an image of every ballot it scans, Stottler said.
Milwaukee, the state’s biggest city and typically among the last municipalities to finish counting votes, lobbied for such a proposal last year. Similar legislation came up in 2020, passing the Assembly but not the Senate.
Rep. Scott Krug, the former chair and current vice chair of the Assembly Elections Committee, said he could support some version of an early voting expansion, as long as all Wisconsin municipalities participated.
“My issue is finding a way to have availability in rural areas like mine,” said Krug, who lives in Nekoosa, a city of 2,500 in central Wisconsin. “So many towns have clerks with other full-time obligations. I’d only support an expansion of early voting if access were equal across the board.”
That would include set hours, set days and funding for smaller communities, he said, adding that he was willing to negotiate with advocates of the measure. In the past, funding election offices has been a tough sell in the Legislature.
Claire Woodall, former executive director of the Milwaukee Election Commission and a current senior adviser at the election reform group Issue One, said the early voting proposal could help election officials, especially if every municipality had the same early voting program.
And to reduce confusion and the potential for errors, Woodall said, it would be better to roll out such a program over multiple years, rather than in one go.
Michigan recently implemented a similar measure, allowing voters to cast ballots early in person and insert them directly into a tabulator. The Michigan early voting program runs for a minimum of nine consecutive days, but municipalities can offer the option for as many as 28 days total before an election. The change helped speed up election results in 2024 without leading to any notable issues.
Pre-processing ballots on Monday before election
The so-called Monday processing proposal appears likely to garner more support in the Legislature than it has in the past. For years, election officials have been lobbying for the proposal to allow election officials to begin processing ballots the Monday before an election. Resistance from Republican lawmakers appears to be withering.
The proposal, election officials say, would speed up election results that have taken longer to report as more voters choose absentee voting. And critically, the earlier results could stave off false allegations about fraudulent late-night ballot dumps, like the ones then-President Donald Trump made about Milwaukee after his 2020 loss.
The Monday processing proposal, along with the early voting one, would help election officials finish counting ballots earlier, Woodall said.
Wisconsin’s most recently proposed early processing measure would have allowed election officials to start checking absentee ballot envelopes for voters’ identity and eligibility, open the envelopes, take out the ballots, and scan them through tabulators — but not tally them until Election Day.
But despite growing Republican support, the measure has faced GOP headwinds in the Legislature. In 2020, the proposal received public hearings in both chambers but never passed out of committee. In 2022, it passed the Senate but not the Assembly. This past session, it passed the Assembly but not the Senate.
The most significant opposition in the Senate this past session came from Sen. Dan Knodl, the Republican chair of the chamber’s election committee. He said that he didn’t trust Milwaukee enough to support the bill and that he was concerned about the chain of custody for ballots. Other Republicans worried that there weren’t enough GOP election observers in Milwaukee to watch the Monday and Tuesday processes. Knodl’s opposition stalled the proposal. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, a Republican, criticized the Senate’s inaction.
This upcoming session, Knodl is in the Assembly, and he’s not leading the election committee. One of the Senate’s top Republican leaders, Sen. Mary Felzkowski, said in December that she supports the proposal.
Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.
Steil was appointed to the role last week by Rep. French Hill, the House Financial Services chair who has emerged as a major crypto backer in Congress.
The State Building Commission on Friday approved a new proposal to use unspent funds for a new engineering building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It comes after Republicans on the commission blocked a similar proposal last month.
Students at Abundant Life Christian School returned for classes at the private Madison school for the first time since a shooting there left three people dead.
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