U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will move its Milwaukee processing operations from a downtown building owned by the Milwaukee School of Engineering to a site on the Northwest Side, an ICE spokesperson said in an email to NNS.
ICE has been using the university-owned building at 310 E. Knapp St. as a processing center, a presence that has drawn weekly protests from students and community members since June.
A spokesperson for the General Services Administration, the real estate arm of the federal government, said the GSA “remains focused on supporting this administration’s goal of optimizing the federal footprint, and providing the best workplaces for our federal agencies to meet their mission,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to NNS.
Demonstrators have been calling on the university to cut ties with the agency.
MSOE officials say the university inherited the federal lease when it purchased the building in 2023 and does not have the legal authority to remove ICE.
Alan Madry, professor emeritus at Marquette University Law School, said there is no question the federal government has eminent domain authority in such situations.
The federal government has the legal power to take or use property for public purposes even if a private landowner or local government objects.
In a statement to NNS, ICE said the transition “will follow a phased approach to ensure a smooth and efficient process” and that the agency “remains committed to maintaining continuity of operations as the office becomes fully operational.”
Processing centers are typically used to conduct interviews and sometimes hold people for the short term rather than overnight detention.
The ICE spokesperson did not provide a timeline for the move, but said the new location at 11925 W. Lake Park Drive will operate as a processing center, not a detention facility.
In a statement, Jeremy McGovern, spokesperson for the Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services, said the city has no additional inspections scheduled for the Lake Park Drive site and that the certificate of occupancy is already in place.
Because the federal government is not subject to local zoning and permit requirements, McGovern said, the city cannot determine when the site becomes active and has limited knowledge about the federal timeline.
The university says it intends to use the Knapp Street building for academic purposes once ICE leaves. But Noah Dinan, a sophomore studying software engineering at the school, said the lack of clarity about the move raises troubling possibilities.
The transition could take years, or ICE could expand its Milwaukee operations rather than relocate, said Dinan, who is a member of the university’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America.
The organization has circulated petitions, contacted alumni and joined the weekly Friday protests.
Dinan also pointed to the financial incentives of leasing to ICE.
According to the General Services Administration’s September 2025 lease inventory, the federal government is paying the university about $2.1 million per year to occupy the Knapp Street site through April 2028.
Despite the news that ICE has plans to transition from Knapp Street to its new property, Dinan said he and other students plan to continue protesting.
“Our campaign is one of sanctuary,” Dinan said.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
ICE plans to leave Milwaukee School of Engineering facility is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
SUPREME COSTS: This is the second in a series of articles about how Wisconsin chooses its judges.
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court justices were concerned.
For the first time, a campaign for a high court seat had topped $5 million in spending, driven by negative television advertising that had rarely before been part of this state’s judicial races. They feared it could happen again.
That’s why all seven justices — conservatives as well as liberals — signed a 2007 letter to Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and the Legislature, calling for “realistic, meaningful public financing for Supreme Court elections” to protect the court’s reputation against “the risk … that the public may inaccurately perceive a justice as beholden to individuals or groups that contribute to his or her campaign.”
It took two tries — and two more big-spending high court elections — before a Democratic-led Legislature and Doyle enacted a public financing law in 2009. But it lasted for just one Supreme Court campaign before a Republican-controlled Legislature and GOP Gov. Scott Walker repealed it in 2011.
The justices still had their own chance to protect the court’s reputation, by strengthening the rules for when they would have to step aside from cases involving their financial backers. Instead, they adopted what might be one of the nation’s most lax recusal rules for campaign donations.
Three of the conservative justices who had signed the 2007 letter were part of the 4-3 majority that enacted a 2010 recusal rule largely written by the major business organization that was pumping millions of dollars into conservative high court campaigns.
The stories behind that shift in recusal rules, the short-lived venture in public financing of high court races and the campaign finance laws that followed help explain how Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign spending exploded this spring to a national record of $114.2 million — almost 20 times the cost of that first big-money election 18 years earlier. That total doesn’t include billionaire Elon Musk’s controversial $30.3 million effort to hand out checks to conservative voters.
Yet the history of public financing and attempts to tighten recusal rules also offer hope for those still trying to stop the trend of ever more expensive judicial races.
Public financing responds to a central concern that current and former justices and others voice about multimillion-dollar Supreme Court elections — the perception that big donors are buying justices who will rule in those donors’ favor when their cases reach the court.
“Why do people think this is a good use of their money? What do they think they are getting from this court?” Justice Brian Hagedorn asked about big donors in an August interview with Milwaukee’s WISN-TV. “It is in many respects a vote of no-confidence in this court — that this court is not going to be a place that’s just going to apply the law, at least all seven of us.”
Advocates of public financing believe voters and taxpayers should be a candidate’s biggest donors. Candidate campaigns receive grants from state or local governments while agreeing to limits on spending and on how much they accept from individual and organizational donors.
That wasn’t a new idea in Wisconsin in 2007. A public financing system already had been in effect for 30 years for candidates for all state offices, including Supreme Court justices.
The Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund grew out of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, which held that limits on campaign spending violated the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech — unless candidates voluntarily agreed to limit their spending in exchange for public financing.
The Legislature responded by enacting the nation’s most comprehensive public financing law. Taxpayers decided how much the state campaign finance fund should receive each year, by checking a box on their income tax returns to designate $1 of their taxes for public financing.
That system “worked extremely well for over a decade,” according to a 2002 analysis by the nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. “The vast majority of candidates in both parties accepted public financing and ran campaigns under spending limits.”
However, the system declined for several reasons, the Democracy Campaign report found. In 1986, the Legislature stopped adjusting maximum campaign grants for inflation, leaving them frozen at that year’s levels. Also, even though the $1 checkoff didn’t increase any individual’s taxes, taxpayer interest waned, as participation fell from a peak of 19.7% in 1979 to 5% in 2002.
The third factor, according to the Democracy Campaign, was another side effect of Buckley v. Valeo, which ended limits on “issue ads” that aren’t coordinated with candidates and that don’t explicitly tell viewers to vote for or against a specific candidate. Such ads started popping up in Wisconsin elections as early as 1996. Candidates balked at spending limits when they knew they might have to respond to unlimited negative advertising by outside groups, the Democracy Campaign wrote.
Nonetheless, the 2000 Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates, then-Milwaukee County Judge Diane Sykes and then-Milwaukee Municipal Judge Louis Butler, still used public financing in their campaigns. After Sykes won, one of her advisers complained that the spending limits “killed the drama of a truly exciting matchup.” However, the candidates themselves attributed the drama-free race to their own commitment to civility, with Butler reflecting that “media coverage … didn’t come because we weren’t being nasty to one another.”
That would change after the conservative Sykes became a federal appeals court judge and Doyle appointed the liberal Butler to replace her. Incensed by a product liability decision written by Butler, the state’s largest business group, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, started spending millions of dollars to elect conservatives to the high court.
In the first WMC-funded campaign in 2007, now-Justice Annette Ziegler defeated liberal attorney Linda Clifford at a cost more than four times the previous record of $1.4 million. The high price tag and flood of negative advertising spurred calls for reform.
Doyle proposed more extensive public financing for Supreme Court campaigns. Ziegler and Butler joined the rest of their colleagues in backing the concept, without signing on to the specifics of Doyle’s proposal. The bill passed in the Democratic-led Senate but died in committee in the Republican-controlled Assembly.
Just as the justices feared, Butler’s 2008 bid for a full term sparked an even more expensive and mean-spirited contest than Ziegler’s 2007 race. Conservative Michael Gableman defeated Butler, the court’s first Black justice, in a $6 million campaign that drew accusations of racist and misleading advertising.
Diane Diel, then president of the State Bar of Wisconsin, warned lawmakers that “the infusion of such large amounts into a judicial campaign poses a threat to both judicial neutrality and public trust in the justice system.”
The Democratic-controlled Legislature passed a public financing bill, and Doyle signed it into law as the Impartial Justice Act in 2009. Abiding by the new law, both 2011 Supreme Court candidates, conservative Justice David Prosser and liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg, accepted state grants and held to spending limits.
But the candidates’ treasuries accounted for less than a quarter of the $5.9 million spent in a campaign supercharged by controversy over Republican legislation that stripped most public-sector workers of nearly all collective bargaining rights. Anticipating that legal challenges eventually would reach the high court, conservative interests outspent unions on issue ads, $2.7 million to $1.6 million, in a race so close that Prosser won only after a recount.
Prosser’s victory maintained the conservative court majority that later upheld the bargaining legislation known as Act 10. Meanwhile, the GOP-led Legislature and Walker repealed the Impartial Justice Act and dismantled the Wisconsin Election Campaign Fund shortly after the spring 2011 election.
State Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, is now drafting a bill to revive the Impartial Justice Act, which she calls “really important to preserving judicial integrity.”
Roys, who is running for governor, said one major difference in her proposal will be the size of the campaign grants. She’s considering amounts 10 times higher than what she called the “laughably low” original grants of $100,000 for primary candidates and $300,000 for general election candidates. Grants of $1 million in the primary and $3 million in the general election would exceed the campaign treasuries of any high court candidate before the 2023 race, which at the time set a national spending record of $50.4 million.
“It can’t be joke money or nobody will do it,” Roys said.
North Carolina’s first-in-the-nation system of paying for state supreme and appellate court campaigns met the same fate as Wisconsin’s original Impartial Justice Act in 2013, after Republicans won control of that state’s legislative and executive branches. That leaves New Mexico as the only state funding judicial campaigns with taxpayer dollars.
Instead of setting specific grant levels, New Mexico uses a formula based on the number of registered voters eligible to vote in each partisan primary or general election and on whether the election is contested or uncontested, with limited individual donations supplementing public grants. With no primary contests and four general election candidates for two contested seats, the state fund provided $1.1 million of the $1.2 million spent in 2022, up slightly from 2020, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Of the other 13 states that offer public campaign financing for at least some elections, 11 appoint high court justices; Michigan’s system applies only to gubernatorial races; and Minnesota’s system excludes Supreme Court candidates.
Both the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and the Brennan Center advocate for public financing.
Public financing doesn’t stop special interests from spending big on “issue ads” or through independent expenditures on ads that clearly state who they favor or oppose.
That outside spending has exceeded the cash spent directly by the candidates in 10 of the last 12 contested Supreme Court campaigns — by ratios as high as 4 to 1 in 2008 and 3 to 1 in 2011.
The only exceptions were two elections in which liberal incumbents trounced conservative circuit judges: then-Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson in 2009 and then-Justice Ann Walsh Bradley in 2015.
In Wisconsin’s first two multimillion-dollar Supreme Court contests, WMC’s political action committee (PAC) spent $2.2 million on issue ads backing Ziegler in 2007 and $1.8 million on issue ads backing Gableman in 2008, according to Wisconsin Democracy Campaign estimates.
That triggered disputes over whether those two justices should step away from cases involving WMC. Ziegler refused to recuse herself from one 2007 case in which WMC had filed a friend-of-the-court brief, but a month later recused from another case brought partly by the Wisconsin Realtors Association, which had directly contributed the then-maximum $8,625 to her campaign.
Over the next two years, justices fielded four petitions asking them to clarify recusal rules. The League of Women Voters of Wisconsin and former Justice William Bablitch urged the court to set thresholds for when donations or outside spending by a litigant or attorney would require a justice to recuse. Conversely, WMC and the Realtors Association called for rules that would not require justices to recuse based only on how much a litigant or attorney had spent supporting their campaigns.
While the Wisconsin justices considered those petitions, the U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on a case in which coal company CEO Don Blankenship had spent $3 million supporting candidate Brent Benjamin’s 2004 West Virginia Supreme Court campaign — more than all of Benjamin’s other backers combined. Benjamin narrowly won and cast the deciding vote to overturn a $50 million judgment against Blankenship’s company after refusing to recuse himself.
In their 5-4 decision tossing the state court’s ruling, the federal justices held that the circumstances were so extreme that they created “a serious risk of actual bias” that required Benjamin to recuse. However, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s 2009 opinion added that few other cases would likely meet the same standard.
Against that background, the Wisconsin Supreme Court voted in 2010 to deny the LWV and Bablitch petitions and adopt verbatim the WMC and Realtors Association rules recommendations. Conservative Justices Patience Roggensack, Gableman, Prosser and Ziegler backed the new rules, while liberals Abrahamson and Bradley and moderate Justice Patrick Crooks dissented.
“Neither Justice Ziegler nor any other justice recused from this rulemaking process, despite the financial backing they had received from the parties requesting the rules,” the University of Wisconsin Law School’s State Democracy Research Initiative recounted in a report.
Explaining the new rules, the court majority argued that disqualifying judges based on legal campaign donations “would create the impression that receipt of a contribution automatically impairs a judge’s integrity.”
Also, because Supreme Court justices aren’t replaced when they recuse, the majority wrote, “involuntary recusal … has greater policy implications” than in lower courts because it changes how many and which justices are deciding a case. On Wisconsin’s closely divided seven-member high court, the withdrawal of a single justice from the majority bloc can often create a 3-3 deadlock.
Nonetheless, the State Democracy Research Initiative called the Wisconsin rules “unusual.” Former Justice Janine Geske agreed the change was a step backward.
By contrast, several states and the American Bar Association’s Model Code of Judicial Conduct “require judges to recuse when a party or a party’s lawyer have contributed more than a specific amount to a judge’s campaign,” according to the State Democracy Research Initiative. A few other states call for recusal based on campaign contributions but don’t set a specific dollar limit. And most states leave recusal up to judges but don’t exclude contributions as a reason to do so.
Both recusal rules and outside campaign spending were in the spotlight again in 2015.
A case before the high court turned on a state law barring independent expenditure groups and issue ad organizations from coordinating with candidates’ campaigns. Act 10 had triggered an unprecedented recall against Walker. After the Republican governor’s victory in that 2012 recall election, several district attorneys jointly opened what was supposed to be a secret John Doe investigation into whether his campaign had illegally coordinated with groups that funded issue ads supporting him.
Some of the same organizations under scrutiny had also spent millions on issue ads in support of four conservative justices. But Prosser and Gableman refused to recuse themselves from the case challenging the probe.
Howard Schweber, professor emeritus of political science and legal studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the conservative justices’ decision not to recuse “a truly shocking situation.” By contrast, Ann Walsh Bradley recused herself because her son worked with one of the attorneys involved.
With its four-member conservative majority intact, the high court ruled the prohibition on coordinating with issue ad groups was unconstitutional, ending the investigation of Walker. Legislative Republicans promptly wrote the court’s decision into a 2015 campaign finance law, which Walker signed.
At the time, Wisconsin and Florida were the only states that allowed issue ads to be coordinated with a candidate’s campaign, said Jay Heck, executive director of the government reform group Common Cause Wisconsin. Weak coordination rules like Wisconsin’s “effectively allow wealthy special interests to bankroll candidates,” sidestepping limits on direct donations to campaigns and opening the door to “corruption and the appearance of corruption,” said Elizabeth Shimek, senior legal counsel for campaign finance at the Campaign Legal Center.
Concern about Wisconsin’s lax recusal standards would only grow. In 2017, 54 retired judges — including Geske and Butler — petitioned the high court to toughen recusal rules.
When the 2010 rules were adopted, the petition noted, the majority contended that direct donations were too small to influence justices because the 2009 Impartial Justice Act had sliced contribution caps from $10,000 for individuals and $8,650 for political action committees to $1,000 for each. But the 2015 campaign finance law boosted the donation limits to $20,000 for individuals and $18,000 for PACs.
Similarly, the petition said, the 2010 majority had argued that judicial candidates couldn’t be held responsible for groups making independent expenditures and running issue ads because at the time they were legally barred from coordinating with those groups. But the coordination rules for issue ads also had changed with the 2015 law and the John Doe decision that preceded it.
The retired judges asked for a rule that would require litigants and their attorneys to disclose their contributions to the judges hearing their cases at each level. Supreme Court justices would be required to recuse if they received contributions or benefited from outside spending of more than $10,000, with lower amounts for lower court judges.
And to address the high court majority’s concern about recusal leaving the bench short, the retired judges called for a constitutional amendment that would allow Court of Appeals judges to sit in for justices who recuse themselves.
But the Supreme Court rejected the petition on a 5-2 vote along ideological lines. Most of the conservative justices in the majority said they trusted judges to decide when to recuse, while Justice Rebecca Bradley argued that required recusal would disenfranchise the voters who elected a justice.
The issue could come up again now that liberal Jill Karofsky is chief justice. Speaking at a WisPolitics event in October, she said she is committed to holding an “open” and “transparent” hearing about establishing new recusal rules for the court.
State law sets recusal standards for some conflicts of interest, but not campaign contributions, according to the State Democracy Research Initiative.
The Brennan Center still advocates nationwide for the kind of recusal rules that the retired judges supported, said Douglas Keith, deputy director of the center’s judiciary program. However, Keith added that he wasn’t aware of any state that requires litigants to disclose contributions in court.
Another Brennan Center recommendation urges independent review of recusal motions. As of 2016, Wisconsin was one of 35 states that allow high court justices to decide whether to recuse themselves, while Michigan was among the 15 states where someone else rules on recusal, according to the center’s most recent report on that question.
Efforts to redraw legislative and congressional districts in this decade have spurred new recusal controversies — and turned the tables on which party backs recusal.
When Republicans took full control of the executive and legislative branches after the 2010 elections, they drew maps that guaranteed their party a comfortable majority in both the Assembly and Senate, even if state voters were split 50-50, in what experts called one of the nation’s most extreme examples of gerrymandering.
A decade later, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers clashed with legislative Republicans over how to redraw the maps after the 2020 Census, throwing the issue into the courts. With virtually no legal precedent, justices voted 4-3 to accept the GOP argument that court-approved maps should change as little as possible from the 2011 gerrymander.
Total Wisconsin Supreme Court campaign expense paid by Democratic and Republican parties, 2007-2025
*2025 data not including related $30.3 million petition drive.
**Graphic only includes main liberal and conservative candidate.
***Includes both contributions to candidates and independent expenditures.
Sources: Wisconsin Democracy Campaign and OpenSecrets
Liberal Janet Protasiewicz, then a Milwaukee County judge, called those 2021 maps “rigged” during her successful 2023 high court race. Shortly after Protasiewicz took office, flipping the court to a liberal majority, voting rights groups filed suit to overturn the legislative maps.
Citing Protasiewicz’s previous comments and her heavy Democratic financial support — which amounted to 59% of her campaign treasury — Republicans demanded that she recuse from the redistricting case. However, neither state law nor judicial rules require judges to recuse because of their statements, as long as they have not specifically promised to rule in a certain way, the State Democracy Research Initiative noted.
Also, the $9.9 million Democratic contribution to Protasiewicz was proportionately less than the $2.6 million that the conservative Alliance for Reform dropped on issue ads supporting Rebecca Bradley in 2016, the State Democracy Research Initiative’s report pointed out. Bradley didn’t recuse when an alliance leader was a party to the original redistricting litigation.
Protasiewicz didn’t recuse either when justices voted 4-3 along ideological lines to reverse the least-change doctrine and order new maps.
But Protasiewicz declined to participate in one of the liberal-led court’s three otherwise unanimous rulings rejecting challenges to the 2021 congressional maps. Two more challenges are still pending.
If the issue reaches the high court again, the panel will include new Justice Susan Crawford, whose campaign last spring received $11.8 million from Democrats while Republicans were pumping $9.7 million into her conservative opponent Brad Schimel’s race.
Although donations to parties and party donations to candidates are unlimited under the 2015 campaign finance law, they are publicly disclosed, along with the parties’ donors’ names. Issue ad and independent expenditure groups also aren’t limited in how much they take in or spend. And issue ad groups don’t have to report either donations or spending, a practice known as “dark money” for its lack of transparency.
Roys and Rep. Amaad Rivera-Wagner, D-Green Bay, are working separately on campaign finance legislation that would set limits on donations to those organizations and require issue ad groups to disclose their donors, as parties and independent expenditure committees already do. Roys said her bill would focus specifically on judicial elections, while Rivera-Wagner’s bill would apply to all elections.
“Wisconsin is becoming the centerpiece for billionaires trying to influence elections,” Rivera-Wagner said. “This is just unacceptable.”
Both Roys and Rivera-Wagner said they would like to go further, but could be limited by the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which removed limits on corporate and union spending on issue ads and independent expenditures, and by the GOP legislative majority’s support for Wisconsin’s 2015 campaign finance law. Another federal court case, SpeechNow.org v. FEC, struck down federal limits on donations to PACs.
In that legal environment, holding down spending on Supreme Court campaigns could remain challenging as long as Wisconsin remains among the 22 states that elect justices.
Next: Should Supreme Court justices be appointed?
Wisconsin Watch reporter Brittany Carloni contributed to this report.
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Unlimited donations, weak recusal rules led to record Wisconsin Supreme Court spending is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
For Wisconsin residents who love winter, the arrival of cold and snow has been an early Christmas gift. But if you are heading out to one of Wisconsin's more than 15,000 lakes to ice fish, snowmobile or skate, experts have some advice to stay safe.
The post Experts share tips for staying safe on the ice appeared first on WPR.
A shift in the Trump administration’s stance toward Afghan refugees has shaken members of Wisconsin’s Afghan community, following months of renewed uncertainty about their status in the United States.
The post Afghans in Wisconsin face uncertainty amid Trump administration crackdown appeared first on WPR.
The latest federal data shows sales of milk beverages turned around in 2024, increasing by 358 million pounds or just under 1 percentage point from the previous year.
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Gableman argued Protasiewicz shouldn't participate because, as a Supreme Court candidate in 2022, she issued a press release calling his investigation "disgraceful."
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The state’s Safe Drinking Water Loan Program is allowing smaller Wisconsin villages to fund needed water projects they otherwise couldn’t afford.
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The College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence was approved on Thursday by the Board of Regents.
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About 36 percent of Wisconsin’s youngest students are below the 25th percentile for reading, according to the Department of Public Instruction’s first literacy screening.
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The projects will introduce a mix of internet technology to unserved areas: about 76 percent fiber, 10 percent fixed wireless, and 14 percent satellite.
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Fincantieri Marinette Marine laid off nearly 100 workers on Wednesday, about a week after the U.S. Navy announced it was canceling much of a multi-billion dollar order for ships that would have been built in Wisconsin.
The post Marinette Marine lays off almost 100 workers a week after the Navy canceled ship orders appeared first on WPR.
A settlement is pending in the state’s case against a Marinette manufacturer of firefighting foam over alleged violations of the state’s spills law for failing to report PFAS contamination.
The post Settlement nears in Wisconsin lawsuit against Tyco, Johnson Controls over PFAS appeared first on WPR.
A Biden-era protection for reproductive and gender affirming health care information was upended by a federal judge in Texas in June. Despite several lawsuits, key privacy rules for medical records remain, but some experts say they aren’t sufficient. (Photo by Dave Whitney / Getty Images)
The four lawsuits at the center of a Republican-led effort to ensure law enforcement can access reproductive health records are now mostly resolved, after attorneys for Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton agreed last week to dismiss the last remaining suit challenging the legality of a foundational health privacy rule.
Paxton filed the lawsuit in September 2024 arguing that Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration illegally created a rule under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act barring certain reproductive health care information from being disclosed if a procedure such as abortion was obtained in a state where it is legal.
The federal HIPAA law is meant to protect patient information generally, especially when that information travels between providers. It contains exceptions for information that can be disclosed to investigators, who can subpoena records from other states.
Ashley Kurzweil, senior policy analyst for reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, said the dual threat that Paxton’s lawsuit presented was alarming on a much wider scale than just reproductive health care, so it is a relief that the case is dismissed. Overturning key privacy protections from 2000 that formed the basis of the Biden-era rule could have thrown the entire health care system into chaos, she said.
“We are thrilled that the 2000 privacy rule is still in effect. It is hugely important that it is still in place,” Kurzweil said. “However, (it) provides insufficient safeguards for reproductive health care information when it comes to the broader landscape of increased criminalization risk that people are facing.”
The 2024 rule specifically relating to reproductive and gender-affirming health care information was nullified in June by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk. His ruling came in a Texas-based case filed by a clinician in a small town who said the rule created a conflict with her responsibility to report child abuse, because she considers abortion and gender-affirming health care to be child abuse.
Without those 2024 protections, doctors can choose whether to report patients to law enforcement, Kurzeil said, and some might also be discouraged from offering reproductive health care altogether to minimize legal risks.
States Newsroom reported more than 400 people were charged with pregnancy-related crimes in the two years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, according to data from the nonprofit Pregnancy Justice.
One of those people was Brittany Watts, an Ohio woman who went to the hospital with miscarriage complications and waited for hours without receiving help. After miscarrying at home and returning to the hospital, staff called the police, accusing her of abuse of a corpse. A grand jury declined to indict her, and Watts is now suing the hospital.
In nine of the 400 cases, pregnant people were accused of researching or attempting to obtain an abortion.
The case before Kacsmaryk is the only one of the four that resulted in a ruling. Although it was filed in the last few months of the Biden administration, the bulk of the case was litigated under Republican President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice.
Repealing the rule was a directive in Project 2025, the conservative blueprint published by the Heritage Foundation. Several prominent anti-abortion organizations were part of the panel that drafted Project 2025, and many of the people involved in writing the 900-page document now work for the Trump administration.
Democracy Forward, a nonprofit legal organization, represented Doctors for America and the cities of Columbus, Ohio, and Madison, Wisconsin, in an attempt to intervene in the case because they did not expect the government to defend the rule. If they were allowed to intervene, they could appeal Kacsmaryk’s opinion striking down the rule regardless of the Trump administration’s decision.
Their attempts were denied by Kacsmaryk, and while the organization did initially appeal that decision, the attorneys dropped the effort in September, saying in a court filing that “the resources of the parties and the courts would be best conserved by dismissing this appeal.”
In a statement to States Newsroom, a spokesperson for Democracy Forward said they will continue to pursue every tool available to defend reproductive rights from political interference and anti-abortion extremists.
The other two cases are in Missouri and Tennessee, where Republican attorneys general also challenged the 2024 reproductive health care-specific rule. The Missouri case was dismissed in September, because Kacsmaryk’s decision had a nationwide effect, and the Tennessee attorney general asked the court to dismiss their case for the same reason. The judge in that case has not yet granted the motion.
Texas and Louisiana have recently launched investigations into out-of-state doctors who, through telehealth, prescribed and mailed abortion medication to patients in their states where abortion is outlawed.
Texas officials have repeatedly investigated and attempted to prosecute people for either leaving the state to seek abortion care or for prescribing abortion medication from a different state. At the end of October, a New York judge dismissed a civil case brought by Paxton seeking $100,000 in damages from a provider the AG said prescribed abortion pills to a woman in the Dallas area, according to The Texas Tribune. Officials in Louisiana attempted to extradite the same New York doctor on criminal charges related to an abortion medication prescription for a pregnant minor. That case was also rejected.
Those attempts were some of the first that tested shield laws implemented by 18 states, including New York. Four others have executive orders from Democratic governors saying they won’t comply with extradition requests for investigations into reproductive health care.
Texas has also passed a law allowing people to seek at least $100,000 in damages if someone they impregnated or someone they’re related to received abortion pills by mail from another state. That law took effect Thursday, Dec. 4.
Kurzweil said those shield laws are a vital help to patients seeking care, but the addition of a federal protective rule would be ideal.
“The two in tandem would be much more fulsome and would address gaps that come up,” she said.
This story was originally produced by News From The States, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Members of the National Guard stationed outside Union Station in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 18, 2025. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court Thursday paused a lower court’s order to remove the National Guard from the streets of Washington, D.C., eight days after two members were attacked in broad daylight in the district.
The three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit granted the Trump administration’s request that the Nov. 20 decision finding the Guard presence illegal to be stayed “pending further order of this court.”
“The purpose of this administrative stay is to give the court sufficient opportunity to consider the motion for stay pending appeal and should not be construed in any way as a ruling on the merits of that motion,” wrote Judges Patricia Millett, Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao.
Millett was appointed by former President Barack Obama, and Katsas and Rao were appointed during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Roughly 2,000 National Guard troops in D.C. were originally expected to remain in the district through February, according to the lower court’s order.
The stay comes just over a week after two West Virginia National Guard members were shot on Nov. 26 just blocks from the White House. U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries the following day, Thanksgiving. U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, underwent surgery for critical injuries and remains hospitalized.
The suspected shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, a 29-year-old Afghan national who was living in Washington state, pleaded not guilty from his hospital bed during a virtual hearing in D.C. Superior Court Tuesday. Lakanwal is charged with first-degree murder while armed, possession of a firearm, and assault with the intent to kill.
The Trump administration filed the emergency motion to stay the lower judge’s order on the day of the shooting. The administration requested the circuit court issue a decision by Dec. 4.
Judge Jia Cobb, for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, found the administration’s deployment of more than 2,000 guard troops in the city illegal but stayed her Nov. 20 decision until Dec. 11 to give the administration time to appeal and remove the guard members from the district’s streets.
Trump initially mobilized 800 National Guard troops to the nation’s capital in August after claiming a “crime emergency” in the district, despite a documented three-decade low in crime.
Many were instructed they would be carrying service weapons, The Wall Street Journal reported on Aug. 17. The White House effort was accompanied by a heightened U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement presence in the district.
Trump also federalized the district’s police force for 30 days as part of a district-wide crackdown. While the federalization of the police force expired, Trump has kept the National Guard in the district.
Since then, Republican governors from Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia, among others, have agreed to send their own Guard members to the district.
The mobilization had been tied up in court for months.
Farm workers harvesting yellow bell peppers near Gilroy, California. (Nnehring/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration Thursday announced new restrictions for immigrants, reducing the work authorization periods from five years to 18 months, the latest crackdown on legal immigration.
The new policy follows the shooting of two West Virginia National Guard members by an Afghan national granted asylum earlier this year.
The shift will not only affect hundreds of thousands of immigrants, but the shortened period for work authorization could create massive backlogs at the agency responsible for processing legal immigration requests, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
“Reducing the maximum validity period for employment authorization will ensure that those seeking to work in the United States do not threaten public safety or promote harmful anti-American ideologies,” USCIS Director Joseph Edlow said in a statement.
“After the attack on National Guard service members in our nation’s capital by an alien who was admitted into this country by the previous administration, it’s even more clear that USCIS must conduct frequent vetting of aliens,” he continued.
Immigrants affected by the new changes include refugees; those granted asylum; those with a withholding of removal; those with pending applications for asylum or withholding of removal; those adjusting their status, for example by gaining a green card; and those who fall under the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act of 1997.
That act applies to certain Nicaraguans, Cubans, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, nationals of former Soviet bloc countries and their dependents who in the 1990s had applied for asylum and were systematically denied.
Additionally, USCIS fees for applying for permits and other paperwork increased as a result of the massive tax and spending passage that Republicans passed over the summer and President Donald Trump signed into law. For initial employment authorization, fees are now $550 and $275 to renew.
Following the shooting, U.S. Army Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died. A second guard member, U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, 24, remains critically wounded but hospitalized in stable condition.
In response, the Trump administration has ramped up its crackdown on legal immigration and highlighted the need for its mass deportation campaign. The suspect, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, pleaded not guilty to several charges in court on Tuesday.
This week, all immigration applications from 19 countries listed on Trump’s “high-risk” countries or travel ban from earlier this year, were paused — a move that freezes processing for green card holders and citizenship applications.
Supporters gather for a rally to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, a longtime champion of creating legal status for immigrants brought into the country as children who will retire next year, re-introduced his trademark immigration bill for the last time Thursday.
Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, first introduced the measure now known as the Dream Act in 2001 with Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and has reintroduced it every Congress since. Congress has not passed the bill.
Durbin, 81, spoke about his legacy on immigration at a Thursday press conference.
“We are a nation of immigrants. I am proud to be the son of an immigrant,” the No. 2 Senate Democrat said. “This is a proud son of an immigrant who’s doing everything he can to help the next generation of immigrants be part of America’s future. The fight has just begun.”
While Congress is again unlikely to approve the measure this year, younger Senate Democrats Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada and Alex Padilla of California said Thursday they would carry on the effort.
“The dream is still alive,” Padilla said. “We are committed as ever to get it across the finish line.”
Cortez Masto agreed.
“Some day, with the hard work of everyone, we (will) get it across the finish line,” she said.
Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski co-sponsored the latest version of the legislation.
The Dream Act would create a path to citizenship for immigrant children who came into the country with their parents without legal authorization.
The bill has nicknamed more than 530,000 immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program as Dreamers. The Obama administration created the program in 2012 as a temporary measure to allow recipients to obtain work permits and drivers licenses while Congress created a pathway to citizenship.
DACA’s legality is tied up in the courts, throwing its recipients into limbo.
For now, existing DACA recipients can continue to renew, but the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in January upheld deportation protections for recipients, but found the work authorization portion unlawful. The appeals court limited its ruling to Texas, which spearheaded the suit, meaning that DACA remains in full effect in every state and U.S. territory except Texas.
Many immigration policy experts have called DACA outdated because there are now thousands of undocumented youth who are not eligible for the program because they were not even born by 2007, the year a recipient must have started residence in the United States.
A federal judge in 2021 blocked new applicants from being accepted.
Many DACA recipients have been caught up in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Dozens of recipients have been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite their legal status, according to immigrant advocacy groups tracking the issue.
“This moment in the history of our nation is a terrible, challenging moment for so many people, not just the Dreamers, but immigrants in general,” Durbin said.
“I’ve been both angry and heartbroken to watch masked federal agents parading in their combat uniforms with automatic weapons in the city of Chicago,” he continued. “I’ve seen them wreak havoc in these communities and sow fear among people who are afraid to even go outside, to go to church or to go shopping.”
The executive director of the immigrant advocacy group United We Dream, Greisa Martinez Rosas, said that while DACA has allowed some immigrant youth to obtain work authorization and deportation protections, more needs to be done, especially under a second Trump administration.
“We are currently facing unprecedented attacks that pose the greatest threat to… the future of the DACA program, and in doing so, the future of this country and those millions of people who would make our country stronger every single day,” she said.
Durbin said the Dream Act would be a “key step toward true, positive, bipartisan change” in immigration policy.
The last time Congress came close to bipartisan immigration reform was in 2013.
That year, the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” senators, including Durbin, crafted a bill to create a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented people who had resided in the country for years.
The Senate passed the measure, but then-House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, never brought the bill to the floor for a vote.
U.S. Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., points to text messages by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth during an annual worldwide threats assessment hearing at the Longworth House Office Building on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. The hearing held by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence addressed top aides inadvertently including Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic magazine, on a high level Trump administration Signal group chat discussing plans to bomb Houthi targets in Yemen. (Photo by Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth violated official policy when he used the publicly available Signal app to message about military plans from his personal cell phone, including imminent bombings in Yemen, according to a report released Thursday by the Pentagon’s own watchdog.
The Defense Department Inspector General’s 84-page report concluded Hegseth sent information about the “strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory over an unapproved, unsecure network approximately 2 to 4 hours before the execution of those strikes.”
“Although the Secretary wrote in his July 25 statement to the DoD OIG that ‘there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission,’ if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes,” the report states. “Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”
Members of Congress from both political parties requested the Defense Department Inspector General look into Hegseth’s use of Signal after a journalist at The Atlantic was inadvertently added to a group chat of national security officials planning the bombing in Yemen. Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg later published a series of stories detailing the messages.
Acting Defense Department Inspector General Steven A. Stebbins released a memo in April announcing he had opened an investigation into the matter.
Members of Congress’ reaction to the report was mixed, with Republicans suggesting more technology is needed for the Pentagon, while Democrats called for Hegseth to resign.
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker, R-Miss., issued a statement saying the report shows Hegseth “acted within his authority to communicate the information in question to other cabinet level officials.”
“It is also clear to me that our senior leaders need more tools available to them to communicate classified information in real time and a variety of environments,” Wicker added. “I think we have some work to do in providing those tools to our national security leaders.”
Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member Jack Reed, D-R.I., said in a statement the report confirms “that Secretary Hegseth violated military regulations and continues to show reckless disregard for the safety of American servicemembers.”
“For months, Secretary Hegseth has attempted to mislead Congress and the American people, claiming repeatedly that no classified information was involved,” Reed said. “The Inspector General has now definitively cast doubt on those false assurances.”
Reed added that Hegseth should “explain himself to Congress, the public, and the servicemembers he leads. The men and women of our armed forces deserve leadership they can trust with their lives.”
The Inspector General report said Hegseth declined to sit for an interview with the Defense Department’s oversight agency, that he refused to hand over his personal cell phone to investigators and that he didn’t retain some of the messages in accordance with federal recordkeeping requirements.
Officials working for Hegseth shared copies of the Signal chat with the inspector general, but those were incomplete since the app’s auto-delete feature was on at the time. Signal users can adjust that for different lengths of time or turn it off completely.
Hegseth was in the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, in his home the morning and early afternoon of March 15 to monitor “the operation against the Houthis,” according to the report.
Two aides who were with Hegseth at the time told investigators he used “secure, classified” systems to communicate with United States Central Command officials “during the planning and execution of the strikes against Houthi targets that day and reviewed information related to the strikes.”
“In the SCIF, the Secretary had access to multiple means of secure communication that allowed him to provide the necessary operational details and updates to non-DoD government officials on the Signal group chat,” the report states.
The group chat about the Yemen bombing that accidentally included a journalist wasn’t the only one Hegseth used to communicate about official Pentagon business from his personal phone.
Eight officials within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Chief Information Officer told investigators that Hegseth created “multiple Signal group chats in which the Secretary and others allegedly discussed official DoD business and nonpublic information.”
“One of the officials we spoke with stated that the Secretary posted the same sensitive operational information concerning the Houthi attack plans on the ‘Defense Team Huddle’ group chat,” the report states, later adding Hegseth declined to provide any information about that chat.
The Inspector General opted not to make any recommendations about the use of Signal in the report, since “records management issues arising from the use of Signal and other commercially available messaging applications are a DoD-wide issue.”
A previous inspector general report also called on the department to “improve training for DoD senior officials on compliance with records retention laws and policies.”
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Ala., wrote in a statement that it is “important to remember that this was a successful operation that took out a dangerous target with no harm to U.S. troops. It’s clear that the discussion on Signal didn’t compromise the mission.”
“During the past few administrations, the use of Signal for communication between government officials has grown, so I appreciate the comprehensive work by the IG to develop recommendations on how to improve and secure communications,” Rogers said. “I encourage the Administration to follow these recommendations, and I look forward to discussions with the Pentagon on how to implement them.”
House Armed Services Committee ranking member Adam Smith, D-Wash., called the report “a damning review of an incompetent secretary of defense who is profoundly incapable of the job and clearly has no respect for or comprehension of what is required to safeguard our service members.”
“It confirms staggering violations of policy – namely that unsecured platforms were used by the secretary to boast about sensitive operational details that could have jeopardized both the mission and, more importantly, the lives of American service members tasked with carrying out Operation Rough Rider,” Smith said.
Senate Defense Appropriations subcommittee ranking member Chris Coons, D-Del., said in a statement the report “concluded that Secretary Hegseth violated DOD procedure and put service members’ lives at risk with his reckless mishandling of sensitive information.”
“In March, I led a group of senators in pressing the Trump administration to investigate this blatant misconduct. Any service member who acted with such disregard for our national security would be dismissed, at the very least,” Coons said. “Our nation’s highest ranking defense official should not be held to a lower standard than the men and women he oversees. For the good of our nation, I once again call on Secretary Hegseth to resign.”
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Jim Himes, D-Conn., said in a statement the report “confirms what I feared when this Signal thread became public: We are fortunate that the mission was not compromised and that servicemembers were not put at needless risk thanks to Secretary Hegseth’s reckless treatment of classified information.”
“Pete Hegseth’s behavior and lack of judgment would be a fireable offense for anyone else in the Department of Defense,” Himes said. “What’s more, his refusal to sit for an interview with the Inspector General or submit his device for examination is yet another example of his failure to take responsibility for his actions.”
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