Louise K. Waakaa’igan, a poet and member of the Anishinaabe (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa) tribe in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, spent 16 years at the Shakopee women’s prison on the outskirts of the Twin Cities. Waakaa’igan was one of the 19 writers featured at a program called Beyond Bars: Voices of Incarceration.

The event, held on Oct. 24 at Hamline University in St. Paul, was the 15th public reading organized by the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, made possible by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Some of the writers, like Waakaa’igan, had been released and now have jobs on the  outside. Waakaa’igan is the event coordinator at Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University in Wisconsin. Others are still incarcerated and their writings were read by other authors or by a writing mentor or instructor.

More than 500 people filled the large, open venue at Hamline University overlooking the campus. The mood was upbeat. Writers who had recently been released got standing ovations, and all who had spent time in prison received flowers.

Waakaa’igan, who has participated in several of the past events since 2020, said she started writing when she was young as a way to “survive early adolescence,” but had stopped writing as an adult until she was in prison and a volunteer group encouraged her to start writing again in 2004.

“That’s really where my voice solidified, where I had an actual writing community for the first time in my life,” she said.  “Just a circle of writers where we would give each other feedback, where we’d be able to share, learn different aspects and different pieces of the craft, which was really beneficial.”

In 2014 Jennifer Bowen, the founder of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, came to Shakopee, and helped expand the prison writing program with support from a large group of mentors who give feedback to incarcerated writers and instructors who teach in the prisons and provide a “creative community” to encourage writers.

“It’s just a creative, collaborative, supporting community that recognizes the writer, whether they’re incarcerated or not, recognizes the writer as an essential part of our creative life,” Waakaa’igan said of the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.

Bowen spoke of her appreciation for the writers and those who came out to support them.

“The incarcerated writers you all have sent thousands, literally thousands, of notes of feedback to, have long written under pressure, under surveillance, and toward change,” she said. “They’ve told us stories about 600 days in segregation, about surviving the Khmer Rouge, about missing their daughter on her birthday every single year for 21 years. Many of those writers are home now, joining us as citizen artists on pages and stages and in the streets, showing up to offer change as artists and the art when it’s most needed, which is now. And they are building nonprofits that connect and organize and heal this community.”

The readings kicked off with a student introduction by an incarcerated writer named Andrew  (read by Tarik Dobbs) who described himself as serving more than one life sentence. He recounted not caring about writing when he joined a workshop in prison just to pass the time, but then found something more:

“Writing gave me my life back, or at least made my fate and future possible, tolerable. And more often than one might think, for someone serving multiple life sentences, enjoyable — the  kind of joy and serenity only possible when one finds a sense of purpose, a reason for being. For me, this meant, in some part, the self-expression, the catharsis that comes from any writing, as small as one word on a post note or a magnum opus on the meaning of the universe.”

Waakaa’igan read “East of Cicero,” a poem that recalls memories of abuse and struggles experienced after leaving the reservation:

“The year was 1999. They just buried half my identity. I refused to attend the ceremony after talking with Ni maama (Ojibwe word for mother). Instead, I sat in the dark, carving scars on my anemic body, dirtying my pale skin blending tears with Mad Dog 20/20, burning stale cigarettes in my nephew’s sandbox. I began driving alone back then, replacing reservation roads for out-of-state freeways…I met my first demon there on I-94 east of Cicero. He silenced me like those drunk hands did in Six Mile. I laughed as I flicked my Newport out the window. I’m not a little girl anymore. I bragged. I’ll fight back this time. It was his turn to laugh, and he did, mimicking that drunken slur that left boozy saliva on my five-year-old body? …It wasn’t until I slept in that cement cell block in Minnesota that he let my tears dry on their own. Those saltless tears pulled next to me on that cement floor pitied me, just as that demon den east of Cicero.”

Commenting on her poem, she said, “There are traumatic events in people’s lives, that I think, unfortunately, happen when we’re young that we learn how to recover and heal from, and I’m not exempt from that, and there have been things that have happened in my life that I’m still trying to recover and heal from, and my writing has definitely been a way to make sense of some of that and move on and heal in a way.”

She also read a poem written in prison about the place that shaped her:

“…I’m from Packer games on Sundays, Greyhound trips for Christmas, and Easter baskets with Karla. I’m from women with the same last name and a father none of us knew. I’m from the woods, northern, where pines and birch bark blanket both ends of tribal roads, paved and gravel. I’m from a single parent household. Michael Jackson cassette tapes, Purple Rain posters, and latchkey kids. Title V programs, commods (commodities, federal government issued food) on pantry shelves, cucumbers from Grandpa Jake’s garden and a mean ol’ dog named Turkey. I’m from ‘crying won’t change anything,’ and ‘you should have known better.’ I’m from punitive silence and where it’s normal, hugs are warm, forced Catholicism still weighs heavy on Imam’s shoulders. This is where I will always return.”

The poem, she said, was a kind of “sweet lamentation,” of the place she couldn’t return to because of incarceration.

Von Johnson, a writer recently released from prison and now on supervision, read his poem “Here Now!” describing the hardships in prison and then being released into society where he was adjusting to the freedom, figuring out who he spend his free time with,  learning new technology, enjoying his first savoy steak, but also the continued accountability to the criminal justice system living with an ankle monitor:

“I have to fill out a pass to go everywhere, even to come here tonight. Noting the time to leave, how long the drive will take, the moment I arrive, the purpose of being in each destination. My selfie game is out of control, except there’s always some address or giant logo next to my face to identify that I reached my destination, as if this ankle monitor wasn’t enough, right? How long I will stay, the minute I leave, my travel time, the next logo-slash-address field, you get the picture. I have to have permission to see my mother. Rules on how long I can hold my significant other, but I guess I’m here now. I need permission to drive a car, own a car. I’m not allowed to finance a car. Hell, get into a car. But I’m here now…”

Mark Altenhofen, called Red because he formerly had a red beard, read his  poem, “Do you remember,” written in prison upon learning a life-long friend outside was dying of leukemia:

“…Do you remember the feel of fist against flesh when we fought? The bitter tears on our lips with “I love you” and “I’m sorry” still foreign to us. Do you remember tumbling through the dust, our blood mixing with it until we fell side by side, too exhausted to do anything but laugh? Your mom compared us to Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. We acted out the stories written until we nearly drowned…”

After his reading, Altenhofen talked about how  the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop helps remind people in prison that  “we’re still human beings.” That  is “huge,” he said, “because it’s really easy to lose your humanity in there, and to be reminded we’re still people. We still have people that care about us, and there’s a community out here we can come back to. … It gives us something to hold onto and to look forward to, and to make ourselves better men.”

He added, “I was one of those guys I didn’t know how to talk about emotions. I treated emotions like I was a diabetic and that was sugary cereal for kids.” Writing, he said, was “a way to get to deal with the stuff I never had a chance to deal with, I never had the courage to talk to anybody about.”

Peter Schilling has mentored seven writers through the  Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop.  He said writers in prison often are processing their experience in a way that helps them cope. He noted one of his mentees wrote a Western, with wide open spaces that speak of unrestricted freedom as a counterpoint to his confinement, and another wrote a horror, modeled on a Steven King novel, transposing real struggles into the stories of fictional characters.

Michael Kleber-Diggs, a writing instructor in prisons since 2015 and board president for Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, said the evening event represented an effort to “transcend prison walls and reach the community,” and also to “tear down the distinction between incarcerated writers and community writers.”

One of the evening’s last offerings was an original song written by a man named Will, who had recently been released. He performed  “Among these voices,” an anthem to living courageously: “Justice, burn my lips come roaring off my tongue. Set me alight to set me free. This tide has risen to make many voices one. Among those voices you’ll find me.”

A jury has found Javarius Hurd, 18, not guilty of reckless homicide in the death of a youth counselor at the Lincoln Hills School for Boys. Hurd was, however, found guilty of battery by a prisoner. 

Hurd had been charged with reckless homicide in the death of Corey Proulx, who died after a confrontation with Hurd in 2024. Prosecutors said that Proulx chased Hurd after the then 16-year-old threw a cup of soapy water in another staff member’s face. Proulx chased Hurd into an outdoor recreational area where, in a scuffle with Hurd, he hit his head on a hard surface. 

After Proulx’s death, the Department of Corrections issued a statement that staff members were collectively mourning. In a press release sent out after the incident, the DOC said that Proulx’s fiancee and daughter “would like everyone to know that Corey was an amazing partner, father, and human being.” 

Hurd’s case became a flashpoint both in and outside of the courtroom. While his attorneys battled prosecutors unsuccessfully to prevent the case from being tried in adult court, Proulx’s death was used by Republican lawmakers to take shots at the approach to juvenile justice taken by Gov. Tony Evers.

Lincoln Hills had become notorious as one of the nation’s largest juvenile prisons where youth suffered abuse and excessive force while guards and counselors were under pressure from  staffing shortages. Recently, Lincoln Hills was found to be in compliance with the requirements set forth after a class action lawsuit over those conditions. As a result, court-ordered monitoring of the facility was halted as new, smaller facilities are being opened around the state. 

A sentencing hearing for Hurd has been set for Friday morning, Oct. 30.

The U.S. Department of Justice in a federal court hearing Tuesday warned California election officials could be prosecuted if they count ballots cast by noncitizen voters, in a case brought by the Trump administration demanding that the state set aside the ballots of 20,000 suspected noncitizen voters.

The remark by a DOJ lawyer about “criminal liability” for election officials who process ballots drew a sharp rebuke from the judge presiding over the hearing.

“This court believes it would be wise — it would be wise that any threats to the state, county elected employees cease immediately,” Judge David Carter said from the bench.

The extraordinary argument from DOJ came as President Donald Trump’s last-minute push to assert authority over voting encounters skepticism and resistance from federal judges less than a week before Election Day. Trump faces political defeat if Republicans lose one or both chambers of Congress in the midterm elections.

Carter, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, held the hearing in the Justice Department’s lawsuit that seeks to force California election officials to segregate and not count ballots from the list of 20,000 unless they can prove their citizenship. 

Carter adjourned an hours-long hearing in Los Angeles by promising a decision Wednesday. Before adjourning, Carter urged the Justice Department to drop the menacing rhetoric.

Possibly heading to Supreme Court

Carter’s ruling — whatever he decides — will almost certainly be appealed to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and, possibly, the U.S. Supreme Court. A three-judge panel of the appeals court has already ruled against the Justice Department once in the case.

During the hearing, Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, raised the prospect that election officials could be criminally exposed if they move forward with counting the ballots.

“What they cannot do is knowingly count ballots when they have specific information that these individuals are noncitizens. That they cannot do,” Essayli said, adding that “they would be criminally liable if they knowingly process a ballot of a noncitizen. They would have the same criminal liability of the person who voted.”

Anne Bellows, a lawyer for California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, said that even though the Justice Department refers to the list as “likely” noncitizens, the court heard Essayli “threaten elections officials with criminal prosecution if they tabulate the ballots of those on this list.”

Christopher Pelham, a lawyer for Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, said the prospect that state and local election officials could face federal “trouble” for processing ballots “is chilling for them.”

List of suspected noncitizens

Earlier this month, the Justice Department provided a list of 20,000 California voters it said were suspected noncitizens and gave state and local officials 48 hours to review. When state and local election officials refused to act immediately, the DOJ sued to force election officials to segregate ballots from those voters and not count them unless they could prove their citizenship.

Carter appeared to signal he is skeptical of the Justice Department’s emergency request. At one point, he suggested he was inclined to set a hearing within the next couple weeks — likely after the election — for a deeper exploration of how the list of 20,000 people was compiled and its reliability. 

He indicated that would give time for a fuller examination of the issues at play but wrap up before Dec. 3, when California officials must certify election results.

Court documents filed by the Justice Department indicate the U.S. Department of Homeland Security developed the list based on a public California voter roll the agency obtained. 

In a court declaration filed Monday, Nicolas Bartelli, associate director of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a sub-agency of DHS, wrote that the agency “enhanced” the voter data using the research service LexisNexis.

‘The stakes here are enormous’

Essayli told the court that the Justice Department’s case would rise and fall on the credibility of the evidence. He said that once California officials were informed about the likely noncitizen voters, they must act.

“It means something to be a United States citizen. It means something to participate in an election,” Essayli said. “We want to make sure those interests are safeguarded.”

Lawyers for Weber and Logan sharply criticized the Justice Department’s arguments during the hearing. They voiced deep reservations over how the list was compiled and cast the DOJ’s move as an encroachment on California’s authority to run its elections.

The U.S. Constitution assigns states the responsibility of administering elections. Congress can override state rules and regulations, but the executive branch has no unilateral power to intervene absent authority from Congress.

The DOJ has pointed to a federal misdemeanor crime against noncitizen voting as justification for segregating ballots. 

But attorneys for the election officials argued the prohibition doesn’t preempt California’s state election laws, which also include a ban on noncitizen voting. Voters in California must attest under penalty of perjury they are a citizen and qualified to vote.

Bellows described the consequences in the case as sweeping. Los Angeles County election officials have written in court declarations that segregating ballots would lead to potentially “catastrophic” problems.

“The stakes here are enormous,” Bellows said, arguing that the DOJ’s demand risks disenfranchising voters.

The U.S. Department of Justice plans to send election monitors to every state ahead of Election Day, expanding a long-standing practice that’s spurred concern this year among Democrats and voting rights advocates because of President Donald Trump’s push to influence elections.

The Justice Department for decades has deployed monitors across the country to watch the voting process. During President Joe Biden’s administration, the DOJ sent monitors to 64 jurisdictions across 24 states for the 2022 midterm elections.

The 2026 monitoring program is larger, with the Justice Department announcing it will have a presence in all 50 states. DOJ spokesperson Kiersten Pels told States Newsroom on Monday that about 1,000 monitors will be involved but that the department won’t disclose the full list of monitored locations until Election Day — Nov. 3.

“Every monitor will merely observe and report any potential violations of federal law to the Department, which will be reviewed after Election Day,” Pels said in a statement.

Lawsuits prompt unease

While election monitors, who watch polling places and election officials for compliance with federal voting rights laws, have long been a feature of U.S. elections, the Trump administration’s extraordinary moves to assert federal authority over state-run elections have left many Democrats and even some Republicans uneasy about this year’s expansive effort.

The Justice Department has sued dozens of states in an attempt to force election officials to turn over voter lists that contain sensitive personal data, such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. The DOJ has lost 27 cases so far, and won none.

Less than two weeks ago, the Justice Department sued California to block election officials from counting ballots from roughly 20,000 voters it says are suspected noncitizens. 

And on Friday, the DOJ sued Alaska to preemptively prevent the certification of its U.S. Senate election if the Republican incumbent loses by less than the number of votes received by another candidate of the same name, citing the potential for voter confusion.

But concerns about DOJ monitors began building in August after Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon, a Republican, expressed reservations about monitors, calling their actions “very odd” after DOJ personnel watched voting in the state’s primary election. 

Andrew Walchuk, senior policy director and counsel for voting & fair representation at the watchdog group Common Cause, told reporters last month that monitors in and of themselves are nothing new, pointing to the long history of the DOJ’s monitoring program.

“But with this administration, we will be watching their activity very closely,” Walchuk said.

1,000 monitors, 95,000 polling places

Election experts have emphasized that even with a 1,000 monitors, the Justice Department presence across the country will be far too small to interfere with voting on a wide scale. For example, the 2024 election included more than 95,000 polling places, according to survey data from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

“The math just ain’t mathing,” Harry Black, a senior counsel at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, said during a panel discussion on the midterms earlier this month at the University of Pittsburgh.

In early October, the NAACP sued the Justice Department for records about the election monitoring program. In their complaint, lawyers for the NAACP argued that the “unprecedented deployment” of federal officials could jeopardize the election and interfere with the right of voters to cast their ballots without intimidation.

U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, an appointee of President Joe Biden in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., denied a request by the NAACP for an emergency order directing the DOJ to immediately begin producing records. The underlying lawsuit remains pending.

Local announcements of locations

While the full location list for the election monitors remains closely held, the Justice Department last week began notifying counties that will have monitors. In turn, some state and local election officials have announced where monitors will be present.

In Washington state, DOJ monitors will deploy to King County, which includes Seattle. In Oregon, they’ll be sent to the Portland area.

Salt Lake County in Utah will receive at least one monitor. Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, a Republican who has clashed with the Trump administration after she refused to hand over voter data, told reporters last week that the Justice Department offered assurances about how the monitors will act.

“They won’t be approaching voters. They won’t be wearing any sort of insignia,” Henderson said.

In Maine, DOJ monitors are expected to be present in Portland and Lewiston. Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, has said her office “will monitor the monitors very carefully to ensure that they don’t cross any lines.”

Pels said all monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, which includes not interfering in the voting process.

“Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate,” Pels said.

Reporting contributed by Maine Morning Star’s Lauren McCauley and Utah News Dispatch reporter Alixel Cabrera.

President Donald Trump’s 11th-hour campaign to intervene in California’s vote counting encountered its first resistance from federal courts on Monday, with appellate judges ruling against the effort.

A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled against a U.S. Department of Justice request for a court order requiring California election officials to segregate and not count the ballots of some 20,000 voters, who federal officials say are suspected noncitizens, until those voters can prove otherwise. The decision, issued Monday, came after rare oral arguments on Sunday.

Two of the three judges sharply questioned a Justice Department lawyer over the demand, as well as the timeline of the agency’s actions. A third judge appeared more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s arguments.

The oral arguments, held virtually, came after the Justice Department said a district court judge hadn’t ruled fast enough on its request for a temporary restraining order to require California officials to set aside the ballots of suspected noncitizens. 

In Monday’s 2-1 decision, the majority wrote that the appeals court lacked jurisdiction over the case because the DOJ “failed to allow the district court adequate opportunity to consider” the request.

One of the appellate judges emphasized on Sunday that the district court judge had swiftly scheduled a hearing, currently set for Tuesday, less than a week after receiving the case.

“I don’t see how we have jurisdiction,” said Judge Mark Bennett, a Trump appointee who often led the skeptical questioning of the DOJ.

Last-minute push

As Election Day approaches, the Trump administration is mounting a furious final bid to assert authority over state and local election officials. 

The Justice Department first demanded immediate action in a last-minute lawsuit that alleges ballots cast by alleged noncitizens in California risk diluting the votes of U.S. citizens. 

It then opened a new front on Friday, preemptively suing Alaska over the future certification of its U.S. Senate race. Democrats and voting rights groups filed a flurry of court papers over the weekend opposing the Alaska lawsuit.

Sunday’s oral arguments in the California case, which lasted nearly two hours, marked the first courtroom showdown in the Trump administration’s new round of preelection legal action. One or both lawsuits could be before the U.S. Supreme Court within days, depending on the speed of lower courts.

An ‘astronomical’ number of ballots

Justice Department attorney Matthew Donnelly told the three-judge panel that the DOJ decided to seek an emergency order after learning how many mail-in ballots election officials were already processing, at least several hundred thousand so far. 

He said the agency hadn’t been aware of what he called the “astronomical” number of ballots as he explained why the DOJ didn’t ask for a temporary restraining order until four days after it first sued California.

“Frankly, we did not appreciate the scale,” Donnelly said, though California is a universal vote-by-mail state that sends a ballot to all voters.

Seth Waxman, a lawyer for Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan, told the court that Donnelly’s assertion was “absurd on its face.” Election officials in California have warned that complying with the Justice Department’s demands so close to Election Day could have catastrophic consequences. 

“The numbers are publicly available,” Waxman said.

Authority over elections

The U.S. Constitution’s Elections Clause places the responsibility for administering elections with the states, with Congress retaining the power to override state regulations. 

Donnelly clashed with Bennett over whether the legal basis for the Justice Department’s demands of California, a federal law that makes it a misdemeanor crime for noncitizens to vote in federal elections, represents an instance of Congress asserting its authority over elections.

Donnelly said the federal law preempts California’s action “here that frustrates its purpose” — in other words, the refusal of state and local officials to set aside the suspected noncitizen ballots. 

But Bennett said California law also bans noncitizen voting, and he argued that what Congress passed doesn’t directly change the rules state lawmakers adopted, which require voters to attest under penalty of perjury that they are qualified to vote.

‘An emergency of their own making’

The Trump administration has said the Department of Homeland Security compiled the list of 20,000 suspected noncitizens based on public California voter data it obtained. 

Judge Gabriel Sanchez, an appointee of President Joe Biden, questioned the reliability of the list, noting that federal officials initially told California this summer they believed the state had potentially more than 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls.

“Somehow the district court was supposed to resolve all this in a matter of hours by noon on October 22?” Sanchez said, referring to the deadline the Justice Department requested for a decision from the district court judge.

Samuel Siegel, a lawyer representing California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, told the appeals court the voter list the Trump administration obtained was “wildly outdated.” He said the 9th Circuit has nothing to decide because U.S. District Court Judge David Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, has yet to rule.

“It is an emergency of their own making,” Siegel said of the Justice Department.

Sanchez and Bennett agreed. In a per curiam majority opinion, they wrote the “United States’s claimed emergency, at least in part, is a self-constructed one.”

Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee and the only judge on the panel who at times appeared to agree with the Justice Department’s arguments, pushed Siegel on the consequences of not ordering California to set aside the ballots. Donnelly said repeatedly that once the ballots are processed, it becomes impossible to pull them out, even if it later becomes clear they were fraudulently cast.

“Without an injunction, you’ll never know, correct?” Bumatay asked Siegel, who responded that voters must affirm their citizenship.

Bumatay dissented from Monday’s opinion. He wrote that he would have granted the DOJ request.

“The question—does the federal government have the power to stop this potential attack on the integrity of our elections? Under both federal law and the Constitution, the answer must be ‘yes,’” Bumatay wrote.

Carter has promised to rule promptly after a Tuesday hearing on the Justice Department’s request for a temporary restraining order. A denial could prompt the DOJ to appeal again.

The U.S. Department of Justice is stepping up its legal campaign over the midterm elections, suing Alaska over its U.S. Senate election and appealing a lawsuit against suspected noncitizen voters in California.

Election law experts have cast doubt on the strength of the cases, criticizing them as performative.

The Justice Department sued Alaska election officials late Thursday in a preemptive attempt to stop the state from certifying the results of its Senate election if, under the state’s ranked-choice voting method, the Republican incumbent loses by a smaller margin than the votes earned by another candidate of the same name. 

Separately, the Justice Department appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals a lawsuit seeking to prevent California election officials from counting the ballots of approximately 20,000 voters it says are likely noncitizens unless they can prove their citizenship. The DOJ had demanded a district court decision by Thursday.

Collectively, the Justice Department’s actions signal an expanding legal effort to assert authority over voting as Election Day approaches. President Donald Trump faces political peril in the midterms, with Democrats all but certain to launch investigations into his administration if they retake the House or Senate.

The Trump administration’s past attempts to influence how states run elections largely failed, with the U.S. Supreme Court blocking proposed restrictions on mail ballots and federal judges dismissing DOJ lawsuits to obtain states’ sensitive voter data. But in the waning days before the midterm elections, federal officials are again ramping up election-related activity.

“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump, speaking to reporters on Friday, said of the Alaska lawsuit.

Another Dan Sullivan suit

The Alaska lawsuit came hours after U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to rule out efforts to block states from certifying their elections. Speaking to reporters after an unrelated event in Virginia, Blanche said it wasn’t the DOJ’s intention to “improperly interfere” with election certifications even as he left room for his department to act.

“I mean, is there any scenario? Yes, of course there’s scenarios that we could all come up with, hypothetically, you know, some doomsday scenario, for example, right?” Blanche said.

The Alaska Division of Elections and the Justice Department didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

In the Alaska Senate race, Republican Sen. Dan S. Sullivan and his supporters have cast Dan J. Sullivan, also a Republican, as a spoiler in a competitive race against Democrat Mary Peltola. 

State officials initially kept Dan J. Sullivan off the August primary ballot but the Alaska Supreme Court overturned the decision. He finished third, with 2.5% of the vote, qualifying for the four-way general election.

Trump had previewed a possible lawsuit earlier in the week. On Truth Social, the president on Wednesday called the Senate race in Alaska “totally confusing” and slammed Dan J. Sullivan’s presence.

“We are looking at powerful legal options to remove the fraudulent Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. from the Ballot, and holding the Democrats accountable for their Election Interference, in the pursuit of Justice and Fairness,” Trump wrote.

Experts skeptical

Early expert reaction to the Justice Department’s complaint has been sharply critical. The complaint cites the preamble of the National Voter Registration Act, which says one of its purposes is “to protect the integrity of the electoral process.” 

Writing in Election Law Blog, Derek Muller, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame focused on elections, called the legal argument “one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen.”

“Some, in a panic, might react that the Department is trying to deny certification of an election in a state. Of course that’s what the Department is trying to do. But the legal claim is so absurdly thin, there’s essentially no likelihood of success,” Muller wrote.

California noncitizen case appealed

In California, Assistant U.S. Attorney Julie Hamill filed a notice of appeal in the Justice Department’s lawsuit over alleged noncitizen voters just three days after the the DOJ requested a temporary restraining order to halt ballot counting for individuals on the list of 20,000. 

Hamill wrote that the DOJ was interpreting U.S. District Court Judge David Carter’s silence as a denial of its request. 

Carter, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, had only taken on the case a day earlier and had set a hearing for Oct. 27. Earlier this year, he became the first federal judge in the country to rule against the Justice Department’s lawsuits attempting to force states to turn over sensitive voter data.

On Friday, the Justice Department filed a new motion asking Carter to block the ballot counting and requested a ruling by noon Pacific time. 

In that filing, Hamill wrote that “every minute” of ballot processing that occurs without setting aside ballots of suspected noncitizens dilutes the votes of U.S. citizens.

Case ‘exceedingly weak,’ critics say

Critics of the Justice Department’s actions argue the time crunch is largely of its own making. 

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, noted during a press call Thursday that the DOJ didn’t file its lawsuit until more than a week after California began mailing ballots — and then several more days to seek a temporary restraining order.

“I think this case is exceedingly weak,” said Becker, who worked as a senior trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Voting Section during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

Attorneys for California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat, and Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan have both asked Carter to dismiss the lawsuit. 

Logan’s legal team on Wednesday wrote that Los Angeles County hasn’t changed how it conducts elections. What’s changed, they wrote, was the federal government’s posture.

“Weeks before Election Day, the United States asks this Court to intrude on the administration of an election,” Logan’s lawyers wrote.

The current Trump administration claims its mass deportation efforts have expelled nearly a million people through July of this year, but those include both voluntary returns and people turned around at the border, according to a new analysis by the former chief statistician for the Department of Homeland Security.

The level of deportations is sharply higher than during the Biden and first Trump administrations but well below the level of the 2000s. Deportations peaked at about 1.9 million in fiscal year 2000 as border enforcement ramped up under a sweeping immigration enforcement law in 1996.

Former DHS official Marc Rosenblum did the analysis, using only public records, for the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank for immigration research. Rosenblum resigned in protest in July against what he called the Trump administration’s “war on immigrants.” He had been with DHS since 2016 and executive director of the statistics office since 2023. 

Rosenblum emphasized in his analysis how many non-criminals have been either forcibly deported or pressured to leave voluntarily. Only 20% overall — and 28% of those in the U.S. for at least two years — have a criminal conviction.

“These data here do not suggest the administration is deporting the worst of the worst,” Rosenblum said.  

Even among convicted criminals, he added, the records were more likely to be immigration or traffic infractions rather than violent or other more serious crimes. 

DHS officials have maintained that living in the country illegally is enough reason to be deported. Tom Homan, the administration’s so-called border czar, told a Florida audience Oct. 1 that deportations have ramped up this fall and will be even higher in 2027. He was speaking to a Hispanic leadership event near Miami sponsored by the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Mass deportation is happening,” Homan said. “I think September’s going to be the highest deportations of any month in the history of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Right now we’ve arrested more people than in the history of this nation.” 

He added later, “Wait until you see what we do next year.”

Rosenblum tallied 980,000 deportations, including arrangements to leave voluntarily after arrest, during the second Trump administration through July 31, about 18 months. About 300,000 had been arrested inside the United States, but most deportations were from the U.S. border with Mexico. There, 680,000 people were either turned around at the border or arrested at the border and deported after processing. 

The number of people leaving the country without being arrested is disputed — DHS earlier this year claimed more than 2.2 million “self-deportations,” apparently based on a decline in immigrant population in surveys. Others dispute that number, saying it’s more likely immigrants are avoiding government surveys. 

In his analysis, Rosenblum estimated the number of immigrants leaving of their own accord — not including people who had formal agreements to leave voluntarily — at between 310,000 and 1.5 million for immigrants who had been here at least a year. The departures include legal immigrants and those who had been living here illegally. 

Rosenblum’s estimate of departures, other than deportation, is imprecise, relying on Mexican census data on its returning citizens to estimate a “plausible level of departures” for other nationalities. 

The numbers in his analysis include people making arrangements to leave voluntarily rather than continue their court cases or contest a return at the border, about 170,000.  It may not include some people who came forward voluntarily to claim financial assistance to leave from the Project Homecoming program. 

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

National Democrats are suing President Donald Trump, accusing his administration of intimidating election officials and asking a federal court to block him from interfering in the midterm elections.

The lawsuit, filed late Tuesday in Washington, D.C., comes as the Trump administration mounts a highly public offensive against voter fraud in California just two weeks before Election Day and as federal agents face allegations they are questioning people at their homes about their voter status.

The Department of Justice has sued state and local officials, demanding they not count the ballots of roughly 20,000 California voters that the DOJ alleges are noncitizens and suggesting they will face prosecution if they do. The Trump administration is currently scrutinizing an additional 17,000 California voters, according to a court filing.

Jeffries, Schumer sign on 

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who’s in line to become speaker if his party retakes the House, and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, along with other Democratic groups and a California voter, allege in their lawsuit that the Trump administration has engaged in a pattern of intimidation intended to frighten officials into complying with unlawful demands to thwart voting.

The executive branch has no authority to assert authority over states’ maintenance of their own voter rolls and determinations of who is qualified to vote, they say. The U.S. Constitution assigns states the responsibility of administering elections.

“Thwarted in Congress and the courts, the administration has now simply disregarded the tools Congress provided it and fashioned its own cudgels instead,” lawyers for the Democrats write in their legal complaint.

The lawsuit names Trump, the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the leaders of both agencies as defendants.

The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department said in a statement that it enforces federal election law and that election integrity is a top priority. Every action the DOJ has taken related to this year’s elections, the statement said, “is grounded in law and being litigated in open court.”

Homeland Security called the lawsuit a “political stunt.”

Dozens of states unsuccessfully sued by DOJ

Noncitizen voting is a rare phenomenon, studies have consistently found. The Justice Department this week charged 38 noncitizens in California with election crimes, an infinitesimal percentage of registered voters. 

Even if all 20,000 individuals on the DOJ list are noncitizens, it would represent only about 0.08% of the nearly 23.2 million registered voters in California. 

For more than a year, the Trump administration has attempted to influence how states run elections. The Justice Department sued dozens of states — all unsuccessfully — to force them to hand over sensitive data on voters. Homeland Security refashioned a powerful computer program called SAVE into a tool that can verify citizenship, though critics say it falsely flags U.S. citizens.

Trump pushed Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would have required voters nationwide to prove their citizenship. The legislation passed the House but encountered bipartisan opposition in the Senate, where a handful of Republicans and Democrats prevented it from advancing.

Trump also attempted to use the U.S. Postal Service to impose national restrictions on voting by mail. The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the Postal Service rules from taking effect ahead of the midterms.

The broad effort has played out as Trump’s political fortunes appear to be dimming. Just 36% of likely voters approve of Trump’s performance, according to a New York Times-Siena University poll released Wednesday. If Democrats retake the House or Senate, they will likely initiate a myriad of investigations into Trump and his administration that could consume the final two years of his term.

New blitz in California

Against that backdrop, the Trump administration has in recent days launched a new voter fraud blitz targeting California, a blue state that mails ballots to all voters. 

Last week the Justice Department provided state and local officials with 20,000 names that it said Homeland Security had identified as likely noncitizens. After giving state officials just 48 hours to act on the list, the DOJ sued. 

On Monday, DOJ attorneys asked for a temporary restraining order that would immediately force California to comply with their demands that these individuals not be provided mail ballots and that their ballots not count unless they offer proof of citizenship. It also suggested in a court filing that Homeland Security could accuse more California voters of being noncitizens.

Nicolas Bartell, associate director of the Fraud Detection and National Security Directorate at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a sub-agency of Homeland Security, said in a declaration filed in court on Tuesday that USCIS “has identified a separate batch of more than 17,000 voting records potentially tied to noncitizens after an initial review of voter rolls.”

But Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean Logan is casting doubt on the reliability of Homeland Security’s review — and arguing complying with the DOJ’s demands would severely disrupt the election locally.

Logan’s office analyzed a sample of 200 names of the 20,000 provided by the Justice Department. In a court filing, lawyers for Logan wrote that his office found that 25.8% of the sample recorded a U.S. birthplace, a guarantee of citizenship except in extremely limited circumstances. About 71% had never voted.

Monica Flores, the assistant registrar-recorder for the Candidate and Voter Services Bureau, wrote in a court declaration that if forced to comply with the Justice Department’s demands, “it would be virtually impossible to timely certify the election results in compliance with state law.”

‘Fearmongering and intimidation’

California state Sen. Lena Gonzalez, a Democrat, at a news conference on Tuesday called the Trump administration’s efforts an attempt to silence voters. She urged voters not to be afraid.

“This is a federal administration that operates through fearmongering and intimidation,” Gonzalez said.

San Francisco, Santa Clara and several advocacy groups sued Homeland Security in September in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging that DHS has authorized broad election-related field operations. Armed agents have been sent to homes to interrogate residents about their voter eligibility, the lawsuit says.

The California Nurses Association, National Nurses United and the Voto Latino Foundation joined the local governments in suing.

A Homeland Security Investigations internal memo dated Aug. 31 describes a “surge initiative” beginning Sept. 1 that includes conducting field interviews. The memo, which was filed in court, identifies California, Georgia, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin as targets of the surge during September. Additional locations are redacted in the document.

“DHS’ stated intention of questioning Americans at their homes weeks before an election is voter intimidation, and protections against this form of harassment extend beyond the polling place,” Hayden Johnson, a lawyer at Protect Democracy, a legal advocacy group representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement when the lawsuit was filed.

Justice Department lawyers have responded in court filings that the plaintiffs haven’t identified a single affected voter. The allegations of intimidation also lack specifics, the DOJ says.

The federal government has statutory authority to investigate potential voting by noncitizens,” DOJ lawyers wrote in a filing. “Enjoining the government from even investigating such criminal violations would damage the public interest, not serve it.”

A hearing on a preliminary injunction in the case was held Monday. No decision was immediately issued.

Republican Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney is waging his second challenge against Wisconsin's Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul on Nov. 3.

The post Trump looms large in rematch for Wisconsin attorney general between Kaul, Toney appeared first on WPR.

More elected leaders including both U.S. Senators from Wisconsin have reported their offices received packages containing a suspicious substance.

The post More Wisconsin lawmakers receive ‘suspicious’ substances by mail appeared first on WPR.

The U.S. Department of Justice is intensifying its campaign against voter fraud with a spree of arrests in the final weeks before Election Day, an effort that voting rights advocates warn risks instilling fear among voters.

Over the past week, the Justice Department unveiled election-related criminal charges against 28 noncitizens in California and threatened state and local election officials with prosecutions. 

It’s now asking a federal judge to immediately order California election officials to not count the ballots of voters it suspects are noncitizens until their citizenship can be verified — citing the new wave of arrests as justification.

Federal prosecutors’ focus on alleged voter fraud comes as President Donald Trump stares down an increasingly dire political landscape in the midterm elections. 

As his approval ratings sag, Democrats are favored to retake the U.S. House and possibly the Senate, an outcome that would trigger a wave of congressional investigations into the president and his administration.

Feds and states

The Trump administration’s confrontation with California is quickly developing into a last-minute showdown over the limits of the federal authority in elections. 

The Justice Department failed to force states to turn over sensitive voter data and the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump’s plan to restrict voting by mail. The pressure on California marks a new front in the federal government’s push to assert influence over how elections are run, a responsibility assigned to the states by the U.S. Constitution.

“The Trump administration’s decision to launch a highly publicized federal sweep just two weeks before Election Day is the latest escalation in a coordinated campaign meant to sow fear and confusion amongst voters,” Jonathan Paik, executive director of OC Action, an Orange County, California, civics group, told reporters on Tuesday.

On Monday, the Justice Department announced the arrests of 11 noncitizens and criminal charges against 28 noncitizens in total in California. The DOJ said all 28 individuals are lawful permanent residents. 

The Los Angeles Times reported that some expressed confusion over the charges as they made their initial appearances in federal court in Los Angeles, saying they had no recollection of registering to vote.

The same day, the DOJ filed court papers asking a federal court to issue a temporary restraining order requiring California to not count ballots cast by roughly 20,000 registered voters that the department says are likely noncitizens unless they can confirm their citizenship. 

The request comes after the DOJ first sued California last week, after giving state and local officials 48 hours to investigate the names.

In the court documents, the DOJ says that without court action, a significant risk exists that American votes will be diluted. It notes that all 28 individuals charged were on the list of suspected noncitizen voters given to state officials.

“California is mailing ballots to noncitizens, and they are refusing to comply with federal law, which makes it a crime for noncitizens to vote. The voting rights of American citizens must be protected,” Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney in California, said in a statement.

Election officials warned

The Justice Department recently raised the prospect that election officials who stand in its way could face prosecution. In a Friday letter to Los Angeles County, Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter wrote that if people knowingly tabulate ballots cast by individuals “identified by federal agencies as noncitizens, they risk becoming aiders and abettors to a federal crime.”

While the DOJ’s actions appear concentrated in California, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of Texas, said in a Monday statement that local election administrators have a duty to prevent illegal voting “and I’m here to make sure they do their job.”

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, predicted the Justice Department’s California lawsuit would fail. 

Becker, a former senior trial attorney in the Justice Department’s Voting Section during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, said election officials are not committing crimes but he anticipates that the Trump administration may raise the “noise level” as Election Day approaches.

“I think there is just a lot of garbage being thrown at the wall because they don’t have any other tools left and they appear to have given up on persuading the electorate in this election,” Becker said on a press call Tuesday.

California election officials have begun to fight back in federal court. Lawyers for California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a Democrat in court filings on Tuesday urged the court not to let the Justice Department effort proceed.

Weber’s lawyers argue that no barrier exists to the Justice Department enforcing federal prohibitions against noncitizen voting. They note that since August, the California Secretary of State’s office has received federal grand jury subpoenas for about 300 people. Monday’s arrests, they say, actually underscore that federal prosecutors can already work through existing rules and procedures to combat alleged fraud.

“At best, this litigation is a reckless political stunt. At worst, it threatens to disenfranchise thousands of Californians this election,” lawyers for Weber wrote.

In a declaration filed in court, Aman Bhullar, a high-ranking official in the Los Angeles County Assistant Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk’s Information Technology Bureau, warned that the Justice Department’s request raised the possibility of a “catastrophic impact” to voting within the county, the most populous in the nation. 

The consequences, Bhullar wrote, range from halting all vote counting to halting the ability of voters to cast a ballot in person. 

Additionally, Bhullar wrote that his team had analyzed a sample of 200 of the 20,000 names provided by the DOJ. They found that nearly 43% had canceled voter registration records and that 86 of the 200 had been mailed a ballot — and that every voter not mailed a ballot had a canceled or inactive record. 

Of the 200 names analyzed, about 71% had never voted.

Dramatic voter fraud arrests

The Justice Department has said that the Department of Homeland Security identified the names after analyzing the state’s publicly available voter roll data and checked them against immigration records and other sources of federal information. Justice Department lawyers say Homeland Security didn’t use the SAVE system, a computer tool that can verify citizenship that Democrats and other critics say falsely flags U.S. citizens. 

DOJ lawyers are separately fighting with the watchdog groups Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington over whether the actions in California violate a federal judge’s order in Washington, D.C., blocking the department’s efforts to obtain state voter roll data and feed it to Homeland Security.

Amid dueling court filings on Tuesday, the Justice Department posted to social media a video montage of voter fraud arrests in California set to rock music. Several clips show Homeland Security Investigations agents in tactical gear leading away a handcuffed man who appears to be wearing red pajama bottoms.

Kevin Lainez, the mayor of Commerce, California, where one person was arrested in the Justice Department’s anti-voter fraud operation, told reporters on Tuesday that the charged individuals must go through the appropriate legal process.

“But let me be clear,” Lainez said. “The timing of the operation and the way it was run was nothing short of political theater.”

After the U.S. Department of Justice sued California over its refusal to remove voters the federal government alleges are noncitizens, voting rights advocates fear the Trump administration is violating a court order blocking it from rooting out noncitizens with states’ voter data.

U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan on Oct. 9 ruled against the Justice Department’s year-long project to obtain state’s unredacted voter rolls, which include sensitive personal data, and share them with the Department of Homeland Security to identify possible noncitizens. The DOJ on Friday said it plans to appeal the decision.

In letters sent on Oct. 13, the Justice Department gave California officials 48 hours to review and remove a list of some 20,000 registered voters that the Trump administration believes are noncitizens. 

Many are concentrated in the Los Angeles area, and state and local elections officials both refused to act on the list. The DOJ immediately sued after its deadline passed on Thursday.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit, coming less than three weeks before Election Day and with voting underway in California, amounts to the latest development in President Donald Trump’s efforts to assert authority over elections, which under the U.S. Constitution are administered by the states. Trump faces a deluge of investigations and pushback if Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress in November.

Democrats and voting rights groups have previously raised alarms about the possibility of the Trump administration attempting to interfere with voting. For some, the legal action against California only exacerbates their concerns. 

Letter sent, hearing requested

On Thursday, several Democratic senators wrote to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to demand that the DOJ confirm it won’t seize ballots or other election materials.

The watchdog groups Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, which represents voters who sued to block the DOJ’s voter data sharing, have asked Sooknanan to hold a hearing to look into whether the Trump administration’s actions violate her order. They said the DOJ has adopted an “exceedingly narrow view” of her decision.

“By attempting to superintend voter roll list maintenance and prohibit registered voters from exercising the franchise without adequate consideration of the reliability of the underlying data, DOJ’s October 13 letters and the actions described in the California (lawsuit) appear to implicate — and perhaps outright violate” Sooknanan’s order, lawyers for the groups wrote in a court filing.

On Friday, Sooknanan ordered the Justice Department to respond to the request for a hearing in District of Columbia federal court by Monday.

Email exchange

Common Cause and CREW filed in court a late Thursday email exchange with Christian Dibblee, a Justice Department trial attorney, in which Dibblee writes that Homeland Security obtained a publicly available voter roll of California voters — as opposed to the full, unredacted roll that DOJ has sued states over — and that DHS didn’t use the SAVE system to identify possible noncitizens. 

SAVE, a computer system operated by DHS, combs through government databases to verify citizenship, but critics point to examples of the program falsely flagging U.S. citizens. The U.S. Supreme Court in September ruled that states could continue accessing SAVE ahead of the midterm elections, but most states are currently prohibited from conducting mass purges of voters because it’s too close to the election.

Sooknanan’s order “does not extend to using other methods, nor does it prohibit taking enforcement actions based on those other methods,” Dibblee wrote, adding that Homeland Security also wasn’t a party to the lawsuit challenging the DOJ’s voter roll effort.

The Justice Department’s lawsuit against California offers a broad overview, but few specifics, of how Homeland Security compiled its list of suspected noncitizens. It says that Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, compares “information about voter rolls” with “its internal data” to identify possible noncitizens. Additional investigative steps, not described, are used to assign a confidence level — low, medium or high — to each match.

ICE then connects high confidence matches with an “alien number” and those individuals are compared against internal records regarding naturalization and parental citizenship. Records from the State Department and Social Security Administration are also reviewed, the DOJ says in its lawsuit.

Individuals that ICE still believes to be noncitizens are then sent to Homeland Security Investigations, a sub-agency of ICE, according to the Justice Department. HSI conducts an “analytical data enrichment process” before sending data to HSI criminal investigators in the field.

In a statement Friday, DHS said it uses multiple data sources, from both government and commercial third-party sources, to supplement public information.

Mullin slams ‘unlawful voting’ 

In a Thursday statement, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin called the number of alleged noncitizens registered to vote in California “completely unacceptable.” He said even one noncitizen vote cancels out the ballot of a U.S. citizen and undermines elections.

“DHS is committed to identifying unlawful voting, protecting the integrity of federal elections, and ensuring that only eligible American citizens elect America’s leaders,” Mullin said.

Democrats and voting rights experts have questioned the Justice Department’s decision to file the lawsuit with the election underway. The DOJ previously lost a lawsuit seeking to force California to turn over its unredacted voter roll — one of 23 similar lawsuits over state voter data that the Trump administration has lost.

The Trump administration’s efforts to identify large numbers of noncitizen voters have, up to this point, also fallen short of its own standards. Over the summer, the federal government claimed that California had upwards of 190,000 noncitizens on its voter roll. 

By contrast, Thursday’s lawsuit alleges only roughly 20,000 noncitizen voters — about 0.08% of the nearly 23.2 million registered voters in California.

DHS said Friday that 190,000 remains the number of potential noncitizen voters but that 20,000 represents a subset who have gone through a manual verification process so far.

“Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there’s no widespread voter fraud in the U.S.,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, wrote on social media. “The Trump Admin’s last-minute demands are meritless, and we look forward to making our case in court.”

Gov. Tony Evers toured a new Milwaukee juvenile facility on Wednesday along with Department of Corrections leaders, closing another chapter in the troubled history of the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake youth prisons. The sleek, colorful new facility looked like  a well-resourced though highly secure school. The Southeast Regional Care Center for Youth, or SERC, will house 32 boys who are in the DOC’s custody. 

While serving their sentences the boys will have access to educational programs, a gym, a greenhouse and other opportunities to help prepare them to return to their communities. Since many of the boys will be from the Milwaukee area, the new $65.6 million facility will make it easier for their families to visit compared to Lincoln Hills, hours away in Irma, Wisconsin. 

“This new facility marks a historic milestone for our state and is the beginning of what I hope is a real, meaningful transformation of not only juvenile corrections in our state but of corrections in Wisconsin,” Evers said. “Not only will this new facility allow us to safely move our kids closer to their homes, their families, and their support systems, but it will give kids and families hope for a brighter future. With evidence-based strategies, this new facility will provide young people the role models, educational opportunities, and support needed so they can grow, be better, and do better, all while helping to reduce crime, prevent violence, and keep our kids, families and communities safe.”

SERC is located on Milwaukee’s North Side, tucked away a few blocks  from a busy roadway just north of Good Hope Road. At first glance the tan brick building resembles a small school, but a closer look reveals  large tinted windows and a few State Patrol vehicles parked outside. Walking through the front door, visitors come to  a metal detector station in a  front lobby with light colored walls, tiled floor and chairs. 

Wednesday’s official  tour of the new facility began with a visit to the SERC’s chapel. Next, Evers was guided by DOC Sec. Jared Hoy and DOC juvenile corrections administrator Lance Horozewski to an outside area surrounded by a high brick wall and security gate, where Evers viewed a basketball court and a large greenhouse next to  raised garden beds — one for each boy which the facility will house.

Heading back inside, Hoy and Horozewski showcased medical facilities with individual exam rooms and areas where youth can access needed dental care. There was also a large kitchen, and spaces where youth could learn welding and woodworking. Evers also looked over visiting areas complete with games and kiosks for video visits, a large indoor gym and basketball court and classrooms. Evers also checked out a creative room where the boys will be able to make and record music, and even make videos using a large green screen.

The area where the boys will be housed was  behind a door, which will be controlled by staff monitoring from an adjacent room. A common space contained couches, tables, a couple of phones and games. Down the hall were dorm rooms with wood floors and gray metal furniture, with one bed per room, a toilet, desk, and a window with a view of the outdoors, with a blind the boys can open or close. 

The design of SERC is intended to forge a new direction for juvenile incarceration in Wisconsin. For years, the Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools were  notorious for reports of abuse and suffering for both youth housed there and the staff responsible for their care. Earlier this year, a federal judge ended mandatory oversight of Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake after the DOC had been found to be in “substantial compliance” with reforms mandated after a 2018 class action settlement.

Lincoln Hills’ troubled history led the Legislature to spend years planning to close the 500-bed facility, convert it to an adult prison, and open up smaller and safer juvenile facilities which would also be closer to home for the youth housed there. 

Evers appeared to approve of SERC as he walked through its halls. “But our work is not over — far from it, ” he said in a statement. “Our state is decades behind in how we think about corrections, and this new facility is the first step, but it is only a step. We must continue our work to modernize our corrections system into the 21st century and close Lincoln Hills and Copper Lake schools for good.”

Hoy said that looking around SERC “you see a school, not a prison.” He went on to say in a statement that “that’s because it is a school and even more. It’s a place to learn and to heal. There’s no barbed wire. No towers. There are big windows, color, space. And it’s all secure both for the youth and for the neighborhood. The design supports what we now know about adolescent development, and the programming offered here will follow suit with staff using evidence-based techniques to help youth make better choices and support rehabilitation.”

Hoy said at the beginning of November the first group of youth will be moved into SERC, with more to come over the following months into the holidays. “We’ve been recruiting for staff starting back in the summer,” said Hoy. “And so we’ve had two graduating classes already. We’ll have more than adequate staff. Not just safety staff — so your youth counselors that are here  — but education, treatment, all of those different functions are already on board…And then we will continue to staff up. We have another class graduating, I think at the beginning of November.”

Staffing shortages had long plagued Lincoln Hills and other DOC facilities. Hoy told the Wisconsin Examiner that the DOC has paid particular attention to staff-to-youth ratios for the SERC to help prevent burnout among staff, and has established staff wellness spaces. Hoy also said that “the space itself lends to a sort of feeling of wellness and calmness.”

Another Type 1 facility is being constructed in Dane County which is designed to hold 32 boys and eight girls. The DOC is also pushing for a third facility to be opened in northern Wisconsin in order to serve youth from that region of the state. Hoy told the Examiner that having multiple facilities would allow the DOC to cross-train and pull staff from one facility to another in order to help fill any gaps and prevent burnout.

Many of the staff who will work at the new facility are from the Milwaukee area, and theoretically might have an advantage in  relating with the youth there. Kashunda Brown, 37, one of SERC’s youth counselors, explained that she grew up on the North Side of Milwaukee where she learned what it’s like to experience poverty and living in a single parent home. Brown also has two boys of her own which “resonates with the youth that we encounter here,” she told the Examiner. 

Keana Berkhalter, 32, a licensed counselor who will be working with the facility’s Psychological Services Unit, is also from Milwaukee. “I’ve seen the complex issues and challenges that we have here, as well as the strengths that Milwaukee has,” Berkhalter told the Examiner. Berkhalter said that it’s important that youth know that the staff understand them because it helps them feel safe. “As human beings, it’s easier to connect to people that look like us, or at least that we have some sort of similar commonality.” 

The experiences the counselors share with the youth help them to connect. “I think that gives me leverage to connect to the youth, as well as help them feel safe and to talk to me and to want to trust and confide in me, to talk about things that maybe they don’t want to talk to anybody about.”

Brown said the greenhouse, raised beds, and creative spaces are especially important for the boys SERC will house. To anyone who questions whether the facility should feel more punitive, Brown says, “I think the punitive is them being away from their family.” 

She continued, “this should be, and is, a space where they can have different things that they don’t experience on the outside. A lot of people don’t have access to a basketball court at home. A lot of people don’t have access to gardening.” These translate into coping skills the boys can take home with them to avoid getting in trouble. 

Youth who learn that they enjoy woodworking, cooking, growing food in the garden or other activities available at SERC could take that with them and become more productive members of society, Brown said. “I think all the skills that they will get here, they can use on the outside. The punitive is them being in here.” 

The U.S. Department of Justice is demanding California not count ballots from voters it says are suspected noncitizens, a move by the Trump administration to apply last-minute pressure as voting begins in the midterm elections.

The Justice Department on Tuesday gave California election officials 48 hours to remove voters on a list contained on a thumb drive provided to Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the country. The DOJ also wants election officials to withhold mail ballots from these voters. 

The demand appeared in letters to the California Secretary of State’s Office and the Los Angeles Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk. The DOJ gave the state until noon Eastern on Thursday to comply, threatening legal action if that deadline is not met.

The letters set the stage for a courtroom confrontation between the Trump administration and the largest state in the country ahead of Election Day. The Justice Department’s demand marks an extraordinary effort to dictate to state officials who will be allowed to cast a ballot even as voting is underway.

“The United States hopes that you share our commitment to ensure that only American citizens participate in our federal elections. Allowing noncitizens to vote cancels citizen votes,” R. Trent McCotter, an acting deputy U.S. attorney general, wrote in a letter to California Democratic Secretary of State Shirley Weber.

Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk Dean C. Logan said in a statement that his office received the thumb drive, along with a handwritten note containing a password. Workers in the office did not seek to open the thumb drive, which would have violated data security protocols, he said.

He said he would work with Weber and the state attorney general to determine next steps.

“Maintaining accurate voter registration records is a fundamental responsibility of our office,” he added. “Federal and state laws are clear on how voter eligibility is established – and any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching.”

In a statement late Wednesday, Weber said the DOJ’s actions “only serve to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections.”

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press account on social media called the Trump administration’s actions “completely unacceptable and inappropriate.” 

Questions linger

It’s not clear whether the Justice Department plans to send letters to additional states. The Justice Department provided copies of the letters to States Newsroom on Wednesday but didn’t answer a question about whether other states would receive them.

In the letters, McCotter asked California election officials to segregate the mail ballots of the suspected noncitizens until their citizenship status is determined. The individuals shouldn’t be sent mail ballots if they haven’t already been sent one, McCotter added, and any returned ballots should not be tabulated until citizenship can be determined.

McCotter did not say how many individuals are on the DOJ’s list or how the federal government came to believe they aren’t citizens. He wrote that the Justice Department would “seek emergency relief” if California didn’t comply. 

Voter roll changes prohibited during election season

Federal law prohibits most states from conducting systematic purges of voters less than 90 days before an election. If the Justice Department sues to force California to remove the suspected noncitizen voters, a judge would likely grapple with whether the DOJ-provided list represents the kind of mass removal that’s not currently allowed.

Voting rights groups and Democratic election officials, as well as some Republicans, have warned that Trump may try to interfere in the midterm elections. If Democrats retake control of the U.S. House or Senate, the final two years of the president’s term could be mired in investigations and legislative gridlock.

Federal courts have uniformly blocked the department’s efforts to force states to turn over their voter rolls, including sensitive personal information such as driver’s license and Social Security numbers. And a federal judge last week ruled against the DOJ’s use of voter data even from states that voluntarily provided the information.

The U.S. Supreme Court also blocked Trump’s attempt to restrict voting by mail through the U.S. Postal Service, leaving the president with few remaining avenues to assert authority over elections, which are administered by the states under the U.S. Constitution.

“Donald Trump’s attempt to invalidate votes in California is an attack on every voter across the country. The president is abusing his position in a callous attempt to take away the power of everyday people, but here in California we’re not going to let him,” Jonathan Paik, a leader with Can’t Stop California, a nonpartisan voter mobilization group, said in a statement.

Trump has long complained about California elections, especially the speed of ballot counting in the state. California’s long count is a well-known feature of its elections, with election officials given about a month to process and tally all ballots and doesn’t indicate fraud.

The Justice Department has followed Trump’s lead in scrutinizing California’s elections. The top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles has linked suspicions about California’s elections to the state’s refusal to turn over its unredacted voter roll.

Milwaukee County is a step closer to getting rid of Flock automatic license plate reader cameras. On Monday, joined by county board members, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley signed a resolution directing the removal of Flock cameras from county parks.

“Today is about our commitment to protecting the rights and privacy of our residents,” said Crowley, who is running for governor against Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany.  “Across the country, the use of Flock cameras and automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, has sparked a fierce backlash that defies traditional partisan lines. Residents and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are asking whether the convenience of this technology is worth the cost to our privacy, and who is accountable for how it is used.”

Flock cameras store images of traveling vehicles and their license plates in a database which can be searched by law enforcement using license plate numbers or vehicle descriptions. 

Although police can use the AI-powered cameras to investigate crimes such as homicide, kidnapping and theft, they have also been used to track protesters and women suspected of crossing state lines to seek an abortion. There have also been numerous cases in Wisconsin and elsewhere of officers or police staff using Flock to track romantic partners and exes. In some areas, local police chiefs and elected officials have expressed a distrust of Flock Safety, the multi-billion dollar company behind the cameras. 

Both Crowley and Tiffany have criticized Flock, though Tiffany said just months ago that he did not know what the cameras were. Since then Tiffany has proposed prohibiting shared revenue funds from being used for Flock cameras, and has labeled Crowley as an advocate of constant surveillance. Police surveillance cameras were  adopted in Milwaukee as the city and county sought to tamp down reckless driving and car theft with the support of  Republican lawmakers. 

Crowley said that in Wisconsin, “Flock executives have shown a pattern of misleading the public about their business practices, their safety record, their commitment to privacy, and their efforts to protect vulnerable populations.” He added that, “nationwide, we have seen documented cases of law enforcement officials misusing this data for personal and often malicious reasons.”

Though Crowley said that none of those cases involved Milwaukee County employees, but two officers with the city’s police department have been charged or sentenced for misusing Flock. 

Crowley said that while he appreciated the sheriff’s office work on a policy framework to address concerns about Flock, “even the strongest policy framework is only as trustworthy as the company behind the technology, and a good relationship with the vendor does not safeguard our residents’ data.” 

“‘It hasn’t happened here yet’ is not a good enough reason to keep this technology in place,” he said. “We cannot wait until data is breached, privacy is compromised, or information is misused before we act. When it comes to our residents’ rights and safety, we must be proactive.”

Milwaukee County’s contract with Flock expires in December, and the proposed 2027 budget does not include funding for Flock. Last week, teams of Milwaukee County Park workers began covering the cameras to prevent them from collecting data. In recent public meetings, the sheriff’s office pushed against the cancellation of Flock, attributing a 43% decline in certain crimes within county parks to the camera’s arrival, and warning that crime will rise should they be removed. Recently, the Milwaukee Police Department signaled that it would renew its own contract with Flock while also employing new auditing and other guardrails to detect further signs of misuse.

“Our residents should be able to enjoy our beautiful parks without wondering whether their presence is being logged in an AI-powered surveillance system run by a company that has already lost the trust of local governments and law enforcement agencies across the country,” Crowley said. “Today, Milwaukee County is choosing to put our residents first. And I will keep making that choice, every day, in every decision.”

As candidates debate public safety ahead of the midterm elections, a new assessment of the nation’s historic homicide decline suggests there is no single explanation for the drop — and that some widely discussed enforcement strategies may have played little role.

A survey of nearly 50 crime scholars convened by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice found the strongest support that the top contributing factors to the drop in homicide rates have been community violence intervention programs, the easing of pandemic-related disruptions, and focused deterrence strategies that pair law enforcement with social services.

The findings come amid a historic national decline in homicide. In 2025, the estimated U.S. murder and nonnegligent manslaughter rate fell 18.1% compared with 2024, which equates to about 4 killings per 100,000 people. It tied the lowest rate recorded since national estimates began. The FBI recorded the same rate in 1955 and 1956. 

But a national decline does not mean every community has experienced the same drop.

The decline has unfolded in cities with different public safety strategies, economic conditions and political leadership, complicating efforts to credit any one approach, according to the council’s report.

The researchers rated 48 potential explanations for the decline between 2022 and 2026. Six factors received support from more than two-thirds of respondents as contributing either substantially or to a limited degree:

• Expanded community violence intervention programs, which work directly with people at highest risk of violence, were rated as either a major or a limited contributor contributing by 91% of researchers. 
• The pandemic recovery was rated as a major or a limited contributor by 83% of respondents. It was the only factor that a majority of respondents, 57%, rated as a major contributor.
• Eighty-three percent of the crime scholars gave credit to the increased use of focused deterrence, an approach that targets high-risk individuals and groups directly with a carrot-and-stick approach through social support and law enforcement.
• Researchers also pointed to increased local government capacity to provide social services, with 75% rating it either a major or limited contributor.
• Greater public safety and support resources relative to demand earned a rating of 68%.
• And more proactive policing was likewise named as a major or limited factor by 68% of the scholars.

Researchers largely dismissed more than half of the potential explanations, including National Guard deployments, increased immigration enforcement and increased pretrial detention. 

Other factors thought to have contributed little included homeless encampment removals, improved housing stability, electronic monitoring, GLP-1 medications, declining cash use, presidential public safety signals, DNA databases, neighborhood crime alerts and increased incarceration.

The findings do not establish that any one strategy caused homicide to fall. The ratings reflect researchers’ professional judgments, not definitive findings, and multiple factors may have overlapped or reinforced one another, according to the council’s report. 

The council also cautioned that a factor judged to have contributed little to the recent decline could still help reduce violence in the future.

But understanding what drove the decline could help policymakers determine how to sustain the progress, according to the council’s report. 

“Theories and claims abound, and sorting among them is essential if we’re going to sustain the progress. This diverse array of researchers took the challenge seriously, testing competing explanations, debating the evidence, and making tough judgments,” Adam Gelb, the president and CEO of the council, said in a news release. “Their effort leaves the country with a much clearer picture of what likely contributed, what probably did not, and what we still need to learn.” 

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.

Three weeks before Election Day, the Trump administration’s sprawling project to send sensitive personal information on millions of voters to the Department of Homeland Security has been declared illegal by a federal judge.

The blistering court decision comes after the Department of Justice pressured or sued states for their voters’ information and then, according to court records and federal documents, turned over the data it obtained to Homeland Security Investigations — a sub-agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.

The decision, issued late last week, marks the latest rebuke of the Trump administration during more than a year of legal confrontations with dozens of states and voting rights groups over President Donald Trump’s efforts to assert authority over voting ahead of the midterm elections. 

If Republicans lose control of one or both chambers of Congress, Trump’s final two years in office could be consumed by Democratic-led investigations into his administration and opposition to his legislative agenda.

The Justice Department’s legal arguments suggested that “every American citizen who registers to vote is the subject of a voter fraud investigation underway in the (Justice Department’s) Civil Rights Division simply because they registered to vote,” wrote Judge Sparkle Sooknanan of District of Columbia District Court, an appointee of President Joe Biden.

“Behind all the window dressing, the challenged policy represents the federal government’s attempt to decide who gets to vote,” Sooknanan wrote. “But Congress has left that authority where our Constitution has always placed it: with the states.”

SAVE program

The Justice Department has already lost at least 23 district court lawsuits seeking to force states to provide voter data. The U.S. Supreme Court also blocked Trump’s plans to use the U.S. Postal Service to restrict voting by mail. 

While the Supreme Court cleared states to use a supercharged Homeland Security computer program called SAVE to seek out noncitizen voters, its effects on the midterms have been minimal because most states are restricted by federal law from conducting mass purges of registered voters so close to an election.

SAVE’s opponents point to multiple examples of the program falsely flagging Americans as possible noncitizens. Sooknanan previously ruled against SAVE’s use in a June decision, which the Supreme Court overturned in September when it allowed states to access the program.

Asked about Sooknanan’s latest decision, Justice Department spokesperson Kiersten Pels in an email to States Newsroom said only that the department was “reviewing the ruling.”

More noncitizen voting charges

In recent weeks, the Justice Department has filed a series of cases alleging noncitizen voting, which studies have consistently shown rarely occurs. The DOJ on Monday announced voter fraud charges against 16 individuals, including 13 noncitizens. In September, prosecutors secured grand jury indictments against 10 noncitizens in Minnesota.

“The law is clear, only American citizens may vote in American elections, and enforcing this law is fundamental to our democracy. That should not be a partisan concept,” U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said at a late September news conference.

Sooknanan’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed in April by the voting rights group Common Cause and a group of voters. While both Republican and Democratic-led states had fought the Justice Department individually, the new lawsuit targeted the entire voter roll collection project — a choice aimed at protecting voters living in states that had shared or might share their data with the Trump administration voluntarily.

“This is a victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice. It’s time the Trump administration stop these desperate attempts to seize voters’ private data and take control of our elections,” Virginia Kase Solomón, Common Cause president and CEO, said in a statement.

16 states provided voter rolls

Despite the courtroom losses, the Trump administration still obtained records on tens of millions of voters. At least 16 states voluntarily provided the Justice Department with their voter rolls, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, which has tracked the DOJ’s actions.

Those states include Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming.

Court filings and internal government documents show the Trump administration put the information to use. Last week, the watchdog group Democracy Forward released internal HSI reports showing the agency received nearly 51 million Justice Department records as part of its “election integrity” investigations.

The HSI reports didn’t describe the nature of the Justice Department records. But Sooknanan wrote the DOJ had given records on millions of voters to ICE. Sooknanan ruled the transfers violated the Privacy Act, a federal law that restricts how federal agencies collect and share information on individuals.

Sooknanan referenced a letter from the acting director of ICE to the Justice Department asking for the state voter lists as part of an initiative to combat voter fraud. In the March 6 letter, Todd Lyons asked for the data “in order for HSI to conduct appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

DOJ attorney Eric Neff replied to Lyons on March 12 to confirm the data sharing. He wrote that Homeland Security and the Justice Department would “take reasonable efforts to limit impacts to the privacy and civil liberties of United States citizens.”

However, Sooknanan found that the DOJ sought to investigate every registered voter without a specific reason to believe they committed voter fraud or that their states violated federal election laws. She warned that the department cannot evade the free speech protections within the Privacy Act by launching a “dragnet” investigation of the whole country.

‘Not only ill-conceived, but illegal’

Justin Levitt, who served as senior policy adviser for democracy and voting rights in the Biden White House and is now a law professor at Loyola Marymount University, said not much in Sooknanan’s decision will directly affect the 2026 elections. 

Writing in Election Law Blog, Levitt noted that most states never turned over their voter files to the Justice Department, and of the states that did, only a few appeared to have pledged to act on whatever “unreliable garbage” data the DOJ sent back.

“But even without a direct impact on anything happening in the next month, this is an important declaration that the whole program was not only ill-conceived, but illegal,” Levitt wrote.

The Trump administration may still be allowed to compile lists of voting-age citizens in each state as part of a sweeping executive order on voting by mail signed by Trump in March. But court-mandated notice requirements mean the lists won’t be available before the midterms.

The so-called state citizenship lists are the only major element of the executive order not currently blocked by the courts. The order directs Homeland Security to work with the Social Security Administration to develop the lists and provide them to state officials, though it doesn’t require states to do anything with the information.

Maryland judge to consider citizenship lists

U.S. District Court Judge Paula Xinis, an appointee of President Barack Obama in Maryland District Court, is set to decide what the Supreme Court’s Sept. 25 decision allowing the use of SAVE means for the fate of the citizenship lists. 

The Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC, a public interest research organization, sued the Trump administration over the lists in August. While Xinis hasn’t ruled in the lawsuit, she has ordered the DOJ to provide at least 30 days notice of any effort to move forward with the initiative or provide the lists to states.

With less than a month before Election Day, the notice requirement effectively means the lists won’t be available before the midterm elections, even if they are upheld in court. Still, the eventual outcome holds potential consequences for future elections if states use the information to purge registered voters.

EPIC and the Justice Department have submitted dueling briefs to Xinis on what the SAVE decision means for the citizenship lists.

Lawyers for EPIC argue that key differences exist between the state citizenship lists and the SAVE system. While the SAVE system discloses information on requested individuals, they noted, the executive order mandates providing information on all U.S. citizens by state.

“Critically, states or localities must initiate a request for verification of specified individuals’ citizenship status in order to utilize” SAVE, the attorneys wrote.

Lawyers for the Justice Department called the argument a “red herring.” In their brief, they argue that state officials would have to log into a federal portal to download the citizenship data.

“That affirmative conduct would be materially similar to sending a request to DHS: either way, the State would itself initiate the transfer of data,” the DOJ brief says.

Xinis could rule at any time.

A $3 million capital investment to equip Dane County sheriff’s deputies with body cameras has been included in the proposed 2027 county budget. Dane County Executive Melissa Agard and Sheriff Kalvin Barrett praised the move as an investment in public safety. 

“Public Safety is one of the most fundamental responsibilities we have in county government, and our residents deserve to feel safe and have confidence in the people and institutions that serve them,” Agard said last week. “This $3 million investment is about strengthening safety, transparency, and public trust. Body-worn cameras can provide greater clarity when questions arise, strengthen accountability, and help protect both members of the public and the deputies who serve them.”

A county press release states that a Wisconsin Department of Justice Survey found that 88% of responding law enforcement agencies reported using at least one form of recording device. The survey found 12% of responding agencies reported using neither body cameras nor dash cameras. 

Sheriff Barrett called body cameras “an important resource that supports accountability, transparency, and trust.” Barrett added that “this investment will enable us to build on the work we began with our pilot program and move Dane County forward. The funding reflects what can be accomplished when we collaborate with our community partners and elected officials toward a shared goal. I especially appreciate County Executive Agard’s leadership and support in making this possible.”

The sheriff’s office is also finalizing policies for the cameras including how to use them, how long footage is retained and when it can be released.

Body cameras became a hot topic in Dane County after the shooting of Corey Ruiz by a Madison police officer. The officers involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras, leaving bystander video as the main public video evidence of the incident. The Madison Police Department, despite being one of the state’s largest, does not have a uniform body camera program. After the Ruiz shooting, community members called on city officials to equip all officers with body cameras.

“Technology alone does not create trust,” said Agard. “It matters how that technology is used and whether the public understands the policies surrounding it. As we make this investment, we are committed to ensuring transparency and accountability remain at the center of implementation.”

Candidates running in the race for Wisconsin Attorney General sparred on a myriad of topics during a debate Sunday, including adequate resources to address crime.

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Madison's police chief sees body cameras as a way for the department to "dissect" each use of force to make improvements.

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