Simulated gravestones are arrayed in front of the Madison Labor Temple on Monday, April 28, 2025, to commemorate Workers Memorial Day. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Some 112 Wisconsin workers died on the job in 2023, the AFL-CIO reported Monday as labor unions marked Workers Memorial Day to highlight workplace dangers.

“When a union is there at the workplace, injuries go down and lives are saved,” said Kevin Gundlach, president of the South Central Federation of Labor, representing union workers in Dane County and surrounding counties.

Workers Memorial Day serves both to remember those who have lost their lives at work as well as “fighting for the living” to have a safe workplace, Gundlach told the Wisconsin Examiner. The date, April 28, coincides with the anniversary of the date that the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act took effect 54 years ago.

The AFL-CIO’s analysis draws on 2023 job fatality, injury and illness data along with workplace safety regulation enforcement data for the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2024.

Of the 112 Wisconsin worker deaths in 2023, 15 were from assaults and other violent acts, 37 from transportation incidents, 17 from falls, 19 from exposures to harmful substances or environments, and 23 from “contact with objects or equipment,” according to the AFL-CIO.

“Every worker in Wisconsin has the right to a safe job,” said Wisconsin AFL-CIO President Stephanie Bloomingdale. “We need collective bargaining rights and strong unions for all to best ensure that safety concerns are adequately and timely addressed in the workplace.”

Union groups around Wisconsin held events, including in Madison, Milwaukee, Eau Claire, La Crosse and Wausau.

At the Madison event, people working in health care, construction, education and as state game wardens came out. There was also testimony on behalf of immigrant workers in the construction industry.

“Many of these workers are exploited and don’t have a union,” Gundlach said. Recent attacks on migrants have made some “fearful to speak up for workplace conditions.”

The event also called attention to workplace violence as a danger, and the need for employers to address workplace safety issues.

In its report, the AFL-CIO criticized the administration of President Donald Trump, which marks its first 100 days this week, for “totally decimating the fabric of what makes government protections work for people through attacks on job safety, public health, union rights and the independence of federal agencies.”

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President Donald Trump speaks during an executive order signing in the Oval Office on Feb. 11, 2025. Trump signed two immigration-related orders on Monday in an event closed to press photographers. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Monday evening signed executive orders targeting so-called sanctuary cities by threatening to revoke federal funding and providing legal services and national security assets to law enforcement.

The signings fell on the eve of Trump’s first 100 days of his second term, during which his administration has enacted an immigration crackdown that has led to clashes with the judiciary branch and cities that do not coordinate with federal immigration authorities, often referred to as “sanctuary cities.”

“Some State and local officials nevertheless continue to use their authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of Federal immigration laws,” according to the executive order regarding sanctuary cities. “This is a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law and the Federal Government’s obligation to defend the territorial sovereignty of the United States.”

The order directs the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to publicly list local jurisdictions that limit cooperation with immigration officials, but do not stop immigration enforcement.

Jurisdictions on the list will then be reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget to “identify appropriate Federal funds to sanctuary jurisdictions, including grants and contracts, for suspension or termination, as appropriate.”

This is not the first time the Trump administration has targeted jurisdictions that don’t fully cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. 

The Justice Department recently filed a lawsuit against the city of Rochester, New York, over its immigration policies after local law enforcement did not assist federal immigration officials in an arrest. The Trump administration argued those ordinances in Rochester were impeding federal immigration enforcement.

The president also signed an executive order in January that threatened to withhold federal funding from states and local governments that refused to aid in federal immigration enforcement activities. A federal judge in San Francisco last week blocked the Trump administration from withholding federal funds from 16 so-called sanctuary cities.

Republicans have also scrutinized those policies, including during a six-hour hearing of the U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that included grilling mayors from Boston, Chicago and Denver, on their cities’ immigration policies. 

The executive order also aims to curb any federal benefits that may extend to people without permanent legal status.

That executive order directed DOJ and DHS to “take appropriate action to stop the enforcement of State and local laws” that allow for students without proper legal authorization to receive in-state tuition, which would include those with Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

Last week, administration officials cheered the FBI arrest of a Wisconsin judge who they say helped an immigrant in the country without legal authorization escape detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The arrest followed the third appearance by ICE officers seeking to make arrests at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, a practice some experts believe hinders local law enforcement.

Law enforcement resources

A second executive order Trump signed Monday provides legal resources for law enforcement officials “who unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law.”

The order also directs coordination among the departments of Justice, Defense and Homeland Security to “increase the provision of excess military and national security assets in local jurisdictions to assist State and local law enforcement.” 

Earlier Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the executive order relating to law enforcement will “strengthen and unleash America’s law enforcement to pursue criminals and protect innocent citizens.”

 

Tim Muth, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Wisconsin, said that during a hearing in computer engineering student Krish Lal Isserdasani's case that “the government's lawyer was unable to say that it wouldn't happen again." UW-Madison Engineering Hall. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

University of Wisconsin international students’ visa terminations are being reversed by the Trump administration after many judges across the country blocked the actions, including in Wisconsin.

Dozens of UW students were part of a group of thousands of international students in the U.S. who had their visas abruptly cancelled without notice from the federal government and without a chance to challenge the decision. 

According to a Politico report Friday, the Trump administration said in federal court it was reversing course and reinstating visas for many international students and alumni. A Justice Department attorney said, according to the report, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is “developing a policy that will provide a framework for SEVIS record terminations, and that the records for students “will remain active or shall be reactivated if not currently active, and ICE will not modify the record solely based on the [National Crime Information Center] finding that resulted in the recent SEVIS record termination.” The attorney also emphasized that ICE still has the authority to terminate a SEVIS record for other reasons.

The American Immigration Law Association estimates there were about 4,700 affected students across the country. 

UW-Madison said in a statement Monday that each of the 27 cancellations for its international students and alumni were reversed as of late afternoon Saturday, and that affected students and alumni will be able to continue their studies or post-graduation training at UW-Madison as a result.

Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin said in the statement that she was “relieved and grateful” for the development. 

“This situation was deeply troubling, upended lives and created both fear and harm,” Mnookin said. “I want to personally thank the many members of our community, along with local, state and federal officials, who worked to assist our students.”

Reported reversals started Thursday and continued through the weekend, according to UW-Madison, and similar to the cancellations, there was no explanation for the records being restored.

The institution said that it has notified the students of the most recent change to their records and that International Student Services and International Faculty and Staff Services are continuing to provide information, resources and support.

“We are pleased to see that all of our affected students and alumni have had their SEVIS records returned to active status, as it has been a difficult period for all involved,” UW- Madison International Division Dean Frances Vavrus said in a statement. “We will continue to follow this evolving situation closely throughout the summer and upcoming academic year.”

Universities of Wisconsin spokesperson Mark Pitsch said in an email that there have been “a number of reversals at our universities” and that the situation remains “fluid.”

Reversals come after judges in cases across at least 23 states had issued emergency orders temporarily blocking the government’s action including in Wisconsin.

In one case, Krish Lal Isserdasani, a 21-year-old computer engineering senior from India, had his SEVIS record terminated less than a month before he was scheduled to graduate from UW-Madison. His case had noted that Isserdasani and his family have spent about $240,000 on his education at UW-Madison and he could lose $17,500 on the current semester’s tuition and would be responsible for four months of rent despite not being able to stay in the country. Isserdasani had also reported a significant psychological impact, including “difficulty in sleeping and fear that he will be placed in immediate detention and deportation.” U.S. District Judge William Conley had temporarily blocked his visa cancellation. 

In another case last week, Conley said that the government had wrongly cancelled Yue “Alison” Yang, a UW-Madison student from China, and granted her protection from deportation. 

Despite the step back by the Trump administration, the ACLU of Wisconsin is calling for injunctive relief from federal courts. The ACLU of Wisconsin filed an amicus curiae brief in two cases challenging the revocations, including Isserdasani’s case and a case recently brought by three anonymous international UW-Madison students, saying the issue isn’t “moot.”

Tim Muth, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Wisconsin, said that “resorting to the courts is continuing to be an important check on actions that this administration is taking without regard to the human consequences on persons like the student in this case.”

In an amicus curiae brief, Muth wrote that the reversal offers “little protection” for plaintiffs and urged the Court to issue a ruling that “declaring such terminations, without due process and without compliance with applicable law and regulation, to be illegal.”

“It is clear that the recent pivot by the federal government should not moot these 100+ cases pending around the country since they are clearly able to be reversed immediately after dismissal of suits challenging them, and the present likelihood of irreparable injury to the Plaintiffs remains a going concern,” Muth wrote in the amicus curiae.

Muth told the Wisconsin Examiner that the reversals are a sign of the Trump administration’s “losing record” in these cases, but said it’s difficult to trust the Trump administration on immigration matters. 

“It’s not as if the Department of Homeland Security issued a press release or a formal statement announcing a change in policy,” Muth said. “What we had were a couple of attorneys in a couple of different cases saying the government is reactivating student status in SEVIS… Nothing official… has come out from the government. No statement of ‘Oh, we made a mistake on these 4,700 students, and we’re going to correct it. We’re so sorry.’” 

Muth said that during a hearing Monday in Isserdasani’s case Conley asked the government’s lawyer if she was authorized to say that a termination of Isserdasani SEVIS status wouldn’t happen again under the “new policy that supposedly they are developing.” 

“The government’s lawyer was unable to say that it wouldn’t happen again,” Muth said. “That is why the ACLU and… lawyers for international students around the country are saying there continues to be the need for courts to step in until there’s some legally binding correction made by the government.”

Muth said the law is “pretty clear” about when international students can lose their status. Those cases include when someone is no longer a full time student, when someone is engaging in employment that isn’t authorized by the law, lying to ICE or committing a crime of violence. He said things like traffic citations or an arrest for a charge that has been dismissed (as in the case of Isserdasani) are not authorized reasons for terminating somebody’s F1 visa status. 

“It is not something that can just be done unilaterally because the government has decided it wants to have fewer international students,” Muth said. 

The brief notes that students were provided with “vague boilerplate reasons” for their visa termination. In Isserdasani’s case, he received an email that said he was “otherwise failing to maintain status” and that he was “identified in criminal records check and/or has had their VISA revoked.” It states that the reasoning does not satisfy due process requirements because it doesn’t describe a student’s circumstances and students are not provided with the opportunity to defend themselves. 

In the brief, Muth also notes the recent case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was erroneously deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration, saying that the visa cancellations for international students are part of a larger pattern of the Trump administration ignoring the due process rights — which includes being entitled to notice and the opportunity to be heard — of noncitizens. 

“The due process protections of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution are protections, not just for U.S. citizens, but they are protections for everyone residing in this country — that right not to be arbitrarily arrested, detained, kicked out of the country,” Muth said. 

Muth said he didn’t know what new policy the Trump administration could be developing.

“If they’re talking about coming up with a policy that would allow them to terminate SEVIS records in that situation, I think they would be violating the existing law set up by Congress,” Muth said. “People are entitled to what they didn’t get here, which is, if you’re going to terminate my status, tell me why, and give me a chance to object if what you are doing is contrary to law or contrary to what the facts are.”

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Funding freezes and reported threats to eliminate the Head Start early education program have prompted a letter from Senate Democrats to the Trump administration. (Getty Images)

Senate Democrats and two independents who caucus with them wrote to the Trump administration Monday demanding that officials release Head Start funding, reverse staff cuts and head off reported plans to zero out the early education program for low-income families.

The letter, led by Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin and two colleagues,  follows a funding halt in late January and early February; the closure of Head Start regional offices in April and the termination of those offices’ employees; and a subsequent report that the program has reduced payments in this first half of 2025 compared with a year ago.

“It is abundantly clear that these actions are part of a broader effort to ultimately eliminate the program altogether, as the Administration reportedly plans to do in its fiscal year 2026 budget proposal,” states the letter sent by Baldwin, Sens. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont), and 39 other Senate members.

Head Start has already been appropriated $12.3 billion for 2025 — the same amount as in 2024 — and has a formula for allocating funds, the senators wrote, leaving “no justifiable reason” for funding delays, while there has been no explanation from the administration.

Earlier in April it was reported the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal included no funding for Head Start. The senators’ letter notes that the Office of Management and Budget directed the Department of Health and Human Services to set aside funds from the 2025 budget “to close out the program” in budget documents leaked 10 days ago.

“If this explains any of the delay in awarding fiscal year 2025 funding, we want to be clear, no funds were provided in fiscal year 2025 to ‘close out the program,’ and it would be wholly unacceptable and likely illegal if the Department tries to carry out this directive,” the senators wrote.

The letter is directed at U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“You promised ‘radical transparency’ as Secretary, yet it is unclear how these actions will improve Head Start programs, and you and your staff refuse to respond to basic inquiries and requests for information,” the senators wrote.

The letter cites additional Trump administration actions involving the program over the last three months.

The federal Office of Head Start has told local programs that funding would not be approved for “training and technical assistance or other program expenditures that promote or take part in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives,” but the agency hasn’t provided any guidance “for what would be considered ‘DEI,’” the letter states.

Nevertheless, the senators add, that could conflict with requirements for the program under federal law, such as one that programs provide appropriate instruction for English learners.

Programs submitting documentation for payment of expenses that they have incurred and are authorized under their federal grants are now being asked to provide additional justification, which the letter states “creates an illusion of improving oversight but only serves to add unnecessary red tape. “

The five-page letter asks Kennedy to answer a series of questions, including whether HHS will reverse the regional office closures and reinstate fired Head Start personnel, when Head Start agencies will receive confirmation that they can access their additional grant installments for the year and whether the administration will distribute all of Head Start’s funds for the 2025 fiscal year “as required by the Head Start Act.”

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White House Border Czar Tom Homan talks with reporters on the driveway outside the White House West Wing on March 17, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — White House border czar Tom Homan on Monday blamed the parents of U.S. citizen children the Trump administration sent to Honduras over the weekend.

At a Monday morning press conference, Homan defended the government’s actions to remove three young children from two different families alongside their mothers who were in the country without legal authorization but participated in a program that allows otherwise law-abiding migrants to stay in their communities.

“If you enter this country illegally, it’s a crime,” Homan said. “Knowing you’re in this country illegally, you put yourself in that position. You put your family in that position.”

The children, all under the age of 10, were placed on deportation flights to Honduras on Friday after their mothers checked in with a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in New Orleans as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program, which allows immigrants to stay in their communities while undergoing immigration court proceedings.

An attorney for one of the children, Gracie Willis at the National Immigration Project, said the 4-year-old U.S. citizen with Stage 4 cancer was deported without access to his medication.

Homan has argued the mothers requested to be deported with their children, but attorneys for the families argue they were “denied access to legal counsel, and swiftly deported without due process.”

Due process concerns

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, whom Trump appointed to a seat on the Louisiana federal bench in 2018, expressed concern that a 2-year-old U.S. citizen had been deported, despite her father’s wishes she remain in the U.S., according to court filings.

Doughty scheduled a May 16 hearing because of his “strong suspicion that the government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

“The government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote in his order. “But the court doesn’t know that.”

Willis, from the National Immigration Project, raised concerns about a lack of due process and how the deportations have separated families.

“What we saw from ICE over the last several days is horrifying and baffling,” she said in a statement. “These mothers had no opportunity to speak with their co-parents to make the kinds of choices that parents are entitled to make for their children, the kinds of decisions that millions of parents make every day: ‘what is best for our child?’”

Homan has argued the children were deported at the request of the mothers and that the Trump administration was “keeping families together.”

“What we did is remove children with their mothers who requested their children depart with them,” he said. “When a parent says, ‘I want my 2-year-old baby to go with me,’ we made that happen. They weren’t deported. We don’t deport U.S. citizens. The parents made that decision, not the United States government.”

Wisconsin judge

Monday’s remarks from Homan come the day before President Donald Trump will mark the 100th day of his second term. His early days in office have centered on carrying out his campaign promise of mass deportations of millions of people in the U.S. without permanent legal status.

Trump will sign two executive orders on immigration late Monday: one relating to border security and another to require the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to publicly list so-called sanctuary cities that do not coordinate with federal immigration law enforcement.

Homan also stood by the Trump administration’s decision to arrest a federal judge in Wisconsin on the grounds she obstructed immigration officials from detaining a man attending his court hearing. It marked an escalation between the Trump administration and the judiciary branch, raising concerns from Democrats.

The arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan was highly publicized after she was handcuffed in public and FBI Director Kash Patel bragged about the arrest on social media.

Attorney General Pam Bondi said on Fox News that the Trump administration was going to continue to go after judges who “think they’re above the law.”

“When you cross that line to impediment or knowingly harboring, concealing an illegal alien from ICE, you will be prosecuted, judge or not,” Homan said. 

 

Bascom Hall, University of Wisconsin-Madison. (Ron Cogswell | used by permission of the photographer)

With the 100th day of President Donald Trump’s second term in office approaching, University of Wisconsin-Madison professors and staff met Thursday to take stock of the growing threats to higher education and U.S. democracy and to discuss collective action to push back. 

UW-Madison professor Mark Copelevitch said the threats to higher education are “unprecedented because it’s happening in America” yet compared the current moment to a movie that historians and experts have seen “over and over again.” 

Copelovitch described the current U.S. system of government as competitive authoritarianism. He said comparisons for what is happening today don’t have to go back to 1930s Germany — recent examples are  Viktor Orban in Hungary and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey. 

“Universities are centers of independent ideas and dissent. Professors are attacked by populist and nationalist leaders as being the radical elite,” Copelovitch said.

University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, including Copelovitch and other professors were gathered for panels organized by the Public Representation Organization of the Faculty Senate (PROFS) and the Academic Staff Professionals Representation Organization (ASPRO) to discuss shared challenges and the prospects for collective action to defend higher education.

UW-Madison is facing an array of challenges to its operations due to the federal government as over $12 million in research grants to UW-Madison have been cut and caps on indirect cost reimbursements for research grants at 15% represent another significant cut to research funds, and dozens of students across UW campuses and other schools had their visas cancelled. Copelovitch said it is part of a greater attempt to exert influence over the shape of universities across the country.

“What’s happening at Madison [is] terrible and horrible and has real world consequences specifically here,” Copelovitch said. “But again, it is part of a broader pattern that is affecting all the universities across the country. So far, most universities have treated the problems as institution-specific symptoms… That is the big challenge right now. How do you get dozens, if not hundreds of institutions, to start acting collectively to push back against this?”

The panelists said one of the big challenges that universities face is explaining to the public how their budgets work and the impacts of potential cuts.

UW-Madison Veterinary Medicine Research Administration Director Jenny Dahlberg said one lost grant will be “much more broad reaching” than some imagine. “This is an entire generation of scientists that no longer will have opportunities to conduct research. That is alarming,” she said. 

Dahlberg said faculty and staff need to find a way to protect their ability to speak freely about research and to train the next generation. 

Copelovitch said universities will have to communicate to the public about their budgets and recent attacks on academic freedom, and explain that if those things continue it “ultimately means that the universities that people think they’re going to send their kids to eventually are just not going to exist in that format.”

Don Moynihan, a University of Michigan professor and previously a UW-Madison faculty member, said conversations about whether universities are too reliant on federal funding miss the point. He said that investments into research at universities were part of a deal between universities and the government created at the end of World War II. 

“If you will help us with our goals of building out research infrastructure, we will ensure a steady flow of resources into that research infrastructure,” Moynihan said. “Now, we have one of those partners basically withdrawing from the partnership and not just withdrawing from the partnership, but also trying to dictate what the other party does, even though they’re bringing less resources to the table and that activity violated that contract.” 

Moynihan said there’s no way to manage the budget holes that could be created by cuts and that it’s not really feasible that the private sector could fill to gap.

“You’re going to accept or live with a much smaller campus that does much less research…  and that story will be true across lots of other research areas,” Moynihan said. 

Moynihan said the Trump’s administration’s letter to Harvard University, which demanded changes to its administration, student admissions process and called for audits into “DEI” across the campus, lays out a “full menu” of administration priorities. The administration said it would also be cutting over $2 billion in federal grants to the school. 

Moynihan said that it’s clear that individual universities making side deals won’t be a viable strategy. 

“Without collective action, there is not going to be any effective pushback against this administration,” Moynihan said.

Copelovitch said that he has been “heartened” to see the pushback in the last few weeks. UW-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin signed a letter together with hundreds of other higher education leaders to speak against the “unprecedented government overreach” and the “political interference now endangering American higher education.”  

Copelovitch said discussions about universities banding together, including a recent proposal that  Big Ten schools form a NATO-like agreement, will also be key. 

“No chancellor or provost is going to stick their neck out and lead the fray. Harvard is doing it a little bit, and Harvard can afford to do it, but leaders of any individual public institution are not going to do that, so there’s a need to speak collectively,” Copelovitch said. 

“Fragility” of U.S. democracy

The upheaval in U.S. institutions has gone beyond higher education, and at a separate event, titled “The Fragility and Performance of Democracy in the U.S.” hosted by the Elections Research Center on Thursday afternoon, focused on analyzing Trump’s attacks on the U.S. administrative state and the consolidation of executive power .

UW-Madison professor and director of the Elections Research Center Barry Burden said he didn’t think “any of us imagined we would see the kind of chaos that we’ve experienced these first 100 days,” but said the second Trump administration “has been so massively disruptive” and is “pushing the limits of what a democratic system can handle.” 

“It is doing things that previously seemed illegal, impossible, unimaginable or unconstitutional, and they’re happening daily and often with people who are not really part of the government or part of his party — people like Elon Musk and others — being brought in to do the hatchet work on federal agencies,” Burden said. 

Burden said that Trump is showing warning signs of a “personalized” president, which is often a warning sign for democracies. 

“We’ve seen in other countries where a fairly elected leader, and [Trump] is a fairly elected leader, can nonetheless abuse the government against their enemies and make it a kind of weapon — whether it’s using the IRS for political purposes, or threatening judges or intimidating universities or journalists,” Burden said. “All of those things are using his power as president to get parts of society to bow to him and serve his interests.” 

Burden said the protests being held across the country at state Capitols, in small cities and towns — including in Wisconsin — in recent weeks are a sign that civil society is starting to rise up in opposition. 

“We’ve seen the public come back out of its hiding,” Burden said. He added that unpopularity amongst the public and public resistance — along with accountability by the courts and the media — are what has been essential in resisting autocrats in eastern Europe and Latin America as well. “It’s all hands on deck, really, to stop a democratic government from sliding away.”

Burden said that people need to understand their place in upholding democracy.

“Democracy needs people to keep it flourishing,” Burden said. “It doesn’t operate on its own. We often think of it as a kind of system. You write a constitution, and it exists, and it’s in place, and it will just continue. That’s not how it works. It has to be sustained and tended to and protected. It takes a whole bunch of different actors. It takes the public being vigilant. It takes journalists, media outlets holding government accountable, and transmitting what’s happening. … and it takes political parties to govern themselves and keep bad elements out of government.”

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Foreign-made semiconductors are facing scrutiny and tariffs by the Trump administration, which would cause a ripple effect for manufacturing and price of most electronic goods, experts say. (Photo by Narumon Bowonkitwanchai/Getty Images)

The price of technology goods and services in the U.S. will likely rise in the next few months, experts say, as the White House continues to shift its strategy on tariffs for imported electronic hardware.

After initial reports that Chinese goods would receive as high as a 145% tariff, President Donald Trump said on April 13 that electronics like smartphones, computers and semiconductors — chips that process, power and transmit information — would be exempt. But Trump said later that day that imported semiconductors, and the electronics they’re embedded in, will likely be facing their own tariff structure in the coming weeks.

In tandem with Trump’s announcement, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced an official investigation into semiconductor imports, aiming to study the national security implications of importing manufacturing equipment and derivative products. The move is likely two-fold, tech experts say — Trump’s aim with foreign tariffs is to pressure American manufacturers to make more goods in U.S. facilities.

But his administration is also likely looking for cybersecurity risks that could be introduced through foreign manufacturing, like in compromised operating systems, embedded malicious code, or flawed designs, said Derek Lemke, senior vice president of product level intelligence at risk management firm Exiger.

“They power everything from advanced weapons systems and critical infrastructure to smartphones and laptops,” Lemke said. “Many of these components are manufactured abroad, often in regions with rising geopolitical tensions or limited transparency into supply chain practices.”

The U.S. is currently upping its manufacturing of semiconductors. It produced about 10% of the world’s semiconductors in 2022, and is projected to reach 14% by 2032 with the additional funding and infrastructure provided by the CHIPS and Science Act, passed during the Biden administration. But while many advanced chips are designed by American companies like Nvidia, Apple, Qualcomm and AMD, they are manufactured in Taiwan, which is currently negotiating tariff deals with the U.S.

Many electronics involve manufacturing processes from all over the world, making the tariff structure involved a complicated one. And while it’s a good idea for Americans to manufacture more of their semiconductors to diversify the global supply chain of chips, the country is nowhere near prepared to make as many as we need, said Nikolas Guggenberger, an assistant professor of law with a focus on antitrust, law and technology, privacy, and regulation at The University of Houston Law Center.

Guggenberger called semiconductor manufacturing “among the most complex industrial processes on Earth,” which would require years of planning, training and billions in investment for the U.S. to become a leader.

While the U.S. awaits more clarity over tariffs on electronic goods and the findings of the semiconductor probe, Guggenberger and Lemke say that American consumers should prepare themselves for higher prices on smartphones, laptops and other personal devices. Because semiconductors are used in so many everyday products, those price hikes could seep into wider spending, Guggenberger said.

“From a computer to everyday devices, like a garage opener, or a toaster,” he said. “It’s everything, it’s absolutely everything.”

Guggenberger said there’s a possibility that very high tariffs could also lead to a pause or slowdown in manufacturing in general, meaning consumers may see emptier shelves or a backlog on products in a few months.

Those on the software side of the tech industry will feel the effects, too, Lemke said. Software companies, AI developers and cybersecurity experts all rely on computing power from chip hardware, and disruption in the supply chain could slow innovation in these businesses, he said.

Even just the discussion of tariffs is having a ripple effect through the tech sector, Lemke said. Companies are having to evaluate their supply chains, their sourcing and maybe stockpile some components to their products.

“The uncertainty alone is enough to influence pricing, procurement strategies and investment decisions across the tech ecosystem,” Lemke said. 

In the village of Noatak in Alaska’s Northwest Arctic region, Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) data showed the community had lower breastfeeding initiation and six-week breastfeeding rates than the statewide average. This data supported funding to offer culturally-adapted peer breastfeeding services in the region. (Courtesy of Laura Norton-Cruz)

In the remote villages of Alaska where social worker Laura Norton-Cruz works to improve maternal and infant health, there are no hospitals.

Pregnant patients, almost all of whom are Alaska Native, often fly on small 10-seat planes to the region’s larger hub community of Kotzebue. While some give birth there, many more then take a jet out of the Northwest Arctic region to Anchorage, the state’s largest city. By the time they fly back to Kotzebue for their six-week checkup, a high percentage have stopped breastfeeding because of a lack of ongoing supports. 

Norton-Cruz knows that because of data collected by Alaska’s Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS)— a grantee of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s PRAMS program, started in 1987 in an effort to reduce infant morbidity and mortality.

But earlier this month, the Trump administration cut the federal program, its 17-member team and more workers in the Division of Reproductive Health as part of sweeping layoffs within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Rita Hamad, associate professor at Harvard School of Public Health, said PRAMS helps researchers understand what kinds of state policies are improving or harming child health.

“I can’t overemphasize what an important dataset this is and how unique it is to really show national trends and help us try to understand how to optimize the health of moms and young kids,” Hamad said.

PRAMS does not ask abortion-related questions, but some anti-abortion groups still try to make a connection.

“The cuts seem appropriate given all the bias in choosing topics and analyzing data, but if Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System wishes to justify their reporting, point to the study that has most helped women and their children, born and preborn, survive and thrive,’’ Kristi Hamrick, vice president of media and policy at Students for Life of America, told States Newsroom in an email.

Over the past two years, Norton-Cruz used Alaska’s PRAMS data to identify low breastfeeding rates in the region, connect with people in the villages and interview them about what would help them continue to breastfeed. What they wanted, she said, was a peer in the community who understood the culture — so that’s what she’s been working to set up through federal programs and funding that is now uncertain.

Norton-Cruz also uses responses from PRAMS surveys to identify risk factors and interventions that can help prevent domestic and sexual violence and childhood trauma, particularly in rural communities, where the rates of domestic violence and maternal death are high.

“PRAMS data not being available, I believe, is going to kill mothers and babies,” she said. “And it’s going to result in worse health for infants.”

New York City grant is renewed, but data collection is paused

Individual states collect and report their own data, and the CDC team was responsible for aggregating it into one national picture. Some localities, such as New York City, maintain a full dashboard of data that can be explored by year and survey question. The most recent fully published data is from 2022 and shows responses by region, marital status, Medicaid status and more.

For instance, 2022 data showed women on Medicaid experienced depressive symptoms at a higher rate after giving birth than those not on Medicaid. It also showed that a much higher percentage of women not on Medicaid reported putting their babies on their backs to sleep, the recommended method for safe sleep — 63% of women on Medicaid reported following that method, versus 85% not on Medicaid.

Hamad said PRAMS is the only national survey dataset dedicated to pregnancy and the postpartum period. Her team has studied the outcomes of the Women, Infants, and Children food assistance program, and how state paid family leave policies have affected rates of postpartum depression.

“This survey has been going on for decades and recruits people from almost all states,’’ she said. “There’s really no other dataset that we can use to look at the effects of state and federal policies on infant health and postpartum women.”

Under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Health and Human Services laid off about 10,000 employees as part of a restructuring effort in early April. The overhaul is part of the “Make America Healthy Again” initiative, and the agency said it focused cuts on redundant or unnecessary administrative positions. It rescinded some of the firings in the weeks since, with Kennedy telling reporters that some were “mistakes.” It’s unclear if any of those hired back were PRAMS employees.

The cuts, Hamad said, also run counter to the administration’s stated goals of wanting to protect women, children and families.

“The government needs this data to accomplish what it says it wants to do, and it’s not going to be able to do that now,” she said.

The funding for local PRAMS programs seems to be unaffected for now. Spokespersons for health department teams in Alaska, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas told States Newsroom they have not had any layoffs or changes to their grants, but the funding for this fiscal year ends on April 30. Forty-six states, along with D.C., New York City and two U.S. territories, participate in the program. According to the CDC, those jurisdictions represent 81% of all live births in the United States.

New York State Department of Health spokesperson Danielle De Souza told States Newsroom in an email their program has received another year of funding that begins May 1 and supports one full-time and two part-time staffers. But without the assistance of the national CDC team to compile, clean, and prepare the data, maintain the data collection platform and establish standards, De Souza said their state-level operations are on pause.

“We remain hopeful that the data collection platform will be fully reactivated, and that CDC coordination of PRAMS will resume,” De Souza said. “The department is assessing the challenges and feasibility of continuing operations if that does not occur.”

Hamad said some states might be willing to allocate state dollars to the programs to keep them running, but the states that have some of the worst maternal and infant health outcomes — such as Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama — are the least likely to have the political will to do that. And it would still make the data less robust and valuable than it was before.

“If one state is asking about how often you breastfed in the last week, and another one is asking about the last month, then we won’t have comparable data across states,” she said.

Project 2025, anti-abortion groups have criticized CDC data collection

Jacqueline Wolf, professor emeritus of social medicine at Ohio University, has studied the history of breastfeeding and childbirth practices and said the rates of maternal and infant death were high in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For every breastfed baby, 15 raw milk-fed babies died. Wolf said 13% of babies didn’t live to their 1st birthday, and more than half were dying from diarrhea.

To help determine what was causing those deaths and prevent it, public health specialists created detailed forms and collected information from families about a mother’s age, the parents’ occupations, race, income level, household conditions, and how the babies were fed.

Researchers at that time were able to determine that babies who weren’t breastfed were getting sick from unpasteurized milk and tainted water supply, and more than half were dying from diarrhea. Through public health reforms, like requiring cow’s milk to be pasteurized, sold in individual sterile bottles and kept cold during shipping, infant death rates dropped, Wolf said.

Health officials also increased education campaigns around the issue. Today, PRAMS uses survey data the same way.

“These were detectives,” Wolf said. “That’s what public health really is, detective work, which is why this data is so important.”

Project 2025, the blueprint document of directives for the next Republican presidential administration crafted by conservative group Heritage Foundation in 2024 and closely followed by President Donald Trump and his cabinet, details plans for the CDC’s data collection efforts. Page 453 of the 900-page document, written by Heritage Foundation executive Roger Severino says it’s proper for the CDC to collect and publish data related to disease and injury, but the agency should not make public health recommendations and policies based on that data because it is “an inescapably political function.”

The agency should be separated into two, Severino wrote, with one agency responsible for public health with a “severely confined ability to make policy recommendations.”

“The CDC can and should make assessments as to the health costs and benefits of health interventions, but it has limited to no capacity to measure the social costs or benefits they may entail,” the document says.

On page 455, Severino says the CDC should also eliminate programs and projects that “do not respect human life” and undermine family formation. It does not name PRAMS as a program that does this, but says the agency should ensure it is not promoting abortion as health care.

Hamrick, of Students for Life of America, told States Newsroom in an email that because there is no national abortion reporting act that tracks outcomes for women who end a pregnancy, assumptions in current reports “taint the outcomes.” Hamrick said the CDC has done a poor job of getting a complete picture of pregnancy risks, including the risk of preterm birth after having an abortion.

“Taxpayers don’t have money to waste on purely political messaging,” Hamrick said.

Without data, researcher worries policy recommendations will be easier to dismiss

If researchers like Laura Norton-Cruz don’t have PRAMS data moving forward, she said they will be operating in the dark in many ways, using anecdotal and clinical data that is not as reliable and accurate as the anonymous surveying. That can make it more difficult to push for funding and program changes from lawmakers as well.

“Moms need safe housing and domestic violence resources, moms need health care and breastfeeding support, and if we can’t show that, then they can justify not providing those things, knowing that those most affected by not having those things will be groups who are already marginalized,” Norton-Cruz said.

While HHS did not cite the administration’s ongoing efforts to remove any content from the federal government that acknowledges disparities in race or gender as its motivation for cutting the PRAMS team, researchers who spoke with States Newsroom think that could be the underlying reason. 

Wolf said race matters in data collection just as much as household economics or class, and it is just as relevant today as it was when PRAMS was established, as maternal death rates for Black women and other women of color are disproportionately high in a number of states. Those states are also often the poorest and have higher infant mortality rates.

Wolf recalled that during Trump’s first term in 2020, the first year of COVID, the administration ordered the CDC to stop publishing public data about the pandemic. She sees a parallel to today.

“I fear that is exactly what’s going on with PRAMS,” she said. “To pretend like you don’t have the data, so the problem doesn’t exist, is just about the worst response you can think of, because more and more mothers and babies are going to get hurt.”

States Newsroom state outlet reporters Anna Kaminski, Danielle Prokop and Emma Murphy contributed to this report.

A power line pole lies splintered in the middle of a road in front of a house in Lake Stevens, Wash., after a November 2024 “bomb cyclone” storm that caused widespread damage in the state. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied Washington’s request for a disaster declaration that would allow the state to seek federal recovery funds. (Mathieu Lewis-Rolland/Getty Images)

ISSAQUAH, Wash. — In the wake of recent natural disasters, state leaders across the country are finding that emergency support from the federal government is no longer a given.

Under President Donald Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has denied federal assistance for tornadoes in Arkansas, flooding in West Virginia and a windstorm in Washington state. It also has refused North Carolina’s request for extended relief funding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene.

While it’s not uncommon for the feds to turn down some requests for disaster declarations, which unlock federal aid, state leaders say the Trump administration’s denials have taken them by surprise. White House officials are signaling a new approach to federal emergency response, even as Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem threaten to shut down FEMA altogether.

“The Federal Government focuses its support on truly catastrophic disasters—massive hurricanes, devastating earthquakes, or wide-scale attacks on the homeland,” Brian Hughes, a spokesman for the National Security Council, which advises the president on issues of national security, said in a statement to Stateline.

Hughes said state and local governments “often remain an impediment to their own community’s resilience.” He called on states to take on a more extensive role.

“States must have adequate emergency management staff, adoption and enforcement of modern building codes, responsible planning and strategic investment to reduce future risk, commonsense policies that prioritize preparedness over politics, disaster reserve funds to handle what should be routine emergencies, pre-negotiated mutual aid and contingency contracts that speed up recovery, and above all, an appetite to own the problem,” the statement said.

State emergency management leaders say the federal retreat from disaster response has upended a long-established system.

“This is very unusual,” said Karina Shagren, communications director with the Washington Military Department, which oversees the state’s emergency management division. “This is the first time in recent memory that we have hit all the indicators to get FEMA’s public assistance program and we’ve been denied.”

Michael Coen, who served as chief of staff at FEMA during the Obama and Biden administrations, said the president has “broad discretion” to approve or deny disaster requests, regardless of whether they meet specified conditions. If Trump intends to curtail federal support, Coen said, he should give states clear guidelines.

“They should have a dialogue with the states, so the states aren’t spinning their wheels making requests that are going to get denied,” Coen said.

He added that states need guidance if they’re expected to build emergency management programs to take on what the feds once handled. Not all states, Coen said, have the capacity to replicate those functions. And disasters are expected to increase in frequency and severity because of climate change.

“Having that capability in every single state instead of having one FEMA is not the best use of tax dollars to prepare for the worst day,” he said.

Historically, FEMA has coordinated the federal response during emergency situations. In the National Security Council statement, Hughes said Trump has promptly authorized “life-saving emergency support to states during and in the immediate aftermath of disasters.”

But the agency’s larger role has focused on recovery after disasters, assessing damage and distributing funding to help communities rebuild. Now, some communities are finding that support is no longer a sure thing.

Issaquah, Washington, was among the cities hit hard by the “bomb cyclone” that ripped through the state last November. Severe winds killed two people in the state, knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of residents and caused millions in damage, state officials said.

A city of about 40,000 residents in the Cascade foothills, Issaquah’s costs from the storm totaled $3.8 million — covering road repairs, removal of 800 tons of tree debris and overtime pay for first responders. Mayor Mary Lou Pauly said the city has seen four events since 2020 that qualified for federal disaster aid, with no previous denials. If Washington is unable to win its appeal with FEMA, she said, Issaquah will take a financial hit to its reserves, leaving it more vulnerable to future storms.

“We put a lot of investment in being resilient,” Pauly said. “When you get to a number like $3.8 million, that is too big of a number for us to be able to rebuild without assistance. Our residents pay federal taxes, and this is what they think they pay them for, this is what they expect their national government to do. They do not want me to set property taxes 100% higher.”

Pauly echoed Coen’s view that FEMA should give states a clear outline of the role it will play.

“What we all want to know is what are the rules of the game?” she said. “If the criteria has changed, then why aren’t we getting told about it?”

Washington state leaders said they were shocked when FEMA denied their request for $34 million to help repair roads, utilities and power systems. Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson said the state’s application met all of the “very clear criteria to qualify.” He has vowed to appeal the decision.

“We were really relying on that funding,” said Shagren, of the Washington Military Department. “If the appeal is denied, our local jurisdictions will have to prioritize which projects they can move forward with and which they don’t. They’re going to be impacted greatly. This wasn’t some small storm.”

Other states also have been surprised by FEMA denials. Arkansas suffered 14 tornadoes last month, triggering a request for a disaster declaration from Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. But the feds told state leaders to handle it on their own.

“[I]t has been determined that the damage from this event was not of such severity and magnitude as to be beyond the capabilities of the state, affected local governments, and voluntary agencies,” the federal government’s denial read, according to Arkansas Times.

Sanders has appealed that decision, saying the disaster caused “widespread destruction” that requires federal help.

In West Virginia, state leaders asked for disaster aid to cover 14 counties that were struck by flooding in February. But FEMA denied individual assistance to seven of those counties. Republican Gov. Patrick Morrisey said in a statement that he is looking at options to appeal, but praised the Trump administration for its “strong support” following the floods.

Democratic leaders in the state have called on Morrisey to demand more help from the feds, WOWK reported.

Meanwhile, FEMA has said it will no longer match 100% of North Carolina’s spending to recover from September’s Hurricane Helene. Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said the cost share was crucial to the state’s efforts to rebuild.

“The need in western North Carolina remains immense — people need debris removed, homes rebuilt, and roads restored,” Stein said in a statement this month, according to NC Newsline. “I am extremely disappointed and urge the President to reconsider FEMA’s bad decision, even for 90 days.”

Stateline reporter Alex Brown can be reached at abrown@stateline.org.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.

Protesters gather outside of the Federal Building in Milwaukee to denounce the arrest of Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

After the arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan by federal agents Friday morning, the city’s political and activist communities responded forcefully, protesting against the arrest across the city. 

Dugan was charged with obstruction of justice and harboring an individual after a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents showed up outside of her courtroom last week to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. 

The criminal complaint against Durgan alleges she broke the law by allowing Flores-Ruiz to use a side door in her courtroom to exit without going past the agents. The agents saw him leave and later apprehended him on foot. 

While a larger protest took place outside of the federal courthouse in downtown Milwaukee, local resident Jeneca Wolski stood alone outside of the county courthouse where Dugan was arrested.

“[I’m] just a local citizen who is horrified that we are finding ourselves in this position right now,” Wolski told the Wisconsin Examiner. “We’re sliding downhill so fast. I don’t want to be looked back on by history as part of it. We have to do everything we can to kick and fight and scream to save our democracy right now.” 

At a press conference, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley accused the administration of President Donald Trump of acting to intimidate “anyone who opposes these policies.” Crowley added that Dugan was arrested by a “large, performative showing” of federal agents in the county courthouse. 

 “We have an obligation to administer our courts in a safe, efficient manner that delivers due process for anyone,” Crowley said. “The Trump administration’s actions are clearly preventing us from doing so by intimidating judges and eroding public faith in our judicial system.” 

People gathered outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee Friday afternoon to protest Dugan’s arrest. At the rally, Christine Neumann Ortiz, executive director of immigrant rights group Voces De La Frontera, told the Wisconsin Examiner the Trump administration was trying to undermine efforts to oppose its immigration policies.

“They basically want to be unleashed to do whatever they want to commit these raids in courtrooms across the country,” she said. “They don’t want any resistance from judges or from the community standing up for people’s due process rights or limiting their policies of mass deportation and racism.”

Seven of the city of Milwaukee’s legislative representatives said in a joint statement that Dugan’s arrest and ICE operating inside the courthouse will “lead to a breakdown of civil society.”

“The County Courthouse is a sanctuary for justice and peace where the accused come forward willingly in a fair and unbiased process,” said the lawmakers, Sens. Chris Larson and Tim Carpenter and Reps. Christine Sinicki, Darrin Madison, Supreme Moore Omokunde, Angelito Tenorio and Sequanna Taylor. “Arresting people out of a courtroom will lead to a breakdown of civil society. We do not support the presence of ICE in places where it will lead to intimidation against witnesses and victims of crimes, denying everyone involved the justice they deserve.”

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned how Dugan’s arrest makes the country safer. 

“The Trump Administration continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse,” Durbin said. “When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States. How does this make America any safer? How does arresting a sitting judge make America any safer? It is imperative that Judge Dugan is afforded due process and the presumption of innocence, as required by our Constitution and her fundamental rights as an American.”

State Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein (D-Middleton) and Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, criticized the arrest in a joint statement. 

“Today’s arrest of a sitting judge, at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, is a frightening escalation of the Trump Administration’s attacks on America’s judicial system,” they said. “This is part of a pattern by this Administration – defying court orders, flouting the democratic system of checks and balances, ignoring the right to due process, and threatening judicial independence – that alarms us as legislators and as residents of this great state and this great country. We will follow this case closely. We will continue to stand up to lawless and unconstitutional actions. And, we will always fight for a bedrock principle of American democracy: equal justice under the law.”

The Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an activist group, was planning protests Friday afternoon outside the federal courthouse and Saturday outside the FBI’s Milwaukee field office. In a statement, the group said the arrest was a “heinous attack.” 

“They are seeking to send a clear message: either you play along with Trump’s agenda, or pay the consequences,” the group said. “During this period of racist and political repression, we must stand together to denounce today’s actions by the FBI. What happened to Dugan is not new. The FBI and other agencies have been emboldened in recent months, snatching people off the streets, separating families, terrorizing communities, breaking doors down of pro-Palestine activists, and contributing to the unjust deportation of immigrants who don’t have criminal records. What is new is that they have gone after a judge.”

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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A handful of Democratic U.S. senators sounded the alarm Friday after federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on charges she obstructed immigration officials from detaining a man in her courtroom, saying the arrest marked a new low in President Donald Trump’s treatment of the law.

Some congressional Democrats framed the FBI’s Friday morning arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan as a grave threat to the U.S. system of government, saying it was part of Trump’s effort to expand his own power and undermine the judiciary, with which the administration has become increasingly noncompliant.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the judge’s arrest on social media late Friday afternoon as a “dangerous escalation.”

“There are no kings in America. Trump and (Attorney General Pam) Bondi can’t just decide to arrest sitting judges at will and threaten judges into submission,” wrote Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Trump administration officials, including Bondi, defended the arrest as legitimate. The FBI had been investigating Dugan after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers sought to detain an immigrant without legal authority to be in the country who was in her courtroom on a misdemeanor charge.

Bondi wrote on social media just after noon Eastern, “I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan — a county judge in Milwaukee — for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov. No one is above the law.”

Democrats object

Democrats in Washington who sounded their objections to the arrest Friday argued it subverted separation of powers.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, said Trump “continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse.”

In a statement, Durbin added that local courtrooms should be off limits to immigration enforcement agents.

“When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States,” Durbin wrote.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who represents Wisconsin, issued a statement shortly after news of the arrest, calling it “a gravely serious and drastic move.”

“In the United States we have a system of checks and balances and separation of powers for damn good reasons,” Baldwin said.

“The Trump Administration just arrested a sitting judge,” Arizona’s Ruben Gallego said in a social media post. “This is what happens in authoritarian countries. Stand up now — or lose the power to do so later. The administration must drop all charges and respect separation of powers.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, was more careful in his criticism but said Trump is “constantly challenging” separation of powers laid out in the Constitution.

“I don’t know what happened in Wisconsin, but amplifying this arrest as the Attorney General and FBI Director have done looks like part of a larger intimidation campaign against judges,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in a statement.

In a since-deleted post on Bluesky, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey accused Trump of “using immigrants to justify an all-out assault on our democracy and rule of law.

“After openly defying a Supreme Court order, calling for judges to be impeached, and bullying and belittling judges, today his FBI director took the extreme step of ordering a sitting judge arrested,” Booker wrote, referring to the high court’s order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is being held in El Salvador.

Spokespeople for Booker did not respond to a late Friday inquiry about why the post was taken down.

Trump officials back up arrest

Administration officials boasted online following the arrest.

FBI Director Kash Patel deleted a post on X in which he wrote Dugan  “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery.

Trump posted a screenshot on his social media site from the conservative activist account “Libs of TikTok” that featured a photo of Dugan and celebrated her arrest.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan said that Dugan crossed a line in her opposition to the administration’s agenda.

“People can choose to support illegal immigration and not assist ICE in removing criminal illegal aliens from our communities, BUT DON’T CROSS THAT LINE,” he wrote on X. “If you actively impede our enforcement efforts or if you knowingly harbor or conceal illegal aliens from ICE you will be prosecuted. These actions are felonies. More to come…”

Trump vs. courts

Trump and administration officials have publicly attacked judges online, including calling for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia after he ordered immigration officials to halt deportation flights to El Salvador.

The administration allowed the flights to reach Central America, and is now at risk of being held in criminal contempt of court as a legal fight plays out.

The president’s verbal attacks on Boasberg prompted a rare rebuke from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-March.

And the administration has seemingly refused to do anything to facilitate the return of Maryland resident Abrego Garcia from a notorious El Salvador mega-prison, despite a Supreme Court order.

The Milwaukee County Courthouse. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan on Friday, accusing her of obstructing an immigration enforcement action last week. 

Dugan was arrested at 8:30 a.m. at the county courthouse, according to the U.S. Marshal’s Service. She was scheduled to make an initial appearance in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Dries at 10:30 on Friday. According to a criminal complaint, she’s been charged with obstructing or impeding before a department or agency of the United States and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest.

Online court records show that the government did not request that Dugan be held in detention and that she was released on an O/R bond, meaning she was released from custody without having to post bail and signed an agreement that she’d appear in court when required.

The agency’s director, Kash Patel, wrote on the social media platform X that Dugan had “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. In the now-deleted post, Patel accused Dugan of creating “increased danger to the public.” 

Flores-Ruiz appeared in Dugan’s courtroom on April 18 for a pre-trial conference on charges of misdemeanor domestic battery. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents appeared outside Dugan’s courtroom, she led Flores-Ruiz and an attorney out a side door and down a private hallway. 

ICE agents later apprehended Flores-Ruiz on foot. This is the third time since March that immigration agents have appeared at the Milwaukee County courthouse to conduct arrests — a tactic that local officials have said threatens to undermine the work of the local justice system by making immigrants fearful of coming to the courthouse to testify in court.

Dugan-Crim-complaint

In an initial statement, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said he was aware of Dugan’s arrest and that the legal process should be allowed to play out. 

“Like any individual in this country, I believe she is entitled to due process,” Crowley said. “We should let the facts come to light and the legal process play out.”

But later, he accused the FBI of politicizing the arrest to punish perceived enemies.

“It is clear that the FBI is politicizing this situation to make an example of her and others across the country who oppose their attack on the judicial system and our nation’s immigration laws,” he said. “FBI Director Kash Patel issued a public statement on X, which he hurriedly deleted, making unsubstantiated claims about Judge Dugan’s case before charges were officially filed and she could have her moment in court. Director Patel’s statement shows that Trump’s FBI is more concerned about weaponizing federal law enforcement, punishing people without due process, and intimidating anyone who opposes those policies, than they are with seeking justice.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said the administration of President Donald Trump is attacking democratic values.

“In the United States, we have a system of checks and balances and separations of power for damn good reasons,” she said. “The President’s administration arresting a sitting judge is a gravely serious and drastic move, and it threatens to breach those very separations of power. Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a Democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by. By relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders, and arresting a sitting judge, this President is putting those basic Democratic values that Wisconsinites hold dear on the line. While details of this exact case remain minimal, this action fits into the deeply concerning pattern of this President’s lawless behavior and undermining courts and Congress’s checks on his power.”

Gov. Tony Evers said the arrest was another example of the Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary.

“Unfortunately, we have seen in recent months the president and the Trump Administration repeatedly use dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine our judiciary at every level, including flat-out disobeying the highest court in the land and threatening to impeach and remove judges who do not rule in their favor,” he said. “I have deep respect for the rule of law, our nation’s judiciary, the importance of judges making decisions impartially without fear or favor, and the efforts of law enforcement to hold people accountable if they commit a crime. I will continue to put my faith in our justice system as this situation plays out in the court of law.”

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) said the arrest was “shocking.” 

“This Administration’s willingness to weaponize federal law enforcement is shocking and this arrest has all the hallmarks of overreach,” Moore said. “Federal law enforcement coming into a community and arresting a judge is a serious matter and would require a high legal bar. I will be following this case closely and facts will come out, however, I am very alarmed at the increasingly lawless actions of the Trump Administration, and in particular ICE, who have been defying courts and acting with disregard for the Constitution.”

The ACLU of Wisconsin wrote on social media that ICE making arrests at courthouses interferes with the work of local justice officials.

“Judges have a duty to maintain order in their courtrooms and ensure the fair administration of justice, and federal law does not require state judges to act as agents of federal immigration enforcement,” the organization said. “Everyone is due their day in court, and when ICE starts showing up to courts looking to make arrests, it risks interfering with those rights. In recent weeks, the administration has attacked the integrity of our judicial system, refused to comply with a Supreme Court order, and arrested a judge for using her authority to protect the fair administration of justice.”

This is a developing story and will be updated

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) listen to community members at an April 24 roundtable in Richland Center. (Hery Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

RICHLAND CENTER — In a 90-minute roundtable meeting at the Richland Center community center Thursday, President Donald Trump’s name was mentioned just twice. But community leaders highlighted how his administration’s policies are already wreaking havoc on the county with the sixth highest poverty rate in the state. 

About 15 area leaders representing small business owners, farmers, schools, hospitals and community advocacy groups met Thursday with state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) and Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez. Throughout the event, the attendees discussed how the policies and plans of Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to cut or diminish Medicaid, Social Security and education funding while instituting widespread tariffs on imported goods from countries around the world and making it harder for migrant workers to obtain visas could decimate their region. 

“None of this is right. Where I’m at that age in my life where I don’t get more thoughtful, I get more pissed,” Brett White, executive director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program, said. “And because this is all not necessary, this is completely unnecessary, which means that it’s intentional.” 

The group noted repeatedly that a cut to programs in one area had a ripple effect across every other community institution. 

White, and Chris Frakes, the organization’s senior director, said that the cuts to Head Start early childhood education programming that have already come and are set to deepen under Trump are their biggest worry. 

There are currently about 70 kids in Richland County enrolled in Southwest CAP’s Head Start program, according to Frakes. If those programs are lost, poor kids in Richland County will never catch up, she said. 

“Because we know if you enter kindergarten already behind, there’s virtually no chance to catch up by third grade,” Frakes said. “If you’re not on grade level reading in third grade, we know your life prospects go down dramatically, right? So Head Start fills this critical, vital need to get those kiddos onto par with their middle class peers when they hit kindergarten, so that they are ready to learn, and their families have the sort of surrounding supports, whether that’s food, whether that’s access to transportation, for medical care.” 

If Head Start gets cut, the children who are affected will eventually reach Aaron Mithum, the middle and high school principal for the Kickapoo Area School District. Mithum says the district is “waiting for the other shoe to drop” on the future of the approximately $800,000 it gets annually from the federal government as Trump seeks to shut down the U.S. Department of Education. 

If Head Start leaves poor kids behind before they turn five, by the time they reach Mithum at a middle school that’s also struggling financially, there won’t be many options. 

“We’re getting them when they get into pre K or kindergarten, and now we’re trying to go from there, and now, all of a sudden, they don’t have any of that foundational aspect,” Mithum said. “It’s a building block, trickle effect, and not in a positive way. So now it’s that much harder for us to do what [Head Start wasn’t] able to do, and it continues to go up. And it’s just really hard to think about, what does that look like? What does that look like to be a parent with a special ed kid who needs speech services or reading services, or whatever. And the answer is, sorry, not our problem.” 

While the child care and education system of a community that’s already seen the closure of its local University of Wisconsin campus faces the prospect of being unable to keep poor kids from falling behind, the area’s food system is also being hit. 

Retaliatory tariffs on the area’s wheat, corn and soybean farmers are hurting their ability to find international markets for their products while tariffs imposed by Trump have made fertilizer and machinery more expensive, said Sally Leong, Wisconsin Farmers Union member and former professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison. 

Those struggles are continuing to push up the price of food, causing local families to rely on food pantries more than used to, according to Jackie Anderson, executive director of Feeding Wisconsin. 

Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) paused funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which Anderson said has amounted to about a 30% cut to what food banks are able to buy. USDA has also ended a program that connected local farms with food pantries to supply fresh produce. 

“Food banks are really looking at the bottom line and saying, like, ‘How are we going to be able to get that amount of food here?’” Anderson said. 

The tariffs are also affecting the companies providing jobs in the area. Marty Richards, the county tourism director, said that Rockwell Automation has delayed and cancelled orders because of Trump’s tariffs. Meanwhile it’s getting harder to find local workers and Trump’s restrictive immigration policies have made it nearly impossible to hire migrant workers. Richards said the company has had a hard time getting workers from its plant in Mexico to come to the U.S. even temporarily for technical training

Teri Richards, board member of the Greater Richland Area Chamber of Commerce, said the county desperately needs more people and she doesn’t know where to find them. 

“We’re obviously not having enough babies. We’re struggling to get that immigrant population and we can’t keep stealing from each other,” she said. “So it’s time to go into Chicago or Milwaukee, to even get a few of those folks moved out here? I don’t know.” 

With fewer people moving in and federal policies discouraging investment from the business community and cutting funds from schools and child care, the community is also facing the management of an aging population. About 30% of the population is older than 60 and 14% is disabled, according to Roxanne Klubertanz, manager of Richland County’s Aging and Disability Resource Center (ADRC). 

That aging population means the community is only going to become more reliant on federal programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Currently, the ADRC helps people in the community apply for Medicaid to pay for the services that will help them stay in their homes for as long as possible or move to an assisted living facility — currently a cost of about $3,800 per month, she said. 

Republicans in Congress are currently weighing a budget proposal that would slash Medicaid funding. Klubertanz said without the program people won’t be able to access those services and will ultimately get sicker and require a placement in a nursing home — a cost of about $10,000 per month. 

“So if that funding, that Medicaid funding, goes away, what’s going to happen?” she said. “Maybe right away, you’re going to see some decreases, but people are going to get sicker and need more services, and then they have to pay for that nursing home placement, which is almost three times the cost. So if you’re trying to fix something today, you have to think about what it’s gonna be like in five years. You’ve gotta have that long range thinking.” 

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Education Secretary Linda McMahon testifies during her Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Feb. 13, 2025.  (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration Thursday to pause enforcement of a new U.S. Education Department ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

The order came as another federal judge in New Hampshire issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the Trump administration from yanking federal funding from many schools.

The New Hampshire order, though, only applied to schools that employ members of the National Education Association — the country’s largest labor union, which brought the case challenging the ban — or the Center for Black Educator Development.

The rulings used different legal logic but arrived at the same conclusion: The administration’s ban on race-conscious practices is not valid.

In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher said she ruled not on the merits of the policy, but the way the Trump administration developed it.

“This Court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue here are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But this Court is constitutionally required to closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires,” she wrote. “The government did not.”

Gallagher’s order pauses the enforcement of a Feb. 14 letter to school districts from Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, that threatened to rescind federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices in programming, admissions, scholarships and other aspects of student life.

In New Hampshire, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty wrote that “the loss of federal funding would cripple the operations of many educational institutions.”

McCafferty’s order has a nationwide effect, but McCafferty limited it to schools that employ NEA members, rejecting the union’s attempt to completely halt the policies outlined in the letter.

Teachers unions sued

The Feb. 14 letter drew swift legal action, and the National Education Association brought the suit in New Hampshire against the administration alongside the Center for Black Educator Development. 

The American Federation of Teachers — one of the largest teachers unions in the country — filed a complaint in February alongside its affiliate, AFT-Maryland. The American Sociological Association and a public school district in Oregon also sued over the letter.

“Today the court confirmed the importance of our job as educators to foster opportunity, dignity, and engagement,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement after the Maryland ruling.

“The court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” she added. “It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”

NEA also celebrated the preliminary injunction granted in its case Thursday, and the union’s president, Becky Pringle, said in a statement “today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.”

The statement said President Donald Trump, billionaire head of the U.S. DOGE Service Elon Musk and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were responsible for an “attack” on public education.

“The fact is that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Linda McMahon are using politically motivated attacks and harmful and vague directives to stifle speech and erase critical lessons to attack public education, as they work to dismantle public schools,” Pringle said. “This is why educators, parents, and community leaders are organizing, mobilizing, and using every tool available to protect our students and their futures.”

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Letter raised questions

In the February letter, Trainor offered a wide-ranging interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

Trainor wrote that though the ruling “addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly.”

The four-page letter raised a slew of questions for schools across pre-K through college over what fell within the requirements, and the department later released a Frequently Asked Questions document on the letter in an attempt to provide more guidance.

Earlier this month, the Education Department gave state education leaders just days to certify all K-12 schools in their states were complying with the letter in order to keep receiving federal financial assistance. The department and the groups suing in the New Hampshire case later reached an agreement that paused enforcement. 

Former Social Security Administration Commissioner Martin O’Malley came to Wisconsin this week as he travels the country warning about the danger of cuts to the administration. | Photo courtesy Maryland's Executive Office of the Governor.

Martin O’Malley, the former Maryland governor and Social Security commissioner under President Joe Biden, was rushing around Wisconsin Thursday, conducting a flurry of local media interviews before speaking at an evening town hall in Racine.

“I’ve found myself doing a lot of town halls,” O’Malley said, speaking on his phone from the passenger seat of a car as he hurried to a local TV station.

On Wednesday, he was in Kansas City, Missouri, talking to constituents of Democratic Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. Before that he traveled to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, at the invitation of a grassroots group to speak to a big crowd of people worried about threatened cuts to benefits for seniors.

In Racine on Thursday night he joined a town hall hosted by the progressive coalition group Opportunity Wisconsin. U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, a Republican who represents the 1st District, was invited, but did not attend.

“Having served in the agency so recently, as its last confirmed commissioner, I just feel a responsibility to speak up,” O’Malley said of his detour from private life to travel the country criticizing President Donald Trump and Elon Musk for cutting Social Security staff and closing offices.

“The only thing that’s going to stop the driving of Social Security into system collapse is the American people rising up,” he added.

When he came into the Social Security Administration in 2023, O’Malley said, a decade of staff reductions had reduced the agency’s workforce to a 50-year low, just as the Baby Boom generation was causing a spike in the number of retirees it was serving. As a result, “every line of service was headed in the wrong direction.”

“The agency needed to turn things around, and to their credit they did it,” he said. O’Malley is full of praise for the federal workers he supervised, who reduced call wait times from 42 and a half minutes on average to 12.8 minutes, along with other improvements. “It’s one of the most highly skilled executive services I’ve ever worked with,” he said, including when he served as mayor of Baltimore and governor of Maryland. The “obsessive compulsive” culture of the agency, as O’Malley affectionately terms it, has meant that over the last 90 years, no one missed a check.

Then came Trump and Musk, who “unleashed a reign of terror on those employees” — “the same people who got us through COVID without ever missing a payment.”

Mass firings, a hostile work environment, and the huge waste of taxpayer money as employees were paid to walk out the door appalled O’Malley.

Instead of rooting out “waste fraud and abuse,” Musk’s DOGE cut the IT department in half, undoing the work O’Malley and his colleagues had done to improve service at the agency. 

As Trump and Musk drive out the people who know how the system works, intermittent IT outages have become a problem. The website for Social Security accounts has gone down. Wait times are skyrocketing. And as the problems get worse, O’Malley said, “ultimately, it will interrupt benefits.”

“I don’t know when it will happen,” he said, “but when it breaks, it will break.”

What is the point of this wanton destruction? 

“I don’t know what the end game is,” O’Malley said.  

Members of Congress in both political parties have told him they think Trump and Musk have set their sights on the $2.6 trillion in the Social Security trust fund in order to make tax cuts for the superwealthy permanent.

Then there’s Musk’s nihilistic ideology, captured in his assertion that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” 

“There’s no more empathetic program than Social Security,” says O’Malley. “It guarantees widows and orphans and people who are disabled don’t live in poverty. Maybe Musk thinks those are useless members of society who don’t help build his immense wealth. I don’t know.”

Whatever their motives, O’Malley is certain that Musk and Trump must be stopped from a campaign that will end in enormous damage to Americans. 

O’Malley’s message is the opposite of Musk’s — far from being riddled with waste, fraud and abuse, the Social Security administration is a model. Fraud affects less than one-half of 1% of Social Security funds. And far from being wasteful, the program spends 1.2% of its budget on overhead, meaning it could be seen as the most efficient insurance company in the world. Private health insurance companies have notoriously high administrative costs.

Other “Big Lies” O’Malley is out to bust include the whopper that immigrants without legal status are draining resources from the system. In fact, they pay about $26 billion in Social Security tax withholdings to fund benefits they themselves can never access, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Nor are dead people drawing Social Security benefits. “There is no zombie apocalypse,” says O’Malley. Facts and figures supporting the efficiency of Social Security are laid out in plain language on his website, winbackourcountry.com.

The good news is that people are beginning to push back on the idea that Social Security is riddled with abuse and should be made more “efficient.” 

“Congress people are getting a heck of a lot more calls now than they did two months ago,” O’Malley said, “whether it’s from people experiencing long wait times, or having trouble accessing the benefits they’ve worked their whole lives to earn, or who are just seeing what’s happening on the news.”

That pressure is absolutely necessary if we are going to prevent the raiding and destruction of a New Deal program that has served so many people so well for generations. 

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Protesters gather outside of the Federal Building in Milwaukee to denounce the arrest of Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

After the arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan by federal agents Friday morning, the city’s political and activist communities responded forcefully, protesting against the arrest across the city. 

Dugan was charged with obstruction of justice and harboring an individual after a group of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents showed up outside of her courtroom last week to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. 

The criminal complaint against Durgan alleges she broke the law by allowing Flores-Ruiz to use a side door in her courtroom to exit without going past the agents. The agents saw him leave and later apprehended him on foot. 

While a larger protest took place outside of the federal courthouse in downtown Milwaukee, local resident Jeneca Wolski stood alone outside of the county courthouse where Dugan was arrested.

“[I’m] just a local citizen who is horrified that we are finding ourselves in this position right now,” Wolski told the Wisconsin Examiner. “We’re sliding downhill so fast. I don’t want to be looked back on by history as part of it. We have to do everything we can to kick and fight and scream to save our democracy right now.” 

At a press conference, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley accused the administration of President Donald Trump of acting to intimidate “anyone who opposes these policies.” Crowley added that Dugan was arrested by a “large, performative showing” of federal agents in the county courthouse. 

 “We have an obligation to administer our courts in a safe, efficient manner that delivers due process for anyone,” Crowley said. “The Trump administration’s actions are clearly preventing us from doing so by intimidating judges and eroding public faith in our judicial system.” 

People gathered outside the federal courthouse in Milwaukee Friday afternoon to protest Dugan’s arrest. At the rally, Christine Neumann Ortiz, executive director of immigrant rights group Voces De La Frontera, told the Wisconsin Examiner the Trump administration was trying to undermine efforts to oppose its immigration policies.

“They basically want to be unleashed to do whatever they want to commit these raids in courtrooms across the country,” she said. “They don’t want any resistance from judges or from the community standing up for people’s due process rights or limiting their policies of mass deportation and racism.”

Seven of the city of Milwaukee’s legislative representatives said in a joint statement that Dugan’s arrest and ICE operating inside the courthouse will “lead to a breakdown of civil society.”

“The County Courthouse is a sanctuary for justice and peace where the accused come forward willingly in a fair and unbiased process,” said the lawmakers, Sens. Chris Larson and Tim Carpenter and Reps. Christine Sinicki, Darrin Madison, Supreme Moore Omokunde, Angelito Tenorio and Sequanna Taylor. “Arresting people out of a courtroom will lead to a breakdown of civil society. We do not support the presence of ICE in places where it will lead to intimidation against witnesses and victims of crimes, denying everyone involved the justice they deserve.”

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned how Dugan’s arrest makes the country safer. 

“The Trump Administration continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse,” Durbin said. “When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States. How does this make America any safer? How does arresting a sitting judge make America any safer? It is imperative that Judge Dugan is afforded due process and the presumption of innocence, as required by our Constitution and her fundamental rights as an American.”

State Senate Minority Leader Diane Hesselbein (D-Middleton) and Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Public Safety, criticized the arrest in a joint statement. 

“Today’s arrest of a sitting judge, at the Milwaukee County Courthouse, is a frightening escalation of the Trump Administration’s attacks on America’s judicial system,” they said. “This is part of a pattern by this Administration – defying court orders, flouting the democratic system of checks and balances, ignoring the right to due process, and threatening judicial independence – that alarms us as legislators and as residents of this great state and this great country. We will follow this case closely. We will continue to stand up to lawless and unconstitutional actions. And, we will always fight for a bedrock principle of American democracy: equal justice under the law.”

The Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, an activist group, was planning protests Friday afternoon outside the federal courthouse and Saturday outside the FBI’s Milwaukee field office. In a statement, the group said the arrest was a “heinous attack.” 

“They are seeking to send a clear message: either you play along with Trump’s agenda, or pay the consequences,” the group said. “During this period of racist and political repression, we must stand together to denounce today’s actions by the FBI. What happened to Dugan is not new. The FBI and other agencies have been emboldened in recent months, snatching people off the streets, separating families, terrorizing communities, breaking doors down of pro-Palestine activists, and contributing to the unjust deportation of immigrants who don’t have criminal records. What is new is that they have gone after a judge.”

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U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during her confirmation hearing on Jan. 15, 2025. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A handful of Democratic U.S. senators sounded the alarm Friday after federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on charges she obstructed immigration officials from detaining a man in her courtroom, saying the arrest marked a new low in President Donald Trump’s treatment of the law.

Some congressional Democrats framed the FBI’s Friday morning arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan as a grave threat to the U.S. system of government, saying it was part of Trump’s effort to expand his own power and undermine the judiciary, with which the administration has become increasingly noncompliant.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decried the judge’s arrest on social media late Friday afternoon as a “dangerous escalation.”

“There are no kings in America. Trump and (Attorney General Pam) Bondi can’t just decide to arrest sitting judges at will and threaten judges into submission,” wrote Schumer, a New York Democrat.

Trump administration officials, including Bondi, defended the arrest as legitimate. The FBI had been investigating Dugan after U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers sought to detain an immigrant without legal authority to be in the country who was in her courtroom on a misdemeanor charge.

Bondi wrote on social media just after noon Eastern, “I can confirm that our @FBI agents just arrested Hannah Dugan — a county judge in Milwaukee — for allegedly helping an illegal alien avoid an arrest by @ICEgov. No one is above the law.”

Democrats object

Democrats in Washington who sounded their objections to the arrest Friday argued it subverted separation of powers.

Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, said Trump “continues to test the limits of our Constitution — this time by arresting a sitting judge for allegedly obstructing an immigration operation at the courthouse.”

In a statement, Durbin added that local courtrooms should be off limits to immigration enforcement agents.

“When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice in the United States,” Durbin wrote.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who represents Wisconsin, issued a statement shortly after news of the arrest, calling it “a gravely serious and drastic move.”

“In the United States we have a system of checks and balances and separation of powers for damn good reasons,” Baldwin said.

“The Trump Administration just arrested a sitting judge,” Arizona’s Ruben Gallego said in a social media post. “This is what happens in authoritarian countries. Stand up now — or lose the power to do so later. The administration must drop all charges and respect separation of powers.”

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee, was more careful in his criticism but said Trump is “constantly challenging” separation of powers laid out in the Constitution.

“I don’t know what happened in Wisconsin, but amplifying this arrest as the Attorney General and FBI Director have done looks like part of a larger intimidation campaign against judges,” the Rhode Island Democrat said in a statement.

In a since-deleted post on Bluesky, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey accused Trump of “using immigrants to justify an all-out assault on our democracy and rule of law.

“After openly defying a Supreme Court order, calling for judges to be impeached, and bullying and belittling judges, today his FBI director took the extreme step of ordering a sitting judge arrested,” Booker wrote, referring to the high court’s order that the Trump administration “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who is being held in El Salvador.

Spokespeople for Booker did not respond to a late Friday inquiry about why the post was taken down.

Trump officials back up arrest

Administration officials boasted online following the arrest.

FBI Director Kash Patel deleted a post on X in which he wrote Dugan  “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery.

Trump posted a screenshot on his social media site from the conservative activist account “Libs of TikTok” that featured a photo of Dugan and celebrated her arrest.

White House Border Czar Tom Homan said that Dugan crossed a line in her opposition to the administration’s agenda.

“People can choose to support illegal immigration and not assist ICE in removing criminal illegal aliens from our communities, BUT DON’T CROSS THAT LINE,” he wrote on X. “If you actively impede our enforcement efforts or if you knowingly harbor or conceal illegal aliens from ICE you will be prosecuted. These actions are felonies. More to come…”

Trump vs. courts

Trump and administration officials have publicly attacked judges online, including calling for the impeachment of District Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia after he ordered immigration officials to halt deportation flights to El Salvador.

The administration allowed the flights to reach Central America, and is now at risk of being held in criminal contempt of court as a legal fight plays out.

The president’s verbal attacks on Boasberg prompted a rare rebuke from U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in mid-March.

And the administration has seemingly refused to do anything to facilitate the return of Maryland resident Abrego Garcia from a notorious El Salvador mega-prison, despite a Supreme Court order.

The Milwaukee County Courthouse. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

FBI agents arrested Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan on Friday, accusing her of obstructing an immigration enforcement action last week. 

Dugan was arrested at 8:30 a.m. at the county courthouse, according to the U.S. Marshal’s Service. She was scheduled to make an initial appearance in front of U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Dries at 10:30 on Friday. According to a criminal complaint, she’s been charged with obstructing or impeding before a department or agency of the United States and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest.

Online court records show that the government did not request that Dugan be held in detention and that she was released on an O/R bond, meaning she was released from custody without having to post bail and signed an agreement that she’d appear in court when required.

The agency’s director, Kash Patel, wrote on the social media platform X that Dugan had “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. In the now-deleted post, Patel accused Dugan of creating “increased danger to the public.” 

Flores-Ruiz appeared in Dugan’s courtroom on April 18 for a pre-trial conference on charges of misdemeanor domestic battery. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents appeared outside Dugan’s courtroom, she led Flores-Ruiz and an attorney out a side door and down a private hallway. 

ICE agents later apprehended Flores-Ruiz on foot. This is the third time since March that immigration agents have appeared at the Milwaukee County courthouse to conduct arrests — a tactic that local officials have said threatens to undermine the work of the local justice system by making immigrants fearful of coming to the courthouse to testify in court.

Dugan-Crim-complaint

In an initial statement, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said he was aware of Dugan’s arrest and that the legal process should be allowed to play out. 

“Like any individual in this country, I believe she is entitled to due process,” Crowley said. “We should let the facts come to light and the legal process play out.”

But later, he accused the FBI of politicizing the arrest to punish perceived enemies.

“It is clear that the FBI is politicizing this situation to make an example of her and others across the country who oppose their attack on the judicial system and our nation’s immigration laws,” he said. “FBI Director Kash Patel issued a public statement on X, which he hurriedly deleted, making unsubstantiated claims about Judge Dugan’s case before charges were officially filed and she could have her moment in court. Director Patel’s statement shows that Trump’s FBI is more concerned about weaponizing federal law enforcement, punishing people without due process, and intimidating anyone who opposes those policies, than they are with seeking justice.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said the administration of President Donald Trump is attacking democratic values.

“In the United States, we have a system of checks and balances and separations of power for damn good reasons,” she said. “The President’s administration arresting a sitting judge is a gravely serious and drastic move, and it threatens to breach those very separations of power. Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a Democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by. By relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders, and arresting a sitting judge, this President is putting those basic Democratic values that Wisconsinites hold dear on the line. While details of this exact case remain minimal, this action fits into the deeply concerning pattern of this President’s lawless behavior and undermining courts and Congress’s checks on his power.”

Gov. Tony Evers said the arrest was another example of the Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary.

“Unfortunately, we have seen in recent months the president and the Trump Administration repeatedly use dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine our judiciary at every level, including flat-out disobeying the highest court in the land and threatening to impeach and remove judges who do not rule in their favor,” he said. “I have deep respect for the rule of law, our nation’s judiciary, the importance of judges making decisions impartially without fear or favor, and the efforts of law enforcement to hold people accountable if they commit a crime. I will continue to put my faith in our justice system as this situation plays out in the court of law.”

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore (D-Milwaukee) said the arrest was “shocking.” 

“This Administration’s willingness to weaponize federal law enforcement is shocking and this arrest has all the hallmarks of overreach,” Moore said. “Federal law enforcement coming into a community and arresting a judge is a serious matter and would require a high legal bar. I will be following this case closely and facts will come out, however, I am very alarmed at the increasingly lawless actions of the Trump Administration, and in particular ICE, who have been defying courts and acting with disregard for the Constitution.”

The ACLU of Wisconsin wrote on social media that ICE making arrests at courthouses interferes with the work of local justice officials.

“Judges have a duty to maintain order in their courtrooms and ensure the fair administration of justice, and federal law does not require state judges to act as agents of federal immigration enforcement,” the organization said. “Everyone is due their day in court, and when ICE starts showing up to courts looking to make arrests, it risks interfering with those rights. In recent weeks, the administration has attacked the integrity of our judicial system, refused to comply with a Supreme Court order, and arrested a judge for using her authority to protect the fair administration of justice.”

This is a developing story and will be updated

Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez and state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) listen to community members at an April 24 roundtable in Richland Center. (Hery Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

RICHLAND CENTER — In a 90-minute roundtable meeting at the Richland Center community center Thursday, President Donald Trump’s name was mentioned just twice. But community leaders highlighted how his administration’s policies are already wreaking havoc on the county with the sixth highest poverty rate in the state. 

About 15 area leaders representing small business owners, farmers, schools, hospitals and community advocacy groups met Thursday with state Sens. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi) and Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) and Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez. Throughout the event, the attendees discussed how the policies and plans of Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress to cut or diminish Medicaid, Social Security and education funding while instituting widespread tariffs on imported goods from countries around the world and making it harder for migrant workers to obtain visas could decimate their region. 

“None of this is right. Where I’m at that age in my life where I don’t get more thoughtful, I get more pissed,” Brett White, executive director of the Southwestern Wisconsin Community Action Program, said. “And because this is all not necessary, this is completely unnecessary, which means that it’s intentional.” 

The group noted repeatedly that a cut to programs in one area had a ripple effect across every other community institution. 

White, and Chris Frakes, the organization’s senior director, said that the cuts to Head Start early childhood education programming that have already come and are set to deepen under Trump are their biggest worry. 

There are currently about 70 kids in Richland County enrolled in Southwest CAP’s Head Start program, according to Frakes. If those programs are lost, poor kids in Richland County will never catch up, she said. 

“Because we know if you enter kindergarten already behind, there’s virtually no chance to catch up by third grade,” Frakes said. “If you’re not on grade level reading in third grade, we know your life prospects go down dramatically, right? So Head Start fills this critical, vital need to get those kiddos onto par with their middle class peers when they hit kindergarten, so that they are ready to learn, and their families have the sort of surrounding supports, whether that’s food, whether that’s access to transportation, for medical care.” 

If Head Start gets cut, the children who are affected will eventually reach Aaron Mithum, the middle and high school principal for the Kickapoo Area School District. Mithum says the district is “waiting for the other shoe to drop” on the future of the approximately $800,000 it gets annually from the federal government as Trump seeks to shut down the U.S. Department of Education. 

If Head Start leaves poor kids behind before they turn five, by the time they reach Mithum at a middle school that’s also struggling financially, there won’t be many options. 

“We’re getting them when they get into pre K or kindergarten, and now we’re trying to go from there, and now, all of a sudden, they don’t have any of that foundational aspect,” Mithum said. “It’s a building block, trickle effect, and not in a positive way. So now it’s that much harder for us to do what [Head Start wasn’t] able to do, and it continues to go up. And it’s just really hard to think about, what does that look like? What does that look like to be a parent with a special ed kid who needs speech services or reading services, or whatever. And the answer is, sorry, not our problem.” 

While the child care and education system of a community that’s already seen the closure of its local University of Wisconsin campus faces the prospect of being unable to keep poor kids from falling behind, the area’s food system is also being hit. 

Retaliatory tariffs on the area’s wheat, corn and soybean farmers are hurting their ability to find international markets for their products while tariffs imposed by Trump have made fertilizer and machinery more expensive, said Sally Leong, Wisconsin Farmers Union member and former professor of plant pathology at UW-Madison. 

Those struggles are continuing to push up the price of food, causing local families to rely on food pantries more than used to, according to Jackie Anderson, executive director of Feeding Wisconsin. 

Under Trump, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) paused funding for The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP), which Anderson said has amounted to about a 30% cut to what food banks are able to buy. USDA has also ended a program that connected local farms with food pantries to supply fresh produce. 

“Food banks are really looking at the bottom line and saying, like, ‘How are we going to be able to get that amount of food here?’” Anderson said. 

The tariffs are also affecting the companies providing jobs in the area. Marty Richards, the county tourism director, said that Rockwell Automation has delayed and cancelled orders because of Trump’s tariffs. Meanwhile it’s getting harder to find local workers and Trump’s restrictive immigration policies have made it nearly impossible to hire migrant workers. Richards said the company has had a hard time getting workers from its plant in Mexico to come to the U.S. even temporarily for technical training

Teri Richards, board member of the Greater Richland Area Chamber of Commerce, said the county desperately needs more people and she doesn’t know where to find them. 

“We’re obviously not having enough babies. We’re struggling to get that immigrant population and we can’t keep stealing from each other,” she said. “So it’s time to go into Chicago or Milwaukee, to even get a few of those folks moved out here? I don’t know.” 

With fewer people moving in and federal policies discouraging investment from the business community and cutting funds from schools and child care, the community is also facing the management of an aging population. About 30% of the population is older than 60 and 14% is disabled, according to Roxanne Klubertanz, manager of Richland County’s Aging and Disability Resource Center (ADRC). 

That aging population means the community is only going to become more reliant on federal programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Currently, the ADRC helps people in the community apply for Medicaid to pay for the services that will help them stay in their homes for as long as possible or move to an assisted living facility — currently a cost of about $3,800 per month, she said. 

Republicans in Congress are currently weighing a budget proposal that would slash Medicaid funding. Klubertanz said without the program people won’t be able to access those services and will ultimately get sicker and require a placement in a nursing home — a cost of about $10,000 per month. 

“So if that funding, that Medicaid funding, goes away, what’s going to happen?” she said. “Maybe right away, you’re going to see some decreases, but people are going to get sicker and need more services, and then they have to pay for that nursing home placement, which is almost three times the cost. So if you’re trying to fix something today, you have to think about what it’s gonna be like in five years. You’ve gotta have that long range thinking.” 

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Education Secretary Linda McMahon testifies during her Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Feb. 13, 2025.  (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration Thursday to pause enforcement of a new U.S. Education Department ban on diversity, equity and inclusion practices.

The order came as another federal judge in New Hampshire issued a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the Trump administration from yanking federal funding from many schools.

The New Hampshire order, though, only applied to schools that employ members of the National Education Association — the country’s largest labor union, which brought the case challenging the ban — or the Center for Black Educator Development.

The rulings used different legal logic but arrived at the same conclusion: The administration’s ban on race-conscious practices is not valid.

In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Stephanie A. Gallagher said she ruled not on the merits of the policy, but the way the Trump administration developed it.

“This Court takes no view as to whether the policies at issue here are good or bad, prudent or foolish, fair or unfair. But this Court is constitutionally required to closely scrutinize whether the government went about creating and implementing them in the manner the law requires,” she wrote. “The government did not.”

Gallagher’s order pauses the enforcement of a Feb. 14 letter to school districts from Craig Trainor, the department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, that threatened to rescind federal funds for schools that use race-conscious practices in programming, admissions, scholarships and other aspects of student life.

In New Hampshire, U.S. District Judge Landya McCafferty wrote that “the loss of federal funding would cripple the operations of many educational institutions.”

McCafferty’s order has a nationwide effect, but McCafferty limited it to schools that employ NEA members, rejecting the union’s attempt to completely halt the policies outlined in the letter.

Teachers unions sued

The Feb. 14 letter drew swift legal action, and the National Education Association brought the suit in New Hampshire against the administration alongside the Center for Black Educator Development. 

The American Federation of Teachers — one of the largest teachers unions in the country — filed a complaint in February alongside its affiliate, AFT-Maryland. The American Sociological Association and a public school district in Oregon also sued over the letter.

“Today the court confirmed the importance of our job as educators to foster opportunity, dignity, and engagement,” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement after the Maryland ruling.

“The court agreed that this vague and clearly unconstitutional requirement is a grave attack on students, our profession, honest history, and knowledge itself,” she added. “It would hamper efforts to extend access to education, and dash the promise of equal opportunity for all, a central tenet of the United States since its founding.”

NEA also celebrated the preliminary injunction granted in its case Thursday, and the union’s president, Becky Pringle, said in a statement “today’s ruling allows educators and schools to continue to be guided by what’s best for students, not by the threat of illegal restrictions and punishment.”

The statement said President Donald Trump, billionaire head of the U.S. DOGE Service Elon Musk and Education Secretary Linda McMahon were responsible for an “attack” on public education.

“The fact is that Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Linda McMahon are using politically motivated attacks and harmful and vague directives to stifle speech and erase critical lessons to attack public education, as they work to dismantle public schools,” Pringle said. “This is why educators, parents, and community leaders are organizing, mobilizing, and using every tool available to protect our students and their futures.”

The Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.

Letter raised questions

In the February letter, Trainor offered a wide-ranging interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 involving Harvard University and the University of North Carolina, which struck down the use of affirmative action in college admissions.

Trainor wrote that though the ruling “addressed admissions decisions, the Supreme Court’s holding applies more broadly.”

The four-page letter raised a slew of questions for schools across pre-K through college over what fell within the requirements, and the department later released a Frequently Asked Questions document on the letter in an attempt to provide more guidance.

Earlier this month, the Education Department gave state education leaders just days to certify all K-12 schools in their states were complying with the letter in order to keep receiving federal financial assistance. The department and the groups suing in the New Hampshire case later reached an agreement that paused enforcement.