Data centers are mushrooming all over the country, with many planned projects on deck in Wisconsin. We need to get ahead of them by putting in place protections for the state's energy and water resources. (Photo by Dana DiFilippo/New Jersey Monitor)

Wisconsin stands at a pivotal moment.

Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and hyperscale data centers are arriving quickly, bringing enormous demand for electricity and water. The real question is not whether these investments will come, but how we manage them and who pays the costs if we get it wrong.

Families want affordable bills. Businesses want reliable power. Communities want clean water and economic opportunity. We need a  common-sense approach to guide how we respond to rapid data center growth.

An unprecedented load and a real affordability risk

The scale of proposed data centers is unlike anything Wisconsin has seen.

Just two projects, one in Port Washington and another in Mount Pleasant, have requested nearly four gigawatts of electricity combined. That is more power than all Wisconsin households use today.

Meeting this demand will require massive investments in power plants, transmission lines, substations, pipelines and water infrastructure. But under Wisconsin’s current utility model, these costs are not paid only by the companies driving demand. They are instead spread across all of us who pay electric bills, including families, farms, and small businesses that won’t benefit from data center power.

For small businesses operating on thin margins, even modest increases in electric or water rates affect hiring, pricing and long-term viability. In rural communities with fewer customers sharing infrastructure costs, the impact can be even more severe.

This concern is already becoming real. Utilities are citing data center demand to justify new methane gas plants and delaying coal plant retirements. Utilities doubling down on fossil fuels should give every one of us pause.

Why costly gas is the wrong answer

Building new methane gas plants for data centers would lock customers into decades of fuel price volatility, even though cleaner options have become cheaper and faster to deploy.

Wind, solar and battery storage can come online far more quickly than fossil fuel plants and without exposing families and businesses to unpredictable fuel costs. Battery storage costs alone have fallen nearly 90% over the past decade. 

Across the country, these tools are replacing methane gas plants in states as different as Texas and California.

There is also a serious risk that we will pay higher bills for decades, even when data centers stop using those methane gas plants. In Nevada, a major utility has acknowledged that only about 15% of proposed data centers are likely to be built. When speculative projects fall through, all of us are left to pay for infrastructure we actually never needed.

This is not ideology. It is basic financial risk management, and basic fairness.

Clean energy is the lowest-cost path

Wisconsin policymakers and elected officials need to put guardrails in place to protect everyday residents from the AI bubble that’s threatening the state. The core principle should be that data centers operate on 100% clean energy, not as a slogan, but because it is the lowest-cost and lowest-risk option over time.

A smart framework would require developers to:

• Supply at least 30% of their power from on-site and Wisconsin-based renewable energy
• Offset additional demand through energy efficiency, demand response – at least 25% of peak capacity and smart grid flexibility
• Participate fully in utility efficiency and renewable energy programs rather than opting out
• Each data center project should require a legally binding Community Benefit Agreement that clearly defines community protections and benefits, negotiated among developers, local governments, neighborhood-based organizations and underserved communities

This approach reduces peak demand, lowers infrastructure costs and protects existing customers while allowing data centers to advance.

Major companies like Microsoft, Google and Meta have already publicly committed to operating on carbon-free energy. We need to hold them to that. Wisconsin risks losing our competitive advantage if we default to gas-heavy solutions instead of offering clean, flexible grids.

Water is a non-negotiable constraint

Energy is not the only concern. Water matters just as much.

A single hyperscale data center can use millions of gallons of water per day, either directly for cooling or indirectly through power generation. In communities with limited water systems, that can crowd out agricultural use and raise residents’ water bills.

Wisconsin should require closed-loop cooling systems, full accounting of direct and indirect water use, and ongoing public reporting to ensure local water supplies are protected.

A practical path forward

Wisconsin does not have to choose between economic growth and affordability. We can do both if we insist on clear guardrails.

That means requiring data centers to pay the full cost of service, powering growth with clean energy first, and protecting water resources and ratepayers from unnecessary risk.

Data centers are coming. The question is whether Wisconsin families and small businesses will be partners in that growth or be left paying higher bills for decades to come.

If we choose smart clean power over costly gas, Wisconsin can lead.

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Former special counsel Jack Smith arrives to testify during a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on Jan. 22, 2026 in Washington, DC.  (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Republicans on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee sought to poke holes Thursday in former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s investigations into President Donald Trump, while Democrats on the panel commended him and Smith restated his finding that Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election results.

Republicans on the panel accused Smith, a longtime prosecutor who has led investigations of public officials of both major U.S. parties and international figures, of undertaking a partisan probe targeting Trump ahead of the 2024 election. 

“It was always about politics,” Chairman Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican, said to open the hearing.

During the hearing, Trump posted on social media a suggestion that he would seek to prosecute Smith. 

But Smith, and the many Democrats on the committee who defended him Thursday, repeatedly asserted that his investigation was by the book, guided by Justice Department policies, legal requirements, “the facts and the law.”

“I made my decisions without regard to President Trump’s political association, activities, beliefs or candidacy in the 2024 election,” Smith said in an opening statement. “President Trump was charged because the evidence established that he willfully broke the law — the very laws he swore an oath to defend.”

Smith led two prosecutions of Trump during the years between his presidential terms. 

One, in District of Columbia federal court, accused Trump of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results. The other, in Florida federal court, accused Trump of mishandling classified documents. 

Grand juries indicted Trump in both cases but the Justice Department dropped both cases after Trump’s 2024 election victory, consistent with department policy that forbids prosecution of a sitting president.

Trump attempting ‘intimidation’

Midway through the five-hour hearing, Trump posted to Truth Social his analysis of the meeting and a veiled threat against Smith.

“Deranged Jack Smith is being DECIMATED before Congress,” he wrote. “If he were a Republican, his license would be taken away from him, and far worse! Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me. The whole thing was a Democrat SCAM — A big price should be paid by them for what they have put our Country through!”

In the hearing room, Smith directly rejected charges he was motivated by partisanship, and said he would not give in to intimidation attempts by Trump.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Democrat or a Republican,” he said. “No one — no one — should be above the law in this country.”

Vermont Democrat Becca Balint noted Trump had used the term “Deranged Jack Smith” 185 times on Truth Social. 

“I think … the statements are meant to intimidate me. I will not be intimidated. I think these statements are also made as a warning to others what will happen if they stand up,” Smith responded. 

“We did our work pursuant to department policy,” he continued. “We followed the facts, we followed the law, and that process resulted in proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, that he committed serious crimes. I’m not going to pretend that didn’t happen because he’s threatening me.”

Phone records

Several committee Republicans challenged Smith’s pursuit of phone records from members of Congress related to the election interference case.

The case included an examination of Trump’s attempt to block Congress’ certification of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith and other prosecutors sought phone logs leading up to the eventual attack on the Capitol that day.

Republicans on the panel accused Smith of violating Congress’ rights as a co-equal branch of government and took further umbrage at efforts by Smith and his colleagues to keep the records requests secret, and noted that only Republicans’ records had been sought.

Jordan said his phone records were among those obtained, and described the entire investigation as a partisan attack on Trump.

“Even the Democrats said this was wrong,” he said. “We shouldn’t be surprised. Democrats have been going after President Trump for 10 years, for a decade, and the country should never, ever forget what they did.”

Smith said the investigation had to do with Trump’s pressure campaign on members of Congress to object to the election results, including appeals to Republicans’ partisan loyalties. If the president had been a Democrat, he’d have sought Democrats’ records, he said.

He and Democrats on the panel also noted that the phone records only included data like the length, time and date of phone calls, without disclosing anything about their content. Such records are typical pieces of conspiracy investigations, they said.

Complimentary Dems

Democrats complimented and defended Smith throughout the hearing. 

“Special Counsel Smith, you pursued the facts,” ranking Democrat Jamie Raskin of Maryland said. “You followed every applicable law, ethics rule and DOJ regulation. Your decisions were reviewed by the Public Integrity Section. You acted based solely on the facts.”

Raskin contrasted Smith’s approach with that of Trump, who he said sought unprecedented control over the Justice Department to pursue “political vendetta and motives of personal revenge.”

Several other Democratic members held Smith up as an exemplary public servant.

“I want to thank you for your service,” Tennessee Democrat Steve Cohen said. 

“I think you’re a great American, and you came out of this as being somebody who people can respect and look up to,” he said. “We should be instilling people’s desire to go into justice, to go into law, to go into government. You’re an example of the type of person they should follow.”

Ensign Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. (Photo by Zach Spindler-Krage)

A proposal to repeal a ban on mining in northeastern Minnesota’s Superior National Forest is headed to the U.S. Senate following approval in the House, reigniting a long-simmering fight between environmentalists and pro-mining interests.

The reaction of outdoors and environmental groups was swift Wednesday.

“Congress just tossed aside years of scientific study and local input about how to conserve the headwaters of this wilderness for future generations, allowing the threat of toxic mining to return,” Jordan Schreiber, director of government relations at The Wilderness Society, said in a statement. He called on the Senate to “reject this attack and the precedent it sets to arbitrarily strike down” public land protections.

House Republicans voted Wednesday to undo former President Joe Biden’s 20-year moratorium on the extraction of copper, nickel and other minerals across more than 225,000 acres near the popular Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. If approved by the Republican-controlled Senate, the resolution would next go to President Donald Trump, who has indicated he would sign it into law. 

The resolution requires only a simple majority vote to pass the Senate, rather than a filibuster-proof majority.

Republican Congressman Pete Stauber, whose Duluth-based district covers the area, introduced the resolution last year. It uses an obscure but increasingly popular procedural tool that allows Congress to void certain Executive Branch actions.

In a statement Wednesday, Stauber hailed the resolution’s passage as a win for the regional economy, national security and congressional prerogatives. The resolution would prevent future administrations from imposing similar bans in the future.

“Reversing Biden’s mining ban will protect Northern Minnesota jobs, strengthen national security through domestic production, and prevent future overreaches from happening again,” Stauber said.

Organized labor cheered the move, too, albeit in terms more palatable to the Democratic base.

“One of the most important contributions Minnesota can make to the fight against climate change is leading the world in setting the highest bar for labor and environmental protections in the responsible production of copper, nickel and other critical minerals,” Joel Smith, president and business manager of LIUNA Minnesota and North Dakota, said in a statement, also mentioning the promise of “family-supporting careers” for union members and “community-supporting jobs at schools, hospitals, public and private sector employers.”

Environmental and outdoor recreation groups have long opposed mining near the Boundary Waters, a remote section of Superior National Forest along the border with Canada. The groups say it would disturb critical habitats and pollute a pristine watershed enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. 

In a statement describing the resolution as an unprecedented use of congressional power over public land use, Save the Boundary Waters urged voters to contact their senators and push for a “no” vote on the resolution. Save the Boundary Waters is pushing for a permanent ban on copper-ore sulfide mining in the boundary watershed. Citing peer-reviewed scientific research, the group says mining for copper and other heavy metals inevitably leaches sulfuric acid, toxic metals and other pollutants into surrounding water systems, harming the natural environment and imperiling tourism.

Northeast Minnesota sits atop the Duluth Complex, one of the world’s richest deposits of copper and nickel. Twin Metals, a subsidiary of the Chilean mining conglomerate Antofagasta, wants to extract both minerals — along with cobalt and other precious metals — from underground veins near Ely and Babbitt, about a dozen miles from the wilderness area.

It would be the first copper-nickel mine in Minnesota, which produces most of the United States’ domestic iron but few other metals. Regional and state officials have sought for years to reduce northeastern Minnesota’s economic dependence on volatile global markets for iron and steel. Its rich deposits of higher-value metals, along with elusive gases like helium and possibly hydrogen, could offer a lifeline.

The Twin Metals project has been in development for more than 15 years amid an arduous state and federal permitting process. It suffered a severe setback in early 2023 when the Biden administration announced a 20-year moratorium on mining across 350 square miles of the Superior National Forest, though Minnesota has issued new mineral exploration permits in the years since.  

Copper, nickel, cobalt and some precious metals are key inputs for a bevy of medical, automotive and industrial products. They’re also needed to produce wind turbines, solar panels, rechargeable batteries and other electrical technologies that scientists say are crucial for mitigating local air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Environmentalists say the the demand can be met with more robust recycling. 

Mining companies and their allies say it’s better for everyone’s sake to extract them in the United States rather than countries with lax environmental and human health protections, such as China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Removing the 20-year moratorium allows “proposed developments to proceed through the world’s strictest state and federal regulatory and permitting processes,” Stauber said on Wednesday.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance gives remarks following a roundtable discussion with local leaders and community members amid a surge of federal immigration authorities in the area, at Royalston Square on January 22, 2026 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Trump administration has sent a reported 3,000-plus federal agents into the area, with more on the way, as they make a push to arrest undocumented immigrants in the region. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday blamed Minnesota elected officials for the clashes between federal agents and protesters, arguing that their refusal to facilitate the federal government’s immigration enforcement is the cause of the chaos across the Twin Cities.

Vance held a closed-door roundtable with federal agents, law enforcement and businesses. The Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and Republican House Speaker Lisa Demuth, R-Cold Spring, confirmed after the fact that they were in the room with Vance, though other participants are unknown.

Democrats who said they were not invited included Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.  

Vance took questions from reporters, defending the actions of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and downplaying recent, high-profile instances of alleged civil rights violations committed by federal agents.

In at least one instance, Vance misled the public when he said the Trump administration is focused on Minneapolis because “that’s where we have the highest concentration of people who have violated our immigration laws.” This is false.

Pew Research estimates that 130,000 undocumented immigrants lived in Minnesota as of 2023.

States that are the most populous — California, Texas, Florida and New York — had the highest concentration of unauthorized immigrations, a combined 8 million in 2023.

A reporter asked the vice president about agents detaining a 5-year-old boy, whom the Columbia Heights Public School district says agents used as “bait” to draw family members away from their homes.

Vance said the incident is an example of the media failing to provide context about ICE’s arrests. Vance said the boy was not arrested, but the boy’s father was in the country illegally. When ICE approached the father, he ran and left his child, Vance said.

“Are they supposed to let a five-year-old child freeze to death? Are they not supposed to arrest an illegal alien in the United States of America?” Vance asked sarcastically. “… If we had a little cooperation from local … and state officials, I think the chaos would go way down in this community.”

At a Thursday press conference, a lawyer for the boy’s family disputed that the father was in the country illegally, stating he came into the country a few years ago seeking asylum.

Vance said the administration wants Minnesota law enforcement to work with the federal government and honor ICE “detainers.” Detainers are written requests from ICE that a local jail or other law enforcement detain an individual for an additional 48 hours to give ICE time to decide to take the person into federal custody to begin removal proceedings.

Minnesota officials say that they honor ICE detainers. In addition, some of the arrests that ICE claims to have made in recent weeks were people already in prison that Minnesota handed over.

Vance downplays arrests of U.S. citizens

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit last week alleging that immigration authorities are racially profiling Minnesota residents and detaining people with legal status, even U.S. citizens. Numerous U.S. citizens have said they’ve been arrested by ICE.

When asked about alleged instances of racial profiling and arrests of U.S. citizens, Vance said citizens are arrested because they’ve assaulted immigration agents, and agents are not looking for people based on skin color.

“When there are American citizens who have been caught up in some of these enforcement operations, very often it is people who have assaulted a law enforcement officer,” Vance said. “They’re not being arrested because they violated the immigration laws. They’re being arrested because they punched a federal law enforcement officer. That is a totally reasonable thing.”

He again blamed Minnesota officials.

“So long as we had more cooperation, I think they can do these things in a much more targeted way. They would actually know where some of the bad guys are,” Vance said.

Vance said that based on what he heard in his roundtable Thursday, he doesn’t believe the Insurrection Act needs to be invoked at this time, like President Donald Trump threatened last week. The Insurrection Act is a rarely-invoked 19th century law that would allow Trump to send the military to Minnesota.

“What I do worry about again is that the chaos gets worse. If more and more ICE agents are getting assaulted, if other law enforcement officers start getting assaulted, that would be a real problem,” Vance said. 

After Vance’s visit, Walz said the estimated 3,000 federal agents patrolling Minnesota shouldn’t be there.

“I’m glad the Vice President agrees the temperature needs to be turned down, but actions speak louder than words,” Walz said on X. “Take the show of force off the streets and partner with the state on targeted enforcement of violent offenders instead of random, aggressive confrontation.”

The E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., home of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, on July 14, 2025. (Photo by Jacob Fischler/States Newsroom)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender troops came under scrutiny again in federal court Thursday — this time before a three-judge appeals panel considering the merits of the president’s executive order.

The policy has been challenged in two major federal cases, one of which the administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court’s emergency docket. In May, the justices allowed the ban to go into effect while the lawsuits continue in the lower courts.

For just over three hours at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, judges pressed the Trump administration and the lawyer for the plaintiffs in Talbott v. Trump for clarity on the ban instituted just under one year ago.

The panel was made up of Judges Judith W. Rogers, appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994; Robert L. Wilkins, appointed by President Barack Obama in 2014; and Justin R. Walker, a 2019 Trump appointee.

U.S. Deputy Associate Attorney General Abhishek Kambli, arguing for the administration, told the judges the ban in question rests on the findings and policy of former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. 

“The Mattis report does provide the rationale,” Kambli said, when pressed by Wilkins on why “people who’ve been in (service) for years, with Bronze Stars and commendations” are swept up in the policy.

“What we have here is an area of medicine, which we can all agree there’s uncertainty over,” Kambli argued.

Mattis, who served during Trump’s first term, disqualified transgender service members from the military, except in very narrow circumstances. 

A February 2022 Defense Department report concluded that transgender service members, even members who are not suffering a gender dysphoria diagnosis, “could undermine readiness, disrupt unit cohesion, and impose an unreasonable burden on the military.”

Kambli, moments later, added the courts are “ill equipped” to decide the issue and should show deference to the military.

But Shannon Minter, legal director for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, said Kambli and the Trump administration ignored new information revealed after President Joe Biden reversed the Mattis ban and allowed transgender troops to serve openly.

Minter, who argued in court for the plaintiffs, said there was “zero evidence of any problems. … That is part of the record now.”

“So for someone to come in and just go back to keeping people out … this is based on animus,” Minter said.

The government “has to show there is a legitimate purpose,” Minter said.

Process for discharging trans troops debated

Kambli told the judges that “so far no one has been discharged” and the policy is still “in progress.”

The transgender service members would be informed via letter of an honorable discharge, and would have the opportunity to go before a three-officer administrative discharge panel, he said. 

The special panel process is usually reserved for members who’ve served six or more years, but the military will make an exception for trans members with less than six years of service, Kambli added.  

In an animated exchange, Rogers pressed back: “The end result is predetermined. It’s a meaningless process. It’s just moving paper around.”

Jennifer Levi, senior director for GLAD Law, one of the organizations representing the roughly 30 plaintiffs, told States Newsroom after the arguments that trans members have already been “forced out” through a voluntary process.

“This was an important hearing, and the plaintiffs in this case are all meeting military standards and reflect some of the highest ideals of this country. They’ve committed their lives to service, and the military has conceded that they have been able to contribute and meet all of the rigorous standards for service,” Levi said.

“This hearing brought out just how devastating and harmful it is to purge a group of people who have been contributing and putting their lives on the line in service of the country.”

The Pentagon declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation.

Trump order

Trump signed the order on Jan. 27, 2025, asserting the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” 

Further, the order said that being transgender is “not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member.”

Eight active-duty service members and transgender individuals who are actively pursuing enlistment in the armed forces initially brought the case against Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, among other officials and three branches of the U.S. military. The number of plaintiffs has since grown.

U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Ana Reyes granted the plaintiffs a preliminary injunction in mid-March, criticizing the administration in her 79-page opinion for a lack of data proving the claims in Trump’s order.

“Transgender persons have served openly since 2021, but Defendants have not analyzed their service. That is unfortunate. Plaintiffs’ service records alone are Exhibit A for the proposition that transgender persons can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence,” Reyes wrote.

Administration officials swiftly appealed the case to the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Oral arguments were heard April 22 before Judges  Cornelia Pillard, appointed during Obama’s second term, and Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas, both appointed during Trump’s first term.

On Dec. 9, the three judges issued a 2-1 decision staying the lower court’s preliminary injunction, with Katsas and Rao writing the Hegseth policy “likely does not violate equal protection.” 

Pillard issued a blistering dissent, asserting the ban “brands all transgender people, without regard to individual merit, as unworthy to serve in our armed forces solely because they are transgender.”

In a separate case, Shilling, et al v. Trump, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on April 18 upheld a lower court’s ruling that allowed transgender troops to continue serving, denying the government’s appeal. 

In May, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Trump to ban transgender people from the military.

Smoke is seen over buildings after explosions and low-flying aircraft were heard on Jan. 3, 2026 in Caracas, Venezuela. (Photo by Jesus Vargas/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House failed Thursday to back a resolution curbing President Donald Trump’s military operations abroad, following U.S. intervention to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Thursday’s resolution tied at 215-215. If passed, it would have directed “the President to remove United States Armed Forces from Venezuela, unless explicitly authorized by a declaration of war or specific statutory authorization for use of military force.”

Republicans Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Don Bacon of Nebraska voted in favor, along with all Democrats present. The vote was held open for about an hour to allow Texas Republican Wesley Hunt to arrive and cast a vote against the resolution.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, earlier this month were taken by the U.S. military to face an indictment in New York City on narco-terrorism and conspiracy charges originally levied in 2020. The couple has pleaded not guilty. 

The Jan. 3 military operation in Venezuela was conducted without approval of or notification to Congress.

Prior to the military operation in Venezuela, the Trump administration had conducted a monthslong bombing campaign of small boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. strikes have killed more than 115 people whom Trump officials have alleged, without proof, were smuggling drugs to the U.S.

Both chambers have now tried to curb Trump’s military actions in Latin America through a war powers resolution, but have not been able to gain enough votes. 

The Senate earlier this month was initially successful in a procedural vote on a war powers resolution, but the measure eventually failed after two Republicans who had backed the measure voted against it.

Congress passed a war powers resolution in 1973 to limit the president’s authority to wage war overseas after the Nixon administration secretly bombed Vietnam and Cambodia, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Then-President Richard Nixon vetoed the resolution, but Congress overrode the veto. 

Federal agents block in and stop a woman to ask her for another person’s whereabouts Monday, Jan. 19, 2026 in south Minneapolis. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)

WASHINGTON — The House Thursday passed four appropriations bills to fund the government and avert a partial shutdown, but Democrats largely objected to spending on the Department of Homeland Security amid aggressive immigration enforcement in communities across the country. 

Democrats have pushed for tougher oversight of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. In addition, members of the progressive wing of the caucus vowed to not approve any funding for DHS after federal immigration agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis earlier this month. 

The 37-year-old mother’s death led to massive community protests and  thousands of ICE agents have aggressively descended into Minnesota.

“(Homeland Security Secretary) Kristi Noem and ICE are out of control,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement. “Taxpayer dollars are being misused to brutalize U.S. citizens, including the tragic killing of Renee Nicole Good. This extremism must end.” 

The four bills — Defense; Homeland Security; Labor, Health and Human Services and Education; and Transportation, Housing and Urban Development — are the last remaining appropriations bills needed to avoid a partial government shutdown by Jan. 30. 

The Homeland Security funding bill passed 220-207. The remaining bills passed 341-88.

Democrats who joined Republicans in voting for the Homeland Security bill included Reps. Jared Gold of Maine, Henry Cuellar of Texas, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington state, Tom Suozzi of New York, Don Davis of North Carolina, Laura Gillen of New York and Vicente Gonzalez of Texas.

Republican Thomas Massie of Kentucky voted against the DHS funding bill.

Separately, GOP Rep. Virginia Foxx, chairwoman of the Rules Committee, added a provision to repeal a law that allows members of the U.S. Senate to sue for up to half a million dollars if their phone records were obtained by special counsel Jack Smith during his investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election. In a rare move, the provision passed unanimously. 

Smith was also on Capitol Hill Thursday to testify about his investigation before lawmakers on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. 

The Senate will take up the appropriations bills when senators return from recess next week.

What does the Homeland Security bill include?

The Homeland Security bill provides $64.4 billion in funding for fiscal year 2026. It cuts funding for Customs and Border Protection by $1.3 billion, and maintains flat funding for ICE at $10 billion.

The bill attempts to put guardrails around immigration enforcement by allocating $20 million for body cameras for ICE and CBP officers. 

It also requires DHS to provide monthly updates on how the agency is spending the $190 billion it received from the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” the president’s signature tax and spending cuts package signed into law last summer.  

The bill also restricts ICE to spending only $3.8 billion of its fiscal budget on detention. However, the agency will still be able to pull $75 billion from OBBBA, including for detention.

Most Dems say they can’t back any ICE funding

During Thursday’s debate of the bill, Republicans supported the Homeland Security bill, and argued that it contains other agencies beside immigration enforcement. 

But a majority of Democrats said they could not vote to approve the agency’s funding because of ICE’s actions.

“I think we should look at the bill in its totality,” GOP Appropriations Chair Tom Cole of Oklahoma said. “Encouraging people to believe we have massive bad actors in a particular agency… comparing law enforcement officers to the Gestapo or Nazis, that’s not true. The right thing to do is to fund the people who protect America.”

Foxx criticized Democrats for their concerns over ICE enforcement tactics. On the House floor, she defended the agency, arguing that “ICE agents are arresting some of the worst criminals imaginable.”

“The issue is that ICE is terrorizing communities and attacking people, including U.S. citizens,” countered the top Democrat on the Rules Committee, Jim McGovern of Massachusetts. “This is an out-of-control agency at war with communities across the country and they don’t give a damn that you are a U.S. citizen.”

The top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, said he could not support voting for the bill because the Trump administration has weaponized the agency and “DHS has strayed from its core mission.”

“Republicans in control of Congress, however, are conducting zero oversight and do nothing but send blank check after blank check to DHS,” he said in a statement. “I have consistently supported the DHS workforce over the past two decades and continue to do so, but I cannot – in good conscience – vote to send another dime to CBP and ICE as they terrorize our communities and sully the constitution.”

Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, said she will vote against the bill, even though she is proud of several provisions, such as the increase to Federal Emergency Management Agency funding and a pay raise for air traffic controllers. 

But, she said, “It is impossible to ignore the impact ICE has had.”

“ICE is an agency that has shown itself to be lawless,” she said.

Republicans tout body camera provision

GOP Rep. Mark Amodei of Nevada, the chair of the panel that deals with funding for Homeland Security, defended the funding bill, and noted that it provides immigration officers with body cameras. He said funds are also provided in the measure for the Coast Guard and agencies dealing with cybersecurity. 

Cuellar of Texas, the top Democrat on that same panel, acknowledged that “this bill is not perfect.” 

“It’s better than the alternative, leaving the department with a blank check,” he said. “This bill flat funds ICE but at the same time, we strengthen oversight of ICE.”

Minnesota Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum said the ICE enforcement in Minnesota and across the country is one of the “worst cases of civil rights violations by the federal government in recent history.”   

“Minnesotans are being racially profiled on a mass scale, assaulted on our streets, kidnapped from our communities,” she said. 

At least 40 immigrants ICE arrested in Minneapolis in recent weeks are being detained at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia, three detainees told Source New Mexico. (Patrick Lohmann/Source NM)

Dozens of immigrants currently housed at a New Mexico detention facility arrived there recently from the Minneapolis area, the site of a massive federal immigration operation and intensifying protests.

Three detainees at the Torrance County Detention Facility in Estancia told Source New Mexico in phone interviews Wednesday evening that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested them separately in Minnesota on or around Jan. 5 before quickly flying them to a detention facility in El Paso, which was rapidly filling with new arrestees as they stayed there for several days. 

On Jan. 11, officers woke them up around 4 a.m. and bussed about 40 of them to Estancia, a journey that required detainees to be awake for 24 hours, detainee Jorge Cordoba told Source. Everyone on the bus to Estancia was arrested in Minneapolis or nearby, he said. 

Cordoba, 33, said he has lived in Minneapolis for more than 20 years and lives in the United States legally under protected Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival status granted to immigrants who arrived here as children. His parents brought him here from Mexico when he was 10, he said. 

“My wife is a U.S. citizen. I have four kids,” he said. “I’ve been a pretty good citizen. It’s been more than 10 years since I got a speeding ticket.”

Cordoba’s protected status didn’t stop an ICE agent from arresting him around 4:30 a.m. Jan. 5 on his way to work at a humidity control company, he said. ICE agents took him to a temporary detention facility in the city and, by 10 p.m. that night, Cordoba was already in El Paso, he said. 

While Source could not independently corroborate his account, Innovation Law Lab, an immigrant legal advocacy group, provided details of its own interviews with recent jail arrivals, including one account that matches Cordoba’s. 

Now Cordoba remains in New Mexico awaiting a hearing before a judge to demonstrate that he still has DACA status.

“I’m stuck here,” he said. 

Irina Vaynerman, a Minnesota-based lawyer with the organization Groundwork Legal, told Source on Thursday that ICE is deliberately shipping detainees to far-away facilities to deprive them of legal access and family support. 

Her organization is seeking a federal judge’s order to return one of her clients from New Mexico. In a legal filing Wednesday, she argued that “Oscar O.T.”, a Guatemalan man seeking asylum, is being denied constitutional due process and that his transfer to New Mexico violates a judicial order that he be able to face a judge in Minnesota. 

“This is just part of a much bigger story about not just the unlawful detentions that are happening, but on top of that, the intentional evading of the court’s orders and court’s jurisdiction,” she said.

She said ICE shipping detainees out-of-state prevents “individuals who have been unlawfully detained from being able to connect with local counsel and file the legal actions they need to be able to get free.”

In Oscar’s case, she said, ICE’s system for lawyers to track their clients was not working, so they had no clue where he was until she got an email from ICE saying he was being held in “Albuquerque.” 

No ICE detention facility exists in Albuquerque, so Vayneman said it’s possible he is actually in Estancia, an hour or so away from Albuquerque, and was bussed there along with fellow Minneapolis residents from El Paso. 

“That is the type of insanity that is going on, the intentional disappearing of Minnesotans who have been unlawfully detained,” she said. “It is genuinely the government’s effort to try to erase entire swaths of the U.S. population in an unlawful way.”

An ICE spokesperson did not respond to Source’s request for comment about why the agency would hold Minneapolis arrestees in Estancia. A spokesperson for CoreCivic, which owns and operates the facility, referred Source’s request for comment to ICE.

It’s not clear exactly how many Minneapolis arrestees are held in Estancia. Tiffany Wang, a lawyer with Innovation Law Lab, told Source on Wednesday that a “decent number” of roughly 100 detainees the group spoke with last week were from Minnesota. The Portland-based immigrant legal advocacy group does weekly jail visits. 

Wang said her best guess as to why ICE would select Estancia is that the jail has space, following a reduction in detainees that coincided with a two-month-long contract expiration between ICE and CoreCivic late last year. She noted that many detainees previously arrived there from a makeshift ICE facility in the Florida Everglades known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

“TCDF just has served as this holding place for people caught in other states, and sent here with really no regard to the family that they have in other places or with the attorneys that they may have in their home states, or anything,” she said.

The Legislature is currently considering a ban on public entities like Torrance County from contracting with ICE and CoreCivic for the purpose of immigrant detention. One reason lawmakers cite is to prevent public bodies from being complicit in President Donald Trump’s mass deportation push in New Mexico and across the country. 

A New Mexico House committee is scheduled to take up the bill Thursday afternoon.

Cordoba, along with fellow Estancia detainees Cirilo Figueroa and Felix Garcia, all told Source they worry most about their families more than 1,200 miles away in Minnesota amid protests and an immigration crackdown that have seized the city. Like Cordoba, Garcia and Figueroa said they’ve lived in the city more than 20 years. Garcia, 59, has 12 grandchildren, as well as a nephew whom ICE briefly detained despite him being a US citizen, he said. 

All have watched local news reports from inside the jail showing the chaos in their hometown, they said, and described feeling powerless to help their families from so far away. 

“It’s not fair,” Cordoba said, his voice cracking, “what’s happening.”

Colleagues of Juan Sebastian Carvajal-Munoz, a civil engineer with a work visa detained by agents Thursday morning, discuss where to move his car. Colleagues Amanda Barnett, left, and Ali Brady, right, talk to Top of the Old Port parking lot attendant, Greg Seligman. (Photo by Rose Lundy/ The Maine Monitor)

Masked agents in police vests detained Juan Sebastian Carvajal-Munoz, a civil engineer from Colombia employed by an engineering consulting company, in Portland on Thursday morning. Carvajal-Munoz earned a master’s degree from the University of Maine, and colleagues said he was in the country on a work visa.

Agents left the car he was in, a grey Hyundai Tucson, running — with a smashed window — at the scene on Pearl Street in downtown Portland after taking Carvajal-Munoz just after 9 a.m., according to video from bystanders and an interview with a nearby parking attendant. A passerby then drove the vehicle into the parking lot, the attendant said.

The detention happened as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is conducting what it is calling “Operation Catch of the Day,” an immigration enforcement effort across Maine, “targeting the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens who have terrorized communities,” according to an ICE press release.

But Carvajal-Munoz has no criminal record, according to TLOxp, a background check system from TransUnion.

He is at least the third person detained in Maine whom news outlets have found does not have a criminal record. ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment and has not publicized a complete list of people it has detained. The agency said on Tuesday it had arrested 50 people in Maine, but the “Worst of the Worst” list it published contained only 13 names as of 12 p.m. on Thursday.

“In America, we don’t believe in secret arrests or secret police,” said Gov. Janet Mills during a Thursday press conference on ICE enforcement in Maine.

Agents pulled Carvajal-Munoz over by the Top of the Old Port parking lot between Cumberland and Congress streets, according to Greg Seligman, the parking lot attendant working at the time. Seligman said he didn’t see the interaction but saw the aftermath: Agents had smashed a car window and left the car running, he said.

Seligman said someone who witnessed the incident asked him if they could move the car into the parking lot. The car was still there around 10 a.m., and there was still glass on the road from where Carvajal-Munoz had been pulled over.

Seligman said Portland police responded to 911 calls after the detention but told him there was nothing local police could do as it was a federal operation. The Portland Police Department confirmed it received a report of a disturbance at 8:48 a.m. and that officers responded to check out the area.

Amanda Barnett, Carvajal-Munoz’s coworker at GEI Consultants in Portland, said Carvajal-Munoz is in Maine legally on a work visa. He has worked at the company for two-and-a-half years, according to another colleague, Ali Brady, who said they started on the same day in June 2023.

“I’m really scared for him,” Barnett said.

GEI Consultants is an engineering and environmental consulting firm with 62 locations across the U.S. and Canada, according to its website. Reached by phone, a company representative confirmed Carvajal-Munoz worked there but declined to comment on the detention while the company was gathering information.

An observer posted a video online of agents in police vests leading Carvajal-Munoz with his hands behind his back to a dark-colored car with flashing lights above the windshield. A second video showed the agents’ car driving away, leaving the car Carvajal-Munoz had been driving in the street.

Barnett said she heard from Carvajal-Munoz’s girlfriend that she received an emergency alert from Carvajal-Munoz’s phone. The girlfriend asked Barnett if he had made it to work. When Barnett and Brady learned he hadn’t, and saw the videos of him online, they both went to Pearl Street.

Carvajal-Munoz received a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Maine in Orono in May 2023, the school confirmed Thursday.

Aaron Gallant, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at UMaine, said Carvajal-Munoz was one of the hardest-working students he has had.

“I know that the entire department and faculty look very highly on Juan Sebastian,” Gallant told The Maine Monitor. “I’m shocked to hear this. I know his employers have been extremely happy with his performance as they’ve communicated to me regularly.”

Carvajal-Munoz has three years of experience in geotechnical engineering, geotechnical instrumentation, and construction observation, according to his LinkedIn profile.

“I have overseen and conducted geotechnical investigations for communities, cities, and agencies using a wide range of drilling, sampling, and in-situ testing methods,” he wrote on the platform. “My technical expertise includes shallow and deep foundation analysis, soil and rock slope stability analysis, and instrumented pile load testing.”

Deputy Editor Erin Rhoda contributed reporting.

Mural depicting workers painted on windows of the Madison-Kipp Corp. by Goodman Community Center students and Madison-Kipp employees with Dane Arts Mural Arts. (Photo by Erik Gunn /Wisconsin Examiner)

Wisconsin job growth has been slowing over the last year, new data published Thursday suggests.

Total nonfarm jobs in Wisconsin rose by 9,000 in December compared with November, the Department of Workforce Development reported. When compared with December 2024, however, the increase amounted to 6,700 — suggesting a “cooling and holding pattern” in the state’s economy, said Scott Hodek, section chief in the department’s Office of Economic Advisors, during a media briefing Thursday.

“We’ve seen it cool a little, and that’s following national trends,” Hodek said. “There’s been a fair amount of volatility and uncertainty in the national economy, and of course that impacts Wisconsin as well.”

Earlier this month Groundwork Collaborative, a Washington D.C. progressive economic policy think tank, described the national December jobs report in grim terms.

“The December report caps a year of sluggish job growth, with the fewest number of jobs added outside of a recession since 2003,” Groundwork stated in a Jan. 9 press release. “Hiring slowed sharply over the course of 2025.”

The organization’s analysis put much of the blame on tariffs imposed by the administration of President Donald Trump and the accompanying uncertainty amid federal policy gyrations.

In Wisconsin, while jobs are in decline, three-month trends in separations and layoffs have “stayed pretty stable,” Hodek said Thursday.

“People are just essentially staying in jobs longer and you’re not seeing a lot of necessarily separations, but not necessarily a lot of hiring either,” Hodek said.

Job numbers have fallen in manufacturing and some parts of the service sector. There were 1,100 fewer manufacturing jobs reported in December than in November, and 3,800 fewer than in December 2024. Professional services jobs declined in December by 3,700 compared with November, and by 6,200 compared with December 2024.

Construction jobs increased by 3,100 in December compared with November 2025 and by 5,100 compared with December 2024. Leisure and hospitality gained 4,700 jobs in December compared with November and 10,900 jobs compared with December 2024. The number of health care jobs increased by 1,700 from November to December and by 10,900 from December 2024.

Jobs numbers in the monthly report are projections drawn from a federal survey of employer payrolls.

From a separate federal survey of households that asks whether people are working or actively seeking work, DWD has projected that 65,500 fewer Wisconsin residents were employed in December 2025 compared with December 2024. The state’s unemployment rate remained even with the previous month at 3.1%

The data aren’t granular enough to establish to what extent retirements account for the decrease in the number of employees, Hodek said. But he added that the “overall aging population,” the absence of a surge in unemployment insurance claims  and some other data “would back up this assertion that a fair number of those have to be retirees.”

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos and Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer announced the agreement on WisconsinEye during a joint press conference on Thursday. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R-Rochester) and Assembly Minority Leader Greta Neubauer (D-Racine) announced a tentative agreement on providing state funding to WisconsinEye, the nonprofit that provides livestream coverage of state government. 

It’s been a little over a month since WisconsinEye, which launched in 2007, halted its coverage of legislative hearings, floor sessions and other state government business due to financial difficulties. Since WisEye shut down, the state Capitol has held dozens of committee hearings without any being livestreamed and archived, and members of the public have been prohibited from recording or livestreaming. Only credentialed media has been allowed to record activity. 

Vos and Neubauer announced the agreement during a joint press conference on Thursday. According to Neubauer, the agreement will include an endowment, funded with the $10 million that lawmakers first set aside for WisconsinEye in 2023, as well as requirements that WisconsinEye fundraise to cover some operational costs. 

“The interest will go to WisconsinEye each year so that they can fund the majority of their Capitol operations,” Neubauer said. “This is a really good start. It’s very important for the public to have access, and so we’re optimistic that we’re going to reach a bipartisan solution here soon.” 

Vos said legislators also want to sign a short-term contract with WisconsinEye so the organization can broadcast the February floor period. 

“We’ll hopefully turn that into a longer term contract where we provide them limited funding,” Vos said. “I think it’s a win-win for all.”

As of Thursday, the Assembly will have met four times on the floor without livestreamed or  archived coverage of the sessions. The Senate has met once with a livestream facilitated by the Legislative Technology Services Bureau. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has announced plans to livestream its upcoming oral arguments on the Wisconsin Court System’s website.

“The idea of having one network and one operation for the courts and another for the Legislature, another for the executive branch, certainly is going to cost more than any amount we would give WisconsinEye,” Vos said. “They’ve already done a pretty good job. We’re going to make sure that they’re financially stable, and hopefully they continue doing the work that they’ve already done.”

Vos said that under the tentative agreement, $10 million in state funds would go into a trust fund and the interest accrued from it would be given to a “revamped” board of directors. He said it would be “still transparent and private.”

The $10 million in state funds was initially set aside in the state budget for the organization to use to build a permanent endowment, but it came with a requirement that WisconsinEye raise equivalent matching funds. The organization hasn’t raised enough money to access the funds. In the weeks since shutting down, WisconsinEye launched a GoFundMe that has raised nearly $50,000 from more than 260 donations.

Neubauer said that the interest from the trust fund is not expected to cover the organization’s nearly $1 million annual budget, so there is an expectation that it would raise a few hundred thousand dollars each year.  

“They have said they are able to do [that] and are optimistic,” Neubauer said. 

Neubauer said there will also be a few other provisions related to additional transparency in the organization’s operations and reporting to the Legislature. 

The agreement would also need support from the state Senate. Vos said there was a good discussion on Thursday morning, that Assembly leaders “probably are more in sync” than their counterparts in the other house of the Legislature.

“I think they’re still working through some of the details of how they’d like to work, and that’s why we don’t have a finalized agreement,” Vos said. “We wanted to get the bill out there, start the idea. If they have a different concept, we’ll certainly go through to finalize it, but I think at least based on my discussions this morning, I feel like all four of us are in a similar place. I think our caucuses, we’d like to have some kind of access, it’s just what’s the best vehicle to do it.”

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) told reporters on Wednesday that his caucus believes “that giving the public access to see what we’re doing is important, but… just blindly giving money to an organization that’s asking us for money, but not giving us any answers, is certainly not the solution at this time.” Lawmakers had sent questions to WisconsinEye requesting information on its operations and didn’t receive answers until about 12 days after the deadline. 

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Bystander video shows U.S. Border Patrol agents kneeing a man several times in the face as others hold him down in Minneapolis on Jan. 9, 2026. Violence on behalf of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is on the rise. (Screenshot from video by Monica Bicking via Minnesota Reformer)

State leaders who want to curb the increasingly violent arrest tactics of immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are struggling to push back.

They’ve promised civil rights legislation that could offer alleged victims another route to courts, ordered up official tribunals to gather video and other records, or asked cities to refuse requests to cooperate with raids. But for the most part, states looking for concrete ways to push back find themselves largely hamstrung.

Violence in immigration enforcement is on the rise. A federal immigration agent’s killing of Renee Good in Minnesota on Jan. 7 was one of half a dozen shootings since December. An immigrant’s death in a Texas detention facility this month was ruled a homicide. And detention deaths last year totaled at least 31, a two-decade peak and more than the previous four years combined.

There also have been dozens of cases in the past year of agents using dangerous and federally banned arrest maneuvers, such as chokeholds, that can stop breathing.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in masks and tactical vests have been recorded firing pepper spray into the faces of protesters, shattering car windows with little warning, punching and kneeing people pinned face down on the ground, using battering rams on front doors, and questioning people of color about their identities.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has defended many recorded incidents as legitimate uses of force against dangerous people. And some Republican state lawmakers have said they’ll work to bolster ICE’s work within their borders.

Some lawmakers, legal experts and immigrant advocates worry about whether a lack of oversight from the federal government and the weak positions of state governments could give rise to even more violence as President Donald Trump continues his push to arrest immigrants who are living illegally in the United States.

Previous administrations have prioritized arresting immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who also have criminal records, but that isn’t the case in Trump’s second term.

“You can’t go after a murderer and a garden-variety immigration violator like a poor nanny or a poor landscaper with equal emphasis. This administration has abandoned all discretion and all priorities, and you create this narrative that you’re doing this patriotic, godly thing,” said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney and policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank.

Chishti said there has been a surge in abusive tactics that comes from a series of federal policies. He cited the massive infusion of inexperienced officers under heavy pressure to make arrests, the military-style tactics meant to create spectacle and fear, and the harsh rhetoric aimed, he said, at instilling warlike hostility toward immigrants and protesters.

More agents, more incidents

The number of ICE law enforcement agents doubled in less than a year, with Homeland Security announcing this month it has hired 12,000 new agents out of some 220,000 applicants. More agents have surged into cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, their semiautomatic weapons, bulky vests and balaclavas often contrasting with local police officers wearing name badges and carrying sidearms.

Noem has insisted that ICE and other officers are the real victims of increased violence, citing instances like one on Jan. 14, when a man was shot in the leg by an ICE agent. She said in a news release that bystanders struck an officer with a snow shovel and broom handle in Minneapolis as the officer tried to catch a fleeing suspect. Noem called it “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” in which, “ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life.”

Court papers released Jan. 20 included an officer’s account of only two assailants, the suspect and a friend who owned the car he had been driving, and said the injured suspect was trying to escape into the apartment building and that tear gas had been used to force the men to surrender.

Noem, who claimed Monday that more than 10,000 immigrants have been arrested in Minnesota, has described some people living in the U.S. illegally as “foreign invaders.” She characterized Good’s shooting as self-defense against “an act of domestic terrorism.”

And in a press briefing Tuesday, Trump told reporters that the people being deported “make our criminals look like babies. They make our Hells Angels look like the sweetest people on Earth.”

Such descriptions have become a tool that incites violence, Chishti said.

“When they say that they were doing God’s work with Renee Good, that she was a domestic terrorist, when you frame it that way from the highest leadership of the agency, you’re basically sending a signal that there’s no accountability,” he said.

Democrats push back

State leaders who say they’re worried about violence are trying different approaches, though they can’t completely curb federal policies.

New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul said state resources would not be used to assist in immigration raids, citing the shooting of Good. But local agencies in New York could still use other funds to help with raids.

New Mexico Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham called for curbs on immigrant detention in the state, though two of three existing detention centers there could still continue to operate.

Colorado has launched a new system for claims of misconduct by federal agents, including ICE agents.

Some Republican-led states are taking the opposite tack, with Tennessee proposing legislation that would go beyond cooperation with federal immigration by setting up its own state immigration laws. If enacted, it would test the limits of a 2012 Supreme Court decision that struck down state-based immigration enforcement based on a similar Arizona law.

Tennessee is using White House guidance to draft the legislation, and other states are likely to follow. That would create new civil rights concerns if states pick up some of the same tactics as the federal government.

“That’s another way of unleashing the states, not only to work with the federal government, but also to acquiesce in the states’ enactment of their own immigration enforcement, detention, and removal regimes,” said Lucas Guttentag, a Stanford Law School professor who runs a project tracking federal immigration policy, speaking in a May interview published by Berkeley Journal of Criminal Law.

Combating the federal moves is already fraught, said Guttentag, who has served in immigration policy positions in the Obama and Biden administrations.

“No single political strategy can change it,” Guttentag told Stateline this week. “But litigation has proven both critical and effective in limiting some of the most egregious violations. The violence is a clear violation.”

It’s hard to police an administration that constantly pushes legal boundaries, Guttentag added.

“It’s like a ‘catch me if you can’ administration. They adopt tactics and basically challenge anyone to try to stop them.”

Two former federal prosecutors, Kristy Parker and Samantha Trepel, argued for state civil rights legislation and investigation in a Jan.14 op-ed published in The Guardian with the headline “Cities and states must hold ICE accountable for violence. The feds won’t.”

Accountability commissions — like one created by Illinois in October after ICE operations there — can help, they wrote, preserving evidence and gathering testimony in the face of federal obstruction, like the blocking of a state investigation into Good’s death in Minnesota.

Potential civil rights legislation

Another method mentioned by the former prosecutors: State civil rights legislation could theoretically give people harmed by federal agents a hearing in state court under a legal concept called “converse-1983.”

New York’s Gov. Hochul has proposed such legislation. A similar Wisconsin measure died in July when the Republican majority on the Assembly judiciary committee would not give it a hearing, said Democratic Rep. Andrew Hysell, the bill’s sponsor.

“It’s a positive approach to preserving our rights here in Wisconsin, our constitutional rights, because you can no longer count on the federal government to do that,” Hysell said. “In the situations we’ve seen in Minnesota, the federal government is crossing the line into what appears to be violations of constitutional rights.”

However, the idea of “converse-1983” has yet to be used successfully to sue a federal agent, and might never succeed, said John Preis, a law professor at the University of Richmond.

“I would be shocked if converse-1983 [lawsuits] went anywhere,” Preis said. “States may not enact laws that impede federal officers who were doing their jobs. A converse-1983 action would seem to do this.”

However, in some cases, such as the shooting death of Renee Good, victims may be able to successfully sue the federal government without such a state law, Preis said. The process is difficult but the lawsuit could succeed if a constitutional civil rights violation can be proven, he said. Attorneys for Good’s family announced Jan. 14 that they were considering a lawsuit.

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

President Donald Trump speaks at the Justice Department March 14, 2025, in Washington, DC.  (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump promised Thursday his newly established “Board of Peace” will not “be a waste of time,” just after the leaders of several countries signed its charter at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland. 

Trump, who has been vocal about his hopes to one day win the Nobel Peace Prize, said he expects the board to work in concert with the decades-old United Nations, though he didn’t detail how, since many of the countries belong to both international organizations. 

“Once this board is completely formed, we can do pretty much whatever we want to do, and we’ll do it in conjunction with the United Nations,” he said. “You know, I’ve always said the United Nations has got tremendous potential, has not used it. But there’s tremendous potential in the United Nations.”

The board includes Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bulgaria, Egypt, Hungary, Indonesia, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan, according to a list shared by the White House. 

The Trump administration earlier this month stopped processing visas for residents from several of those countries, writing in a social media post that those “migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates.” Countries on the list include Armenia, Azerbaijan, Egypt, Jordan, Mongolia, Morocco, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. 

Belgium declines

The White House originally included Belgium on the list of Board of Peace members, but Deputy Prime Minister Maxime Prévot wrote in a social media post the country’s leaders have “NOT signed the Charter of the Board of Peace. This announcement is incorrect.”

“We wish for a common and coordinated European response,” Prévot wrote. “As many European countries, we have reservations to the proposal.”

Trump has been highly critical of European allies and repeatedly criticized NATO during his second term, especially as he’s ramped up pressure to acquire Greenland. 

Trump said during his speech, while members of the Board of Peace sat nearby in chairs, that he believes it “has the chance to be one of the most consequential bodies ever created.”

“Together, we are in a position to have an incredible chance — I don’t even call it a chance. I think it’s going to happen — to end decades of suffering, stop generations of hatred and bloodshed, and forge a beautiful, everlasting and glorious peace for that region and for the whole region of the world because I’m calling the world a region,” Trump said. “The world is a region. We’re going to have peace in the world. And boy, would that be a great legacy for all of us. Everybody in this room is a star, or you wouldn’t be here.”

The Democratic gubernatorial field prepares to take the stage Wednesday. Left to Right: Joel Brennan, Kelda Roys, Francesca Hong, Sara Rodriguez, Missy Huges, Mandela Barnes and David Crowley. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

In a music hall just east of Milwaukee’s trendy Walker’s Point neighborhood Wednesday evening, seven Democratic hopefuls in the 2026 race for governor fielded questions from an assortment of small business owners before a friendly crowd of more than 300 people.

Their answers showed only occasional differences on matters of policy. The greater contrasts were in style, tone, vocabulary and presentation.

Answering an audience member’s question about how each of the hopefuls would address Wisconsin’s teacher shortage, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez drew attention to a new state program to create teacher apprenticeships — enabling working teaching assistants “to get a bachelor’s degree while they are teaching assistants with full-time wages, full-time benefits. They will graduate with no debt.”

It was modeled after a similar apprenticeship program to produce more nurses, noted Rodriguez, a nurse who entered politics in mid-career.

Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said prospective teachers should be encouraged, but added that working teachers also need support after years of being demoralized by disrespect and inadequate funding from the Republican-led Legislature.

“We have to create a much better pipeline, making sure that we’re supporting those who are currently in the profession and utilizing them to be the trusted messengers to help recruit more young people into the field,” he said.

“Put a stake in Act 10, and repeal it, and ensure that it never happens again,” said state Rep. Francesca Hong — referring to the 2011 law that stripped most public employees of most union rights and that has been blamed for contributing to teacher shortages in Wisconsin. “Fully fund public education. Reimburse special education at 90% from the state, in parity with voucher schools,” she said, adding, end the voucher program “so we no longer siphon away resources from our public schools to private schools.”

State Sen. Kelda Roys, former Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. CEO Missy Hughes, former Department of Administration Secretary Joel Brennan and former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes also took part in the Wednesday night forum.

With Democratic Gov. Tony Evers’ decision this past July not to run for a third term, the 2026 governor’s race is the first in Wisconsin without an incumbent since 2010. It has drawn a broad field of potential successors in Evers’ own party.

Cletus Hasslinger, 78, of Milwaukee, attended a similar forum back in 2018, when Evers was one of 10 candidates seeking the Democratic nod to run for governor. He turned out for the Wednesday night event and was impressed.

“This is a much stronger group!” Hasslinger said. “It energizes me.”

Sponsored by small business advocates

The forum was held at The Cooperage, a venue in the shadow of Milwaukee’s iconic Hoan Bridge, and was organized by Main Street Action, the political arm of Main Street Alliance. MSA is a small-business organizing group with an agenda centered on economic fairness, contrasting many of its interests with those of large corporations.

The group has embraced the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid expansion and state and federal support for child care and paid leave for workers, among other policies. MSA also campaigns for tax policies that would require big business to pay more and stronger government action against corporate concentration.

“We elevate the testimony, the stories of small business owners,” said Richard Trent, MSA’s national executive director, who counts MSA’s national membership at 30,000 people and said Wisconsin is one of the organization’s hubs.

“So much of how we think about our economy, how we think about what’s best for our cities, our towns — that whole narrative is shaped by the largest corporations, the wealthiest Americans,” Trent told the Wisconsin Examiner. “It’s the small business owners who are driving most of the productivity in our economy, yet get almost none of the say in the policies that actually strengthen their communities.”

The eighth Democrat seeking the nomination, former state Rep. Brett Hulsey, was not invited to join Wednesday night’s forum, which qualified participants if they were polling at better than 0% or if they had raised at least $100,000 in donations.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany and Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann are seeking the GOP nomination. Trent said there aren’t plans for a Republican forum before that party’s primary, also in August, but that MSA intends to bring the winners of both nomination contests together for a forum in the fall.

Questions draw out similar stances

Moderated by Dan Shafer, who publishes “The Recombobulation Area” political analysis and opinion column on Substack and who holds the title of political editor at Civic Media, the forum ran about 20 minutes over its original allotment of 90 minutes.

Shafer brought a half-dozen business owners and Main Street Alliance members to the stage, each posing a question to the gubernatorial hopefuls, then finished the session with a handful of questions submitted by audience members.

Many of the answers didn’t diverge wildly. Expanding BadgerCare to cover more people had broad support. So did the idea of a BadgerCare “public option,” enabling people to pay into the Medicaid-funded health plan if their incomes were not low enough to qualify them for the program.

Roys suggested another variation, allowing Wisconsin residents to buy into the health plan that is available to state employees.

Support for child care funding from the state was also widely endorsed, as was a paid leave program funded through a payroll deduction.

Rodriguez observed that a paid family leave program was in “the last budget that the governor and I put out” (it was cut by the Joint Finance Committee’s GOP majority). Crowley said after he took office as Milwaukee County executive, his administration created a paid family leave policy for county employees to help recruit workers.

Hong pointed to legislation she introduced in the Assembly in the previous session that would have created “one of the most comprehensive paid leave” programs. And Roys cited a paid leave bill she co-authored in 2011, during her previous time in the Legislature.

“Making this universal is going to help small businesses start,” Roys said. “It’s going to help them attract and retain employees and compete with the big businesses who can afford to offer more generous policies.”

Core themes and personal biographies

All seven participants largely stuck to the core themes they’ve sketched out in their campaigns and the biographical details that they hope will persuade primary voters in August why they’re the best choice to carry the party’s standard in November.

Rodriguez highlighted her current role as lieutenant governor — visiting “all 72 counties every year” since assuming that office. She led a health care workforce task force that Evers appointed in 2024.

Crowley emphasized ways in which, as a county executive, he has to deal with issues at the local level that the forum was putting on the agenda for the next governor: housing, health care costs, family leave policies and preparing for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers to descend on Milwaukee.

Hong stressed her experiences as a restaurateur and as a single mom, and her stark assessment that “as a worker and as an employer, the system is rigged against us where people value corporate power and greed more than anything else.”

Roys presented herself as a fierce challenger to the Republicans controlling the White House and Congress: “We need a governor with a spine of steel who will stand up to this Republican regime in all the ways that they are hurting Wisconsin, and especially our small businesses and our family farmers,” she said.

But Roys also declared herself to be experienced in the operations of state government, having had a state Assembly seat previously during the administration of Gov. Jim Doyle and the beginning of Gov. Scott Walker’s first term. And she cast herself as a visionary who sees “a window of opportunity to make real change” in Wisconsin in the coming years.

Hughes said that in her time at WEDC, “I have worked with small businesses all across the state, with Main Street businesses working to understand the challenges that they face,” including day-to-day operations, finding workers and supporting employees who need child care or other resources.

She called attention to an economic plan she released this week with provisions for education, labor-management partnerships and expanding affordable housing.

Brennan described himself as an experienced problem-solver and relationship builder, and a voice for calm in a time of turmoil.

“We live in times that are unlike any other. And we are angry. We’re angry at Donald Trump for what he has done to really do away with some of the values that we hold dear as Americans and as citizens,” Brennan said. “But when some people get angry, they want to get even. When I get angry, I want to roll up my sleeves and get something done.”

Pandemic relief roles

Hughes and Barnes both emphasized roles in Wisconsin’s Main Street Bounceback program, which provided $10,000 grants for businesses to upgrade their operations, including taking over vacant storefronts, in downtowns across the state. Barnes was lieutenant governor in Evers’ first term, forgoing reelection in 2022 in order to run for Senate against Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, a race he lost by about 26,000 votes.

Barnes’ executive branch duties included helping to promote “our Main Street Bounceback program, which helped so many small businesses across the entire state that had been dealt a bad hand,” Barnes said. “We stepped up, we filled the gap, and we met a need. That’s exactly what I intend to do as governor.”

Hughes brought up the program when Chloe Longmire, a Milwaukee entrepreneur, asked the candidates how they would work with economic development agencies to help women-owned and minority-owned small businesses.

“Coming out of the pandemic, I saw across the state Main Streets where businesses had survived and businesses had not survived, and there were vacant spaces,” Hughes said. Main Street Bounceback was designed to enable businesses to occupy vacant spaces easily, with a one-page application and the support of a community member.

“And we trusted those business owners to invest that money in the ways that needed to happen,” Hughes said, with 9,500 businesses in each of Wisconsin’s 72 counties getting aid. “We saw Main Streets at 100% capacity — full, looking for more businesses, looking for more opportunities to move businesses into vacant spaces.”

Brennan, as secretary of the Department of Administration, tracked how the state’s $4.5 billion in pandemic relief was spent. A program focused on movie theaters made a particular impression, he said, with one memorable venue in central Wisconsin that passed through three generations to the granddaughter of the first owner.

“And the $30,000 that they were getting from the COVID relief money was going to pay for utilities, going to pay for their mortgage — it was going to be the light at the end of the tunnel,” Brennan said. “That’s the kind of thing you need to do in a crisis, but it’s also the way you need to be responsive when you’re operating day-to-day, and that’s what we’ll do in a brand new administration.”

After reiterating his involvement in Main Street Bounceback, Barnes pivoted to the original question’s emphasis on businesses owned by women and minorities.

“We should have to incorporate targeted investments in communities,” he said. From there he pivoted again, to a proposal he announced earlier Wednesday for the state to invest in grants for startup grocery stories in food deserts.

“People aren’t able to afford groceries, and we’re going to connect our family farms . . . to bring local food into communities because we can’t have a food desert in a state that produces as much food as we do in Wisconsin,” Barnes said.

A range of answers on taxing the rich

Questions about Wisconsin taxes drew a wider variety of responses.

Roys dismissed the manufacturing and agriculture tax credit, available primarily to larger businesses, as “a giveaway to the wealthiest individuals and corporations in the state” that fails to help economic development.

“We need to restore our progressive taxation system where the amount of money that you pay in to support the public services that all of us enjoy and all of us rely on is based on the money that you earn,” she said. “Right now, working people, the middle class are shouldering a disproportionate burden for paying those services.”

Hong was equally dismissive. “Our small businesses are paying a higher tax rate than some of the wealthiest corporations,” she said. “So, get rid of it. No major corporations should be paying no income tax.”

Crowley said tax credits should focus on small and mid-size companies. “Millionaires and billionaires, let’s face it, they don’t deserve a tax credit,” he said, adding that he would favor a blue ribbon commission to examine state taxes and spending comprehensively.

Rodriguez called for measurable job gains in return for the credit. “If we are going to get tax benefits, we need to tie it to actually increasing the number of people that they are hiring,” she said.

Hughes said that when she was at WEDC and met with business leaders looking to relocate to Wisconsin, they were much less interested in taxes than issues such as the strength of local schools and the university system and the availability of workers.

She demurred on a question about raising taxes on the wealthiest to provide services for people in need and suggested that a sustainable economy is more important.

“My focus is going to be on growing the economy, because my fear is that if we simply increase taxes on the wealthy, the next team will get elected and come back in and take that away,” Hughes said.

“It could mean that we increase taxes on the most wealthy, but in addition to that, we need to be thinking about creating a system that works election after election and administration after administration,” she said. “Growing the economy and making sure that everyone is paying their fair share is the foundation of my candidacy.”

The last question of the night looked to the unease that has been gripping the country after federal immigration agents descended on Minneapolis earlier this month and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good as she sat at the wheel of her van near her home.

How would each of the Democratic hopefuls navigate “maintaining law and order and avoid being positioned by the right as being soft on crime, while ensuring the state citizens won’t be infringed upon by federal government overreach?” Shafer asked, reading from a written submission.

Rodriguez cited her recent statement calling on lawmakers to apply the same rules for ICE as for local law enforcement: ready identification, body cameras and no masks for agents, and forbidding them from going into “sensitive areas” such as schools without a judicial warrant.

“It is personal to me,” said Rodriguez, whose husband is a U.S. citizen born in Mexico.

Crowley said Milwaukee County is currently discussing how it will respond to an ICE influx. “Standing up for people’s constitutional rights, whether a citizen or not, is not soft on crime at all, he said. “We have to make sure that we continue to protect everybody and make sure that we are a safe community.”

Hong said she’s been in touch with mutual aid groups in Minneapolis, and that “ICE is a rogue agency…. Abolishing ICE is a meaningful policy.” Roys vowed to bring the weight of criminal as well as civil liability down on ICE and act against people who “break our laws and brutalize our people.”

Hughes said at meetings in Eau Claire, community leaders told her they are looking to members of the immigrant community “and understanding what they needed and what they were looking for.” Brennan urged learning from the civil rights work of Martin Luther King Jr., “locked in arms with his fellow man and with the people in his community.”

Barnes said he has spoken with people in Minneapolis, and said the next governor must be unafraid of retribution from the White House. “We need change and somebody who’s going to stand up and be strong in this moment,” he said.

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“We obviously believe that giving the public access to see what we're doing is important, but… just blindly giving money to an organization that's asking us for money, but not giving us any answers, is certainly not the solution at this time,” LeMahieu said. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

The Wisconsin Senate passed three constitutional amendment proposals Wednesday, including one to eliminate DEI, one to limit the executive partial veto power and another to prohibit closures of places of worship during emergencies.

With WisconsinEye, the state government video streaming service, still offline, the first floor session of the year for the Senate was livestreamed with the help of the Legislative Technology Services Bureau. 

Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu (R-Oostburg) told reporters ahead of the session that after WisconsinEye halted its coverage on Dec. 15, the co-chairs of the Legislative Joint Audit Committee sent a letter with questions to the nonprofit organization. The letter had a Jan. 9 deadline to reply, but the organization did not provide responses until Jan. 21.

“We obviously believe that giving the public access to see what we’re doing is important, but… just blindly giving money to an organization that’s asking us for money, but not giving us any answers, is certainly not the solution at this time,” LeMahieu said. 

LeMahieu said he had not yet reviewed the answers WisconsinEye sent on Wednesday morning. He said the livestream was not a way to explore replacing WisconsinEye.

The state Legislature set aside $10 million in 2023 to help the organization build an endowment. But that grant came with a requirement that WisconsinEye to raise enough money to match the funds in order to access the state dollars. As it ran out of funds, WisconsinEye asked  the state to make money available for its operating expenses without the match requirement. 

LeMahieu noted that the organization had three years to raise funds and request money from the Joint Finance Committee.

“We just want to figure out, really, what’s going on. It’s not proof that we don’t need WisconsinEye…,” LeMahieu said. “The point of today is just so that the general public can see us in action today.” 

During the floor session, the Senate also took up bills on tax exemptions and education.

Constitutional amendments on DEI, partial veto and places of worship

The Senate passed three constitutional amendment proposals, each of which is on its second consideration, during its Thursday floor session. Constitutional amendment proposals in Wisconsin must pass two consecutive sessions of the Legislature before they go to the voters for final approval.

Republicans have relied on constitutional amendment proposals in recent years to bypass Democratic Gov. Tony Evers. According to a Ballotopedia review, Wisconsin voters decided on 258 ballot measures between  the state’s founding in 1846 and April 2025. About 71% — or 185 — measures were approved and 28% — or 73 — were defeated.

In the last five years, Wisconsin voters will have decided on 10 constitutional amendment questions — a divergence from some points in state history when Wisconsin has gone years without a constitutional amendment going before voters. 

The Senate voted 18-15 to pass a constitutional amendment that seeks to target and eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts throughout Wisconsin local and state governments, officially setting it to go before voters in November. 

If approved by voters, AJR 102 would amend the state constitution to “prohibit governmental entities in the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public employment, public education, public contracting, or public administration.”

Democratic lawmakers said the amendment would take the state backwards. They suggested amending the proposal to enshrine equality and same-sex marriage protections. Those proposals were voted down. 

State Sen. Dora Drake (D-Milwaukee), who chairs the Legislative Black Caucus and has been working to call attention to the proposal over the last few weeks, likened the amendment to lawmakers rolling back Reconstruction efforts after the Civil War. She said the abandonment of Reconstruction efforts to bring justice to those who were enslaved, are the reason why the U.S. lived with Jim Crow laws for so long.

“Lawmakers made a decision to not protect [Americans],” Drake said. “Anything that was built was destroyed. It took nearly 80 years for our country to rectify that mistake with the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and landmark Supreme Court decisions to undo that harm.” 

Drake said the amendment would cause harm and eliminate measures that keep Wisconsinites safe. 

“Republicans will send us back to the pre-Civil Rights era, possibly further,” Drake said. 

Sen. Steve Nass (R-Whitewater) said the proposal is “long overdue” and would give Wisconsin voters the final say on “discrimination at all levels of government.” He said that programs including the Supplier Diversity Program, which was established in the 1980s and certifies minority-owned, service-disabled veteran-owned and woman-owned businesses to provide better opportunities for them to do business with the state of Wisconsin, and scholarships and loans within the state’s higher education system that consider race amount to discrimination.

“Past discrimination, however wrong, cannot be corrected with more discrimination,” Nass said, adding that merit, character and ability should be the only things considered when it comes to programs. 

The Senate also voted on voice vote to pass SB 652, which would amend several programs offered in the University of Wisconsin system to focus on “disadvantaged” students as opposed to considering race. Some of those programs include the minority teacher loan program and minority undergraduate grants. 

Bill coauthor Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) said the proposal will make it so people are able to receive help based on their specific life experiences, rather than having their life experiences presumed.

“We’ll finally make eligibility based on need,” Wimberger said. 

Drake emphasized that several of the programs, including the Minority Teacher Loan Program that was signed into law by Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, were bipartisan efforts at the time they were created. She said lawmakers were forgetting history and abandoning the previous work that was done to address the barriers that students face. She said that the only thing that has changed is the election of  President Donald Trump, who has targeted DEI initiatives, and launched a “war against Black and brown people.”

“Shifting the policy solely to disadvantaged students without acknowledging racial, ethnic disparities risks eroding the progress made to address educational inequities,” Drake said. “That doesn’t solve anything, it covers up the issue.”

Curtailing partial veto powers 

SJR 116, if approved by voters, would prohibit the governor from using the state’s partial veto power to create or increase a tax or fee. It passed the Senate 18-15 along party lines and still needs to pass the Assembly before it would be set to go to voters. 

The proposal was introduced in reaction to Gov. Tony Evers’ partial veto that he exercised on the state budget in 2023 that extended annual school revenue limits for 400 years. 

Sen. Melissa Ratcliff (D-Cottage Grove) spoke against the proposal, saying that the partial veto power is one of the only checks that can “correct harmful or irresponsible provisions that come from the Legislature” and will “weaken one of the few checks that protects the public.” 

AJR 10 would prohibit the state from ordering the closure of places of worship during a state of emergency. The Senate concurred in the bill in a 17-15 vote, meaning it will officially go to voters in November.

The proposal was introduced in response to actions taken during a state of emergency declared by Evers during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was no debate on the floor about the measure.

Tax exemptions

The Senate concurred in AB 38, which would mirror federal policy to exempt tips from state income taxes, in a 21-12 vote. Sen. Sarah Keyeski (D-Lodi), Sen. Brad Pfaff (D-Onalaska) and Jamie Wall (D-Green Bay) joined Republicans in favor of the bill. The Assembly passed the bill last week, so it will now head to Evers for consideration.

The bill would allow tipped employees to deduct up to $25,000 in tips annually from their federal taxable income. Those earning more than $150,000 would not be eligible for the deduction.

According to a Department of Revenue fiscal estimate, the bill would result in Wisconsin collecting $33.7 million less in revenue annually.

The Democratic lawmakers who opposed the bill said it didn’t do enough to ensure that employees make a stable wage. Tipped employees in Wisconsin can currently make a minimum wage of $2.33.

Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) said that raising the minimum wage would ensure that a person’s wage doesn’t rely on “the mood that somebody is in” or “somebody’s willingness to be sexually harassed.” 

“We should not put working people through that,” Roys said.

“You don’t get everything you want in life,” Jacque said. “I think this is something that is going to make life a little bit easier for those who work in the service industry.” 

“We don’t make the employers pay these people fairly,” Sen. LaTonya Johnson (D-Milwaukee) said. “These are the same people who have to rely on child care subsidies, who have to rely on Medicaid.”

Pfaff said in a statement that he voted for the bill because “hard working people continue to feel the pressure of rising costs every time they go to the grocery store, pay their rent and utility bills, and receive their new health insurance premium.” 

SB 69, which will allow teachers who spend money on classroom expenses to claim a subtraction on their state income taxes of up to $300, passed unanimously. 

Three education bills pass

The Senate voted 18-15 to concur in AB 602, a bill that instructs Evers to opt into the federal school choice tax credit program. It now goes to Evers. 

A provision in the federal law signed by President Trump will provide a dollar-for-dollar tax credit of up to $1,700 to people who donate to a qualifying “scholarship granting program” to support certain educational expenses including tuition and board at private schools, tutoring and books, but governors must decide whether to opt in and have until Jan. 1, 2027 to do so.

Sen. Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk) said during a press conference that the program would help provide additional funding to students without using state dollars. She emphasized that if the state doesn’t opt in, then Wisconsinites could still benefit from the credit by donating to programs in participating states, but those dollars would not go to Wisconsin students.  

“We want to see those dollars stay in Wisconsin,” Felzkowski said. 

Evers has previously said he wouldn’t opt the state into the program. He could veto the Republican bill instructing him to do so when it arrives at his desk. 

Sex ed legislation

SB 371 passed 18-15 along party lines. It would add requirements for school districts that provide human growth and development programs to show high definition video of the development of the brain, heart, sex organs and other organs, a rendering of the fertilization process and fetal development and a presentation on each trimester of pregnancy and the physical and emotional health of the mother. It now goes to the Assembly for consideration. 

Roys, the Madison Democrat, criticized the bill as being part of a “nationwide effort by some of the most extreme anti-abortion… to try to indoctrinate young children.” She noted that some of Wisconsin’s prominent anti-abortion organizations support the bill including the Wisconsin Catholic Conference, Pro-Life Wisconsin and Wisconsin Right to Life. 

Felzkowski, the GOP author of the bill, said young people deserve to know “what happens to them, what happens to their body, what happens to a fetus… What are you afraid of? Why would a child having knowledge scare you?”

The Senate concurred in AB 457 18-15 and will now go to Evers for consideration. The bill would require Wisconsin school districts to submit their financial reports to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) on time before they can ask voters for funding through a referendum. It was introduced in reaction to Milwaukee Public Schools approving a large referendum and a subsequent financial reporting scandal in 2024.

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Organizers gather in Menomonie, Wisconsin in early December, 2025 to protest against a $1.6 billion data center proposal in their community. Residents’ concerns over data center development in rural Wisconsin revolve around lack of project transparency, water and energy usage, and financial impact on local tax bases. (Stop the Menomonie Data Center Facebook group)

This story was produced by the Daily Yonder

Blaine Halverson joked that his only exposure to data centers was from the Mission Impossible movies in the 1990s. That was, until one came to his town. Over the last seven months, Halverson’s community of Menomonie, Wisconsin, population 16,700, has become a flashpoint in a growing debate over data center development and local control in the state.

Halverson has lived in Menomonie, which is just over an hour east of Minneapolis, for most of his life. Like many others in his rural community, Halverson didn’t know much about the hyperscale data centers, built by the world’s largest technology companies, that are cropping up across the U.S. to power artificial intelligence. Then, in July 2025, Halverson was on vacation with his wife when he learned of a $1.6 billion data center proposal slated for around 320 acres of farmland on the outskirts of Menomonie.

Immediately, Halverson had questions.

“All of a sudden, I was activated,” said Halverson. “What really activated me was how far along this was, and that the public was just finding out.”

Over the next six months, Halverson and dozens of other concerned Menomonie residents coordinated a local opposition campaign that on January 5, 2026, resulted in Menomonie’s City Council revising a zoning ordinance to bar Balloonist, LLC, the developer representing an undisclosed ‘tech giant’, from moving ahead on construction. 

An attorney for Balloonist LLC did not respond to the Daily Yonder’s request for comment.

Halverson’s frustration about the project’s lack of transparency is one that has echoed throughout the state. In other rural counties and in villages sandwiched between larger cities like Milwaukee, Madison, and Green Bay, data center proposals in places like Beaver Dam, Port Washington, and Caledonia have been met with fierce opposition from residents. Developers eyeing land in Greenleaf, a village outside of Green Bay, and in Grant County, which borders the Mississippi River, have also faced community backlash. Commonly cited concerns revolve around project secrecy and the data centers’ projected energy usage, water needs, and financial impact on communities with small tax bases.

Beyond requiring vast amounts of power and water to keep operations running 24/7, large data center proposals in rural areas often represent a significant, if not dominant, share of the community’s tax levy. This leaves residents fearing what will happen if the planned data centers do not live up to their promises, should the stock market take a turn, the developers go bankrupt, or the technology inside the warehouse-like structures become obsolete. 

“They’re not seeing the long-term risks,” said Prescott Balch about the elected officials who push for data center development in Wisconsin’s rural communities. Balch is a retired software developer and former technology executive at U.S. Bank. He also lives in Caledonia, Wisconsin, a rural village south of Milwaukee whose residents ousted a 244-acre Microsoft data center that was slated for land zoned for agriculture in October of 2025. 

“No investment advisor, for example, would ever let you do [that] with your investment portfolio. They’d get fired for saying, ‘Put all your eggs in this one basket.’ It doesn’t matter how solid that one basket is. It’s still one basket with a lot of risk if it walks out the door,” Balch said. 

A hot spot

Over the last year, rural Wisconsin has become somewhat of a hotspot for data center developers. The allure for Big Tech companies racing to build infrastructure to train and run complex AI models comes in the form of tax incentives, low-cost land, and, in many rural communities, flexible zoning codes. 

But residents like Halverson and Balch are taking notice and starting to organize together. Opposition groups that have formed in communities faced with data center proposals are using digital tools like Facebook and Signal to connect with one another across the Badger State. Now, a growing coalition of rural residents and environmental organizations are urging state legislators to regulate data center development and, in some instances, taking legal action to improve transparency. 

The debate over Wisconsin’s data center boom is both rooted in local governance and relevant to the national conversation about rising electricity costs. In an election year, data center infrastructure has become a political issue, yet it’s one that rural coalition members insist is nonpartisan. What’s on the ballot, including a crowded gubernatorial race, could influence that. 

Why Wisconsin?

To grasp why data centers are coming to Wisconsin, you have to understand a particularly wonky part of the state’s tax code, according to Port Washington resident Michael Beaster. A resident of the rural city just north of Milwaukee, Beaster opposes the $15 billion campus being built by Vantage Data Centers to serve end-users Oracle and OpenAI as part of their $500 billion Stargate campaign to develop AI infrastructure across the U.S.

The wonky policy Beaster is talking about is a tax incremental district, or TID.

In Wisconsin, a TID lets developers pay their property taxes into a separate box from the rest of the community as a way to capture property value growth associated with new projects. During construction, a developer, like Vantage, contributes taxes to this special box to cover infrastructure costs associated with their project, like new roads and power lines. Depending on the terms of the TID, that tax money is then kept in the box until all infrastructure costs have been paid, often a period of 15-20 years.

Typically, this kind of tax policy helps small- or medium-scale developers, like new packing plants or housing developments, pay for their associated infrastructure costs over time. With hyperscale data centers, however, rural residents worry that the high costs of the developments’ power and water infrastructure will rack up for the community to pay while the developers’ taxes sit in a special box. 

“If the village decides to raise the tax levy, it comes off the backs of the current residents only, and that is completely and utterly invisible right now to most people,” said Balch, who worked to reject Microsoft’s proposed data center campus in Caledonia last fall.

In November of 2025, the city of Port Washington approved a TID that enables Vantage to pay upfront for the estimated $175 million in infrastructure costs, plus $91 million for an electrical substation and $187 million in interest, associated with their data center campus, including upgraded water and sewer mains and new power infrastructure. Port Washington will then be responsible for paying Vantage back for those infrastructure costs over time.

The TID is set up as a pool of money to remain open for up to 20 years for the city to draw from to reimburse Vantage. Some residents, including Beaster, have expressed concerns that the financing model could end up raising taxes for locals. On January 2, 2026, a Port Washington-based group of activists filed a lawsuit against the city to challenge the TID.

“People don’t want to see their communities handed over to large corporations,” Beaster said.

Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke did not respond to the Daily Yonder’s request for clarification on whether the city’s TID would result in higher taxes for residents.

Last summer, a bipartisan measure in Wisconsin’s legislature updated the state’s tax incremental financing policy to exempt data centers from caps on the amount of money that can be held in a TID. The act mentions both Port Washington and Beaver Dam by name and was signed into law by Democratic Governor Tony Evers on July 8, 2025. In addition to TIDs, Wisconsin also offers a sales and use tax exemption to incentivize data center development. The exemptions are offered on a ladder based on a developer’s intended investment and the host county’s population, with less populous counties requiring less investment. For rural counties, the minimum investment required to claim the exemption is $50 million. 

For Asad Ramzanali, former deputy director for strategy at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under the Biden Administration, it is this kind of policy that goes against the idea that data centers should have to pay their “fair share”.

“When the largest companies, the most well-resourced companies, in the history of the world are behind these data centers, it feels particularly unfair to have states level tax breaks for construction,” Ramzanali told the Daily Yonder.

“People should not have to pay increased utility bills. People should not have to pay for transmission lines going up, [and] people shouldn’t have to deal with dirty water sources because of a data center.”

Nonpartisan, but political

With local pushback to data centers picking up steam, state legislators are taking note. Beaster said that’s a change from the attitude that some legislators had a few months ago, when his rural community members were mobilizing against the data center in Port Washington last summer and fall. 

“When we started really getting involved in trying to mobilize, we tried to write letters and emails and stuff to state legislators, and they just weren’t very responsive,” Beaster said. “It felt to us like they were more interested in bringing these things here than regulating them.” 

In early December, 2025, Democrats introduced a bill to regulate data centers and entice them to take climate-friendly steps. Under the proposed legislation, residents would be protected from footing the utility costs associated with data centers. If passed, the bill would also subject data centers to an annual fee, ranging from $2-3 million, to fund clean energy and low-income heating assistance programs. The legislation also includes a measure to hinge state tax incentives, like the sales and use tax exemption, upon data centers using at least 70% renewable energy. 

In January, 2025, Republicans introduced a data center bill of their own, with similarities including mandated reporting on water usage and restrictions on passing development-related utility costs onto families and small businesses. The Republican legislation would also mandate that data centers wanting to use renewable energy would need to build those energy sources, like solar, on the same property. 

The utility provisions in both the Democrat and Republican-backed bills come as the Wisconsin Public Service Commission (PSC) prepares to hear a case in February of 2026, from We Energies, the state’s largest utility, that will determine how much data centers will have to pay for their infrastructure, and how much gets passed onto other ratepayers. 

We Energies has requested a pay structure that holds data centers accountable for 75% of their capital costs. That request has been challenged by the Wisconsin chapter of the Sierra Club, which argues large customers like data centers should be held responsible for 100% of their associated costs.

“This is the decision for how much the largest utility is making large customers pay, and right now the proposal is really bad for an average residential customer,” said Cassie Steiner, a senior campaign coordinator at Sierra Club. The PSC is expected to hand down a decision on the 2026 rate structure in the spring. 

Even as data center regulation captures lawmakers’ attention at the state capitol in Madison, organizers in Menomonie, Port Washington, and Caledonia maintain that local opposition isn’t tied to party. 

“One of the things that has been really amazing to me about this process is that I know the people I’m standing shoulder-to-shoulder with in this group, a lot of them never vote the same way I would when we go into the into the voting booth in November,” Halverson said of his work in Menomonie. 

“If it’s your farmland and your community, you’re an extreme environmentalist, and if it’s your power bill going up, then you’re a fiscal conservative.”

People travel through Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on Nov. 7, 2025 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Megan Varner/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials placed an asylum seeker who is eight months pregnant on a deportation flight Wednesday afternoon, even though she was in medical distress, her attorneys told States Newsroom.

ICE officials and the Department of Homeland Security responded to States Newsroom’s requests for comment, but did not answer questions about the specific case. 

Zharick Daniela Buitrago Ortiz, a 21-year-old national of Colombia, has a pending asylum case, said one of her attorneys, Nora Ahmed, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana. Buitrago Ortiz was also represented by the Robert & Ethel Kennedy Human Rights Center. 

As an asylum seeker, she was going through the credible fear process, a key step to establish an immigrant’s claim for asylum if they can show a fear of persecution or torture in their home country. Asylum seekers are typically allowed to live in the United States while their case proceeds.

Buitrago Ortiz is between 32 and 33 weeks pregnant and was deported from Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Airport officials did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment. 

Ahmed said flying late in pregnancy can have serious risks. 

Buitrago Ortiz earlier had been detained in a center in Louisiana. She was placed by ICE on a flight from there to Atlanta prior to her removal to Colombia, her attorneys said.

As she waited for the flight to Colombia, Buitrago Ortiz experienced intense, shooting pain in her back and abdomen, according to her attorneys. They said they were also concerned about the risk to her health and that of her unborn child if she was placed on the flight, which is roughly five hours nonstop. 

ICE generally has a policy to not detain immigrants who are pregnant unless there are exceptional circumstances. Democrats in Congress have raised concerns about reports of ICE detainment of pregnant immigrants, and urged ICE acting Director Todd Lyons to order the release of any immigrants who were pregnant from ICE detention facilities. 

Travel during pregnancy can be risky past 28 weeks and can increase the chances of going into labor, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. 

Ahmed said as recently as Jan. 18, there had been no indication that Buitrago Ortiz would be removed from the United States. 

Ahmed said Buitrago Ortiz came to the U.S. with her family. Her mother received a favorable credible fear interview, meaning an immigration official believed there was a possibility of harm if she returned to her home country. 

The family arrived in El Paso, Texas, in early November, according to Buitrago Ortiz’s mother, who asked not to be named for fear of harming her own asylum case.

Additionally, Ahmed said the father of Buitrago Ortiz’s child was murdered earlier this month in Colombia. 

“It’s important that we understand that there is a woman in medical distress,” Ahmed said. “The clock is ticking.” 

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrive to attend the inauguration of President Donald Trump on Jan. 20, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images)

The U.S. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee advanced resolutions Wednesday to recommend former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton be held in contempt of Congress for failing to comply with a subpoena the panel issued related to the investigation of late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The votes on both resolutions were bipartisan, though Democrats argued over several points during the nearly day-long meeting. The next step would be consideration by the full House. If approved on the House floor, the matter would be referred to the federal prosecutor’s office in Washington, D.C., and could potentially lead to a fine of up to $100,000 or even prison time of up to one year.

The resolution on Bill Clinton passed 34-8, with all Republicans and nine Democrats voting in favor. 

The Democrats who voted to approve the resolution were Maxwell Frost of Florida, Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, Summer Lee of Pennsylvania, Stephen Lynch and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Emily Randall of Washington, Lateefah Simon of California, Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. 

Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Dave Min of California voted present. Greg Casar and Jasmine Crockett of Texas did not vote.

The resolution covering Hillary Clinton was narrower, 28-15, with only three Democrats, Lee, Stansbury and Tlaib, voting in favor.

Subpoenas defied by Clintons, others

Republicans on the committee, including Chairman James Comer of Kentucky, said the Clintons defied subpoenas to provide depositions about Epstein’s long-running record of sexual abuse of young girls. 

“No witness, not a former president or a private citizen, may willfully defy a duly issued congressional subpoena without consequence,” Comer said. “But that is what the Clintons did.”

Democrats said they, too, wanted to hear testimony from the Clintons, whose depositions were ordered by bipartisan subpoenas last year, but that the committee Republicans were singling out the couple because of their partisan affiliation. 

Various other officials, of both parties, who’d received subpoenas also did not comply. Neither did Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislane Maxwell. 

In addition, the U.S. Department of Justice under President Donald Trump has not turned over documents related to the investigation, despite a November law requiring their full release, Democrats on the panel said. 

Yet only the Clintons, influential Democrats, were being prosecuted for defying the committee, Democrats said.

“It’s interesting that it’s this subpoena only that Republicans and the chairman have been obsessed about putting all their energy behind,” ranking Democrat Robert Garcia, of California, said. 

Comer responded that the other examples were different. Other officials had less personal knowledge of Epstein than the Clintons; Maxwell had said she would invoke her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, obviating the need for testimony; and the Justice Department was working, however slowly, on releasing the millions of documents required under the law, he said.

“As I’ve stated many times publicly, we wish this process was going quicker,” he said. “There’s a lot of documents, a lot of redactions. A lot of eyes have to be put on this. The Department of Justice is complying.”

In an open letter to Comer last week, the Clintons said they were working to assist in the investigation, but complained they were being treated more harshly than other witnesses, while also criticizing Comer’s handling of the case.

“Despite everything that needs to be done to help our country, you are on the cusp of bringing Congress to a halt to pursue a rarely used process literally designed to result in our imprisonment,” they wrote. “This is not the way out of America’s ills, and we will forcefully defend ourselves.”

Negotiations or stalling?

Members of each party argued over various issues the panel members had been negotiating with the Clintons, such as the location of the interview, whether notes or a transcript would be allowed and whether the Clintons could provide written testimony only, as other witnesses had.

Democrats on the panel said the Clintons and their lawyers had been working with the committee in good faith to iron out those issues. But Comer said they were stalling the panel in the hopes that Democrats would retake the House in November.

“We have been negotiating for five months,” Comer said. “This is clearly a stall tactic, hoping that the time clock runs out and the House flips and you all let them off the hook.”

Contrary to Democrats’ argument, not every witness was allowed to offer written testimony, Comer added, including Republican former U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr. 

Hillary Clinton inclusion questioned

Bill Clinton had a well-documented personal relationship with Epstein, including travel on the billionaire’s private plane. Photos of the two were among the documents released in the initial tranche the Justice Department provided under the November law.

But Garcia objected to the inclusion of Hillary Clinton in the committee’s resolution Wednesday, saying the available evidence appeared to confirm her public account that she had no knowledge of Epstein’s activities.

“No one who is serious about justice for Epstein’s survivors believes that Hillary Clinton has somehow been involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes,” Garcia said. 

He added that Trump pledged to prosecute Hillary Clinton after he won the 2016 presidential campaign against her. Garcia said it appeared Trump was weaponizing the federal government against a political opponent. 

Other Democrats said the committee was enforcing Trump’s political prosecution.

Comer said Hillary Clinton had a personal relationship with Maxwell and a financial one with Epstein.

Trump also had a personal relationship with Epstein for years. Democrats on the panel repeated Wednesday the widely made assertion that Trump’s Justice Department was shielding the president by resisting the production of documents.

Wisconsin DNR Secretary Karen Hyun testifies to an Assembly committee about legislation to address PFAS contamination. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

A Wisconsin Assembly committee held a hearing Wednesday on a pair of bills to help mitigate and clean up water contamination caused by PFAS — a class of compounds also known as “forever chemicals” that has been tied to cancer and developmental diseases in children. 

For two and a half years, $125 million set aside in the state’s 2023-25 biennial budget to fund the cleanup of PFAS contamination has sat untouched as the Republican-controlled Legislature, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers and a collection of interest groups were unable to reach agreement on how to structure the program and who should be held responsible for the pollution. 

After initial optimism, the first legislative effort died after Democrats and environmental groups complained that the proposal let polluters off the hook. 

While the debate in Madison has dragged on, communities including French Island near La Crosse, the town of Stella near Rhinelander, Wausau and Marinette have continued to face the harms of PFAS-contaminated water. 

When the legislation was introduced again at the beginning of this legislative session, legislators again expressed hope that a compromise could be reached. Earlier this week, the bill’s authors, Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto) and Rep. Jeff Mursau (R-Crivitz), released a proposed amendment to the legislation. One of the bills directs how the money in the trust fund will be directed and the other creates the programs through which the money will flow.

At the hearing Wednesday, the duo emphasized how important it was for them to get the money out the door into affected communities and the need for compromise on the issue. 

“The 2023-2025 budget included $125 million to address PFAS contamination and support cleanup efforts across the state,” Mursau said. “Unfortunately, those funds are sitting idle because we have failed to pass the legislation necessary to put them to work. Progress will require compromise. There are stakeholders on both sides of the aisle who may not like these amendments, but that is the reality of divided government, and it is not an excuse for inaction.” 

The pair said the latest version of the legislation is the result of months of negotiations with the Department of Natural Resources and the Evers administration. 

While the legislation still includes the “innocent landowner” provisions that have been at the heart of the dispute, the amended version tightens the definition of who qualifies. Wimberger said the new definition would still allow the DNR to bring enforcement actions against industries including paper companies and airports, but that the current version represents a lot of movement from the DNR and Evers.

“There was quite a bit of coming off the ledge on the governor’s side regarding innocent landowners,” Wimberger said. 

Additionally, the bill creates a number of programs to test for PFAS and fund mitigation efforts by helping individual landowners dig new wells, helping communities upgrade water treatment systems and funding more comprehensive testing efforts. 

But the language of the proposed amendments shows how difficult it has been for legislators to adjust the dial on Wisconsin’s PFAS policy. The bills now have the support of Evers, the DNR and some of the state’s leading environmental organizations, but industry groups including the state’s largest business lobby, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and the Wisconsin Paper Council argued at the hearing that the bill would single out certain types of industry for enforcement actions. 

“Substitute Amendment One takes a huge step backwards in terms of protecting truly innocent landowners and passive receivers,” Adam Jordahl, WMC’s director of environmental and energy policy, said, referring to a particular provision of the bill.

WMC in recent years brought and lost a lawsuit that would have prevented the state’s spills law from being applied to entities responsible for PFAS pollution. 

Several industry representatives also threatened that if the amended bills are signed into law, they could invite legal challenges because of “constitutional concerns.” Jordahl said that one of the bills treats municipal facilities such as landfills and water treatment plants differently than private businesses conducting similar activities, which could make the law vulnerable to a lawsuit. 

“This discrimination raises a significant constitutional concern under the concept of equal protection,” he said. “A successful lawsuit raising an equal protection claim could result in the invalidation of those unfairly applied exemptions. Second, as a policy matter, we feel this simply makes no sense. What is the policy justification for treating commercial and industrial or manufacturing facilities differently when they’re conducting the same activities and operating under the same laws and regulations?” 

Paper industry representatives said at the hearing it’s unfair for the bill to single them out because the industry will be subjected to increased scrutiny despite their claims that the business does not cause most PFAS pollution.

Last year, the DNR named a paper mill as the responsible party for the PFAS contamination in Stella, which has seen some of the highest concentrations of the chemicals in the state.

Despite the skepticism from the business community about the latest version of the legislation, lawmakers throughout the Capitol appeared confident that it could finally get across the finish line. 

“I met with Republican lawmakers and the DNR last week about critical PFAS bill changes that will be necessary to garner my support, and I’m really optimistic we’re finally going to be able to get something good done here after months of successful and productive negotiations,” Evers said in a statement. “I’m grateful Republican lawmakers have formally introduced an amendment that reflects the changes we’ve agreed to so far as a sign of good faith. We still have some important details to iron out to make sure DNR has the resources they need, but we’ve made a lot of progress. So, I’m really hopeful.”

Both Evers and Wimberger noted that the only remaining sticking point in the negotiations is how many staff members the DNR will be authorized to hire to support the responsibilities required under the bill. The current version of the amendment authorizes 10 positions while Evers is requesting 13. 

Republican leaders in the Legislature have also signaled that the bill is likely to move forward. 

“I think it’s a move in the right direction,” Senate Majority Leader Devin Lemahieu (R-Oostburg) said. “I think it’s a bill that hopefully our caucus can get behind and maybe finally get that money out the door.”

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Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook leaves the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 21, 2026 in Washington, D.C, after the court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Cook. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — U.S. Supreme Court justices across the political spectrum appeared skeptical of President Donald Trump’s swift, informal dismissal of Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook, and his effort to influence the independent central bank that governs monetary policy in the United States.

The oral arguments Wednesday drew a high-profile appearance in the courtroom of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — now a target of a Department of Justice investigation. For months prior to the federal probe, Trump has threatened to fire Powell if the chair did not quickly lower interest rates.

For two hours, the justices heard arguments over whether Cook could remain on the board, as a lower court ruled, while litigation continues examining if Trump violated a “for cause” removal statute when he fired her over social media in late August. 

Trump alleged in an Aug. 25 letter posted to his Truth Social platform that Cook committed financial fraud by lying on mortgage loan documents. Trump declared he had “sufficient cause” to remove Cook based on alleged “deceitful and potentially criminal conduct in a financial matter.”

Under the Federal Reserve Act, the president can only remove board governors “for cause” — as designed by Congress in an effort to preserve the central bank’s independence. 

Trump claims his removals of members of independent government agencies are not reviewable by the courts.

Cook has denied any wrongdoing and challenged the president, the board and Powell, essentially arguing in court that an “unsubstantiated allegation about private mortgage applications,” submitted prior to her Senate confirmation, does not amount to cause for removal. Cook also argued that Trump denied her due process in not giving her notice or a chance to respond to his allegations.

Cook, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, has continued to perform her board duties, without interference from Powell.

Alito questions ‘hurried manner’ of firing

During lengthy questioning of U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer, Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson asked what the risk would be in allowing Cook to remain in her job while the administration made its case to the lower courts.

“The question is: What is the harm of allowing that injunction to remain, because she’s in office now and would just continue?” Brown asked.

Sauer, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, said the administration asserts “grievous, irreparable injury to the public perception, to the Federal Reserve, of allowing her to stay in office.”

“Do you have evidence related to the public perception, or is this just the president’s view?” Jackson, a Biden appointee, pressed back.

Sauer said the evidence regarding Cook’s two separate mortgage applications was contained in Trump’s “dismissal order,” referring to the letter posted on social media. 

Moments later, Brown asked if Cook was “given the opportunity in some sort of formal proceeding to contest that evidence or explain it?”

“Not a formal proceeding. She was given an opportunity in public,” Sauer said.

“In the world? Like she was supposed to post about it, and that was the opportunity to be heard that you’re saying was afforded to her?” Brown asked.

“Yes,” Sauer replied.

Justice Samuel Alito, one of the high court’s most conservative members, asked Sauer why the removal had to be handled “in such a hurried manner.”

“You began by laying out what you claim to be the factual basis for the for-cause removal, but no court has ever explored those facts. Are the mortgage applications even in the record in this case?” asked Alito, who was appointed to the court under President George W. Bush.

“I know that the text of the social media post that screenshots the mortgage applications is in the record. I don’t recall if the paperwork itself was in the record,” Sauer said.

Federal Reserve independence

Over several minutes of back-and-forth, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Sauer on the importance of the Federal Reserve’s independence.

“Let’s talk about the real world downstream effects of this. Because if this were set as a precedent, it seems to me — just thinking big picture, what goes around, comes around — all the current president’s appointees would likely be removed for cause on Jan. 20, 2029, if there’s a Democratic president, or Jan. 20, 2033,” argued Kavanaugh, who was appointed during Trump’s first term.

“We’re really at, at will removal. So what are we doing here?” he asked.

“I can’t predict what future presidents may or may not do,” Sauer replied.

“Well, history is a pretty good guide. Once these tools are unleashed, they are used by both sides, and usually more the second time around,” Kavanaugh said.

Kavanaugh later challenged Cook’s lawyer, Paul Clement, over whether his argument was “tilting the balance too far the other direction from where the solicitor general is.”

Clement responded, “This is a situation where Congress, political animals, one and all, knew better than anyone that the short-term temptations to lower interest rates and have easy money was a disaster in the long term, but was going to be irresistible. 

“And so they tied their own hands by taking the Fed out of the appropriations process, and they tied the president’s hands,” the Alexandria, Virginia-based attorney said. 

In a statement following arguments, Cook said the case is “about whether the Federal Reserve will set key interest rates guided by evidence and independent judgment or will succumb to political pressure.”

“Research and experience show that Federal Reserve independence is essential to fulfilling the congressional mandate of price stability and maximum employment. That is why Congress chose to insulate the Federal Reserve from political threats, while holding it accountable for delivering on that mandate. For as long as I serve at the Federal Reserve, I will uphold the principle of political independence in service to the American people,” Cook continued in the statement.

Regulating interest rates — to cool inflation or stimulate the economy — is one tool the central bank uses to accomplish its dual mandate on employment and price stability.

Subpoena issued

The arguments occurred just a dozen days after Powell received a federal grand jury subpoena as part of a Department of Justice probe into allegations that he lied to Congress about multi-year renovation costs to the central bank’s District of Columbia headquarters.

The revelation of a federal investigation of Powell ignited sharp criticism, even from some Republicans. 

Powell alleged in a rare video statement that the administration’s “unprecedented action should be seen in the broader context of the administration’s threats and ongoing pressure.”

He continued, “The threat of criminal charges is a consequence of the Federal Reserve setting interest rates based on our best assessment of what will serve the public, rather than following the preferences of the president.”

Trump first nominated Powell in 2017 to head the Federal Reserve, for a four-year term that began in February 2018. Biden reappointed him in 2021, and Powell received overwhelming support in an 80-19 Senate confirmation vote.

Wednesday’s arguments also came less than two months after the Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump’s firing of another member of an independent federal agency, Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter.