The Menomonee Falls village board voted to cut the library budget by $300,000 last month. (Menomonee Falls Public Library)

Menomonee Falls residents are concerned about the future of their public library after the village board voted late last month to move $300,000 from the library’s 2026 budget to the police department. 

Board members said the May 19 move, which passed in a unanimous 6-0 vote, was intended to help the police increase staffing in response to an uptick in crime. Critics of the decision said the move is likely to force the library to cut back on staff, hours and programming — potentially putting its certification from Waukesha County at risk. 

The resolution, which was passed months before the board begins working on writing the village’s 2026 budget, also comes as libraries across the country are about to be hit by funding cuts from the federal government as part of President Donald Trump’s effort to slash federal spending. 

This year, the library’s budget was set at about $2.3 million, making the $300,000 cut about 15% of the library’s total budget. The cut is larger than the $225,000 the library was budgeted to spend on purchasing new materials this year. The police department’s 2025 budget is more than $12 million. 

“If village board members are so obsessed with firing librarians, just say so and be transparent with the community, because that is the impact of stealing 20% of the library’s funds,” Ian Dickmann, a community resident and former member of the library board, said at the board meeting. “You will be firing multiple librarians, cutting library hours and negatively impacting library programs, materials and services. The community has spoken in support of the library on multiple occasions. Yet here we are again. If you as a village board cannot manage to properly fund the police and the library, then you have failed as a board.” 

Menomonee Falls Police data shows that crime has increased slightly this year, and through retirements, resignations and leaves, the department currently has fewer than the 65 sworn officers in its budget. Police Chief Mark Waters said at a board meeting in April that the department was working with 54 fully trained officers. 

At that meeting, Waters said that this year, class A offenses, which include more serious crimes such as assaults, robberies and drug offenses, are up 18% compared to the first quarter of 2024. However, much of that increase is due to a 41% increase in drug offenses, of which Waters said the vast majority was “a lot of marijuana taken out of traffic stops.” 

As of April, there had been 41 thefts in Menomonee Falls this year, according to police data, an increase of six incidents from the first quarter last year. The clearance rate, the percentage of crimes that are solved, on those thefts was 51%.

Menomonee Falls Assistant Police Chief Gary Neyhart said in an email that the department has had problems  with staffing, but that budget decisions are up to the board. 

“Chief Mark Waters provides public quarterly updates to the Village Board and a consistent message has been that staffing has been an issue here at the police department,” Neyhart said. “The Village Board then determines how best to address these stated staffing concerns. I also cannot speak on their behalf. I don’t believe we are alone with our staffing issues and that many area departments are in a similar situation as well as dealing with retention and recruitment. We will always strive to provide the highest level of service that our staffing allows.”

Board member Paul Tadda, said at the May meeting that the resolution to cut the library budget was made to maintain the level of police services a suburban community expects. 

“We’re down to 52 fully trained officers. That requires forced overtime to maintain shifts are full and able to respond to emergencies as necessary and provide police services that the village has been accustomed to,” he said. “I do not want to live in Milwaukee.” 

Andy Guss, co-leader of the community group Grassroots Menomonee Falls, told the Wisconsin Examiner he is used to Tadda’s “racist dog whistles,” and that he is more concerned about the library’s ability to remain certified and serve as an important resource for village residents. 

In Wisconsin, counties set a tax levy for library services. Those funds are distributed to municipal libraries to compensate for the use of services by people who live in communities without a library. Municipal residents are exempted from paying the library tax if they live in a community that has a library which meets standards set by the state and county board. 

The Waukesha County standards require the village to provide at least $1,630,000 in the annual library budget, be open at least 60 hours a week, employee at least 17.61 full time employees, have a collection size of at least 125,400 materials, have at least 20 public computers and provide wireless internet access. 

Guss says he’s worried the cuts will put the library dangerously close to not meeting the standards. 

“We’re going to be really close to not hitting the Waukesha County standards,” he says. “And I’m fearful of what will happen if we also lose additional funding from the federal government, because then how short will we be? How many people, how many librarians will we have to fire? How many services will we have to cut? How many books do we not get, how much new material can we not get? How many computers? It’s scary to think about, because it limits access to people that need it. Because I don’t go to the library all the time for books, I use the library for a lot of other things, like book clubs or meeting spaces. What happens to that when the hours are reduced?” 

But at the meeting, board members brushed aside concerns community members raised about the standards. Board member Ann Lessila said in an email to the Examiner that the library won’t suffer.

“By reallocating funds ahead of the budget process, we have allowed the library board extra time to prepare,” Lessila said. “The library has been funded well over the required amount every year, without having to make any significant adjustments. The library remains well funded! Just about every other department has made significant adjustments over the years.” 

Steve Heser, a Menomonee Falls resident and the director of the Milwaukee County Federated Library System, said he highly doubts claims that residents won’t see any impacts from the cuts and that one community library failing to meet the county standards strains the whole county system — which in this case is the Bridges Library System covering all the libraries in Jefferson and Waukesha counties. 

“What you really don’t want in a system is one library failing to meet those standards, and then they’re kind of relying on the other municipalities to foot the bill for their library,” Heser said. 

Aside from the county standards, Guss said he’s also worried about the village board diminishing a community gathering space, especially for kids and teenagers who have already had recreational opportunities taken away. 

In March, the board voted to ban any children over the age of 12 from hanging out unaccompanied at Menomonee Falls Village Park, which is across the street from North Middle School. Village officials said the move was meant to deter vandalism. 

“They’ve got the playground across the street. They ban the 12-year-olds so they can’t go there,” Guss said. “But we do have at the library, they have a teen room that is well managed. I know it’s well attended, but I would assume that, based on these cuts, that they’re going to lower hours, lower staff, and maybe we would even lose the teen room.” 

The Menomonee Falls Village Manager Mark Fitzgerald and six of the village board members did not respond to requests for comment.

The Progress Pride Flag flies over the Wisconsin Capitol. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

For the seventh time, Gov. Tony Evers ordered the Progress Pride Flag to fly over the Wisconsin State Capitol for LGBTQ Pride Month. 

This year, Pride Month begins on the 10th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which gave same-sex couples the right to get married in 2015. But Evers’ celebration of LGBTQ pride is occuring as the administration of President Donald Trump attacks the rights of transgender people and a recent Gallup poll found that Republican acceptance of same-sex marriage has fallen to its lowest level in nine years. 

“When the Pride Flag flies above the People’s House, it sends a clear and unequivocal message that Wisconsin recognizes and celebrates LGBTQ Wisconsinites and Americans,” Evers said in a statement. “Every day, but especially today and this month, we reaffirm our commitment to striving to be a place where every LGBTQ kid, person, and family can be bold in their truth and be safe, treated with dignity and respect, and welcomed without fear of persecution, judgment, or discrimination. I promised long ago that, as governor, I would always fight to protect LGBTQ Wisconsinites with every tool and every power that I have. I will never stop keeping that promise.”

In the executive order Evers signed Friday, he notes that the LGBTQ has been under attack in recent years, including in Wisconsin where Republicans have tried more than once to pass legislation attacking transgender children.

“Despite historic victories, in the last several years, there has been a significant increase in anti-LGBTQ legislation introduced in state Legislatures across the country, including in Wisconsin, that have targeted LGBTQ kids and people and increased dangerous anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, as well as efforts on a state and national level to erase LGBTQ history and stories.” 

The Progress Pride Flag flying above the Capitol includes the recognizable LGBTQ rainbow colors and a chevron of additional stripes that represent LGBTQ people of color, the transgender community and people with HIV/AIDS.

Shawano County was included on a Department of Homeland Security list of jurisdictions "defying federal immigration law"

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security listed Shawano County along with Dane County, Madison and Milwaukee as Wisconsin jurisdictions “defying immigration law” on Thursday. 

The department released the list as part of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump requiring that sanctuary jurisdictions across the country be listed. 

“Sanctuary jurisdictions including cities, counties, and states that are deliberately and shamefully obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration laws endangering American communities,” the DHS announcement states. “Sanctuary cities protect dangerous criminal aliens from facing consequences and put law enforcement in peril.” 

Dane County, Madison and Milwaukee have enacted policies that limit local law enforcement agencies’ collaboration with federal immigration authorities. Earlier this year, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett announced that the county would no longer participate in a program that provides funding in exchange for telling federal agencies when an immigrant without legal status is in custody in the local jail. Milwaukee also refuses to share such information. 

“DHS demands that these jurisdictions immediately review and revise their policies to align with Federal immigration laws and renew their obligation to protect American citizens, not dangerous illegal aliens,” DHS stated.

But Shawano County, which Trump won with 67% of its vote last year, is a Republican Party stronghold that appears out of place on the list. The DHS announcement states that “no one should act on this information without conducting their own evaluation of the information.” 

In 2021, the Shawano County board voted to declare the county a “Second Amendment sanctuary county,” which declared the county sheriff would not enforce any laws which “unconstitutionally impedes our fundamental Second Amendment right to Keep and Bear Arms.” 

The Shawano County administrator and sheriff did not respond to requests for comment.

UW-Madison Engineering Hall. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that international students with ties to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in “critical fields” could have their visas revoked. Rubio didn’t define what those critical fields would be and also provided little detail when he said that the State Department would “enhance scrutiny” on new student visa applications.

The administration has also said it plans to increase the vetting of visa applicants’ social media accounts. The announcement that the administration would be revoking the visas of Chinese students came the same day the State Department announced it had paused scheduling appointments for visa applicants. 

UW-Madison had 3,414 international students from China this spring semester. In recent years, the university has worked to expand its international student body, aiming to increase the international population from 4% to 8% by 2028. The acceptance of international students helps the university increase revenue as state aid has remained flat and inflation has increased costs because international students pay an average of four times the amount of tuition as in-state students. 

The university said Thursday it is monitoring the situation. 

“We are deeply concerned about the impact of such a policy on our Chinese student community,” the university said. 

In a message to its international students, the university advised them to attend visa appointments that are already scheduled and inform university staff if an appointment is canceled. The message also told the students to schedule appointments as quickly as possible once the pause on scheduling is lifted and to enroll in classes for the fall. 

These moves are the latest in the Trump administration’s efforts to attack international student visas. Earlier this spring, the administration deleted visa records for some students over minor traffic infractions and encounters with law enforcement. That effort temporarily canceled the visas of more than two dozen students and alumni at UW schools across the state. 

The Trump administration rolled back that decision and reinstated the visas after a federal judge ruled in favor of a number of students who sued to stop the revocation.

USGS staff install a microsampler in a Milwaukee creek. (Photo by Peter C. Van Metre/USGS)

A field office of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in Rice Lake that serves as part of an expansive national network monitoring water data is set to close next year as part of a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effort to terminate the leases of the agency’s offices. 

The Rice Lake office and an office in Mounds View, Minn., are both operated by the USGS Upper Midwest Water Science Center. They are among the more than two dozen offices across the country DOGE has targeted for closure, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. 

USGS staff and environmental policy workers across Wisconsin say closing  the office in Rice Lake could harm the quality and quantity of the data available in the state — making it harder for local, county and state governments, as well as private citizens and businesses, to make plans and policies in a region that will be at more risk of both drought and extreme weather events as climate change intensifies. 

The USGS water science centers operate thousands of streamgages across the country, gathering data on stream flows and water quality. That data can be used to help design plans for infrastructure such as bridges and dams; inform research on pollutants such as nitrates and pesticides; help farmers set irrigation plans during droughts; give homeowners information on flood plains and support recreational industries such as whitewater rafting. 

“The Rice Lake office is just a very important but small piece of what they do, and what they do is so fundamental to what so many other people are trying to do across so many sectors in the state of Wisconsin,” says Erin O’Brien, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Wetlands Association. “They support state agencies and local communities and others doing not just land and water conservation work, but development and transportation planning and all these other sectors.” 

The agency has been operating streamgages in the United States since the 1880s. One of the first 120 gages the agency installed was in Wisconsin in 1899, according to USGS data. That longevity gives scientists an essential resource for tracking Wisconsin’s bodies of water. It’s easier to understand the effect of a 100-year flood when you’re working with more than a century of data. 

Each individual streamgage increases the value of the entire network, and every additional year of data further improves the data. Many practical uses of the data to understand how rivers and watersheds are functioning require 20 years of measurements, according to a 2021 report on the USGS streamgage network by the Congressional Research Service. 

At a field office such as the one in Rice Lake, the staff is responsible for maintaining and repairing the gages. The risk of closing an office is that the staff won’t be close enough to do that work, resulting in lower quality data, according to Paul LaLiberte, who serves as the chair of Wisconsin Green Fire’s Environmental Rules and Water Resources Work Group. LaLiberte worked on water quality issues for 36 years at the state Department of Natural Resources. 

“This flow data is continually recording, and [the field offices are] the ones that install the equipment, maintain the equipment, and, importantly, go out and calibrate it on a schedule and even in response to events,” says LaLiberte, who worked with staff in the Rice Lake office when he was based in Eau Claire with the DNR. 

“By closing the field offices, that’s going to make it a whole lot harder to do this calibration and maintenance and even run as many stations as they do,” he said. “The consequences will probably be some combination of dropping some stations or having the data be less accurate, because due to travel times, they just can’t send the crews out there to recalibrate the stations. So if the data is less accurate, then the predictions are going to be less accurate, and the infrastructure designs associated with that are going to be less accurate.”

One USGS staff member who works outside of Wisconsin, granted anonymity because agency employees have not been authorized to speak to the media, says staff members across the country weren’t aware their offices were being shut down until the General Services Administration told their landlords the leases would not be renewed. 

The staffer says the terminations are “shocking” because these offices are filled with lab equipment that is difficult to move and there are still not yet plans for alternatives. The result is that the data won’t be collected. 

“I guess maybe this is apparent, but leaving these leases was not a strategy for efficiency,” the staffer says. “There’s no plan in place to leave these facilities and find other alternatives. And it’s a huge effort to now create a plan to find alternatives for these facilities when you know these facilities are in full use, and we don’t see any other options. We will not be able to collect the data that we need to fulfill our mission, because we will be reassigning resources to deal with moving that we don’t have.” 

A USGS spokesperson said in a statement the terminated leases will not harm the agency’s mission. 

“USGS remains committed to its congressional mandate as the science arm of the Department of the Interior,” the spokesperson said. “We are actively working with GSA to ensure that every facility and asset is utilized effectively, and where necessary, identifying alternative solutions that strengthen our mission. These efforts reflect our broader commitment to streamlining government operations while ensuring that scientific endeavors remain strong, effective, and impactful. This process is ongoing, and we will provide updates as more information becomes available.”

The Rice Lake office’s lease is set to end July 31, 2026.

Wisconsin Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor in her Dane County chambers. | Photo courtesy Chris for Justice campaign

Appeals court judge and former Democratic state Assembly member Chris Taylor announced Tuesday she’s running for a seat on the state Supreme Court in next year’s spring election. 

Taylor, who was elected to the Court of Appeals in 2023, will run against conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley in a race that will decide if liberals expand their majority on the Court. 

The two previous state Supreme Court elections, which consolidated the current 4-3 liberal majority, broke national spending records for judicial races. While the stakes won’t be as high in next year’s race, Bradley has been a prominent supporter of conservative causes since she was appointed to the Court by Gov. Scott Walker in 2015. 

Bradley sided with President Donald Trump in his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and has been a vocal member of the right-wing Federalist Society. 

The election takes place just seven months before the midterm elections when statewide offices including governor and attorney general, as well as control of the Legislature, will be up for grabs — giving the state a view of the voting public’s mood before November. 

Taylor previously worked as Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin’s public policy director and served in the Assembly from 2013 until she was appointed to the Dane County Circuit Court in 2020. 

“As an attorney, public servant, and now as a judge, I’ve always been committed to making sure everyone is able to access our justice system,” Taylor said in a statement. “The law is a powerful tool for protecting Wisconsinites, holding people accountable, and making our state stronger.” 

“Justices on the Wisconsin Supreme Court must be fair, independent, and impartial,” Taylor said. “Justice Rebecca Bradley has proven that she’s more interested in pushing her own right-wing political agenda than protecting Wisconsinites’ rights and freedoms. Extremism and partisanship have no place on our state’s highest court. Everyone who comes before the court deserves to be heard, respected, and treated equally – that’s exactly what I’ll do as a Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice.”

While Taylor has been elected to office six times, she has only faced a Republican opponent once. She ran unopposed for her Madison-area Assembly seat in 2012, 2014 and 2018. When she had an opponent in 2016, she won with 83% of the vote. She also ran unopposed for re-election to the Dane County Court in 2021 and for her seat on the District IV Court of Appeals in 2023. 

In a statement, Republican Party of Wisconsin Chair Brian Schimming noted that she’s never had to win the votes of people outside of heavily Democratic Dane County.

“Chris Taylor’s extreme partisan record has never been on full display outside of Dane County,” Schimming said. “After ‘liberal express lane’ elections in Dane County and an appointment from Tony Evers, Radical Democrat Chris Taylor will now have to answer for her extremely partisan record in the Legislature and on the bench.”

A billboard promoting Enbridge Inc. (Susan Demas | Michigan Advance)

Over two days of hearings this week, members of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, environmental advocates and experts testified against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers granting a permit to reroute Enbridge’s Line 5 oil and natural gas pipeline in northern Wisconsin. 

The tribe’s testimony was one of its last chances to prevent the new pipeline from being installed upstream of its reservation — which the tribe says will harm water quality in the watershed, encourage the growth of invasive species and damage wetlands, diminishing the ability to filter pollutants out of runoff before reaching surface waters. 

Enbridge insists the reroute plans do everything possible to minimize the environmental effect of pipeline construction and operation while industry groups and labor unions say the project has been vetted to ensure it isn’t harmful and that the arguments against the environmental effects of construction could be used to slow down any project in the state, not just those the tribe disagrees with politically. 

Last year, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources issued its own permits for the company to build the pipeline with more than 200 added conditions to ensure compliance with state standards. Months after the DNR’s permit decision, a separate pipeline operated by Enbridge in Wisconsin spilled 69,000 gallons of crude oil in Jefferson County. 

The tribe is also challenging the DNR’s permit determination in a series of hearings later this summer. 

For decades, Line 5 ran through the tribe’s reservation and in 2023 a federal judge ordered that it be shut down. Since 2020, Enbridge has been working on a plan to reroute the pipeline, which runs from far northwest Wisconsin 645 miles into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, under the Straits of Mackinac and across the U.S. border into Canada near Detroit. It transports about 23 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids daily.

At the hearings this week, the tribe argued that under the Clean Water Act, the Corps shouldn’t grant the permits because the tribe has determined the new pipeline will negatively affect its water quality. 

Tribal chairman makes the case against Line 5

“Our people have resided in the Bad River watershed for hundreds of years,” Robert Blanchard, the tribe’s chairman, said Tuesday. “It’s our homeland. If the U.S. Army Corps grants these permits, Enbridge is undoubtedly going to destroy and pollute our watershed by trenching, blasting and horizontal drilling across hundreds of upstream wetlands and streams. I’m asking the U.S. Army Corps to think of the people and all the living things this will affect, and to deny the permit for this project.”

During Tuesday’s testimony, Blanchard added, “When I look at my homelands, I see it through the eyes of my grandfather, who saw it through the eyes of his grandfather.” 

Blanchard said he wants his grandchildren to be able to see their homelands through his eyes, too. He recounted boating up the Bad River toward Lake Superior as a boy, catching fish with his elders to eat or to sell at the market. His grandfather taught him to hunt and gather and to this day Blanchard gathers medicinal herbs which are used by his community, he said. He remembers the lumber companies that clear cut the forests, and, he said, some of his loved ones have died of cancer after living near an industrial dump site. 

“That was all in the Bad River watershed,” said Blanchard. He stressed that in tribal tradition, all things in nature have spirit, including the water. To the Bad River Band, nature is not only critical to human survival, it is a sacred thing to be protected. 

In their testimony Tuesday, Enbridge consultants and researchers downplayed concerns about how the pipeline reroute could harm local ecosystems. Just over 118 acres of forest will need to be cleared during construction and turned into a managed grassland. Experts testifying for the company said that the underground pipeline will not act as an underwater dam and disrupt groundwater flow, nor will the explosives used to blast trenches for the pipeline present a danger. Other concerns such as radioactive contamination, PFAS pollution (often called forever chemicals) and arsenic are not used by the project, and have not been detected in the area. 

Although Enbridge’s consultants and experts argued that the project would not violate the Bad River Band’s water quality standards, the Band itself disagreed, citing concerns about pollutants, water quantity and quality, hydrology, mineral content and water temperature. 

Connie Sue Martin, and environmental attorney who testified against the project said the Bad River Band “is the expert” on water quality in the area, not U.S. government agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Esteban Chiriboga, a geologist with the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, testified that the rerouted pipeline’s distance from the reservation is irrelevant because contaminants can travel. Using imagery from Laser Imaging, Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology, Chiriboga demonstrated that waterways and flow channels between rivers, creeks and wetlands are interconnected. Others who spoke against the project on Tuesday expressed concerns about the potential for increased runoff, soil erosion, and the spread of invasive species as consequences of the project. 

On Wednesday, much of the tribe’s testimony centered around the ways in which the tribe’s members rely on the Bad River and its tributaries. 

“You will not find another community so dependent upon subsistence harvesting and dependent upon the health of our environment,” said Dylan Jennings, a member of the tribe and former appointee of Gov. Tony Evers to the state Natural Resources Board. “Simply put, our community maintains a relationship with the entire ecosystem and not a segmented area, we continue to utilize an entire system approach which naturally extends beyond our reservation boundaries.” 

Union members testify in favor of Line 5

During the public comment period of the hearing Wednesday, a number of labor union representatives defended the project as a source of local jobs and environmentally safe. Chad Ward, a representative of the Teamsters Local 346, said members of his union will work on the project and live locally, so they take “very seriously our commitment to the community and the environment around the construction site.” But, he said, the tribe’s complaints could be made about any construction project in the area. 

“I and others have grave concerns that the assertions made by the tribe could have impacts well beyond the Line 5 project itself,” Ward said. “Construction practices considered industry and regulatory best practices for environmental protection are cited as reasons by the tribe for why this project should not proceed, practices that are standard use all over the country” 

“They are practices the Band has been fine with for dozens of projects in the same area,” he continued. “This leaves the impression that these concerns are more based on the political views of the project than the construction method themselves. And while they’re entitled to their political views, it is the job of the permitting process to determine if the laws and regulations are being followed, not weigh the political arguments.” 

After Wednesday, the Army Corps will accept written comments on the permit approval for 30 days and then can make a decision any time after that. The hearings on the legal challenge to the DNR permits begin Aug. 12 in Ashland.

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

Attorneys for Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan filed a motion to dismiss the federal charges against her on Wednesday, arguing the government can’t charge her because she has judicial immunity. 

“This is no ordinary criminal case, and Dugan is no ordinary criminal defendant,” the motion states. “Dugan is a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge. She was arrested and indicted for actions allegedly taken in and in the immediate vicinity of her courtroom, involving a person appearing before her as a party. The government’s prosecution of Judge Dugan is virtually unprecedented and entirely unconstitutional — it violates the Tenth Amendment and fundamental principles of federalism and comity reflected in that amendment and in the very structure of the United States Constitution.” 

The motion states that the problems with the prosecution “are legion,” and begin with her judicial immunity, which prevents judges from being charged with crimes for their official acts. Immunity is not a defense to be used at trial but “is an absolute bar to the prosecution at the outset,” the motion states, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States that found the president can’t be charged with crimes for official acts. 

Dugan has been accused by federal officials of helping an immigrant without legal status in the U.S. escape from federal agents waiting to arrest him outside her courtroom last month. The criminal complaint alleges she directed the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who came to her court for a routine hearing in a misdemeanor case, out a side door to avoid federal agents waiting to arrest him with an administrative warrant. Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer exited the courtroom into the same hallway where the agents were waiting and a DEA agent rode down the elevator with him before he was arrested on the street. 

Trump administration officials have touted the case as an example of a stern federal response to “deranged” judges across the country working to stymie the president’s efforts to increase immigration enforcement. 

Dugan’s motion states the facts alleged in the indictment and criminal complaint against her would be disproven at trial, but that the case should never get that far. 

“Even if (contrary to what the trial evidence would show) Judge Dugan took the actions the complaint alleges, these plainly were judicial acts for which she has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution,” the motion states. “Judges are empowered to maintain control over their courtrooms specifically and the courthouse generally.” 

Dugan’s attorneys also argue that the prosecution violates the Tenth Amendment, which clarifies the balance of power between states and the federal government. The motion states that federal agents going into a state courthouse to arrest a sitting judge is a violation of the Constitution. 

“The government’s prosecution here reaches directly into a state courthouse, disrupting active proceedings, and interferes with the official duties of an elected judge,” the motion states. “The federal government violated Wisconsin’s sovereignty on April 18 when it disrupted Judge Dugan’s courtroom, and it is violating Wisconsin’s sovereignty now with this prosecution. The Court should end the violation of Wisconsin’s sovereignty and dismiss the indictment.” 

Dugan is scheduled to appear in court for her arraignment Thursday morning.

Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on charges of concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings. 

Dugan has been accused by federal officials of helping an undocumented immigrant escape from federal agents waiting to arrest him outside of her courtroom last month. 

The case has been cited by officials in the administration of President Donald Trump as an example of “deranged” judges working to stymie the administration’s increased immigration enforcement. Critics, including 150 judges of both political parties who wrote a letter to the Department of Justice objecting to Dugan’s arrest, have said the charges against a sitting state judge mark an escalation by the Trump administration trying to make a political point in a weak case to attack the judiciary.

Tuesday’s indictment is a normal procedural step in a criminal case but attorneys said after Dugan’s arrest late last month that it was strange that federal prosecutors hadn’t gotten a grand jury indictment prior to bringing the charges against her. Instead, U.S. attorneys filed a criminal complaint, which publicized the case immediately and allowed Dugan’s attorneys to learn the allegations against her. 

The charges stem from a routine court appearance in April by Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. While he was in the courtroom, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI and DEA arrived with an administrative warrant to arrest Flores-Ruiz. 

That warrant, which was not signed by a judge, did not give agents the authority to enter the courtroom. The agents waited in the hallway outside. Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a side door of the room that exited into the same hallway. The agents saw him leave the room and one rode down the elevator with him before he was arrested later on the street. 

Dugan has been temporarily removed from her seat on the Milwaukee County Circuit Court by the Wisconsin Supreme Court while the charges are pending, but after the indictment, her attorneys said in a statement she’ll fight the charges. 

“Judge Dugan asserts her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court.” 

Dugan is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday morning.

A sign protesting Enbridge Line 5 in Michigan. (Laina G. Stebbins | Michigan Advance)

The Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa is preparing to argue against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issuing a permit to reroute Enbridge’s Line 5 oil pipeline in northern Wisconsin. 

For years, the tribe has fought against Line 5, which runs from far Northwest Wisconsin 645 miles into Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, under the Straits of Mackinac and across the U.S. border  into Canada near Detroit. It transports about 23 million gallons of crude oil and natural gas liquids daily. 

An underground section of the pipeline currently passes near a bend in the Bad River on the tribe’s reservation. In 2023, a federal judge ruled that the company was trespassing on tribal land and gave Enbridge three years to shut down the pipeline. 

Since 2020, Enbridge has been working on rerouting the pipeline about 41 miles away from tribal land. That proposal requires permits to be issued by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

The tribe is also currently challenging the state’s permitting process. Hearings will be held in August, September and October in Madison and Ashland in which an administrative law judge will hear arguments against the DNR’s decision to issue permits for the project. 

Army Corps approval of Enbridge’s plan to replace a separate section of the pipeline on the floor of the Straits of Mackinac has been fast tracked under President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring a national energy emergency, but the Bad River section of the pipeline is still moving forward under the normal approval process. 

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Bad River Band and its attorneys will present to the Corps their finding that the proposed rerouted pipeline, which would pass the Bad River upstream of the reservation, threatens the tribe’s water quality and therefore violates the Clean Water Act. 

The tribe’s presentation is scheduled to take all day Tuesday and some of Wednesday. Members of the public will then be able to provide public comment during a virtual hearing and send written comments for 30 days after the hearing. 

Robert Blanchard, the tribe’s chairman, says he’s working to protect the tribe’s resources and way of life by bringing the challenge. 

“Ultimately, we are protecting our resources. We’re downstream from this project. If it were to go in, were to happen, there’s a lot at stake just with how this will affect our waters,” he says. “We have one of the biggest wild rice areas on the Great Lakes. We have a lot of medicines that I and members of my community collect that have been around for hundreds of years, and we have hunting and fishing rights that will be affected. You know, if we can’t use those because of what’s happening upstream, then that will affect our way of life.” 

Juli Kellner, a spokesperson for Enbridge, says the hearings this week are an important step for completing the project, which she adds won’t affect water quality. 

“Extensive and thorough analysis by leading, third-party experts has confirmed that construction impacts will be temporary and isolated, have no measurable impact on water quality, and will not violate the Bad River Band’s water quality standards,” Kellner says. “The project will have environmental protections and restoration plans in place, as approved by state regulators. State permits were issued last fall. We’re confident the Corps is close to completing its process which has included more than five years of public input, expert studies, and rigorous review. In fact, this is one of the most studied projects in Wisconsin’s history.” 

Under the Clean Water Act, if the Corps finds that the project will adversely affect a downstream jurisdiction’s water quality and there are no conditions that can be put on the permit to ensure water quality standards aren’t violated, the permit cannot be granted, according to the tribe’s attorney, Stefanie Tsosie. 

“We are presenting evidence to the Army Corps that the band’s water quality standards will be affected, and there are no conditions that they can put on the project permit such that they can issue it,” she says. “So, I think our hope here is one, to show how much the project is going to impact the advanced water quality, but then two, urge the Corps to not issue the section 404 permit eventually.” 

But the hearing is taking place as the Trump administration has worked to encourage more extraction of natural resources, boost the oil industry and go easier on polluters. Last week, the climate-focused news outlet Grist reported that under Trump, the EPA has practically stopped enforcing the country’s environmental laws. 

Tsosie says all the tribe can work with is what the law says. 

“Well, the standard in the Clean Water Act is pretty clear,” she says. “And that’s statute, so that’s what we’re going with.” 

Blanchard says he can’t forecast what the Corps is going to do, but he can just make his best case that granting the permit will be harmful to everyone who lives downstream. 

“I wish I had that crystal ball to be able to forecast that, but I don’t, so what we’re going to do tomorrow is do our very best to convince them that this is the way it should be,” he says. “We need to look after our Mother Earth, to pay attention to what we’re doing, what’s happening to it, and like I said before, it’s going to affect not just our way of life and not just those that live in the region, not just us as Anishinaabe people, but everybody.” 

If the Corps grants the permit, that decision could still be challenged in court.

Wisconsin Fair Maps Coalition by Tony Webster CC BY 2.0 A yard sign in Mellen, Wisconsin reads: "This Time Wisconsin Deserves Fair Maps," paid for by the Fair Elections Project, FairMapsWI.com. The political sign supports redistricting legislation to reform gerrymandering.

A lawsuit filed Thursday seeks to have the Wisconsin Supreme Court declare the state’s current congressional maps unconstitutional because they pack a “substantial share” of the state’s Democratic voters into only two of eight districts. 

The lawsuit, filed against the Wisconsin Elections Commission by the Democratic law firm Elias Law Group on behalf of nine Wisconsin voters, seeks to have the case bypass the lower courts and be taken up directly by the state Supreme Court. The filing comes one month after the state elected Susan Crawford to the Court, maintaining a 4-3 liberal majority on the body until at least 2028. 

“Wisconsin’s congressional map is antithetical to virtually every principle necessary to sustain a representative democracy,” the lawsuit states. “It impermissibly disadvantages voters based on their political views and partisan affiliation, systematically disfavoring Democrats because they are Democrats. By packing the substantial share of Wisconsin’s Democrats into just two congressional districts, while cracking other Democratic communities into uncompetitive Republican districts, the map condemns the party that regularly splits or wins the statewide vote to permanent minority status in the state’s congressional delegation.” 

The lawsuit argues that the nine voters are deprived of their rights because they are Democratic voters who have been drawn into districts that prevent them from electing their chosen candidates. 

In 2021, Gov. Tony Evers and Republicans in control of the Legislature reached a stalemate in negotiations over new congressional and legislative maps, which required the Court to step in. The Court, then controlled by a 4-3 conservative majority, ruled that it would only consider proposed new maps under a “least change” standard — meaning maps had to adhere as closely as possible to the maps that Republicans instituted in 2011. Those 2011 maps were considered among the most extreme partisan gerrymanders in the country. 

In 2022, the Court ultimately chose congressional maps proposed by Evers, but the lawsuit argues that the Court rejected the “least change” approach when it declared the legislative maps unconstitutional in 2023 and should therefore do the same for the congressional maps. 

Last year the Court rejected a similar effort. 

“This Court has since determined that the novel ‘least change’ approach that directly led to this result lacked any basis in this Court’s precedents, the Wisconsin Constitution, or past Wisconsin redistricting practice,” the lawsuit states. “Yet the congressional map adopted under the “least change” approach is now in effect and will remain in effect for the remainder of the decade absent this Court’s action.”

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden receives the endorsement of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden says he’s working on a proposal that would alter two current work authorization programs to make it easier for businesses including farms and hotels to hire immigrant workers. 

Van Orden, who sits on the House agriculture committee, told the news outlet NOTUS that he’s working with Trump administration officials on a proposal to alter the H-2A and H-2B visa programs. Both programs currently provide temporary work visas for people working seasonally. 

The H-2A program, which is targeted at seasonal farm labor, has frustrated Wisconsin dairy farmers because year-round workers, including in dairy, are not eligible for the program. Immigrant workers comprise an estimated 70% of the labor force on Wisconsin dairy farms. 

“Rocks are heavy. Trees are made of wood. Gravity is real. There’s 20 million illegal aliens here that have been floating agriculture, hospitality and construction for decades, and we need their labor,” Van Orden told NOTUS.

Van Orden said the proposal is in line with the Trump administration’s increased immigration enforcement efforts because it doesn’t offer a pathway to citizenship or encourage an increase in unauthorized crossings of the border while making it easier for people to come to the U.S. to work. 

“That’s why people come here illegally, because it’s so hard to come here legally,” Van Orden said. “We’re all working towards the goal of making sure that our economy can maintain its relevancy.”

The lobby of the Wisconsin Institutes for Medical Research, where researchers say pauses to federal grants have stifled science. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)

Earlier this year, Dr. Avtar Roopra, a professor of neuroscience at UW-Madison, published research that shows a drug typically used to treat arthritis halts brain-damaging seizures in mice that have a condition similar to epilepsy. The treatment could be used to provide relief for a subset of people with epilepsy who don’t get relief from other current treatments.

But even as the culmination of a decade-long project was making headlines as a possible breakthrough for the 50 million people worldwide with epilepsy, Roopra’s research was put on hold because the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under President Donald Trump has stopped reviewing grant requests. 

Now, months after his funding was paused, Roopra says he is facing the choice between cutting corners in experiments to save costs or laying off research staff — which comes with its own loss of years of experience and institutional knowledge. 

“Experiments are being trimmed down,” Roopra says. “So the perfect experiment, which is what every experiment must be, we’re now trying to reanalyze and say, ‘Well, can we get by with less?’ If we do, we’re not going to have the perfect answer, and that’s always a danger.”

Roopra’s lab is currently working on an experiment comparing data from healthy mouse brains to diseased brains and, ideally, he’d have ten of each. But to save costs he now has to use three of each. The result is that the conclusions that can be made from the data are less certain, which only creates more expenses in the long term. 

“What that means is we’ll still get some data, but the confidence we have in our conclusions will be drastically reduced,” he says. “And so any experiments we then decide to do based on that will be on more shaky ground, and experiments further on that will be on even shakier ground. And so you have this propagating knock-on effect, but ultimately, the conclusions you get, they’re going to have to be interpreted cautiously, whereas, if we did the perfect experiment for which we were expecting funds, we would have robust data, robust conclusions. We could move forward, forthright into trials.”

Science is expensive, Roopra says, because results have to be replicated many times. Cutting grant funding, as the Trump administration has done, results in austerity measures at labs and universities. Those budget cuts mean experiments aren’t repeated as many times, which means data isn’t as complete and results in less work reaching the end goal — treatments that improve people’s lives. 

Roopra says that when a patient sees a doctor and is prescribed a drug, that is just the tip of an iceberg, underneath which are the thousands of hours of research and millions of dollars spent at pharmaceutical companies conducting clinical trials and university departments testing theories.

“So it’s actually going to cost everybody more money if we do it this way, because we have to go back,” he says. “And once this moves to clinical trials, which is our goal, if we don’t have the very best, the most solid foundation for doing so, if that trial goes ahead and it fails, it may never be done again. Because trials cost hundreds of millions of dollars, you’ve got to get it right the first time. So that’s what this new normal looks like.”

Roopra’s work is just one research focus in one department on one campus. Wisconsin institutions alone receive about $750 million annually from the NIH. The Medical College of Wisconsin has lost at least $5 million in research grants since Trump took office. 

The cuts affect “every lab, every department, and we’re very biomedical-research centric, but it’s also happening outside of biomedical research,” Dr. Betsy Quinlan, chair of UW-Madison’s neuroscience department, says. “It’s happening in physics and it’s happening in engineering. It’s happening to all research, environmental science.”

Researchers in Wisconsin have had at least $26.8 million in expected grant funding terminated, according to data compiled by Grant Watch, a project to track cuts to grant funding at the NIH and National Science Foundation (NSF). 

“I’ve heard a lot of panic in the community as if the support that the federal government has for science has ended and that science is no longer the priority,” NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said at an event at the Medical College of Wisconsin earlier this month. “One of the reasons I was delighted to be able to come here was to assure people that is not true.”

Nonetheless, among the terminated grants here in Wisconsin are projects to study science misinformation in Black communities, how to engage the public in water stewardship in urban areas such as Milwaukee, the effect of technology on children’s development, the cardiovascular side effects of hormone treatment on transgender men and ways to increase HIV prevention measures among gay men in rural areas. 

“It’s vital that we adopt reforms, real reforms in the research enterprise of this country, so that we depoliticize it, ground it in reality and build a culture of respect for dissent and free speech,” Bhattacharya said.

But discoveries can come from unexpected places, says Quinlan, who warns that the top-down approach to approving research grants that the administration appears to be moving toward will stifle scientific exploration. 

“If the agency says, ‘Here’s a very narrow range of things we will fund,’ it will squash all creativity and real discovery, because real discovery comes when you see something that is unexpected and you follow the unexpected lead,” she says. 

While the cuts to grants are having an immediate impact on research in Wisconsin, there are also concerns about morale among lab staff and a “brain drain” as researchers choose to leave the U.S.  or even abandon science entirely. 

“The biggest problem I think most researchers are facing is the uncertainty and decline in morale that these changes have wrought,” Jo Handelsman, director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, says. “These are extremely real and fairly devastating effects on the research community in terms of what’s already happened, almost every week there’s a wave of NIH termination. No one feels their grant is going to continue for sure. That’s a difficult way to do research.”

For decades, scientists have come from all over the world to work in the U.S. Now cuts to grants and the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies are changing that. Last week, after decisions from a number of judges, the Trump administration walked back an effort to cancel the visas of 27 students at University of Wisconsin schools. Roopra says those fears hurt research. 

“Every minute that that researcher is worried is a minute they’re not thinking about the science,” says Roopra, whose work has also focused on breast cancer. “And so what it looks like is a continuous, chronic fear, which pushes us to think about maybe looking at other options, which we’d rather not do.”

Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-WI) speaks to reporters on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building following a vote on July 25, 2024 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Tierney L. Cross/Getty Images)

U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Prairie du Chien) has said he’s opposed to Republican efforts to make changes to the federal government’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), more commonly known as food stamps, even though he voted for the Republican-authored federal budget blueprint that calls for more than $200 billion in cuts to programs including SNAP. 

Despite voting for the budget blueprint, earlier this week Van Orden co-sponsored legislation that states he’s against a budget bill that would reduce Medicaid and SNAP benefits. 

Republicans in the House of Representatives have been searching for $230 billion in budget cuts for their budget reconciliation bill — which also includes a permanent extension of President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Progress on the bill has stalled as some Republicans have objected to the cuts to popular programs in the blueprint. 

Van Orden sits on the House Agriculture Committee, which oversees SNAP. The committee has been considering a proposal that would, for the first time, pass some of the cost of operating the program on to the states while also adding work requirements and implementing methods to limit future increases to benefits. 

Last week, Van Orden walked out of a Republican House Agriculture briefing and yelled an insult at staff, according to Politico. The outlet also reported he raised concerns that the SNAP changes unfairly penalized Wisconsin during a meeting of House Republicans. 

Democrats said that if Van Orden were really against the cuts, he wouldn’t have voted for the budget blueprint. 

“If Derrick Van Orden really wanted to save Medicaid and SNAP, he should have voted ‘NO’ on the Republican budget that cuts both,” Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Spokesperson Justin Chermol said in a statement, He signaled that Democrats will use the blueprint vote against Van Orden in the 2026 election.

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

A bipartisan group of 150 former federal and state judges criticized the FBI’s arrest of Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan late last month in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. 

The letter, sent on Monday, takes issue with the way federal officials publicized Dugan’s arrest and used it in an attempt to intimidate the judiciary system across the country.

Dugan was arrested and charged with two federal crimes after she directed Eduardo Flores-Ruiz — a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant who appeared in Dugan’s courtroom on misdemeanor battery charges —  to use a side exit when a group of federal agents came to arrest him as part of an immigration enforcement action. 

Dugan herself was arrested a week after Flores-Ruiz, accused of impeding the federal agents. Trump administration l officials quickly drew attention to Dugan’s arrest outside the court. FBI Director Kash Patel posted about the arrest on X and later posted a photo of Dugan in handcuffs being walked out of the Milwaukee County Courthouse. Bondi appeared on cable news to call judges who resist the Trump administration “deranged.”

bondi-letter

The letter states that if Dugan’s case were an emergency she would have been arrested sooner, and since it wasn’t an emergency she didn’t need to be “perp walked” out of the courthouse. She could have been issued a summons to appear before a federal judge, which is common practice in other white-collar criminal cases, according to the letter. 

“The circumstances of Judge Dugan’s arrest make it clear that it was nothing but an effort to threaten and intimidate the state and federal judiciaries into submitting to the Administration, instead of interpreting the Constitution and laws of the United States,” the letter states. “This cynical effort undermines the rule of law and destroys the trust the American people have in the nation’s judges to administer justice in the courtrooms and in the halls of justice across the land.”

Retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Janine Geske is among the letter’s signers.

DNR Secretary-designee Adam Payne and members of the Natural Resources Board at the Jan. 25, 2023 meeting. (Screenshot | DNR)

Gov. Tony Evers on Thursday made two appointments to the Natural Resources Board, the body that sets policy for the state Department of Natural Resources and has been the venue for a number of partisan disputes in recent years. 

Evers reappointed Bill Smith, the board’s current chair, to his seat and appointed former Vernon County conservationist Jeff Hastings. 

Smith was first appointed to the board in 2019 and worked for the DNR for more than 30 years. 

“Over the last several years, the Natural Resources Board has worked on high-profile issues that have captured the attention of the public, and I am glad for the opportunity to continue this important work and advocate for the issues that people across the state feel so passionately about — our state’s green spaces and natural environment,” Smith said in a statement. “My years of experience on the Board lend a unique perspective on the challenges we address as a body, and I am grateful to the governor for the opportunity to continue that work.” 

In addition to working for Vernon County, Hastings worked at Trout Unlimited, serving as project manager of its Driftless Area Restoration Effort to conserve cold water fish habitat in western Wisconsin. Hastings is replacing Marcy West, whose term expired Thursday. 

“I am thrilled to be able to translate my years of work in conservation to the efforts of the Natural Resources Board,” Hastings said. “It is an honor to take up this role, and I look forward to working together with my fellow members to best serve the interests of Wisconsinites and uphold the responsibility we share to preserve and protect our state’s natural resources and wildlife.”

Members of the seven-person Natural Resources Board serve staggered six-year terms to prevent all appointments being made during one governor’s term. Three members are required to be from the northern part of the state, three members must be from the southern part of the state and there is one at-large member. At least three members must have held a hunting, fishing or trapping license in seven of the 10 years before their nomination. 

While the governor appoints members to the board, the Republican controlled Senate confirms them. The board, which has say over hot button issues such as wolf management and water quality standards, has become a regular flash point in the divide between Evers and the Senate. 

Both Hastings and Smith will need to be confirmed to their seats, but state law allows them to fill the role in the meantime.

In 2021, Republicans in the Senate worked with former board chairman Frederick Prehn to keep him in his seat on the board for more than a year after his term’s expiration in an effort to keep appointees of Gov. Scott Walker in control of the board. 

In 2023, the Senate fired four of Evers’ appointees to the board and last year the Senate failed to confirm another Evers board nominee.

The USDA announced earlier this month it was ending a $3 billion program to help farmers use climate-friendly practices. (Preston Keres | USDA)

In the first months of the administration of President Donald Trump, organizations working to keep Wisconsin’s environment healthy have seen cuts to key grant programs. Now they are watching for  Trump’s retreat from environmental protection to hit communities across the state. 

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced it was cancelling the Climate Smart Commodities Program — a $3 billion effort to fund projects across the country to improve soil health, sequester carbon, reduce methane emissions and encourage other climate-friendly farming practices. 

Trump administration officials called the program a “Biden era slush fund,” saying that not enough of the money went directly to farmers. The USDA cancelled projects that did not meet three criteria: a minimum of 65% of funds needed to be going directly to producers, grants must have had one producer enrolled by the end of 2024 and at least one payment must have been made to a producer by the end of 2024. 

“The Partnerships for Climate-Smart Commodities initiative was largely built to advance the green new scam at the benefit of NGOs, not American farmers,” USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins said in a statement. “The concerns of farmers took a backseat during the Biden Administration. During my short time as Secretary, I have heard directly from our farmers that many of the USDA partnerships are overburdened by red tape, have ambiguous goals, and require complex reporting that push farmers onto the sidelines. We are correcting these mistakes and redirecting our efforts to set our farmers up for an unprecedented era of prosperity.”

A USDA fact sheet published last year states that 28 Wisconsin-based projects were funded by the program. One of the organizations receiving funding was the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance, which has worked to protect the Fox and Wolf Rivers — which are connected to Lake Michigan — for more than three decades in the region of the state most densely occupied by industrial agriculture operations. 

On April 22, the Alliance received an official termination notice for two grants it had received through the program to share costs with farmers to institute practices such as cover cropping and no-till planting, according to a statement from the alliance. Both practices help farmers maintain soil health and prevent potentially harmful nutrients such as phosphorus from running off fields and into the local water system. 

The grant funding also supported 10 technical support jobs at county land and water departments, Pheasants Forever and the Wisconsin Farmers Union. The loss of the money has resulted in the cancellation of 37 contracts with farmers, 4,000 acres of planned no-till planting going unfunded and, this fall, 16,000 acres of farmland that may not have cover crops planted. 

In its statement, the Alliance said that government support for programs like these is an investment that helps farmers long term, even if some of the money doesn’t go directly into their hands. 

“We fully support the goal of directing more resources to farmers. In fact, we design our programs with low overhead to ensure dollars go where they matter most,” the Alliance stated. “However, the review process did not account for one important factor: technical assistance is direct farmer support.” 

Just because the money doesn’t go straight to the farmers doesn’t mean they don’t benefit, according to the Alliance.

“Farmers often pay out-of-pocket for the kind of expertise our technical staff provide — support that is essential to the success and longevity of conservation practices,” the statement continued. “Excluding this from the ‘producer-directed’ category overlooks the real-world value of those services. Without that guidance, funding becomes a one-time transaction instead of a long-term investment. Fox-Wolf’s model is built not just on providing financial support, but on ensuring that practices are implemented effectively and sustained over time. That’s what makes our work effective — and why this funding mattered.” 

Jessica Schultz, the Alliance’s executive director, told the Wisconsin Examiner that the goal of the grants was to help the region’s farmers transition to these soil-friendly practices beyond just one season, allowing the organization to help protect the watershed, which is suffering from “excess phosphorus and sediment loading,” in the long term. 

“These practices also improve soil health, but transitioning to a continuous cover system requires a new approach to farm management. This shift can result in short-term yield losses or necessitate investment in new equipment,” Schultz said. “The cost-share provided through our grants would have played a vital role in helping farmers overcome these initial barriers. However, to realize lasting water quality improvements in our rivers and lakes, these conservation practices must be adopted consistently — not just for a single season, but year after year — across the majority of farmland in the basin.”

“The technical assistance offered through our projects was intended to support farmers through this transition, providing both expertise and access to equipment from across the region,” she continued. “Our goal was to foster long-term adoption by equipping producers with the tools and knowledge they need to succeed — not just for one growing season, but for the future health of our local waterways.” 

Climate and sustainability grants worth $100K canceled

The Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance isn’t the only organization that has lost grant funding since Trump’s inauguration. Wisconsin Green Fire has already had two grants, totaling nearly $100,000, canceled, according to Meleesa Johnson, the organization’s executive director. 

The first grant, worth about $32,000, was aimed at working with the Wisconsin Office of Sustainability and Clean Energy to develop resources for local governments seeking to implement climate change mitigation strategies such as improving stormwater management and planting more trees to reduce heat island effects. The second grant was a $65,000 contract with the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service to establish a farm sustainability rewards program. Similar to the alliance’s grant, that program would have given farmers money in exchange for implementing practices such as no-till planting or reducing the use of nitrogen. 

Green Fire had already spent money on getting the farm sustainability program off the ground, and now, according to Johnson, it’s unclear if the organization will be reimbursed. 

“We’re not the only ones,” she said. “There’s a lot of groups out there that have been moving along, doing the work, meeting the benchmarks of contract expectations, and now, well, many of us are, most of us are not being paid for the work that we’ve all begun. So it’s hard. It’s not impossible for organizations to regroup, but it just makes it more difficult.”

Johnson said that this program was about getting money directly to farmers — even if the program’s description used the word “carbon.” 

“First and foremost, this was about getting money into the hands of farmers either already deploying good conservation practices or wanting to, [who] didn’t have the resources to do it,” she said. “This wasn’t about Green Fire. This was about farmers, and we were just developing the metric and the strategies to make sure that high performing farms with good conservation practices were being rewarded for doing really, really good work.” 

Without programs like these, Johnson said, Wisconsin will continue to “see that continual slow degradation of farm fields and water quality.”

The Wisconsin Supreme Court chambers. (Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

An outside investigation found that last year’s leak of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order accepting a case challenging the state’s 1849 abortion law was “likely deliberate,” but was unable to determine its source. 

Last June, Wisconsin Watch published a story detailing the contents of the Court’s draft order agreeing to hear Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin v. Urmanski, the lawsuit challenging the validity of the abortion law. After the leak, all seven members of the Court condemned the order’s release, and the investigation began in August. 

According to a report released Wednesday, investigators interviewed 62 people and reviewed computer records in an effort to find the leak’s source. Despite the inconclusive findings, the report includes a number of recommendations for improving the Supreme Court’s security. 

The draft order was written on June 13 and Wisconsin Watch published its report on June 26. Investigators interviewed the 28 people who had “immediate access” to the draft. They included the seven justices, judicial assistants, law clerks and Supreme Court commissioners, as well as 18 people whose key card data shows they entered the justices’ chambers during that time period, interns and other office staff. 

Investigators requested computer usage data to determine what websites office staff visited during that time frame. The report states, however, that computer usage data from June 13 to 25 is missing. 

“The lack of complete website visitation logs for the period between June 13, 2024 and June 26, 2024 significantly hampered the ability to thoroughly examine the circumstances surrounding the leak,” the report states. “The issue underscores the importance of proper data management, retention, and verification procedures especially when such information is crucial for ongoing investigations.”

No evidence was found during the investigation that would show the leak was caused by an external breach of the Court’s network, according to the report. 

But the report also states that justices and Court staff often send confidential information to the justices’ personal email accounts and leave confidential documents unattended in printer trays. Unauthorized individuals have at times been able to access restricted floors in the Court’s Madison offices, the investigators also found. 

To improve the Supreme Court’s security, the report recommends a number of policy changes. Those include establishing better protocols for the handling of paper copies of confidential documents; stopping the justices’ use of personal email accounts; improving retention of computer history data; and using digital watermarks on confidential documents to ensure “the document remains traceable throughout its lifecycle.”

Audrey Skwierawski, the director of state courts, said in a statement that the Supreme Court would use the report’s recommendations to improve its processes.

“Integrity is the lifeblood of our court system, and we take threats to that integrity very seriously,” Skwierawski said. “Our responsibility now is to respond to and learn from the challenges identified through the investigation. This report gives us an important opportunity to strengthen the systems that support our courts and the public we serve.”

She added that her office is establishing a “Judicial Operations Integrity Task Force” to review the recommendations and proposing ways to prevent similar incidents in the future.

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

Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan’s arrest last week by federal agents is going to make Wisconsin’s court system worse, according to attorneys who practice in the state. 

Earlier this month, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI appeared at the Milwaukee County Courthouse with an administrative warrant to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery, and scheduled for an appearance in Dugan’s courtroom. 

An administrative warrant is not signed by a judge and does not allow agents to enter private spaces to make an arrest like a judicial warrant would. While the agents sat in the hallway outside the courtroom, Dugan told Flores-Ruiz and his attorney to use a side door. The door exits into the same public hallway and one agent rode the same elevator down to the lobby as Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer. Agents let Flores-Ruiz leave the building and then arrested him on the street. 

Last week, FBI agents appeared at the courthouse again to arrest Dugan. She’s been charged with obstructing justice and harboring an individual, both felony counts. Soon after her arrest, and before she had made her initial appearance in front of a judge, President Donald Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel were discussing the case on social media and television, accusing Dugan of being “deranged.” 

Bondi said on Fox News Friday that the charges were filed against Dugan to show the administration was willing to go after anyone, even judges, if they get in the way of their efforts to deport millions of people. Bondi said interfering with ICE agents “will not be tolerated.” 

“What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” Bondi said. “The [judges] are deranged is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today … if you are harboring a fugitive… we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

From the beginning, the case displayed many missteps in an effort to show force and draw attention, says Stephen Kravit, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. 

“It looks like these prosecutors are completely co-opted in Trump World and aren’t really using very good judgment. You should just look at the facts and law, and there’s just no chance they’ll be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Judge Dugan was corruptly intending to avoid a government subpoena, or that she was harboring a fugitive,” he says, calling the charges “crap.”

During the initial arrest of Flores-Ruiz, Kravit questions why DEA and FBI agents are appearing at the courthouse for immigration enforcement actions and why so many agents were needed to serve an administrative warrant. 

“It’s bad for justice on any level. They had six agents there, six to make an unarmed collar of a person who was accused of battery to his roommate,” Kravit says. “And they know he’s not armed. And there’s six of them. Two of them are DEA agents. Those are two agents not enforcing drug laws, which is what they’re charged to do. There’s no drugs involved here, OK? Two of them are FBI agents, who have 100 other different things to do. We probably only have six or seven DEA agents in the state.”

Kravit adds that the whole situation might have gone differently if ICE had gotten a warrant to arrest Flores-Ruiz from a judge rather than one “written by some guy in the office” and it’s going to be difficult for prosecutors to prove Dugan had a corrupt intent by sending Florez-Ruiz out the side door when she could have just been avoiding a “ruckus” outside her door while she’s trying to move on with the court schedule. 

He also takes offense with the way Dugan was “perp walked” out of the courthouse when she could have just been asked to turn herself in; questions why federal prosecutors didn’t bring the case to a grand jury first — which would have been the standard process — and why the country’s most powerful justice officials are discussing the case on cable news. 

“The arrest warrant for the judge is a travesty, but there’s so much reasonable doubt,” he says. “Was she corruptly trying to interrupt a government proceeding? Corruptly? Was somebody paying her money? No, or was she harboring a fugitive? That’s what she’s charged with. Did she harbor a fugitive on any set of facts that you can imagine? That’s what she’s charged with. These are serious felonies. They ruin the woman’s life and all so that Pam Bondi could make a press statement.”

Dugan’s arrest, and the attention her case has brought to ICE operating at county courthouses could have a chilling effect on Wisconsin’s justice system, Jeff Mandell, executive director of Law Forward, says. 

“I do think that there’s a chilling effect to having federal officials prowling a state courthouse to make arrests and absent real danger or exigent circumstances, it feels like that’s not a good thing,” Mandell says. “We want people in our communities to be willing and able to show up in court. We want those people to know that they can do so without feeling like they’re getting entrapped or something like that, and that’s in all of our interests.” 

For immigrants, undocumented or not, appearing in court for any reason now is a fraught decision, which could lead to witnesses to crimes not showing up to testify, Mandell says. 

“If you were just going about your day and something happened to you and this person was a witness, and you needed them to help sort things out in court and things like that, then you know, you didn’t choose your witnesses,” he says.” You didn’t decide who was going to be standing there when you were in an accident or some other misfortune befell you.” 

ICE’s focus on arresting people making court appearances puts those criminal defendants — who have not yet been convicted of a crime — in the position to decide between showing up to court and potentially being picked up by ICE or skipping their court date. Last week, the Wisconsin public defender’s office sent an email to private defense attorneys across the state advising them how to deal with clients asking about ICE operations in courthouses. 

“Explain to the client the consequences of not showing to court like you would to any client,” the email states. “Remember you cannot tell a client not to come but you can explain that ICE has been coming to courthouses and that it may no longer be a safe haven.” 

Mandell says the operations in courthouses and Dugan’s arrest are emblematic of the Trump administration’s worst impulses. 

“I think it reinforces what we’re seeing through day 98 of the administration, what we’re seeing in all kinds of ways in this administration, which is an impatience, a heedlessness, a recklessness, a disregard for norms,” he says. “That many of these folks seem to believe there’s one set of rules for them and a different set of rules for someone else.” 

“So they want respect paid to federal officials, but they are going to trample on state institutions and state officials,” he continues. “They want everyone to follow the law, but they are going to play fast and loose and cut corners, whether that’s using administrative warrants, whether that is avoiding grand juries to bring federal charges.” 

Mandell adds that when Trump was charged with felonies, he was given the privilege of turning himself in to be booked. 

“They want all of the trappings of tremendous respect for their offices, but they are not going to afford even a modicum of respect to others,” Mandell continues, “which we see handcuffing and perp walking Judge Dugan out of the courthouse without even the common courtesy of a phone call to ask if she might be willing to turn herself in, which, of course, is how the President himself insisted on all of his bookings being handled.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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