The Wisconsin Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case that centers on a dispute between state Attorney General Josh Kaul, a Democrat, and the Republican-controlled Legislature about who controls money the Department of Justice is awarded as part of lawsuit settlements. 

The suit is yet another challenge to the lame duck laws Republican legislators and outgoing Gov. Scott Walker enacted in 2018 in the days before the end of Walker’s term and another instance of the Supreme Court stepping in to enforce the separation of powers between Wisconsin’s executive and legislative branches. 

Under several provisions of the lame duck laws, the Legislature sought to limit the executive branch’s authority to spend money. The Supreme Court previously struck down provisions that required the approval of legislative committees before executive agencies could act. 

The Legislature argues that under the law, the attorney general is required to put money from a financial settlement into the state’s general fund, which legislators control through the normal budget process. Kaul argues he can put the settlement funds in accounts controlled by DOJ but doesn’t have the authority to spend those funds without approval from the Legislature’s budget-writing Joint Finance Committee. 

Initially filed in Polk County Circuit Court in 2021, when a conservative majority controlled the Supreme Court, the case appeared in the 2nd District Court of Appeals in 2024 where a 2-1 decision reversed the circuit court’s ruling that Kaul could direct settlement funds into DOJ accounts. 

That majority opinion was authored by Judge Maria Lazar, a conservative judge now running for a seat on the Supreme Court. 

“Despite the legislation expressly designed to bring all settlement funds under legislative control and despite the simple and plain language of that legislation, the Attorney General has continued to act precisely in the manner which the Legislature sought to end,” Lazar wrote.

Generally, conservative legal interpretations of the law involve strict adherence to the exact language of a statute while liberal legal interpretations take into account intent. In this case, that typical structure is flipped. The DOJ argues that it is following the exact language of the law by directing the settlement money into accounts for specific DOJ programs that fall under the umbrella of the general fund and not spending those funds without approval from JFC. DOJ also notes that historically, Wisconsin attorneys general have had broad authority to spend settlement money. 

DOJ attorney Hannah Jurss argued to the Court Wednesday that it isn’t DOJ’s fault the Legislature wasn’t precise enough when crafting the law — though the law has effectively cut off Kaul’s ability to direct the expenditure of settlement funds. 

“We now do not have discretion to expend those monies. So if the intention was to prevent the attorney general’s expenditure of settlement funds as properly understood, it did that,” Jurss said. “There are now monies sitting there that are left to the attorney general’s discretion that the attorney general cannot spend. Instead, I think what the court is seeing in the Legislature’s arguments are unsupported assertions about some sort of broader intent that, frankly, have no support whatsoever in the text of the statutes, in statutory history.” 

Jurss added that a similar structure guides the budget statutes across state government, so if the Court sided with the Legislature, much of the existing budget framework would be affected. She noted programs in the Departments of Tourism and Military Affairs that would be hit. 

“This Court should not cut the wire on the budget statute structure across Wisconsin statutes simply for the Legislature to accomplish its preferred outcome here,” she said. 

Misha Tseytlin, the attorney for the Legislature — whose former position as state solicitor general was cut by the Legislature in the lame duck laws — argued the Court should side with the Legislature to stop Kaul from finding ways around the law. 

“Because the attorney general had found his way around the Legislature’s prior attempt,” Tseytlin said. “I know there’s not a lot of sympathy for the Legislature from the courts, but imagine how frustrating it is. You’re trying to rein in the attorney general, you’re trying to get them to stop these practices, you enact this JFC provision, and they find a way around that.”

U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is calling for a nominating commission to try again to agree on a nominee to be the U.S. attorney for Wisconsin’s Eastern District after interim appointee Brad Schimel’s term in the position expires March 17. 

The judges in the district declined to retain Schimel for the job. Schimel previously served as the Republican attorney general under Gov. Scott Walker and in 2024 he ran unsuccessfully as a conservative for the state Supreme Court. 

Schimel was appointed U.S. attorney by Attorney General Pam Bondi in November after the nominating commission failed to reach consensus on who should fill the job in both the Madison and Milwaukee district offices. 

Last week, Baldwin said Schimel was a “clearly partisan actor” in the federal prosecutor role. 

Historically, Wisconsin’s two senators — including Baldwin and Sen. Ron Johnson — have worked together to name members of the nominating commission which agrees on candidates who are then recommended to the president and attorney general. Restarting the commission would require Baldwin and Johnson to agree on a charter. 

Across the country, the president has generally deferred to the home state senators when choosing U.S. attorneys. 

“I’m glad that the judges of the Eastern District of Wisconsin are respecting the process that Senator Johnson and I have to get high-quality, impartial prosecutors to serve Wisconsin,” Baldwin said in a statement. “It has not always been easy, but the hard work is worthwhile for the people we serve.”

Flocks of poultry in Dane, Jefferson and Walworth counties have been infected with highly pathogenic avian influenza, according to the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. 

The virus has been circulating across North America since 2021, infecting both wild and domesticated birds. The birds on the affected properties will be killed to prevent the further spread of disease, and DATCP has established a 10 kilometer control area around the infected premises in which the movement of poultry is restricted. 

The infected birds in Dane County were in a backyard poultry flock while in Jefferson and Walworth counties the affected birds were in commercial flocks, according to DATCP. 

Officials and farmers in Wisconsin have been managing avian flu infections since spring 2022 when outbreaks across the state shut down poultry shows, exhibits and swap meets. Last year, a dairy herd was quarantined after an infection was discovered. 

DATCP said it is monitoring farm workers at the affected facilities for signs of infection and recommends biosecurity measures to protect flocks and herds near where the current infections were found.

Like many churches, Christ Presbyterian Church on Madison’s near east side displays “welcome” banners outside its front doors. Unlike most churches, those doors are always locked to protect the clients and staff of the Community Immigration Law Center, which works out of offices in the church. 

The locked doors are just one of the many ways CILC has been forced to change as the administration of President Donald Trump seeks to massively decrease the immigrant population in the United States. 

The names of staff members are no longer publicly available on the organization’s website. Legal clinics to provide advice to asylum seekers are no longer being held because the administration has effectively stopped the asylum process. 

Already bursting at the seams of its office spaces in the church, CILC is working this year to grow its staff from eight lawyers and four paralegals to 10 lawyers and 16 paralegals in an effort to fill the gaping need across Wisconsin for immigration attorneys. 

The organization has also beefed up its rapid response capabilities, so when a community organization such as Voces de la Frontera hears about an immigration arrest, that person and their family can be quickly connected with an attorney through CILC. 

Grant Sovern, one of CILC’s co-founders, says that until the last few months, the organization was doing pretty well keeping up with cases — about 300 detention cases since Trump took office.  But with the Trump administration reversing protective orders that had been issued under President Joe Biden and continuing to upend longstanding policies, reinterpret rules and threaten the arrest of new classes of immigrants, CILC needs to do its best to make sure the government is adhering to the law and the Constitution, he adds. 

“The only chance we have for due process is applying the legal system, because the Constitution is still almost working in most of the cases,” Sovern says. “But you can’t just do that on your own. And in immigration, that’s more true because the federal government has a ton of discretion in how they apply those laws and the day-to-day workings of this immigration court.” 

CILC’s legal director, Aissa Olivarez, grew up in the Rio Grande valley near the U.S.-Mexico border. After five years teaching first grade, she attended law school at UW-Madison with the intention of practicing immigration law. She has stayed in Wisconsin because she saw a greater need here than in her home state of Texas, where there’s already robust infrastructure to assist immigrants. 

Growing up Mexican-American near the “militarized border” prepared her for all the tactics that Trump’s ICE has spread across the country, she says. But over the last year, the fear that ICE has caused in Wisconsin’s immigrant communities — particularly as surges of federal agents in neighboring Minnesota and Illinois drew headlines — has put a heavy burden on the CILC staff to be there for their clients. 

“How do we make this sustainable from an emotional point of view?” Olivarez says. She notes that she and her staff are often the first people detained immigrants meet with after their arrest. “And so oftentimes we get a long story or a lot of information that we may not need, but we know how important it is to listen, to lend an ear and to get the facts so that we can complete our mission of making sure that people get strong and good legal advice, but also the mission of just being a human in that space, and providing individuals with the space to talk, with the ability to discuss and ask questions and bring humanity.” 

But, she says, that can mean “we are carrying a very large emotional load, especially watching the way that the dismantling of people’s rights and the dismantling of our immigration courts is happening. There’s a lot of grief involved, and a lot of grief that we have to navigate, knowing oftentimes what people are facing, what they’re going through, and also worry for our own families.” 

Olivarez says it can be daunting to face the caseload, knowing there are about 1,000 days left in Trump’s term, understanding the pace is not likely to let up and trying to avoid burning out. But she feels CILC is playing an essential role for migrant communities across the state. 

“Can we keep up with that in an emotional way? Because the stakes are so high, because it means permanent separation from a family member, permanent exile from the United States, that we are well enough so that we can do the work. But we also haven’t faced this as an organization before,” she says. “And it’s really easy — because of all of the stories we hear and the people we see in these facilities — to lose hope. But I can tell you, the people who are not losing hope are the people who are being impacted. You know, they want to keep fighting. They stay strong through months and years of detention, and it’s a complete privilege and honor to be able to be trusted by the community in that way.” 

Natalia Lucak, the daughter of Czech immigrants, is CILC’s senior program manager. Lucak previously ran the organization’s asylum clinics, assisting asylum applicants with getting the proper paperwork filed to the right agencies. 

Now, she’s working with immigrants in Wisconsin — many of whom have come to the country with legal status only to lose that status because of Trump administration policy changes — to prepare for what happens if ICE arrests them. 

When Lucak started working in immigration law during President Barack Obama’s second term, “the goal and the hope was to help people stay here,” she says. Now she feels like she’s had her “wings clipped” because her job has become all about managing and assessing risk. 

Her job has become “preparing people for the possibility of being detained and advising them that you know what could happen if they’re detained, the likelihood of success in their case,” Lucak says.

“Now it’s just a very different calculus, especially when I talk to families, and as they think about, you know, what would happen to their children if they’re detained?” she says. “How would prolonged detention impact the family? And how much risk are they willing to take to stay here and just hope that things are okay when we are seeing increased detention numbers across the country and certainly in Wisconsin in the last few weeks.” 

For the first time, Lucak says she’s helping families weigh if it’s better to leave the country on their own before they get arrested and deported. There is a lot for her clients to weigh, all while they’re scared for the safety of their loved ones.  

“This administration is random. It’s just by luck that you’ve avoided [arrest] so far And that luck may run out, and who knows when? And so let’s plan,” she says. “People are crying often doing these consultations, and especially if they have kids, maybe they have U.S. citizen kids.”

The questions can be endless. 

“I’ve had various clients who have kids who are special needs, and so they’re U.S. citizens,” Lucak says. “They’re accessing certain programs here. And you’re kind of deciding, do we leave on our own? Do we uproot? Do I risk being deported and being separated from my child? Would my child stay here? My child go with me? How would my child come with me? Like even preparing, does your child have a passport? Like, does your child, if you’re gonna leave, or if you’re detained and deported, and your child needs to follow, that child needs a passport. There are all these documents you need to get in line. And so it’s really just like, do you have a family plan, who’s gonna pick up your kid if you’re detained there at school?” 

Even amid all the uncertainty, all the stress and the burden of being a small staff working out of some church offices to thwart the full weight of the federal government, Lucak says she and her colleagues plan to just keep trying to figure it out. 

“We are gonna find ways to fight and make them follow the law, make them follow due process, make them do these things,” she says. “And you know, they do have our back up to a wall because of all the power that they hold, especially when it comes to immigration.”

She adds that the staff has to be nimble “and not hold being too precious about things that worked under Biden. Like it’s not going to work anymore, and we just have to do it differently.”

Dozens of western Wisconsin residents packed into rooms at the Eau Claire State Office Building this week for the start of a contested case hearing against the state Department of Natural Resource’s decision to grant a permit allowing Ridge Breeze Dairy to expand its operations to include 6,500 cows. 

The Pierce County dairy currently houses 1,700 cows. The expansion would make it the largest factory farm in the seven county region of Barron, Buffalo, Dunn, Pepin, Pierce, Polk and St. Croix counties. 

Local opponents to the Ridge Breeze expansion have been working against the plan since 2024, packing  public hearings and combing through public documents. The activists have uncovered inconsistencies in the dairy’s application — which first had to be sent back by the DNR because the farm’s plan for managing its manure said it would spread liquid manure on nearby fields without the permission of the property owners.

If expanded, the farm would produce 80 million gallons of liquid manure every year. 

Despite the initial application’s problems and the widespread opposition, the DNR approved the expansion in February 2025. 

Tuesday’s hearing was the beginning of the process to challenge that DNR permit decision. The contested case will be decided by Wisconsin Administrative Law Judge Angela Chaput Foy. Foy’s decision will be appealable to the state circuit court system. 

On Tuesday, activists involved in the fight against Ridge Breeze tied their work for the past two years to the recent efforts in other parts of the state by residents working to stop the construction of massive AI data centers in their communities. 

Both conflicts have brought together people of diverse political persuasions to fight outside corporate interests that try to assert the authority to build whatever they want, no matter what the ramifications are for local water, energy use, economies or quality of life. 

“Whether it’s a data center coming into your community, or a massive factory farm like Ridge Breeze, everyday people need to continue to stand together, organize and create greater change that will protect and put the power back into the hands of regular people,” Danny Akenson, an organizer with Grassroots Organizing Western Wisconsin, said at a news conference before the hearing. 

Akenson told the Wisconsin Examiner that it’s no surprise that people of “all political stripes” are seeking basic protections for their communities against corporate extraction. 

“The reality is that rural America — and really communities of all different sizes, rural, urban, suburban — are standing up against massive corporate overreach and the extraction of wealth from their communities into the pockets of shareholders and investors,” he said. 

GRO-WW has been heavily involved in the fight against Ridge Breeze and against the growing popularity of factory farms across western Wisconsin. The organization helped connect the plaintiffs in the contested case with attorneys from Midwest Environmental Advocates to dispute the permit decision. 

Their petition against the permit asks that at the very least it be modified to make sure the DNR is monitoring the local water so the farm is held accountable if the state’s groundwater pollution rules are violated. 

“There is substantial concern as to whether Ridge Breeze can appropriately manage the manure and process wastewater it intends to generate following expansion,” the petition for review states. 

The day began with several hours of public testimony. Members of the public packed into the small conference room where the hearing was held and two overflow rooms, while dozens more watched on the Zoom stream. 

Only opponents of the farm expansion testified, largely rehashing the arguments they’ve made against the expansion for years — that it doesn’t have an adequate manure spreading plan, that the farm traffic will be too loud, that the farm’s location will harm local trout streams and that the already high level of nitrates in the local groundwater will only be made worse.  

Juliet Tomkins, a retired agricultural lawyer who operates a small Pierce County farm, questioned how the judge would feel if the case were about her drinking water.

“I would like you to think about how you would feel if the regulator of your water supply that keeps you and your family and your loved ones safe failed to keep 80 million gallons of contaminants annually out of your water supply because the regulators inadequately reviewed the contamination procedures, and the result of this inadequate oversight was the permanent contamination of your water, the groundwater, for generations to come,” Tomkins said.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission has recommended that the Racine County District Attorney file charges against 13 people for unlawful irregularities in the petitions collected during a failed attempt to recall Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos in 2024. 

In a letter sent on Friday, WEC said that it was recommending charges against two people who collected signatures on behalf of the recall effort who had listed addresses that aren’t their residences on paperwork they submitted for  the signature drive. WEC recommended charges against another 11 people for turning in petition paperwork that listed signatures from people who later said they did not sign to support the recall. 

However WEC did not recommend charges against recall effort organizer Matthew Snorek. The letter states that in a complaint to WEC, Vos made “vague allegations” against Snorek, but they weren’t enough to confirm that he had broken a state law. 

The recall effort at the center of the allegations was the second failed recall drive against Vos in 2024. A faction of the Wisconsin Republican party, particularly around Vos’ Racine County district, has become especially engaged in conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. The recall drives were started because of what organizers charged was Vos’  failure to adequately investigate claims that the 2020 election was stolen from President Donald Trump. 

This is also not the first time that conservatives have run afoul of the rules while opposing Vos. The state ethics commission alleged that during the 2022 primary elections, a political action committee connected to Trump, the Langlade County Republican Party and then-state Rep. Janel Brandtjen worked to illegally funnel $40,000 to the campaign of Vos’ primary challenger. 

Vos announced last month that he will not seek reelection this year, ending his time as the state’s longest serving Assembly Speaker. For the past eight years under Wisconsin’s divided government, he has been the most powerful Republican in the state. 

In a statement, Vos called the recommended charges “just another example of how these recall attempts were a complete waste of time and money when we hold regularly scheduled elections every two years.”

Three new county sheriff’s offices have signed agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement that allow deputies to enforce federal immigration law. 

The sheriffs of Dunn, Green Lake and Walworth counties have signed the agreements under ICE’s 287(g) program. ICE records show the Dunn County agreement was signed Feb. 10 while the other two are still pending. All three counties have signed on to the program under the warrant service officer model, which allows county sheriff’s deputies to arrest people targeted by ICE with administrative warrants. 

With the three new agreements, 19 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties have joined the 287(g) program. Most of the counties have joined the program under the warrant service model while Kenosha and Marathon counties have joined under the jail enforcement model — which allows departments to notify ICE of undocumented immigrants detained in county jails. Kewaunee, Sauk and Waukesha counties have signed up under both models. 

Dodge County does not have a 287(g) agreement with ICE but for years has had a contract to hold federal detainees in its county jail, which includes people arrested by ICE. 

Immigrants’ rights and civil rights groups have criticized the 287(g) agreements, arguing that law enforcement openly stating its support for ICE and its often aggressive tactics discourages immigrants of all legal statuses from reporting crimes as victims or coming forward as witnesses. 

“287(g) agreements do not make anyone safer — they stoke fear and erode trust, deter residents from reporting crime, and divert local resources away from addressing real public safety concerns and the needs of the community,” the ACLU of Wisconsin said in a statement in January after the Kenosha and Sauk county sheriffs signed their agreements.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul said that the nearly eight hours of hearings held by the newly established Committee on the Oversight of the Department of Justice this week amounted to “political theater.” 

In a series of hearings Tuesday and Wednesday, the committee, chaired by Senate President Mary Felzkowski (R-Tomahawk), dug into allegations that the DOJ violated state rules when it hired out of state lawyers on contract to enforce the state’s environmental regulations. 

The attorneys were given fellowships to work as special assistant attorneys general through a New York University program tied to former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The testimony obtained by the committee included input from Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, the state’s largest business lobby and one of the state Republican Party’s most powerful allies, and a dairy farmer who was subject to an enforcement action by the state after he operated his factory farm without a permit for six years. 

The Republican members of the committee said the fellowships presented “troubling” opportunities for a third-party organization to exert partisan influence over the work of the DOJ. Throughout the testimony, Republicans also complained about the specifics of state employment classifications, the timeliness of paperwork filing and previous contributions Bloomberg has made to the Democratic Party of Wisconsin. 

At a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Kaul compared the committee’s work to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman’s widely maligned review of the 2020 election. 

“Increasingly, what we’re seeing are actions from the committee that I would describe as Gableman-esque,” Kaul said. “This is clearly an exercise in political theater, not a substantive exercise, and that’s really unfortunate, because the reality is that we do have serious issues to address on behalf of the people of Wisconsin, and we have progress to make.”

Kaul also questioned how an investigation into outside influence on state government could give the state’s most powerful lobbying organization a multi-hour platform to testify.

“The purported basis for this is to investigate outside influence, and the only outside influence that is going on here is the outside influence on our Legislature,” he said. “Just yesterday, the state’s most powerful lobbying organization got a platform to testify from this Legislature. We did not hear from a single person who was impacted by the harmful pollution, who was there to talk about those harms. So we have a one-sided presentation from the Legislature, and any concerns about outside influence are ones that relate to the actions of the Legislature, not the Department of Justice.”

Republicans on the committee complained that the fellows were paid through the university program while officially being classified by the state as volunteers and that Kaul seeking this outside funding for staff attorneys amounted to an end-run around the Legislature’s authority to decide the department’s budget. 

“If you’re truly a leader of a department, you shouldn’t give up. You seem to believe in certain things, but you’ve given up on trying to help with your own state resources,” Sen. Cory Tomczyk (R-Mosinee) said, asking why Kaul didn’t ask the Legislature for additional money to fund environmental enforcement attorneys. 

Kaul said he’s “confident the current majority will not fund additional environmental positions.” 

Tomczyk also spent a significant chunk of his testimony asking about the timing of DOJ filing paperwork to officially hire the fellows, including when they took their oaths of office and got licensed to practice law in Wisconsin. He compared delays in the oaths being completed with the Tuesday testimony of dairy farmer Phil Mlsna — who missed a filing deadline with the DNR, causing the loss of his dairy farm’s permit.

Felzkowski, a former member of the Joint Finance Committee, has been among the Republicans most hostile to the state’s environmental rules and conservation programs. As a member of JFC, she anonymously held up the Pelican River Forest conservation project and has been heavily opposed to the extension of the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program. 

Throughout her questioning of Kaul, she argued that funding environmental enforcement is inherently partisan. 

“You want the citizens of the state of Wisconsin to believe this is a non-partisan organization without a personal agenda or their own private agenda,” Felzkowski said. 

Kaul said enforcing the state’s environmental laws is a partisan issue only in that many Republicans don’t believe the government should address climate change. 

“Well, what I would say is that the center is focused on environmental protection issues, and so a lot of it is a question of if you view protecting the environment, addressing climate change, working to protect safe and clean water, as partisan issues or not,” Kaul said. 

Following the hearing’s conclusion, the Republican members of the committee held a press conference to say they’d assess the testimony and release a report. During the press conference, Tomczyk questioned if the DOJ should be “punished” over the fellowship issue. 

“If we’re going to punish a farmer for not having his paperwork done, should the DOJ be punished for not having theirs?” he asked, adding that he has “some ideas” for what the punishment would look like. 

The Democrats on the committee said that after two days of testimony, Republicans couldn’t point to any specific cases in which the fellows’ work on a case was unduly influenced. 

“What was clear from the testimony over the last two days is there was not one, not one example of any legal matter or enforcement action that was worked on by these legal fellows that pointed to any special interest,” Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay), a former environmental attorney, said. “They were working on bread-and-butter environmental enforcement actions pertaining to water quality, CAFO regulation, wetland remediation and the like, everything was what we need as a state to protect our communities.”

A coalition of Wisconsin environmental advocacy groups filed a lawsuit Monday challenging an administrative law judge’s decision to uphold the Department of Natural Resource’s permit approval to reroute the Enbridge Line 5 oil pipeline across northern Wisconsin. 

The petition, filed in Iron County Circuit Court by Clean Wisconsin and Midwest Environmental Advocates on behalf of the Sierra Club, 350 Wisconsin and the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, argues that the administrative law judge ignored extensive evidence that the pipeline reroute will damage local waterways. 

A similar lawsuit has also been filed by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The tribe for years has fought against the pipeline, which currently runs across its land. The reroute is happening because a federal judge previously ruled the pipeline must be moved off tribal land, but the tribe argues the new proposed route will continue to harm its water resources. 

The administrative judge upheld the DNR’s permit decision after six weeks of hearings last year. The petitions from the environmental groups and the tribe move the case from the administrative legal process to the state’s court system. Separately, a challenge has been made against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Line 5 permit decisions. 

“We are more committed than ever to protecting Wisconsin’s waters from the irreversible harm this project threatens to cause. We believe the administrative ruling incorrectly decided critical legal and factual issues, and we are confident that our efforts to hold DNR and Enbridge accountable to Wisconsin’s environmental laws will ultimately be vindicated,” MEA Senior Staff Attorney Rob Lee said in a statement.

U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany has enlisted U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in a long-running dispute between the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and the town of Lac du Flambeau over the town residents’ access to roads on tribal land. 

Tiffany, the Republican candidate in Wisconsin’s race for governor this fall, has twice tried to get Bondi to weigh in on the issue, first in an August letter and then earlier this month when Bondi testified before the House Judiciary Committee Feb. 11. 

The dispute has been running since January 2023 when the tribe placed barricades on four roads after negotiations over easements between the tribe, town and title companies broke down. The town sits within the tribe’s reservation and cannot be accessed without crossing tribal land. 

The easements had expired, yet the town and its residents continued to use the tribal roads without payment, which the tribe said amounted to trespassing.The town paid at least $600,000 for road access and the tribe eventually removed the barricades but the federal government later sued the town on the tribe’s behalf. Last August, a federal judge sided with the town, ruling that the roads are public and must remain open. 

After the federal court ruling, a town resident told Wisconsin Public Radio that he was hopeful the decision would calm the chaos of the dispute and a town official said the tribe has been “patient” with the town despite the fact that the community essentially did not pay rent on its use of the land for a decade. 

But now the town has requested reimbursement for the payments it made to the tribe and, at the Feb. 11 committee hearing, Tiffany said the dispute amounted to “extortion.” 

“The perpetrators of this, the tribe out there, they demanded compensation from the town. I would call it extortion,” Tiffany said.

Bondi responded by saying “we would more than welcome working with you.” 

In a statement, Lac du Flambeau Tribal President John Johnson Sr. said the town’s payments to the tribe were “voluntary and lawful” and that Tiffany’s claim was “inaccurate and inflammatory.” 

“To mislead the public by calling the tribe ‘perpetrators’ is not only irresponsible, it is a direct attack on our sovereignty, our treaty rights and our reputation as a sovereign government,” Johnson said.

More than 30 months after Gov. Tony Evers signed the 2023-25 biennial budget into law, setting aside $125 million to help Wisconsin communities mitigate PFAS pollution in the state’s drinking water, the Wisconsin Assembly on Friday unanimously passed two bills to get the money out the door. 

This is the second time legislation to spend the money has reached this point after Evers vetoed a PFAS bill in 2024 over objections that the bill was too friendly to polluters. Since the money was set aside, the issue has been mired in partisan feuding. 

As the Assembly scrambled to finish its work by its self-imposed Friday deadline before lawmakers head home to campaign for reelection, negotiations over the specific language of the legislation pushed the vote, initially scheduled for Thursday, past 8:30 p.m. on Friday evening. 

The two bills were among the last pieces of legislation the Assembly voted on in normal session before adjourning. 

The bill establishes programs to spend the money through grants for private well owners and municipal drinking water systems, boosting the state’s testing capabilities and research into PFAS at Universities of Wisconsin institutions. 

Republicans, with the support of business groups, have been trying to craft legislation that protects “innocent landowners” from being held responsible for PFAS pollution while Democrats and environmental groups have argued the initial bill too widely defined “innocent,” letting polluters off the hook while weakening the state’s toxic spills law. 

The return of the bill this session was met with renewed optimism that a bipartisan agreement could be reached. However, after Republicans narrowed the definition of innocent landowners, business groups such as Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce and representatives of the state’s paper industry abandoned the effort, saying they couldn’t support the proposal anymore. 

Throughout the two and a half years of debate, residents of communities affected by PFAS pollution have continued to struggle, often calling for the Legislature to instead enact standards for the acceptable level of PFAS in the state’s groundwater — the source of drinking water for the hundreds of thousands of Wisconsinites with private wells. 

PFAS pollution has affected larger communities such as Madison and Wausau and small communities such as French Island near La Crosse and the town of Stella near Rhinelander. The class of man-made chemical compounds was widely used in certain kinds of firefighting foams and household goods such as nonstick pans and fast-food wrappers. PFAS have been connected to health problems such as developmental problems in children and certain types of cancer. 

On the floor of the Assembly Friday evening, with lawmakers desperate to hit the road, only three representatives spoke on the bill. 

Rep. Lori Palmeri (D-Oshkosh), a member of the environment committee that produced the bills, touted the measures as a “great compromise” despite late-night final revisions to the bill, while Rep. Jill Billings (D-La Crosse) recounted the “horrifying” struggles PFAS contamination has caused for her constituents on French Island. 

Rep. Jeff Mursau (R-Crivitz), one of the bill’s authors, said the bill is a “small step” toward fully solving the PFAS problem in the state but that the body was finally passing a bill that was the hardest to get across the finish line of his whole career in the Assembly. 

Sen. Eric Wimberger (R-Oconto), one of the co-authors and lead negotiators on the PFAS legislation, celebrated the compromise that came from long negotiations with Evers and the Department of Natural Resources. 

“Today’s vote in the Assembly will bring a massive, multiyear effort to address PFAS contamination in Wisconsin even closer to fruition,” he said in a release sent before 6 p.m. Thursday, more than a day before the Assembly actually voted. “Wisconsinites across the state have suffered for far too long from PFAS polluting their land and water. Bill passage will put innocent communities and landowners on the best path forward to remediate PFAS while ensuring they are not punished or forced into bankruptcy over pollution they did not cause.”

In a week in which the Assembly broke through on a handful of issues that have long been mired in the Legislature’s partisan muck, Wimberger said the bipartisan compromise was notable. 

“Even a broken squirrel can find a clock twice a day,” he said.

Republicans in the Legislature have been working for years to pass legislation that would allow sandhill cranes to be hunted in Wisconsin. GOP lawmakers have introduced several bills on the issue. 

A 2024 legislative study committee assessed ways in which lawmakers could help manage crop damage caused by the birds as well as how to manage a crane hunt. But after introducing a package, they amended it down to just a crane hunt measure. 

GOP lawmakers have spent a few weeks working to pass legislation that would add some regulations on the use of high powered wake boats on the state’s water bodies. The boats have drawn ire from lakeshore residents across the state because of the large waves they create, which can damage shorelines. People also often bring the boats to several different boats, which raises the risk of spreading invasive species in the boat’s ballast. 

Both bills have drawn criticism from members of the public. Environmental and wildlife advocates have questioned the crane bill’s lack of crop damage provisions and complained that Republicans are pushing through a hunt without fully understanding current science. 

The wake boat bill has drawn complaints that it is too friendly to the wealthy wake boat owners and weakens local authority to establish more stringent wake boating rules. 

On Thursday, when the Republican-authored wake boat bill introduced just 10 days earlier came up for a vote on the Assembly floor, GOP members  offered an amendment that jammed in the Republican-authored crane hunt proposal. 

Democrats objected to the last minute combination, with Reps. Angela Stroud (D-Ashland) and Vincent Miresse (D-Stevents Point) calling it “bad governance.” 

“I’m quickly trying to read the amendment to see which of the bills this is, is it the one from the study committee that a bipartisan committee put together, or is it the one that was totally butchered in the Senate, and I don’t have time to read through it, because this is just bad governance,” Stroud said. “I’m going to be a no because these are two different bills completely. But I just want to point out, as I probably just said, that this is not what the people from Wisconsin expect us to be doing when we’re voting on things that deeply affect them.” 

Miresse said the passage of the wake boat bill prioritizes the input of wealthy boat owners and was rushed at the expense of “the vast majority of stakeholders” who were “united against this bill.”

Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers) said it only makes sense to combine the bills because cranes live in marshy areas. 

“I know that it’s common on that side of the aisle to get confused when we’re trying to do good government here, but let me walk them through the germaneness of how these are two very relevant and important things to have together,” he said. “For those who aren’t aware, Sandhill Cranes like to nest near water lines. They like to be in marshy areas. You know, where we often find marshy areas around? Lake shores. You know what’s a great way to protect our lake shores, keeping those high speed, high wake boats away from those shorelines.”

The vote on the combined bill caused further controversy when Republicans moved ahead with a voice vote while Democrats tried to call for a roll call vote. The spat froze the work of the Assembly while every Democrat lined up to record the vote against the combined legislation, which has now been sent to the Senate. 

Hours later, when the standalone Republican bill to establish a sandhill crane hunt came up as originally scheduled, Miresse addressed the body about wake boats. 

“I’m here to talk about wake boats today,” he said to laughter from the Democratic side of the floor.

Republicans said that Wisconsin has a “sandhill crane problem,” noting that the resurgence of the crane population is a conservation success story but now there are too many. 

Rep. Paul Tittl (R-Manitowoc) said the bill supports the state’s farmers and hunters. 

“This bill is about supporting hunters, farmers and getting serious about sandhill crane management here in our state,” Tittl said. “We can’t stand by and let other people dictate our state’s conservation policy on sandhill cranes just because it’s a pretty bird. I agree it is a beautiful bird, and so is a wood duck. I think deer is majestic. Well, so I challenge you now if you support science and facts, hunters, farmers and most importantly, our Wisconsin State Constitution, the vote is yes.”

But Rep. Karen DeSanto (D-Baraboo), whose district includes the International Crane Foundation, questioned how hunting cranes in the fall would prevent farm fields from being damaged in the spring. 

“We need a more comprehensive approach that includes more than just a hunt, because a limited fall hunt would have little impact on spring crop damage,” DeSanto said.

Anti-rights of nature 

Republicans also passed a bill 54-41 that would prohibit local governments from passing ordinances protecting the rights of nature. The bill was introduced after Green Bay and Milwaukee have passed or discussed establishing largely symbolic ordinances protecting the rights of bodies of water to be kept clean. 

The concept stems from provisions in the constitutions of some South American countries and Native American tribes such as Wisconsin’s Ho-Chunk Nation. In American law, environmental activists have been pushing for the legal rights of nature for decades, Rep. Andrew Hysell (D-Sun Prairie) noted. 

“People who have a meaningful relation to the body of water, whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist or a logger, must be able to speak for the values which the river represents and which are threatened with destruction,” Hysell said.

A separate bill, authored by Miresse and introduced last year without any movement, would recognize the natural rights of Devil’s Lake State Park. 

Republicans say such ordinances are communist and anti-business while Democrats point to legal interpretations that recognize corporations as people as setting a precedent. 

“I’d like to thank the authors for bringing this bill. I think it’s worthy of discussion,” Miresse said. “To ensure a livable future, we must restore balance with our natural world, and that means changing how our laws treat nature. Instead of viewing rivers, forests, ecosystems as materials for consumption and dumping grounds, we must recognize their inherent rights to exist, thrive, regenerate and be restored.”

Rep. Joy Goebben (R-Hobart), the bill’s co-author, said it would protect property rights. But Rep. Lindee Brill (R-Sheboygan Falls) complained that Democrats want to protect nature but not fetuses.

“I find it rich that the other side of the aisle talks about inherent rights of water, trees and air. Yet … they produced an amendment to kill children after birth in the womb. So while they talk about drinking water being a luxury, human life should be a luxury that should be valued in this place, and instead, they make a mockery of it.”

The Wisconsin Assembly on Thursday passed bills to legalize online sports betting and add state regulations for University of Wisconsin athletes receiving money for their name, image and likeness rights. 

Both bills passed with no or little debate and the NIL bill passed with just a single no vote. They will now be sent to the state Senate. 

Last fall, Republican lawmakers introduced the online sports betting bill with a lot of momentum. A public hearing on the measure just days after the bill’s introduction. 

The Wisconsin constitution requires that any legal gambling be managed by the state’s federally recognized Native American tribes. Under current law, people can place sports bets in person at tribal casinos but online sports bets — a market that has grown exponentially as legal sports gambling has spread across the country — remained prohibited. Under the bill, Wisconsin would follow a legal framework first established in Florida that would allow online sports betting if the infrastructure to manage the bets is housed on tribal land. 

The sports betting bill was introduced and hearings were held in both chambers of the Legislature in rapid succession, but the bill did not come up for a floor vote until the last day of the Assembly’s schedule. 

The Assembly passed the bill with bipartisan support despite objections from lobbying groups representing the country’s largest online sportsbooks. The state’s tribes have supported the legislation, arguing that the proliferation of live betting markets on websites such as Kalshi and the ease with which many Wisconsinites can cross the border to Illinois where online sports bets are legal, has damaged their business. 

The NIL bill adds regulations for how University of Wisconsin schools manage payment to collegiate athletes. The NCAA officially allowed collegiate athletes to be paid for appearing in advertisements or commercial products such as video games in 2021. 

Under the bill passed Thursday, student-athletes will be allowed to hire agents to represent them and individual universities can facilitate NIL agreements on behalf of their athletes. Students will not be allowed to endorse tobacco products, alcohol or illegal activities. Some records related to NIL agreements will be exempt from the state’s open records law “when competitive reasons require confidentiality.”

The broadly popular Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Grant program is on life support after Wisconsin Senate Republicans canceled a vote on a GOP-authored bill to extend the program during the body’s floor session Wednesday. 

For nearly four decades, the program has allowed the state Department of Natural Resources to support the acquisition of land for conservation purposes. The program is set to expire June 30 when its funding runs out. 

Lawmakers have been working for nearly a year to reach an agreement on an extension. A Knowles-Nelson extension in Gov. Tony Evers’ proposed budget last year was stripped out by Republicans and a Democratic-authored bill supported by all 60 legislative Democrats has languished in a Republican-controlled committee. 

In recent years, a handful of legislative Republicans have become increasingly hostile to the stewardship program, complaining that it has taken too much land off local property tax rolls in the northern part of the state and that a state Supreme Court decision last year removed the Legislature’s oversight authority over the program’s spending. 

In January, Assembly Republicans passed a bill that would extend the program without any funding for land acquisition. With the Assembly holding its final scheduled floor session of the year on Thursday, the Senate’s failure to hold a vote on its version of the bill Wednesday means it’s unlikely a bill will make it to Evers’ desk. 

Democrats have said they won’t support a version of the bill that ends land acquisition under the program. 

In recent weeks, Republicans have begun to lay the groundwork for claiming that any failure to extend the program would be the Democrats’ fault. 

But Sen. Patrick Testin (R-Stevens Point), the author of the Republican proposal, said Wednesday after the bill was dropped from the schedule that the Senate needs to pass a version of the bill with 17 Republican votes.  With supporters and opponents of the program divided within the Republican caucus, advocates for the program have said for months it’s been clear that any version of stewardship extension would require bipartisan support. 

“This has been one of these bills that’s been very difficult to thread the needle on,” Testin said after the Wednesday floor session. “So it’s been sort of a tug of war, you do X, Y, and Z on one provision of the bill. You have members that raise concerns, and if you do X, Y and Z a different way, they’ve got concerns as well.”

Sen. Jodi Habush Sinykin (D-Whitefish Bay), who wrote the Democratic proposal and has been involved in legislative negotiations over the program, said it’s disingenuous for Republicans to point fingers at Democrats, when Democrats are united in their support for the program and have tried to compromise. 

The initial bill proposed by Habush Sinykin included a provision to provide independent oversight of the program as a response to Republican concerns and in recent days offered a compromise of extending the program with $5-6 million in land acquisition funding — about $10 million less than budgeted currently. On the floor on Wednesday, Democrats attempted to force a vote on a motion that would have extended the program for one year at current funding levels. 

“Their efforts to try to cast blame or aspersions on the Democrats when it is apparent that they have too many members of their caucus who are strongly opposed to this program … they have not been shy or reticent about voicing publicly strong opposition to the continuity of this program,” Habush Sinykin said. “So it takes not just a lot of nerve, but a questionable honesty, to try to pin this on Democrats.” 

Habush Sinykin said the Assembly version of the bill was “not even tempting” because it doesn’t include any land acquisition funds. 

“What they are looking for and needing are more Democratic votes, which is a big responsibility, because we care about the integrity of the program,” she said. “So you don’t want to give votes for something that doesn’t have value and isn’t true to the purpose.”

“Everyone in the building knows, and many outside the building know, that Republicans don’t like Knowles-Nelson,” she continued, “that they can’t get it done in their caucus.”

Baylor Spears contributed reporting to this story.

Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Maria Lazar says she wants disagreements on the Court to be more respectful. 

At a Tuesday forum hosted by the Marquette University School of Law, Lazar attempted to distance herself from the highly politicized Supreme Court campaigns of recent years, painting herself as an independent judge who, while leaning more conservative than the Court’s current liberal majority, wants to just follow the law. 

However, since her election to the state’s District Two Court of Appeals, Lazar has been a reliably conservative vote on the reliably conservative appellate panel — including a case in which she sided with election deniers attempting to gain access to confidential voter information. Lazar’s campaign has also received endorsements and financial support from high profile Republicans. 

But she says she’s never been a member of a political party, contrasting herself with her opponent, Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor, who was previously a Democratic member of the state Assembly. State Supreme Court races are nominally nonpartisan, but both political parties have been heavily involved in supporting their preferred candidates in recent years.  

“I am the one on my court that sort of solves the disputes, and I think that on the Supreme Court I would be the same way,” she said. “I know that it would be 3-4, and I know that I’d be in the minority with the more conservative leaning than liberal leaning, and I get that. But the decisions aren’t all 4-to-3. I mean, sometimes they’re 7-0 or 6-1, and I just think that I would bring a level of collegiality, a level of really hard dedication and work.” 

Since the liberal wing of the Court gained the majority with the election of Justice Janet Protasiewicz in 2023, the Court’s conservatives — most notably Justice Annette Ziegler and the outgoing Justice Rebecca Bradley — have frequently lobbed personal attacks at the majority in their published opinions, accusing the majority of being partisan lackeys for the Democratic party. 

Lazar said she doesn’t think the Court should work that way. 

“But some of the opinions written by our Court right now, the differences that are going on on that bench, there’s such a level of dissatisfaction with each other and personal animus that when you read those dissents, you say, how can you write something that personal and mean and then go and work the next day and sit across from that person and say, ‘Let’s talk about the next appeal?’” she said. 

Despite her efforts to paint herself as a moderate, Lazar has occasionally shared her agreement with conservative beliefs on abortion. As an attorney for the state Department of Justice under Gov. Scott Walker, Lazar defended Act 10, the law that repealed labor rights for public employees, and argued in favor of gerrymandered maps Republicans drew in 2011, locking in disproportionate GOP legislative majorities. 

“I would never be on that Court to be a firebrand,” Lazar said Tuesday. “I would be on that Court to stand up for what I believe in and what I believe the law says.” 

At the forum, Lazar said she can’t share with voters how she would decide hypothetical cases, but she can share “what I believe in and what I stand for.” The remark closely mirrors statements Protasiewicz made about her political beliefs during her 2023 campaign. Those remarks have followed Protasiewicz onto the bench, with Republicans often raising them to demand that she recuse herself from controversial cases. 

On her judicial philosophy, Lazar said she’s “an originalist with a slight tinge of textualism.” 

Originalism is a legal theory that emerged in the 1980s and has become the dominant ideology of conservative justices across the country. Under the theory, judges argue that laws should be interpreted through the intent and context of the law when it was written — attempting to glean the motivations of the country’s constitutional framers 250 years after the fact. Critics argue that originalists often use flawed historical analysis. 

But at the forum, Lazar gave a different meaning to originalism. 

“Originalist means that if you get the statute or the law or the constitutional amendment or whatever it is, you look at it first, and if you can’t answer the question, which you probably can’t, because why is it in front of your court if it’s so obvious? So you look at it, and then you look at headings. You look at statutes around it, you look at other statutes in the law. You start looking around. And that’s originalism. You’re looking at the words as they’re written,” she said. 

Lazar said that trying to determine the intent of legislators gets dangerous. 

“Now, some judicial philosophies go all the way out. And they look at everything, what people say when they write the laws, what their intent was, and that’s a little dangerous,” she said. “To me, that’s judicial activism, because I see judges and justices who get to the end result in their mind and then find a way to get there. That’s not the proper way to look at the law, and that’s not what we do. We don’t legislate on the bench. We’re not activists. We don’t have agendas.” 

A group of Democratic state lawmakers on Thursday announced a proposal to put a moratorium on data center construction in Wisconsin as communities across the state grapple with local resistance to the development of hyperscale AI data centers. 

Debates around data centers have become increasingly tense in recent months as residents of communities including Mount Pleasant, Mount Horeb, Beaver Dam, Port Washington and Janesville have rallied opposition to  the approval of data centers by local officials. 

While officials in these communities are often tempted by the promise of increased property tax revenue from the facilities, residents have raised objections to their local representatives ceding local land to multibillion-dollar tech companies, the massive amounts of energy and water needed to operate the large data centers and the related effects on local utility rates and the environment to produce all the power.

Several pieces of legislation to regulate data center construction have already been proposed in the Legislature. In January, Assembly Republicans passed a bill that would establish some regulations, but Democrats said it didn’t do enough to prevent electricity costs from being passed on to regular consumers and included a provision that would stymie renewable energy development in the state. 

With just days left before the Legislature ends its work for the session next week, a group of Democratic lawmakers rolled out a proposal that would pause data center construction until “all of the questions that you have, that you have been asking your local mayors, you have been asking your local legislators, you have been asking these data centers, that all of those are actually answered,” Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said at a press conference Thursday afternoon with local data center activists. 

The bill defines a data center as “a facility having a primary purpose of storing, managing, and processing digital data and that has at least 5,000 servers, occupies at least 10,000 square feet, or has an electricity demand of at least 100 megawatts.”

The bill wouldn’t allow the construction of any data centers in the state until the state establishes a data center planning authority; prohibits energy and water costs from being shifted to residential utility customers; creates a “land and community funding mechanism”; eliminates state and local financial subsidies for data centers; mandates public reporting of data center energy and water use; creates data center-specific pollution regulations; requires that 100% of the energy produced for data centers be renewable; requires that data center construction projects pay prevailing or collectively bargained wages; restores planning authority to the Public Service Commission; prohibits non-disclosure agreements between data centers and government entities and creates an enforcement and penalty structure for data centers that violate regulations. 

“The intent is not to permanently prohibit data centers, but to ensure that any future development is responsible, transparent, and does not impose additional financial burdens on Wisconsin households,” a co-sponsorship memo on the proposal states. “Wisconsinites should not be asked to shoulder higher utility costs while large new energy users operate without clear rules, accountability, or public oversight. This bill provides the Legislature with the time and authority necessary to establish a fair and comprehensive framework that protects ratepayers, workers, and local communities before large-scale data centers are allowed to move forward.”

On Thursday, a few dozen people gathered outside the state Capitol to protest against data center construction before meeting in a hearing room for a news conference and panel discussion. Rep. Francesca Hong (D-Madison), one of the several Democrats running in the primary for governor, said at the press conference that the data center proposals have galvanized anti-corporate views in communities of all political stripes. 

“This is about community power and returning community control to folks all across the state,” Hong said. “I am so incredibly grateful because I have not seen this type of bipartisan opposition to corporate control. I have not seen this type of bipartisan support for ensuring that we protect our natural resources. Our natural resources are not for sale. Our health is not for sale. Our shared future depends on all of us fighting right now to ensure that we are holding AI data centers accountable.”

After White House officials announced Thursday they will be ending the federal immigration enforcement surge in the Twin Cities, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin said she would not vote for a bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security, saying she hopes to prevent some other community from being victimized next.

On Thursday afternoon, Senate Democrats blocked the DHS funding measure. A procedural vote to advance the funding bill failed in the Senate, 52-47. Baldwin joined with all Senate Democrats except Sen. John Fetterman in voting against the measure. 

Baldwin said at a virtual news conference Thursday that her office has received more than 40,000 phone calls demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement be reined in. 

“The Trump administration claimed that they are winding down their invasion of Minneapolis, but I’ll believe it when I see it, and the truth is that is not even close to enough,” she said. “What is stopping them from just going to another American city and causing the same chaos? We need to put in law some serious guardrails and rein in ICE, and that’s exactly what I’m fighting for.”

Baldwin said she wants ICE to be held to the same standards as local police officers, which includes not wearing masks, carrying identification and wearing body cameras. She also said she wants to stop “chaotic, roving bands of federal agents” storming across communities as they have  done in the Twin Cities and to make sure the investigations into the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two U.S. citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis, are conducted independently and transparently. 

But Baldwin said congressional Republicans and President Trump have been unwilling to work with Democrats to put up “common sense” guardrails for ICE operations.

“I am still hopeful that we can find compromise, but negotiations are a two-way street,” she said. “Democrats have put forward some common sense measures that Americans overwhelmingly support, and so it’s up to my Republican colleagues if they want to get serious about negotiating with us. I’ve been clear for weeks that unless serious measures are added to this legislation that serve to rein in ICE, I am not going to be a signatory to a blank check for this administration to wreak havoc on communities and endanger our neighbors.”

The Barron County Sheriff on Wednesday said in a social media post that area residents shouldn’t trust the news media about Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s presence in the area. 

In the post on Facebook, the sheriff’s office challenged the accuracy of local news reports on ICE activity in the area that prompted “a flurry of calls and messages” to the sheriff’s office. The post stated that ICE was in Barron County on Sunday looking for two individuals but did not locate either of them. The post also said that information about ICE should come from the agency itself. 

“The Barron County Sheriff’s Department encourages everyone to read past the headlines and question what they see or hear in the news, and especially on social media, as it relates to ICE operations,” the department wrote. “Do your own research and visit the Immigration and Customs Enforcement website to see what their operations entail and who they are apprehending.”

The post appears to reference Trump administration claims that ICE is targeting the “worst of the worst.” However, recent reporting from CBS News found that less than 14% of the 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in President Donald Trump’s first year in office had been charged or convicted of violent crimes. 

Data from Wisconsin has shown that the immigrants ICE has arrested here have largely been people charged with but not yet convicted of crimes — a practice that some county law enforcement officials have complained prevents the conclusion of local criminal cases. 

Additionally, ICE has frequently lied about its encounters with the public and the people it has arrested. After an operation in Manitowoc County in which ICE arrested several dairy workers — one of the highest profile ICE actions in Wisconsin of the past year — ICE claimed that one of the men arrested was a sex offender. However the man it referred to had been in ICE custody for months prior to the Manitowoc County arrests. ICE claims about violent activity by Renee Good and Alex Pretti, have also been disproven. 

ICE has been expanding operations throughout western Wisconsin since the surge of personnel into Minnesota began in December. In the Facebook post, the Barron County sheriff’s office said it would cooperate with local ICE operations. 

“As previously stated, if ICE comes to Barron County and requests assistance of the Barron County Sheriff’s Department, we will support our law enforcement partners,” the Barron County sheriff’s post stated. “Unlawful obstruction and interference with any operations will not be tolerated.”

Liberal members of the Wisconsin Supreme Court said they were “shocked” at the ramifications of the right-wing Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty’s arguments against a grant program meant to help prevent minority students from dropping out of technical college. 

The Court on Wednesday held oral arguments in a case that began in a 2021 lawsuit in Jefferson County Circuit Court. The suit alleges that the state’s Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant program, administered by the Higher Education Aids Board, unlawfully discriminates based on race. 

The program, established in the 1980s, provides small-dollar grants to Black, Native American and Hispanic students, as well as Southeast Asians who came to the U.S. from Laos, Cambodia or Vietnam after 1975. On average, members of these groups drop out of school or fail to graduate at substantially higher rates than their peers, the state has argued. 

The program has been a frequent target of Wisconsin Republicans in recent years — especially after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended the legality of affirmative action in college admissions. 

The Wisconsin Examiner previously reported that money through the program has largely been used to assist Black students at Milwaukee Area Technical College. 

In a decision last year, the 2nd District Court of Appeals sided with WILL and the taxpayers it is representing, declaring the program unconstitutional. Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul appealed the decision and in November the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. 

WILL attorney Luke Berg argued Wednesday that any program that targets specific racial groups is unconstitutional — regardless of whether those groups face statistical disparities. 

“I think the worst form of discrimination is discrimination under the law, when the law treats individuals differently based on their race,” Berg said. “I’m not asking the Court to ignore that there are disparities in statistics, and I think we should all be concerned about that. But there are poor white students, there are poor Asian students, there are poor Afghani students, there are poor Palestinian students, there are poor Egyptian students.” 

“It cannot have explicit race discrimination under the law,” he continued later. “It can target racially neutral criteria like poverty, and it can solve those disparities indirectly. Give the scholarship to every student that needs it. If there are more poor Black students, more of them will get that scholarship.”

Several of the Court’s left-leaning justices pushed back on Berg’s comments, questioning how ignoring race-based statistical gaps achieves the 14th Amendment’s promise of equal protection. Justice Jill Karofsky told him, “your argument basically asks us to stick our heads in the sand.” 

Justice Rebecca Dallet noted that in Wisconsin, Black mothers and babies face much higher rates of health issues and under Berg’s legal construction, the state couldn’t do anything to specifically target that problem. 

“If the purpose is to help Black babies live who are not living at the same rate as white babies. How would they do that without mentioning the word Black?” Dallet said.

Berg responded that the state could pass a program that applies to “all babies” because “there are some white babies in the world who might need that program, too, and so you would make the program available to all.” 

“That is shocking, and if that’s what our U.S. Supreme Court wants to say, that is shocking, but I don’t think that that’s what they said in SFFA,” Dallet responded. 

Charlotte Gibson, the Department of Justice attorney arguing on behalf of the HEAB, called the appeals court’s decision “radical” saying that it went further than the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to end affirmative action. 

“The court of appeals decision was radical,” Gibson said. “I’m not aware of any court in the country that has come up with a ban this categorical that would impact things like medical research that’s targeted a particular racial group that’s suffering from specific health outcomes. But … that’s exactly what the rule of law they’re looking for would do.”

Berg opened his arguments to the Court saying he believed the justices should dismiss the case and accept the appeals court’s decision. He argued that if the Court sides with the state, an appeal will immediately be filed in federal court. 

“If this court reverses, either on standing or the merits, the next thing that will happen is someone will file this case in federal court, us or somebody else,” Berg said. “It may be a race to the courthouse, because this is, like I said, the lowest of low hanging fruit in terms of federal claims … So what will happen is the taxpayers will pay for this court’s time. The taxpayers will pay for their time to litigate the case again for three to four years. The taxpayers will pay the time [of] federal district court counsel.”

Justices Susan Crawford, Janet Protasiewicz and Dallet objected, saying they took his comments as a “threat.” 

“That is such an inappropriate argument. It is so inappropriate and disrespectful to the state and their program that they are here to argue in front of us, it’s basically a threat to us,” Dallet said.

At a public hearing held by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission Tuesday, dozens of Wisconsin residents decried the effects massive data centers could have on the state’s electricity rates and ability to adopt renewable energy sources. 

The three-member PSC is considering a proposal from the Wisconsin Electric Power Company to establish a tariff system for providing electricity to massive data centers. Under the proposal, “very large” customers that would be subject to the tariff would have a combined energy load of 500 megawatts — the equivalent of powering about 400,000 homes. 

The first phase of Microsoft’s $13.3 billion data center project in Mount Pleasant is projected to require 450 megawatts. 

Critics of the proposal say that under this system, regular consumers will still be on the hook for 25% of the infrastructure costs associated with increasing the state’s energy load. 

Over the past year, the growth of data center development in Wisconsin has spurred an increasingly tense debate. Local governments have been tempted to allow their construction as a source of property tax revenue while local residents raise concerns over energy and water use, the conversion of historical farmland, the ethics of artificial intelligence and long-term environmental impacts.

The massive energy needs of data centers have become the central issue in the debate, with people in Wisconsin and around the country questioning how to manage the demands of giant corporations seeking to use orders of magnitude more energy than is currently being produced.

“I speak to you not only as a We Energies customer, a member of the Wisconsin State Senate, but on behalf of people across Wisconsin who have communicated to me their worry and fear about the development of hyperscale data centers,” Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said at the hearing. “This worry and fear transcends political divides and income brackets, residents and small businesses alike fear that these data centers will fundamentally alter and potentially destroy our Wisconsin way of life, and with good reason; the scale of the proposed development is unprecedented.” 

Larson added that often “this debate is framed as a false choice that our state must prioritize economic growth or meet our clean energy and climate goals. This is simply not true. In reality, Wisconsin can and must be a leader in pursuing both advancing economic development while accelerating a just transition to affordable, reliable, clean energy in a way that does not harm residents, health, economic security or the environment.”

The vast majority of those testifying during the more than three-hour hearing Tuesday afternoon were opposed to the structure of the proposed system — largely due to the 500 megawatt threshold proposed by the utility company. 

Several people said they were concerned that the threshold being set at this level would encourage the growth of still large data centers that use less than 500 megawatts of energy — and the costs of those centers’ electricity use will be passed on to regular consumers. 

“I submit that 500 megawatts is at least an order of magnitude too high,” Pleasant Prairie resident Charles Hasenohrl said. “The threshold should be lower than 50 megawatts, where at that point, companies are required to cover all costs, which again include generation, transmission and distribution.” 

Opponents also said they were concerned that data centers increasing the energy demand in Wisconsin will encourage the PSC and the state’s utility companies to construct new natural gas power plants, instead of encouraging the growth of renewable energy sources such as solar and wind.

“Renewable energy is the cheapest way to generate electricity, and it’s only getting cheaper,” Dr. Jonathan Patz, a professor of health and the environment at UW-Madison, said. 

Patz added that burning fossil fuels to provide energy for currently proposed data centers in southeastern Wisconsin will increase air pollution not only in the immediate region but spread to Chicago and western Michigan. 

“Because the right choice happens to be both the safest and the most affordable. That’s solar and wind power,” Patz said. “Let’s stop killing people unnecessarily with pollution from burning fossil fuels, especially knowing the multi-decadal life span of a power plant. The rest of the world is turning to renewable energy. Why should the PSC prevent us from transitioning to clean energy and improving our health at the same time?”

The handful of people who testified in favor of the proposal were union representatives. Several of the state’s unions have been vocal in supporting the construction of data centers, arguing that their members will benefit from the jobs created while the centers are being built. The union representatives said that the state should work to protect costs from being passed on to ratepayers, but that the state shouldn’t discourage data centers from coming to Wisconsin. 

“These projects require significant amounts of power, far beyond what’s available today to be operational and successfully run,” Jim Meyer, business manager for IBEW Local 2150, said. “Faced with this problem, the traditional method of having a utility company add power generation capacity through building more power plants, then spreading those costs over its customer base, would simply be unfair to its everyday customer, like my membership, who live and work in the areas and are also customers themselves. The VLC tariff will put the tab for those plants exactly where it belongs, with those very large customers who need that new electric load.”

PSC Administrative Judge Michael Newmark said that the job of the commission isn’t to decide if the state should go all in on encouraging data center construction but only the “reasonableness of the rates, terms, and conditions of electric service” in the We Energies proposal. Several people testifying expressed frustration that often the commission holds public hearings only to ultimately vote against the majority sentiment of the public and side with corporate utility interests. 

“I am wondering whether this is an exercise in futility,” Milwaukee resident Ted Kraig said. “Technologically, it makes no sense to be building up old fossil fuel infrastructure, and still, the Public Service Commission just goes and basically rubber stamps it. My concern is that we can have 1,000 people testifying with the best evidence and arguments imaginable, but the Public Service Commission sitting there with little check boxes … We Energies gets whatever it wants.” 

The Public Service Commission is expected to make its decision on the tariff by May 1.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Judge Michael Newmark. We regret the error