A loosely formed coalition of about 60 federal litigators is working with immigration attorneys in Wisconsin who represent clients being detained and facing deportation.
Gabriela Parra, an immigration attorney and partner at Layde & Parra S.C. in Milwaukee, said immigration policies are constantly changing, which adds new challenges.
Many cases now involve both immigration proceedings and federal civil rights issues, she said.
“If you haven’t done this, it’s a learning curve,” Parra said.
Federal litigators and immigration attorneys are working together to help meet this demand in Wisconsin.
Surge in overall need
The need for legal representation has grown as immigration enforcement has expanded.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement held an average of 69,600 people per day in detention in December 2025 – a 78% increase compared with the year before, according to an analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a national nonprofit working on issues related to mass incarceration and immigration.
“There is a due process crisis right now happening in our immigration system,” said Elizabeth Kenney, associate director of Vera’s Advancing Universal Representation Initiative.
While people have the right to obtain an immigration attorney, the government does not have to provide one, said Timothy Muth, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin.
Kenney said not having legal representation has major consequences.
People who have attorneys are up to 10 and a half times more likely to get successful outcomes, Kenney said.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office at 310 E. Knapp St. in Milwaukee. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
More complex cases
Parra said policy changes have added a federal civil rights dimension to many cases – changes that include how the Board of Immigration Appeals has interpreted immigration law.
The board sets binding rules for immigration judges and has authority over appeals in immigration cases.
Parra said there have been more than 80 decisions by the board since January 2025 that have affected immigration policy.
One Board of Immigration Appeals decision, known as Yajure Hurtado, requires immigration judges to treat many as subject to mandatory detention. The decision has significantly limited people’s access to bonds.
“Now you have individuals in detention unless you can file a habeas petition in federal court,” Parra said.
A habeas petition is used to argue that a person’s detention is unlawful.
Habeas petitions vary widely depending on a person’s situation, said Elisabeth Lambert, a federal civil rights attorney working with the network.
Some involve people who have lived in the United States for years and seek release on bond while their cases proceed. Others involve people who entered through legal processes but are later detained and denied bond.
There also are other barriers that make it harder for people to defend themselves, requiring different support in federal court.
For example, Lambert said, immigrants facing deportation don’t have a right to discovery. This means that the only way to get the records is through a specific type of federal records request.
A right of discovery allows defendants to access information that could be used against them from a prosecutor ahead of trial.
Lambert said records can face various delays and other barriers and may arrive after the deportation proceeding has already happened.
Why federal court is different
Lambert said the two court systems – immigration court and federal court – operate very differently.
Each of these legal spaces has its own sets of rules, norms and procedures, she said.
“It’s just a lot to learn very quickly in a very high-stakes situation,” Lambert said.
It works the other way, too.
“I couldn’t go into immigration court,” she said. “I don’t have the knowledge or the experience.”
In one case Lambert and Parra worked on together, a judge issued a restraining order barring ICE from moving ahead with a client’s removal proceeding until a Freedom of Information Act issue was resolved, she said.
Lambert anticipates similar litigation in the future.
“We think that this is going to be a pretty common issue – of the government withholding people’s immigration records as part of this effort to stack the deportation process against people who are seeking immigration relief.”
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
A resident sits on a bench at Make the Road New York, a community center in Corona, Queens, in New York City. Lettering in Spanish reads, "We are here, we're not leaving." The area was one of the largest magnets for asylum-seekers from the border, mostly from Ecuador. (Photo by Tim Henderson/Stateline)
The millions of migrants who were released into the country during the immigration surge that began in 2021 and peaked in 2023 caused a political firestorm when Republican states transported them to Democratic cities. Now, according to a new analysis, many of them are back working in the states that expelled them.
Many of the migrants turned themselves in to immigration officials when they entered the United States illegally, but avoided immediate removal by claiming a “credible fear” of persecution or torture if they returned home, giving them the right to seek asylum. It can take years to receive an asylum hearing. Others seeking asylum arrived with appointments made through a government app or relied on temporary parole programs while pursuing legal status in court.
Now, amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, these migrants are under increasing pressure, threatened with arrest and detention even when they appear for their court dates. Currently, they can begin to work legally after waiting six months, but the Trump administration is seeking to extend the waiting period to one year.
A Stateline analysis of court records shows that the largest numbers of recent asylum-seekers are in New York, Florida, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Utah, all of which have populations that are at least 1% higher than they were in 2020 because of the new migrants. Also in the top 10: Texas, Connecticut, California, Illinois and Colorado. Republican Govs. Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in Texas led the charge to transport migrants out of state. Stateline’s analysis counts only those migrants who are not being detained.
The country that is the single largest source of recent asylum-seeking migrants is Venezuela, with 363,000 as of February. The next largest is Mexico (251,000), followed by Guatemala (241,000), Honduras (240,000) and Colombia (235,000). But those nationwide numbers are scrambled in individual states: Ecuadorians predominate in five states, Nicaraguans in four, and Brazilians and Cubans in three each.
The influx of migrants that began escalating when President Joe Biden loosened immigration rules in January 2021 generated a political backlash that intensified after DeSantis and Abbott began busing and flying border migrants to Democratic-led cities, putting a significant strain on their finances. New York City, for example, spent a total of $8.13 billion on shelter and services for the more than 223,000 asylum-seekers and other migrants who arrived between the spring of 2022 and the fall of 2024.
Meanwhile, some established immigrant communities resented what they saw as lenient treatment of the newcomers.
Local news accounts reported anger over competition for jobs in Latino communities in New York City. But Ernesto Castañeda, director of American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, said interviews there showed more resentment over the aid that was offered to the new arrivals.
“For the first time in U.S. history, there were many big programs to temporarily house and feed the newcomers,” Castañeda said. “People (in New York City) talked about the food cards they got, or the free meals, or the hotel rooms, and that took a lot of the media attention locally.”
But many of the new immigrants also have provided much-needed labor, from the streets of New York City and its suburbs to the dairy farms of Idaho.
“All we can do is just work and hope for the best,” said a woman from Ecuador, who asked to be identified only as Rosa. Rosa works in a family food service business in suburban Spring Valley, New York, one of the top five areas in the country for the sheer number of the migrants, with most coming from Ecuador, according to court records.
“It’s hard here but in Ecuador it’s worse — there are gangs blackmailing you,” said another woman who works in a Queens store labeling packets of Ecuadorian herbs. She declined to identify herself.
In suburbs as well as cities, the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda has immigrants worried. About 22% of the newcomers around the country, in and out of detention, have orders of removal from immigration courts, meaning they could be arrested and summarily deported at any time.
“There were a lot of arrests right around here. People who did everything right got detained,” Rosa said in Spanish, glancing around nervously as she worked making traditional Ecuadorian dishes like corviches, fish fritters, and a fish and onion soup called encebollado.
Customers wait for their orders at an Ecuadorian food truck in Spring Valley, N.Y., a suburb of New York City. The area was one of the largest magnets for asylum-seekers from the border, mostly from Ecuador. (Photo by Tim Henderson/Stateline)
Many of the new arrivals have stopped socializing and stay home when they’re not working, afraid to be caught up in raids that have swept thousands of them up into detention, according to interviews conducted in New York and the District of Columbia by the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies.
Even when much-hated Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was arrested in January and removed to the United States for trial, many Venezuelan asylum-seekers stayed home rather than risk being arrested at public celebrations.
Ecuadorians got less media attention than Venezuelans because they came to a more established community in New York, Castañeda said.
“(Ecuadorians) already had networks, so they were not staying in shelters. They were not in the streets,” he said. “They could work and they were becoming part of the fabric of New York, but now they’re being deported by Trump because ICE knows who they are, where they live and their status is very easy pickings. They’re low-hanging fruit.”
Many Venezuelans would like to go home but face even more chaos after the fall of Maduro, said Héctor Arguinzones, organizer of a Venezuelan immigrant group in New York City.
“Many of us fled Venezuela because our own neighbors were our persecutors,” said Arguinzones. “We’re not trying to, you know, sneak into the United States. A lot of us want to go back. We are full of hope. But we cannot think that this crisis in Venezuela will be solved in three months. We must be patient. What we really need is humanitarian treatment.”
Texas has ended up with the largest number of Venezuelans, an irony noted in a book written by the American University research team. After initially receiving aid in more sympathetic areas such as Colorado, New York City and Washington, D.C., many of the Venezuelans traveled around the country looking for work, but trickled back to Texas where jobs were available and the cost of living was lower.
Living in the U.S. with an immigration court date is a tenuous existence for people fleeing gangs and political oppression in South America and Central America. Fear of returning to a home country can be a valid legal reason to avoid deportation, but it requires legal help and doesn’t prevent detention and pressure to “self-deport.”
“Unfortunately, having an asylum case is not a legal status,” Arguinzones said. “We tell people to keep up with their court cases and keep the paperwork with them, so at least they have something to show. At least it’s something.”
Unfortunately, having an asylum case is not a legal status.
– Héctor Arguinzones, organizer of a Venezuelan immigrant group
Robin Nice, a Boston attorney, said six of her clients with pending asylum cases were detained in a January sweep called Operation Catch of the Day, and only one had had a brush with the law in the form of a year-old traffic case.
“They were typically on their way to or from work, sometimes just getting into their car after finishing a shift,” Nice said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in an unattributed statement to Stateline, said: “A pending asylum case does NOT confer any type of legal status in the United States. If a person enters our country illegally, they are subject to detention or deportation.”
Some of the asylum-seekers pursuing legal status through the courts have already been detained, but they make up a small fraction of the 2.8 million total cases.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan leaves the Milwaukee Federal Courthouse on May 15, 2025. Judge Dugan appeared in federal court to answer charges that she helped Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, an undocumented immigrant, elude federal arrest while he was making an appearance in her courtroom on April 18. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)
A federal judge on Monday denied the appeal of former Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan, who was seeking to overturn a jury’s guilty verdict against her.
Dugan was convicted last year of obstructing federal immigration enforcement efforts for helping an undocumented man who was appearing in her courtroom go out a side door to evade immediate detection by federal agents. After a trial in December, she was found guilty of felony obstruction of justice and not guilty of a misdemeanor charge alleging she concealed an undocumented person from arrest.
On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Lynn Adelman ruled against Dugan’s appeal in a 39-page order. He also again rejected a claim that she was immune from prosecution because her actions were taken while she served as a judge.
Dugan’s legal team indicated in a statement that they plan to appeal Adelman’s ruling. That appeal will take that case to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals.
“We continue to maintain that Hannah Dugan acted lawfully and within her independent authority as a judge,” Dugan’s attorneys stated. “The inconsistent jury verdicts demonstrate that the trial proceedings were flawed, and we plan to appeal.”
An industrial warehouse recently purchased by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for use as a detention center is seen on Feb. 10, 2026 in Social Circle, Georgia. (Photo by Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — New Hampshire’s Republican governor, frustrated with little information about the Department of Homeland Security’s plan to put a new detention facility in her state, joined local Democrats to oppose the move and disclosed DHS plans to retrofit warehouses across the nation to expand immigrant detention.
Two Republican members of the U.S. Senate, one who chairs the Armed Services Committee and another running for governor, personally lobbied DHS to find other locations for planned large-scale detention centers in rural Byhalia, Mississippi, and Lebanon, Tennessee.
And a city manager for a small town in Georgia that overwhelmingly voted to put President Donald Trump back in the White House placed a lock on a meter to prevent water access to a newly purchased warehouse for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
At every turn, DHS has faced pushback from Republicans in its drive to quickly scale up immigrant detention to 92,600 people by September, a pillar of the president’s mass deportation plan as Trump aims to remove 1 million immigrants without legal status each year. Republicans warn that the move to convert warehouses into hulking detention sites in rural areas will strain local communities’ water, sewage, electricity, heat and health care.
Yet Republicans also cheered Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric on deportation, voted to return him to the White House and in Congress last year, GOP lawmakers spearheaded $45 billion for ICE detention.
Experts on detention say the growing burden on communities and the subsequent uproar should be no surprise to members of the GOP.
“You cannot have a successful deportation agenda, which is the president’s obsession of wanting to have 1 million a year … unless you scale up detention,” said Muzaffar Chishti, Migration Policy Institute senior fellow and director of the MPI office at New York University School of Law.
Billions for detention
Last year, congressional Republicans provided a separate funding pool of $175 billion for immigration enforcement through the massive tax cuts and spending package, with $45 billion set aside specifically for the detention of immigrants.
Of that sum, the Trump administration plans to use $39 billion to overhaul its current detention model of using existing jails and prisons and instead consolidate 34 facilities owned by the federal government for detention.
That would include eight mega-sites of refurbished warehouses to hold as many as 10,000 people each; 16 processing centers, also refurbished warehouses, to each hold 1,000 to 1,500 people; and 10 “turnkey” facilities, which would be the preexisting jails and prisons with ICE contracts.
Those plans for DHS to expand immigrant detention became public after New Hampshire’s GOP Gov. Kelly Ayotte released documents about a now-canceled site planned for Merrimack, as well as sites across the rest of the country.
This image, which was included in the Department of Homeland Security documents New Hampshire Gov. Kelly Ayotte released, shows the warehouse in Merrimack, New Hampshire, that the federal government wanted to convert into an immigrant detention center. (Source: Department of Homeland Security)
The eight large-scale sites would hold more people than the largest federal prison in the United States, which houses roughly 4,000 inmates.
“I think for a lot of people, it sounds and looks a lot like we’re building an infrastructure for concentration camps,” said Elliott Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College.
The Trump administration’s rapid expansion of detention — as many as 68,000 immigrants, as of February — has proven deadly. In 2025, there were 31 known detainee deaths, the highest in 20 years. This year alone, more than a dozen immigrants already have died in detention, and advocates are concerned the plans to detain up to 10,000 immigrants in mega-sites will only lead to more deaths.
This is not the kind of economic development many rural communities may have envisioned.
“Having such a big amount of people detained in one place comes with its own issues, but the second thing is that industrial warehouses are just not equipped, and they will never be equipped, to be able to detain that many folks,” said Luis Suarez, the senior field advocacy manager at Detention Watch Network.
“With the current facilities that ICE is managing, we have seen an unprecedented amount of inhumane conditions and deaths, and we feel that with this large-scale expansion that we’re going to continue to see it on a larger scale,” Suarez continued.
Public opinion on detention centers
The GOP pushback on warehouses in communities grew after two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, were killed by federal immigration agents in Minnesota, and public opinion ratings on ICE and the president’s agenda took a dive.
“This is just coming off the heels of what happened in Minneapolis,” Suarez said. “I feel like for people it’s sending a signal that if these facilities open up, there might be increased enforcement, and they don’t want to continue to see the violence that DHS and ICE has been inflicting on communities.”
How the DHS push to acquire warehouses develops over the coming months could also be affected by the newly confirmed Homeland Security secretary, former Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin, who replaced Kristi Noem.
While NBC reported on March 31 that Homeland Security is pausing plans to buy more warehouses, quoting two senior DHS officials, the officials “stressed the decision may only be temporary.”
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, at the time a senator from Oklahoma, speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on March 3, 2026. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newroom)
During Mullin’s confirmation hearing, he agreed to work with local communities concerned with large detention centers after New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim raised the issue.
Kim said in the town of Roxbury, New Jersey, which has a volunteer fire department and 42 police officers, DHS purchased a warehouse as a processing center to detain up to 1,500 people.
Roxbury is in western Morris County, where Trump gained 50% of the presidential vote in 2024. City officials filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration to prevent the conversion of the warehouse.
“Does that sound like the kind of town that has the resources to take on a warehouse of this magnitude?” Kim asked Mullin during his confirmation hearing.
Mullin pledged to personally visit the facility himself, if confirmed.
Oklahomans were only made aware of the potential warehouse because of a local law requiring a mandatory disclosure that any property purchased will not impact the historic preservation of certain buildings.
But not all officials have received warning.
Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, along with congressional lawmakers from both parties, were blindsided by the sale of a warehouse in Salt Lake City to the federal government.
A planned ICE detention facility in Salt Lake City on Wednesday, March 18, 2026. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)
“When the sale went through, we were not given any notice,” Cox told reporters during a press conference. “No members of our congressional delegation were given any notice. No locals were given any notice. That’s, I think, a little frustrating for everyone. We want to work closely together to get things right.”
So far, DHS has purchased 10 warehouses among the 34 planned.
But communities and lawmakers have been able to end the bids of another 13 proposed detention centers, according to Project Salt Box, which is tracking the purchases of warehouses by the federal government.
In Social Circle, Georgia, and Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, located in counties that gave Trump more than 70% of the vote in the 2024 presidential election, local leaders are opposed to the government’s purchase of two large-scale warehouses.
Social Circle City Manager Eric Taylor said a lock would remain on the water meter at a recently purchased facility until ICE officials can demonstrate that the warehouse can operate without overburdening water and sewer services. DHS plans to use the warehouse as one of its mega-facilities to detain up to 10,000 immigrants, which is double the entire population of Social Circle.
The GOP lawmaker who represents that area, U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, also raised concerns about the huge detention center in Social Circle. He voted for the tax cuts and spending package that added billions for detention.
“I’m all for helping DHS, and I’m behind that to make sure we get rid of these illegal criminals that have been throughout our country, but I also understand Social Circle’s concerns, from not just the infrastructure but the resources that may be needed,” Collins said in an interview with a local TV station.
Collins also shepherded a bill through the House, now law, that requires mandatory detainment by DHS of immigrants charged with local theft, burglary or shoplifting. The bill was named after Georgia college student Laken Riley, whose murder by a Venezuelan immigrant conservatives blamed on the immigration policies of the Biden administration.
A warehouse purchased by ICE in Upper Bern Township, Berks County, on Feb. 26, 2026 (Photo by Ian Karbal/Pennsyvlania Capital-Star)
In Pennsylvania, Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro said he’s opposed to the detention center in Schuylkill and another proposed facility, and noted the pushback did not come from Democrats alone.
“I’m going to do everything in my legal power and my regulatory power to see to it that these facilities are not sited here in Pennsylvania,” Shapiro said at a press conference. “After concluding this meeting here today, I’m even more determined … To hear from Republicans and Democrats alike expressing opposition to this, I think speaks volumes about how unwanted these facilities are in our communities.”
Rural America as a home for detention centers
It’s no surprise to Young, a professor of history at Lewis & Clark College, that the federal government is aiming to place detention centers in rural areas, which often lean Republican.
“I think there’s a number of reasons for that,” he said. “One, these rural areas tend to be poorer areas where space is available cheaply, but it’s also areas where the local community might be lobbying for jobs that would come as a result of it. I think the other reason why they put them in these remote areas is it makes it very difficult for lawyers and advocates to access immigrants.”
Two Republican senators, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Roger Wicker of Mississippi, petitioned DHS to halt its plans to acquire warehouses for the purpose of detaining thousands of immigrants.
Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)
Wicker wrote a letter to then-Homeland Security Secretary Noem, asking that ICE look elsewhere for its proposed 8,500 bed-space detention center other than the rural town of Byhalia, which has a population of under 1,500.
“Existing medical and human services infrastructure in Byhalia is insufficient to support such a large detainee population,” Wicker said. “Establishing a detention center at this site would place significant strain on local resources.”
Blackburn also worked with DHS to end plans to build a mega-detention center to hold up to 16,000 immigrants. She told her residents that the planned facilities for detention in Lebanon “will not move forward.”
Additionally, Young said “there is some sort of early version of” the federal government trying to retrofit warehouses to detain immigrants.
“If you go back to the origins of immigrant detention, late 19th century, under Chinese exclusion, there was absolutely no infrastructure for detaining immigrants,” Young said. “And so the first immigrant, Chinese immigrants, were detained and jailed in dock warehouses in San Francisco.”
The most recent example of the federal government turning to quickly constructed detention facilities to detain thousands of immigrants is the mass deportation campaign of 1954.
Most recently was the 1980s, when Mariel Cubans were held on military bases. One of the bases in Arkansas held up to 20,000 Cubans, and a riot erupted. It was a disaster that nearly ended then Arkansas Democratic Gov. Bill Clinon’s political career, and the blunder continued to follow him to the White House.
Detention centers and communities
Deirdre Conlon, an associate professor of geography at the University of Leeds, and Nancy Hiemstra co-wrote a book about the web of financial relationships that detention centers have with local communities and private corporations.
“The people who are detained become commodities out of which revenue is generated, that not only the private provider makes money off, but then the county government becomes dependent on,” Conlon said.
When the federal government disinvests in some communities, filling in budget gaps tends to come from detention centers owned and operated by private companies, Hiemstra added.
“But the warehouse model just axes that relationship,” she said.
Hiemstra, an associate professor at Stony Brook University in New York, points out that even though DHS is trying to pitch to these communities that the operation of a warehouse will create jobs, those skills needed to run a facility are unlikely to come from the local community. A majority of the daily operations of the facility comes from the migrants detained, who typically earn up to $1 a day in cleaning and cooking.
“For the size of some of these facilities and the skills that are required … they will have to pull people from the outside (of the community) in,” she said. “That is not going to benefit the existing community at all.”
An aerial view of a warehouse in Williamsport, Maryland, that Immigration and Customs Enforcement bought and plans to turn into a 1,500-bed immigrant detention center. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Hiemstra said it’s no surprise that DHS is facing opposition to operate large-scale detention facilities in communities.
“It removes the economic benefit to local communities that is present with the existing model,” she said. “Not that we want that to continue, but this will just pull it out of local communities even more and make it a total corporate money grab.”
But the main concern, she added, is using a warehouse to detain thousands of people.
“If these come to pass and it seems normal to throw humans in warehouses that will further normalize the deaths that are occurring and this dehumanization of people,” Hiemstra said.
The president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque was detained by federal immigration agents, drawing accusations Thursday from local officials and religious leaders that the arrest was motivated by his criticism of Israel.
Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian-born legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody by nearly a dozen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who surrounded his car on Monday in Milwaukee after he left his home, according to the Islamic Society of Milwaukee.
Supporters called Thursday for his immediate release. His attorneys said he was detained on the grounds that he is a foreign policy threat, a claim they say has no merit.
Instead, they believe Sarsour, 53, was targeted for speaking out against Israel and for a conviction as a minor by Israeli military courts, which have faced scrutiny over allegations of limited due process and high conviction rates of Palestinians. Israel rejects those claims. The offenses included allegedly throwing rocks at Israeli officers, according to attorney Munjed Ahmad.
“Our government should not be doing the bidding of a foreign government,” Ahmad said of Israel. “There’s no question in my mind is that this is to stifle the discourse on the Palestinian narrative.”
Attorneys said Sarsour, born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has no criminal record in the U.S., where he has lived for more than 30 years. They said the U.S. government has known about Sarsour’s conviction in Israel since he came to the U.S. in 1993.
Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. (Courtesy of Islamic Society of Milwaukee)
An email message left Thursday for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned.
Sarsour’s attorneys have likened the case to that of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student activist who faces deportation because the federal government said he was a foreign policy threat.
Sarsour has been the board president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, the largest Islamic organization in the state, for five years. His attorneys say he holds a green card and lives just outside Milwaukee. His wife and four adult children are U.S. citizens.
At a crowded news conference, boisterous supporters chanted to free Sarsour, recounting his advocacy for those in need. Several recalled Sarsour’s stories about his childhood, including allegations of inhumane treatment while being detained by Israelis.
“He was targeted because of one thing, because he dared stand up to the Israeli army,” Othman Atta, one of Sarsour’s attorneys, told the crowd. “And he was not a U.S. citizen.”
A diverse group of religious leaders in a attendance called Sarsour a valuable community member.
“This appears to be just the latest example of how this administration seeks to silence opposition and intimidate those who speak and act differently,” said the Rev. Paul D. Erickson, bishop of the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Sarsour’s arrest also prompted outcry from elected officials, including Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who called it “an outrage.”
“He is a legal permanent resident. There is no substantive evidence he has done anything wrong,” Johnson said Thursday in a post on X. “This is another example of overreach and harm from the U.S. immigration authorities.”
Sarsour is being held at a county jail in Indiana. His attorneys have filed a petition seeking his release.
“He is ready to fight tooth and nail to make sure that he’s not drug through the mud,” Ahmad said. “He wants to stay in this country.”
Baskets of ballots sit at a new ballot processing center in Thurston County, Washington, on Oct. 30, 2025. (Photo by Jake Goldstein-Street/Washington State Standard)
President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting mail ballots faced a fresh challenge on Friday, as a coalition of Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block an order that experts say is an extraordinary attempt by the president to assert authority over elections.
More than 20 states — led by California, Massachusetts, Nevada and Washington — and the District of Columbia sued in federal court in Massachusetts. They argue the order violates the Constitution, which gives states the responsibility to run elections and allows Congress, not the president unilaterally, the power to override state regulations.
“Though the President may wish he had unlimited power to restrict voting rights, the Constitution gives states – not the White House – the authority to oversee elections,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, a Democrat, said in a statement.
The lawsuit is only the latest in a growing number of legal challenges to the order since Trump signed it on Tuesday.
The Democratic National Committee, top Democrats in Congress and other Democratic groups have sued, along with the American Civil Liberties Union, League of Women Voters, the League of United Latin American Citizens and other voting rights groups.
Friday’s state-led challenge marked at least the fifth lawsuit over the order.
“Neither the Constitution nor any act of Congress confers upon the President the authority to mandate sweeping changes to States’ electoral systems or procedures,” the complaint reads.
The Trump administration has said the order is necessary to ensure the security of elections and crack down on noncitizen voting, which studies have found is extremely rare. Trump acknowledged the order would likely face litigation when he signed it but called it “foolproof.”
“The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement on Wednesday.
List required
The order requires the Department of Homeland Security, with help from the Social Security Administration, to compile a list of voting-age U.S. citizens living in each state and then provide that information to state officials at least 60 days before each federal election.
The order does not tell states how to use the data, but it instructs the U.S. attorney general to prioritize investigations into state and local officials who issue federal ballots to ineligible voters.
The list of citizens will be drawn from naturalization and Social Security records, according to the order. It will also include data from SAVE, a powerful computer program maintained by Homeland Security that verifies citizenship by checking names against information in federal databases.
The order also directs the postmaster general to require every outbound mail ballot be in an envelope that includes a tracking barcode.
At least 90 days before a federal election, states must notify the U.S. Postal Service whether they intend to allow ballots to be sent through the mail. States would then have to submit to USPS a list of voters planning to vote by mail at least 60 days before the election.
“The expression ‘a solution in search of a problem’ came to mind, but this is sort of a quasi-solution in search of a hallucination,” said Pamela Smith, president and CEO of Verified Voting, an organization that promotes the responsible use of technology in elections.
Under the order, the Justice Department and other federal agencies would be directed to withhold federal funds from states and localities that don’t comply with federal laws. It doesn’t specify what federal funds would potentially be targeted or whether states could lose election-related dollars.
“The president’s illegal executive order creates a shadow voter eligibility list within the federal government and it threatens to coerce states into disenfranchising voters missing from those lists,” Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford said at a news conference in Las Vegas.
States say they run elections, not feds
The coalition of states argues in the lawsuit that Trump’s order would require states to upend existing election administration procedures and spend significant time and resources “mitigating the harms” of its requirements and educating voters about the new rules.
The states joining the lawsuit include Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington and Wisconsin, in addition to the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat.
Some Republican state officials have backed Trump’s efforts. Wyoming Secretary of State Chuck Gray in a statement voiced “complete and total” support for the order.
“I look forward to continuing to work with the Trump Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the United States Postal Inspection Service, and our county clerks on implementation of this executive order,” Gray said.
But the states say the order would require states to act contrary to their own voter roll procedures, systems and voter registration laws, the complaint argues. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, a Democrat, said the Constitution is clear that states run elections.
“Not the President,” Mayes said. “And Arizona will not allow the federal government to seize control of our elections.”
Kareem Sarsour, son of Salah Sarsour, speaks to the crowd gathered after his father's arrest by federal immigration officers. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
A large and diverse crowd packed a community center on Milwaukee’s south side Thursday, calling for the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. Sarsour, who is of Palestinian descent, was detained by federal immigration agents Monday morning. His supporters are calling Sarsour’s arrest an targeted act of political retaliation designed to chill opposition to the Israeli government and support for the Palestinian people.
“This is a man who came to the United States and kind of lived the American dream,” Othman Atta, executive director of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, told the audience of community members, press, activists, and local elected officials. “And they are trying to tarnish his image. They’re trying to target him.”
Othman Atta, executive director of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
A green card holder and lawful permanent resident, Sarsour has lived in the United States for over 30 years. “The U.S. government fully vetted his visa application at that time,” Kathryn Brady, head of the Muslim Legal Fund of America’s Immigration Litigation Department, said in a statement Wednesday. Brady said that it’s difficult to believe that the federal government’s “position now is not rooted in a violation of his First Amendment right to speak about the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.”
Atta said that on Monday Sarsour stopped at an old warehouse on Milwaukee’s south side which he owned because mail kept arriving there. As he left, a car came on the wrong side of the street “flying toward him,” said Atta, forcing Sarsour to jump out of the way. The unmarked car stopped and a person allegedly in civilian clothes pointed a gun at Sarsour and asked who he was by name.
Atta said 12 vehicles were involved in the arrest, and Sarsour was loaded into a van before being told he was being taken by federal immigration officers.
Atta said that the story was relayed to Sarsour’s attorney Munjed Ahmad during a phone call in which Sarsour declared that he was a lion and willing to fight. Sarsour was transported to the Broadview Detention Center in Illinois before being quickly transferred to another facility in Indiana, Atta said.
Community members call for the release of Salah Sarsour. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
“This is America,” said Atta. “This is Trump’s America.”
He described Sarsour as a husband, father, grandfather, and a successful business owner who has no criminal record or convictions.
“According to the papers that were filed in immigration court, they went back to when he was a minor — a teenager — in the West Bank under Israeli occupation,” said Atta.
When he was a teenager, Sarsour was arrested and detained by the Israeli police. “He served two years,” said Atta. “Many of you who know him know that his passion for Palestine, his passion for justice, was based on the experience he had and that his family and friends had. He would talk to us many times how for 80 straight days, he was interrogated, and brutalized, and tortured while he was in Israeli military custody.”
Palestinians living both in the West Bank and the region of Gaza, which has suffered catastrophic damage and where tens of thousands of people have been killed during attacks by the Israeli government in the last two and a half years, have reported similar abuse.
In 2024, the United Nations found that due process rights for Palestinians had been violated in the West Bank for nearly 60 years. Last year, charges were dropped against five Israeli soldiers accused of beating and sexually abusing a Palestinian prisoner in an assault that was captured in a video. A top legal official in the Israeli military admitted to approving the video’s release in an effort to show the world how the over 9,000 Palestinians detained by Israel are treated, the Associated Press reported.
Community members call for the release of Salah Sarsour. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
Al Jazeera reported that the bodies of Palestinians released as part of a ceasefire deal between Israel and militant factions of Hamas exhibited signs of torture including restraints and injuries still evident on the dead.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said in a statement Thursday that Sarsour was convicted of throwing Molotov cocktails at the homes of Israeli armed forces.” In the statement, which repeatedly called Sarsour a “terrorist” and an “illegal alien from Jordan,” DHS charged that he “lied” on his green card application to enter the country in 1993 during the Clinton administration, and that his first attempts to apply for an immigrant visa at the American consulate in Jerusalem were rebuffed because of those allegations and others of “illegally attempting to possess” weapons and ammunition.
Atta and Sarsour’s supportive community urged onlookers Thursday not to forget the reports about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.
Atta said that Sarsour was again detained by the Israeli government after returning in 1995, which is where the weapons allegations came from, and that the written charges were in Hebrew, “which he doesn’t read or understand.”
Sarsour’s son, Kareem, was joined by other members of his family Thursday. Over the last two days, the family has been “bombarded” with “thousands of messages from all the people who knew him saying what he meant to them as a father-figure, as a role model, as a beloved community member, it just tells you who he was,” said Kareem Sarsour. Kareem described his father as “always giving” and said that Sarsour had tried to give his children everything he couldn’t have when he lived in the West Bank.
Muslim and Christian faith leaders join to call for the release of Salah Sarsour. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
The crowd that assembled to support Sarsour and his family included many Muslim residents, local activists, and elected officials, with Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley and Mayor Cavalier Johnson in the front row, and further back, Alds. JoCasta Zamarripa and Alex Brower. Christine Neumann-Oriz, executive director of Voces de la Frontera, was in the audience, and speakers from Jewish Voice for Peace joined Muslim and Christian faith leaders in denouncing Sarsour’s detention and calling for his release.
A flurry of Wisconsin lawmakers and local officials have condemned Sarsour’s arrest. Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said in a statement that the federal government was “increasingly fascist” and called Sarsour “a vocal advocate for a free and independent Palestinian State.”
“We have already seen numerous Muslim activists unfairly and unlawfully targeted by the Trump Administration for their beliefs and their speech,” Larson wrote. “These Unconstitutional assaults on our freedoms should alarm all of us. When any individual or group is targeted by the government for their speech, all of our freedoms are threatened.”
Congresswoman Gwen Moore called Sarsour’s detention “completely unacceptable.” “Salah Sarsour is a respected leader in the Milwaukee community, and his detention raises serious concerns about the continued targeting of lawful residents based on the color of their skin or their political beliefs,” she said.
Community members call for the release of Salah Sarsour. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-Milwaukee) charged that Sarsour’s detention was an attack on free speech. “Until free expression and free speech are protected, not treated as a privilege of the Trump Administration’s loudest supporters, this openly fascist government should be neither trusted nor obeyed,” Clancy said in a statement. “We must abolish ICE and hold those responsible for these repeated acts of state violence accountable.”
Statements supporting Sarsour were also put out by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Mandela Barnes for governor campaign, and the Milwaukee Area Labor Council Immigrant Rights Committee.
Ahmad said that he’s “shocked” at how many communications he’s received from attorneys around the country on Sarsour’s case. “We have assembled a very capable legal team, that legal team continues to grow,” said Ahmad, declaring that they will work to free Sarsour. A hearing is scheduled on April 18.
Taylor’s opposition, while a Democratic state lawmaker, to the Republican-backed 2011 state law requiring identification to vote.
Her introduction of a 2017 bill, which did not become law. It would have provided driver’s licenses to unauthorized residents, but the licenses would have been labeled: “Not valid for voting purposes.”
Taylor’s opinion, in a 2024 appeals court ruling, which said absentee ballots count even if voters’ witnesses fail to give election clerks their full address. Citizenship is required to vote in Wisconsin, but Wisconsin election officials generally do not verify citizenship when a person registers.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
We’ve written more extensively about this topic in a different article. You can read more about it here.
Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul has joined other Democratic attorneys general in a friend-of-the-court brief seeking to preserve birthright citizenship in the face of an executive order from President Donald Trump.
The president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a prominent pro-Palestinian activist has been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
Protesters attend a rally on protecting birthright citizenship outside the U.S. Supreme Court as U.S. President Donald Trump attends oral arguments on April 01, 2026 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday seemed poised to reject the Trump administration’s attempt to redefine the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, and instead uphold the country’s long understanding of citizenship by birth on American soil.
If a majority of Supreme Court justices strikes down President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for children born to parents without legal status or temporary immigration statuses like visas, it will be the second recent major blow to the president via the high court. Earlier this year, a majority of justices struck down his use of sweeping tariffs.
Trump, who signed the executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship as one of his first acts after his inauguration in 2025, came to the courtroom to hear the oral arguments, a first for a sitting president.
‘Quirky’ administration argument
A majority of the justices during Wednesday’s oral arguments were skeptical of Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s arguments that the citizenship clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment was only intended to grant citizenship to the children of newly freed African American slaves, not immigrants.
Chief Justice John Roberts called one of Sauer’s key arguments “quirky,” and questioned how it could be applied to an entire class of immigrants without legal status.
Sauer argued that the children born to parents without legal status or temporary visitors are not “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” and are instead subject to the laws of their home country. He cited carve outs in birthright citizenship, such as the children born to foreign diplomats.
“You expand it to a whole class of illegal aliens,” Roberts said. “I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples.”
President Donald Trump speaks during a press briefing at the White House Feb. 20, 2026 in Washington, D.C., after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Trump’s use of emergency powers to implement international trade tariffs. At left is Solicitor General D. John Sauer and at right is Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
Along with Roberts, the liberal wing of the court and conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett also did not seem swayed by Sauer’s argument.
Gorsuch asked Sauer if, under the Trump administration’s interpretation of the 14th Amendment, Native Americans would be considered birthright citizens “under your test.”
“Uh, I think so,” Sauer said.
Indigenous people were granted U.S. citizenship by Congress in 1924, but were not granted citizenship under the 14th Amendment because those children were born to parents who were citizens of tribal governments.
Sauer also contended the 1898 Supreme Court ruling that upheld citizenship based on birth on American soil, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, was wrongly decided.
He argued that the Wong Kim Ark case did not take into consideration “sojourn travelers,” who are temporary visitors in the U.S. and give birth.
Sauer also said the Trump administration was not looking for the justices to overturn that case.
ACLU arguments
Liberal justice Elena Kagan said that Sauer’s argument to the court was an effort to create a “revisionist history” of the Wong Kim Ark case.
“Everyone took Wong Kim Ark to say that, as a result of that, birthright citizenship was the rule,” she said. “And I think everybody has believed that for a long, long time.”
American Civil Liberties Union lead attorney Cecillia Wang said during oral arguments that when the federal government tried to strip Ark of his citizenship, “largely on the same grounds (the Trump administration) raised today,” the Supreme Court rejected those efforts.
“This Court held that the 14th Amendment embodies the English common law rule (that) virtually everyone born on U.S. soil is subject to its jurisdiction and is a citizen,” said Wang, who is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants.
Her parents were in the U.S. on student visas when she was born in Oregon, meaning that if Trump’s executive order were in effect at that time, she would have been denied U.S. citizenship.
“Ask any American what our citizenship rule is and they’ll tell you, everyone born here is a citizen alike,” Wang said. “That rule was enshrined in the 14th Amendment to put it out of the reach of any government official to destroy.”
Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, where nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship.
The text of the clause is: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Experts have warned that if the constitutional right to birthright citizenship were struck down, it would effectively create a class of millions of stateless people, leaving them without a country to call home.
If the high court determines that Trump violated the Constitution with his executive order, it would be a major block to the president’s goal in defining who is American, as Trump has aimed to reshape the country’s racial and ethnic makeup through limits to migration and an aggressive immigration campaign of mass deportations.
A decision from the high court on the case, Trump v. Barbara, is likely not going to come until the end of the court term, in late June or early July. If the court decides to uphold the executive order, it would go into effect 30 days after the ruling.
New world, old Constitution
Sauer argued that birthright citizenship should not be applied to children of temporary visitors, such as foreigners who partake in what opponents call “birth tourism.”
Roberts asked Sauer how much of an issue birth tourism is – the idea that foreign visitors specifically travel to the U.S. for the purpose of giving birth and obtaining citizenship for their soon-to-be born children.
“No one knows for sure,” Sauer said, citing media reports that many Chinese tourists travel to the U.S. and give birth.
However, China does not allow its citizens to have dual citizenship.
Roberts seemed skeptical that birth tourism should be considered in Sauer’s legal arguments for the purpose of restricting birthright citizenship. He told Sauer that birth tourism “wasn’t an issue in the 19th century.”
“We’re in a new world now,” Sauer said. “Where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child as a U.S. citizen.”
But Roberts shot back, “Well, it’s a new world, it’s the same Constitution.”
Other countries
Sauer also argued that the U.S. should fall in line with the citizenship laws of other countries.
“Unrestricted birthright citizenship contradicts the practice of the overwhelming majority of modern nations,” he said. “It demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship.”
Kavanaugh questioned why the U.S. should worry about the citizenship requirements of other countries.
“Obviously we try to interpret American law with American precedent based on American history,” Kavanaugh said. “I’m not seeing the relevance as a legal, constitutional interpretive matter necessarily, although I understand it’s a very good point.”
Shortly after oral arguments ended, Trump took to his social media site, Truth Social, where he falsely said the U.S. is the only country to have birthright citizenship. Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Mexico are among several countries that have birthright citizenship.
“We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” he wrote.
Trump left Wednesday’s oral arguments after Sauer was finished presenting his argument to the justices, and about a few minutes into arguments from the ACLU’s Wang, according to White House pool reports. Oral arguments lasted for about two-and-a-half hours.
Earlier decision
This is the second time the Trump administration has brought a birthright citizenship case before the justices.
Last year, after federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Washington state struck down the president’s executive order, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but asked the justices to consider the lower courts’ use of universal injunctions, rather than the merits of birthright citizenship.
The justices took up the case, and in a 6-3 vote divided along ideological lines, the use of universal injunctions was curtailed by the conservative wing of the high court.
After the ruling, immigration advocates and the ACLU filed class action suits, which were successful in blocking the birthright citizenship executive order. The suits argued that future children born in the United States without gaining citizenship constituted a nationwide class.
“If you credit the government’s theory, the citizenship of millions of Americans past, present and future could be called into question,” Wang said.
More than 30 groups representing Milwaukee School of Engineering students, faculty and staff, unions and politicians, are asking the college to stop cooperating with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which uses a leased building on campus.
As the United States of America marks its 250th anniversary this year, the relationship between the states and the federal government is approaching a breaking point.
Led by a bellicose president, the executive branch has moved to dominate states, resulting in more than a year of escalating confrontations between the two levels of government.
President Donald Trump has worked quickly: In the first year of his second term, he surged thousands of immigration enforcement agents into a resistant Minneapolis and other cities, with fatal results. He seized control of the National Guard in some states against the will of governors.
His administration is trying to force states to turn over sensitive data on millions of voters ahead of the midterms. And it is blocking states from receiving, and distributing to their residents, billions of federal dollars for child care, public health, housing and a host of other congressionally approved programs.
Political parties have swung in and out of power in Washington for centuries, and recent administrations have increasingly clashed with states run by the other party. This time is different, dozens of sources in and around government told Stateline.
Trump and a coterie of loyal aides have set out to remake the nation in the president’s image. Along the way, retribution and raw power have become the administration’s primary tools to bend recalcitrant states to its will. Grants are pulled, armed force deployed, disaster aid withheld.
The states have repeatedly gone to court, asking the federal judiciary to rein in the executive branch. They have also started testing the bounds of their own authority, such as moving to restrict the actions of federal immigration enforcement agents.
The past year has led to a period of sustained state and federal conflict without parallel in modern U.S. history. The consequences for Americans over time will prove enormous, shaping the very nature of our government.
“This kind of battle between the federal government and the states, we’ve just never seen that before and it makes no sense,” said former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman, who was elected as a Republican but later helped co-found the centrist Forward Party.
Tensions between the states and the central government are as old as the nation itself. Alexander Hamilton famously favored a strong central government, while James Madison offered the Bill of Rights — including what became the 10th Amendment, which reserves for the states and the people those powers not delegated to the federal government.
But current strains are testing the bedrock principles of federalism, the uniquely American system created by the framers of the Constitution of power sharing between Washington, D.C., and the states.
Ahead of the 250th anniversary of the country’s founding on July 4, Stateline is exploring how the Trump era is transforming the relationship between the states and the federal government. This article is the first in an occasional series, The 50 vs. The One, that will examine the current fraught moment and what evolving — and often deteriorating — state-federal ties mean for the country, now and in the future.
In interviews and public remarks, current and former elected officials at all levels of government, as well as experts on American government, have described the country as approaching a pivot point. Trump’s second term could mark a defining moment for American federalism, one that will be studied in history books alongside Reconstruction, the New Deal and the Civil Rights Movement.
The United States will either continue to adhere to the principles of federalism, they say, or it will take a significant step toward a more powerful central government that sidelines the states.
“We are in a period of challenged federalism,” said Lisa Parshall, a federalism researcher and political science professor at Daemen University near Buffalo, New York. “The fact that we’re here talking about federalism tells you something about the current state of American politics.”
Dramatic changes in a year
Fears of diminishing state authority have animated state officials over the past year. Republican lawmakers in Utah have invested in federalism education and expanded a group to assess state-federal boundaries, for instance.
In July, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly, both Democrats, publicly abandoned the nonpartisan National Governors Association, in part because they said the organization was not doing enough to protect states’ rights.
Kansas Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly answers questions about federalism during an interview with Stateline in February. Kelly called states the “laboratories of democracy.” (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
States are “laboratories of democracy,” Kelly said during an interview in February, using a classic civics textbook description. States have traditionally operated with relative freedom to pursue their own agendas and solutions to the challenges they face. In turn, states learn from one another.
“That’s been the beauty of it,” Kelly said. “If that’s to go away, if the federal government were — and they are, at this point — undermining states’ authority and responsibility, I think you end up slowing down the entire country.”
In the same way the three branches of government — the legislative, the executive and the judicial — provide checks and balances on one another, federalism imposes a state check on federal power. The U.S. Constitution, which went into effect in 1789, ensured states would command broad power over local commerce, policing, elections and other matters within their borders.
But Trump has at times raised doubt about whether he will always follow the Constitution and has claimed that he can ignore some of its requirements.
Last spring, Trump replied “I don’t know” when asked whether he needed to uphold the U.S. Constitution in the context of due process for immigrants. In 2022, he said massive election fraud allows parts of the Constitution to be terminated. And after his 2020 election defeat, he urged then-Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the results, even though the vice president has no constitutional authority to do so.
In February, Trump asserted that “states are just an agent of the federal government” as he called to “nationalize” elections. Under the Constitution, the responsibility of running elections belongs to the states.
Trump’s critics fault the Republican-controlled Congress for failing to challenge his sweeping assertions of executive power. His administration’s efforts to withhold from states billions in dollars appropriated by Congress, for instance, have spurred relatively little outrage among GOP lawmakers.
“What I think we’re seeing now is a whole different system of crushing state and local government,” said U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat who has been in Congress since 2005. “And bowing down to a new system where we are almost living in a one-person government.”
What I think we’re seeing now is a whole different system of crushing state and local government.
– U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Missouri Democrat
In response to questions from Stateline, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement: “The Trump Administration faithfully upholds our Constitution and the immortalized American principles of federalism, the rule of law, and the separation of powers.”
Trump and his allies have cast the president as a heroic figure capable of smashing through the machinery of government to achieve results on behalf of his voters and at the expense of his enemies. “For those who have been wronged and betrayed … I am your retribution,” he said in 2023.
He has at times taken steps that his supporters argue empower states, including effectively gutting the U.S. Department of Education, which Republicans have long accused of federal overreach. His appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court during his first term helped cement a conservative majority that in 2022 returned the issue of abortion access to the states.
In a statement, the Republican Governors Association told Stateline the current administration trusts governors to run their own states.
“By cutting government bureaucracy and unnecessary red-tape, President Trump is empowering governors to make decisions that best serve their individual states,” wrote Kollin Crompton, an RGA spokesperson.
Scrambled identities
The U.S. Constitution has been gradually amended in ways that have limited state power, most importantly through amendments that abolished slavery, required states to treat their citizens equally under the law, and prohibited states from denying suffrage on the basis of race and sex.
The federal government has also expanded its reach through legislation. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s imposed new economic regulations and created a federal social welfare apparatus that touches nearly every American.
Over time, Democrats broadly came to be seen as the party more comfortable with an active federal government and Republicans as the party seeking a more restrained Washington.
But the Trump era has scrambled those identities.
Trump has shown less respect for traditional conservative ideology, such as limited government and a general deference to the authority of states. Instead, he has taken a maximalist approach to executive power.
His actions have placed Democratic state officials in a position of advancing limits on the federal government, whether through lawsuits or legislation. And they have put Republican supporters of the president at odds with decades of conservative rhetoric.
“I do think that progressives are seeing that federalism — there’s a reason it’s in our constitutional order and it isn’t just something that’s left for conservatives,” said Sean Beienburg, an associate professor at Arizona State University who researches federalism and constitutional law.
In Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon, Trump deployed federalized National Guard troops onto city streets before courts held him back and he withdrew. For a time, active-duty Marines also patrolled Los Angeles, an extraordinary use of the military for domestic purposes.
Oregon Democratic Attorney General Dan Rayfield, who challenged the deployment of the National Guard in his state, said the fight underscores why lawsuits matter in checking Trump’s power.
“People should be shocked that Oregon has filed 55 lawsuits,” Rayfield said in an interview earlier this year. “Their mind should be blown. But their mind should be equally blown at how often we’re winning these cases.”
The Trump administration has won seven court decisions — and lost 58 — so far, according to a New York Times litigation tracker.
I do think that progressives are seeing that federalism, there’s a reason it’s in our constitutional order and it isn’t just something that’s left for conservatives.
– Sean Beienburg, an Arizona State University associate professor
Democratic state lawmakers have also searched for ways to restrict federal immigration agents. In California, Democratic Assemblymember Alex Lee has proposed prohibiting state tax breaks for Immigration and Customs Enforcement contractors — a move that could carry national implications because of the size of the state’s economy.
“We also, now, are reasserting what the role of the states and the federal government are,” Lee said.
But among Republicans, Trump has successfully maintained his grip. Many conservative state leaders have supported the president’s most controversial moves, even those criticized as federal overreach.
During President Joe Biden’s term, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott was a staunch proponent of state autonomy and repeatedly challenged the federal government on regulatory issues and its deployment of a state’s National Guard. But Abbott has supported Trump’s expansion of federal powers, going so far as to authorize the deployment of the Texas National Guard to aid immigration enforcement in Illinois and Oregon.
A masked ICE agent knocks on the window of an observer’s vehicle in Minnesota in January. Some Democratic states want to restrict the actions of federal immigration enforcement officers. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
Republican U.S. Sen. Jim Justice, the previous governor of West Virginia, said federalism remains “alive and well” under Trump. He said he was worried about the nation’s trajectory before coming to Washington in 2025.
“We’ve had to change things,” he said. “There’s new things that are going on that no question they’re disrupting folks on the other side of the aisle.”
Still, other Republicans have pushed back on the administration’s escalating hostility toward liberal states.
Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt sharply criticized the deployment of the National Guard, saying “Oklahomans would lose their mind” if a Democratic-controlled state sent troops to his state during Biden’s presidency. He has warned that the expanding power and spending of the federal government is dangerous no matter which party controls Washington.
“When we have this powerful of a federal government, it should be frightening for everyone,” Stitt said during a February event at The Pew Charitable Trusts in Washington, D.C.
‘States created the Constitution’
As the reach of the federal government ballooned over generations, Democratic and Republican presidents have used federal funding to wield more influence over state and local governments.
Federal dollars account for an increasingly large percentage of state revenues, rising from 22% in 1989 to 36% in 2023, according to Pew, which analyzed census and federal economic data. States received more than $1 trillion in federal grants that year.
Over the years, that largesse has encouraged states to pursue policy agendas favored by the current party in power at the federal level.
But Trump has weaponized federal funds in unprecedented ways, experts say. Bypassing Congress and despite numerous court losses, the White House has held up funding for higher education, transit, housing and infrastructure — particularly for states that displease him.
The administration’s attempts to terminate funding for the $16 billion Gateway rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey remain entangled in a lawsuit. New Jersey Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill said the White House has caused millions in cost overruns and delays, in what she characterized as the most urgent and consequential infrastructure project in the country.
In February, Politico reported Trump told congressional leaders he would release funding for the project in exchange for renaming Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia and Penn Station in New York City in his honor.
The New Hampshire House holds votes in March 2025. New Hampshire House Speaker Sherman Packard, a Republican, says federal-state tensions have been mounting for decades. (Photo by Ethan DeWitt/New Hampshire Bulletin)
Parshall, of Daemen University, noted that more state leaders of both parties are pushing to reassert state-federal boundaries — whether in the areas of agriculture or the future of artificial intelligence.
“Federalism scholars are seeing this as a potentially pivotal moment in federal-state relationships,” she said.
Last August, elected leaders gathered at the National Conference of State Legislatures in Boston, where in 1773 colonists hurled chests of tea into the Boston Harbor in protest of Great Britain’s King George III. At the conference, lawmakers grumbled about a federal government increasingly sidelining states. That organization, representing more than 7,000 state and territory legislators, has consistently urged the Trump administration to respect states’ inherent authority.
In December, a bipartisan group of more than 40 lawmakers from 30 states gathered to discuss federalism issues, unanimously approving a declaration on the importance of states’ ability to legislate independently. That document noted that the Constitution did not create the states, “but rather the states created the Constitution, ratifying a framework in which we would both govern collectively and independently.”
New Hampshire state House Speaker Sherman Packard, a Republican, said state-federal tensions have been mounting for decades. He noted that the major tax and spending law the president signed last summer — often called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — both cut federal funding to states and saddled them with new costs and administrative work. But it’s just the latest example of what he views as a federal government overstepping its bounds.
“And it’s getting more and more prolific that they’re taking on and doing things that most of us feel is inappropriate,” Packard said. “If we don’t fix this, we’re going to lose state sovereignty altogether. And that’s just not the way it was set up.”
Reporter David Lightman contributed to this story. Stateline reporters Jonathan Shorman and Kevin Hardy can be reached at jshorman@stateline.org and khardy@stateline.org.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Federal agents on patrol in Minneapolis in January. A coalition of 22 states says the Trump administration appears to have violated a court order limiting the types of health data that can be shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation proceedings. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
A coalition of 22 states told a federal court that the Trump administration appears to have violated a court order that limited the types of health data that could be shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation proceedings.
Back in December, a court allowed ICE to pull some basic information from Medicaid, the state-federal health insurance program that primarily covers people with low incomes, to help the agency find people who are in the country illegally.
That ruling was a partial win for the administration in a lawsuit in which the 22 states and the District of Columbia had sued to block information sharing between ICE and Medicaid.
But the court also placed restrictions on ICE, saying it could only pull basic data such as addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and citizenship or immigration status. And the ruling barred ICE from collecting information on lawful permanent residents or citizens.
Advocates warned that even the sharing of that partial information would prompt immigrants, including those in the country legally, to forgo health coverage for fear that enrolling in Medicaid could make them or their family members easier for ICE to find.
Now, in a new filing, the states say the Trump administration appears to have ignored the court’s order limiting what information ICE is allowed to have. They claim the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Medicaid, has admitted to sharing with ICE “a large and complex” set of data on Medicaid recipients, even though the court said the data of citizens and lawful permanent residents is off limits.
The states claim the federal government hasn’t clarified how it determines who is “lawfully present,” nor has it confirmed whether it’s filtering out protected individuals from the data it gives to ICE.
The states are asking the court to formally bar the sharing of protected health care information for people lawfully residing in the United States. They’re also asking the court to confirm that “lawfully residing” includes noncitizens who have legal status, such as refugees and asylees. And they want the court to allow the states to examine the data that’s been shared with ICE so far, and how it has been used.
The Trump administration has not yet responded. The plaintiff states are scheduled to appear in a San Francisco federal court on April 30 for a hearing.
The states involved in the suit are those with Democratic attorneys general: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, Wisconsin.
The court’s orders preventing Medicaid data sharing won’t apply to states not involved in the lawsuit.
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments April 1, 2026, in a case challenging the President Donald Trump's order ending birthright citizenship. (Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in a case that could reshape the understanding of who is American by birth.
The case, Trump v. Barbara, challenges President Donald Trump’s executive order that redefines citizenship to exclude children born to parents who either do not have legal status, or hold temporary legal visas.
It has the potential to upend the guarantee of birthright citizenship in effect since a Supreme Court decision in 1898 that extended citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States. There is a small carveout for children born to foreign diplomats.
The Trump administration petitioned the high court in December after multiple lower courts struck down the executive order, finding it violated the Constitution.
Birthright citizenship has been a longstanding core principle in the United States, where nearly any child — regardless of their parents’ immigration status — born on U.S. soil is automatically granted citizenship. Experts have warned that if birthright citizenship were struck down, it would effectively create a class of millions of stateless people.
But what was once a fringe legal theory has been pushed into the mainstream by the president and his far-right allies, who have sought to redefine who is American.
They argue the citizenship clause of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which is the basis for birthright citizenship, was meant to apply to newly freed African American slaves after the Civil War, not to children of immigrants. Most legal scholars and historians disagree with that interpretation.
The text of the clause is: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
After oral arguments are heard on Wednesday, a decision from the Supreme Court is expected before the court’s summer recess begins at the end of the term in late June or early July.
19th-century case
This is not the first time the Trump administration has brought a birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court.
Last year, after federal judges in Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Washington state struck down the president’s executive order, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, but asked the justices to consider the lower courts’ use of universal injunctions, rather than the merits of birthright citizenship.
The justices took up the case, and in a 6-3 vote divided along ideological lines, the use of universal injunctions was curtailed by the conservative wing of the high court.
After the ruling, immigration advocates and the American Civil Liberties Union filed class action suits, which were successful in blocking the birthright citizenship executive order. The suits argued that future children born in the United States without gaining citizenship constituted a nationwide class.
Cody Wofsy, of the ACLU, is a co-lead attorney in the case and told reporters last week that the Supreme Court already decided the issue of birthright citizenship in 1898.
“The constitutional text is clear, the precedent is clear and the history is clear,” Wofsy said.
The 1898 case, United States vs. Wong Kim Ark, settled the idea that automatic citizenship was granted to children born on U.S. soil, Wofsy said.
Ark, born in San Francisco, was denied entry back into the country after visiting China. Officials at the time argued that because his parents were Chinese citizens in the United States on temporary visas at the time of his birth, and therefore were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S., he was not a citizen. He took the issue to the high court and in 1898 the Supreme Court affirmed that children born in the United States were guaranteed citizenship.
Arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, Solicitor General D. John Sauer has said that the 1898 case is being misinterpreted, and that it meant to only include children born to parents who were granted authorization to be in the U.S.
“Illegal aliens are not ‘permitted by the United States to reside here,’ and thus their children are excluded from citizenship,” Sauer argued in briefs.
However, Trump’s executive order would also deny citizenship to children born to parents on temporary visas, such as for work or school.
Sauer also relies on an 1884 Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to John Elk, a Native American man born in Nebraska, who was no longer a member of his tribe and tried to become a naturalized U.S. citizen in order to vote.
Elk was denied citizenship, because he was not “subject to the jurisdiction of” the U.S. because of his “political allegiance” to his tribe, even though he had renounced his tribal citizenship. Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans in 1924.
Sauer cites the Elk case in his argument that the citizenship clause does not apply to children born to immigrants on temporary visas or undocumented people and “only to those born of parents with primary allegiance to the United States.” The administration is not arguing that Indigenous people should be denied birthright citizenship.
Torey Dolan, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said Sauer’s argument wrongly conflates Indigenous people with migrants, despite a long U.S. legal tradition of treating them distinctly.
“American law has always found a way to distinguish Indigenous people from non-Indigenous people in a way that has never been applied to immigrants,” Dolan, an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, said.
She noted that in the Declaration of Independence, which includes the grievances of the colonists, one complaint was how British King George III refused to allow for migration into the colonies in order to occupy land stolen from Indigenous tribes.
“This conflation of immigrants and Indigenous people, for the sake of this argument, I think, is pretty egregious, and I think it really obfuscates American history and its colonial history in particular,” she said.
‘Pure chaos’
Legal advocates challenging the executive order are confident they will win at the Supreme Court.
“President Trump’s executive order is plainly unconstitutional and unlawful, and we’re confident that the Supreme Court will reaffirm existing legal precedent and strike down this executive order once and for all,” Hannah Steinberg, a staff attorney for the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, told reporters.
In briefs, the ACLU has also argued that if Trump’s executive order were to go into effect, it would create a stateless class of people. The Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies migration, found that the end of birthright citizenship would increase the unauthorized population by an additional 2.7 million by 2045.
Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship is part of the administration’s broader goal to curtail migration to the U.S., arguing that birthright citizenship is an incentive for unauthorized immigration.
But the idea that people migrate to the U.S. so their children can be born as citizens is not supported by research, Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said.
“People move mainly for opportunity for themselves and their children and also for safety,” she said. “There are many unauthorized immigrants who have come to the United States with their own children, who were born in another country, who won’t be U.S. citizens, and they still come.”
“I don’t think there’s any evidence that birthright citizenship specifically is an independent pull factor. It’s more the safety, the rule of law and the earnings potential that people see in the United States, and the opportunity to reunite with other families is another major factor,” she continued.
Ama S. Frimpong, the legal director for the immigrant rights group We Are CASA, told reporters that there are practical questions to how Trump’s executive order would even work.
“What happens in a household in which there are older children who are born here and now, suddenly they have a new baby who’s born tomorrow, and that baby is not going to have the same rights that their siblings have?” she asked. “Is a baby going to be subject to detention and deportation by their very own government that is meant to protect them because they were born here?”
That reality of birthright citizenship being stripped, Frimpong said, would be “just pure chaos.”
International migration to Wisconsin has dropped sharply since President Donald Trump’s return to office, mirroring a national slowdown as visa issuances and border crossings decline.
New U.S. Census Bureau data shows Wisconsin gained just over 7,200 residents through international migration between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, down from more than 22,000 over the previous year — a 67% decline.
Overall, Wisconsin added about 16,000 new residents in that period, increasing the state’s overall population by roughly 0.2%.
Nearly every Wisconsin county saw net international migration fall by double-digit percentages. Several counties lost more residents to international migration than they gained.
The few Wisconsin counties that saw net increases added only small numbers of new arrivals from outside the U.S. Shawano County, for instance, received 29 international migrants in fiscal year 2025, up from 24 the year before.
Not all international migration is immigration. The Census Bureau counts movements in and out of the country by citizens and noncitizens as international migration. That includes members of the armed forces and people moving between Puerto Rico and the rest of the U.S.
Federal immigration court records show a similar pattern. Only 198 immigrants with Wisconsin addresses made their first appearance in immigration court in February, down from a monthly peak of about 2,400 in March 2024.
Federal immigration courts, run by the U.S. Department of Justice, handle deportation cases and immigrants’ requests for asylum and other forms of relief.
More than 43,000 immigrants who entered the court system over the past decade listed addresses in Wisconsin.Three-quarters still await final rulings. New arrivals and removal cases slowed to a trickle after President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Many immigrants detained in Wisconsin over the past year first entered the court system before Trump returned to office.
Even so, international migration accounted for nearly half of Wisconsin’s overall population growth between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and a similar share over the past decade.
Nearly two dozen counties lost population last year, and another seven would have lost population without international migration.
In Milwaukee County, a scenario with no international migration in 2025 would have meant a net loss of more than 2,000 residents. Instead, the county shrunk by just over 100 residents. Natural growth outpaced international migration, but the county lost nearly 5,000 residents to domestic migration.
Even as international migration sharply declines, Republican voters in the state continue to express strong concern about immigration. In aMarquette University Law School poll conducted this month, 77% of Republicans said they were very concerned about illegal immigration and border security, compared with 54% who said the same about inflation and the cost of living — the top issue for Democrats and independents.
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