WASHINGTON — Republicans in Congress are once again looking toward the complex budget reconciliation process as a way to achieve some of their policy goals without Democratic votes. 

GOP leaders were able to use the special pathway last year to approve the “big, beautiful” law that extended tax cuts, overhauled and cut Medicaid, provided hundreds of billions in extra funding for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, and raised the country’s debt limit by $5 trillion, among other provisions. 

Now, Republicans will try to use the process at least one more time to provide years of funding to the Department of Homeland Security amid a two-month shutdown, with none of the constraints on immigration enforcement that Democrats have sought. 

Democrats’ push to rein in enforcement after federal immigration officers shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis led to a record-breaking stalemate over the annual DHS appropriations bill. 

The funding lapse hasn’t yet affected Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, DHS agencies which Republicans bolstered in the last reconciliation bill. But it has had an impact on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration.

Reconciliation will require Republicans in the House and Senate to be almost completely unified on their goals, especially if the party tries to include elements of a hot-button voter identification bill called the SAVE America Act or other policies that don’t have a significant impact on federal revenue, spending, or the debt limit. 

What goes in and what is kept out of another reconciliation package will become increasingly important to GOP leaders’ reelection message as the country moves closer to November’s midterm elections. 

Why use budget reconciliation? 

Regular bills need a simple majority vote to pass the House, but at least 60 senators need to vote to end debate in that chamber. This step, sometimes called the legislative filibuster, or cloture, forces bipartisanship on most legislation, unless it moves through the reconciliation process. 

Budget reconciliation bills are exempt from that Senate rule. 

So why haven’t Republicans used reconciliation to enact all of their policy goals and campaign promises since taking over unified control last year? 

Budget reconciliation bills must follow a specific process and meet strict requirements in the Senate, known as the Byrd rule, named for former West Virginia Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd.

Very simply, this requires reconciliation bills to address federal spending, revenue, or debt in a way that is not deemed “merely incidental” by the Senate parliamentarian. 

How complicated could reconciliation really be?

Very.

First, the House and Senate must adopt a budget resolution with identical sets of reconciliation instructions for committees. Those guidelines will give committee leaders either a minimum amount to spend during the next decade or a maximum amount they can add to the deficit during that window. 

The Senate cannot approve the budget resolution without going through a marathon amendment voting session referred to as a vote-a-rama, which typically lasts well into the night. 

A budget resolution is a tax and spending blueprint, sort of like a blueprint for building a house before you’ve actually gotten a mortgage or purchased any land. It’s a proposal, but it doesn’t actually change tax law or spend any money. 

Once the budget is adopted, the House committees that receive reconciliation instructions must draft, debate and vote to send their bill to the Budget Committee. 

Then, the Budget Committee bundles all of the reconciliation bills together in one package and sends it to the House floor, where lawmakers must vote to send it to the Senate, where things get even more complex. 

What happens next?

Before a reconciliation bill goes to the Senate floor, it moves through something referred to as the “Byrd bath,” where the Senate parliamentarian determines if each provision fits the strict rules. 

Senate leaders can take up the House-passed version of the bill or work through the committee process on their side of the Capitol. Typically, the upper chamber goes directly to the floor and amends the House-passed bill. 

The Senate then goes through another vote-a-rama session, giving the minority party, currently Democrats, the chance to put all 100 lawmakers in that chamber on the record about various proposals in the bill. 

That process will be especially challenging this year, with Democrats looking to institute guardrails on immigration enforcement activities and get Republicans up for reelection on the record over some of the most pressing issues facing the country. 

If the Senate makes any changes to the House-passed bill, it must go back to that chamber for final approval before it can go to President Donald Trump for his signature. 

If the Senate approves a bill identical to the one passed by the House, it would go to Trump without needing another House vote. 

What exactly is the Byrd rule?

Elements in the bill would violate that rule if they:

• Didn’t change revenue, spending, or the debt limit. 
• Change revenue or spending in a way deemed “merely incidental.”
• Change policy outside the jurisdiction of the authorizing committee.
• Didn’t comply with the committee’s reconciliation instructions in the budget resolution.
• Increases the deficit past the budget window (usually 10 years).
• Change Social Security in any way, shape, or form.

How many times can Republicans use reconciliation? Is it unlimited? 

They have two more chances during this Congress but are limited by how many budget resolutions they can adopt. 

GOP leaders used the fiscal 2025 budget resolution to set up passage of the “big, beautiful” law. They can write a fiscal 2026 budget resolution for one more round and then use the fiscal 2027 budget resolution to run through a third reconciliation process, if they want to. 

Fiscal years for the federal government begin on Oct. 1.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday he plans to use the complex reconciliation process to fund immigration enforcement for the next three years, though it wasn’t immediately clear if House Republicans were on the exact same page.

The plan to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol with only Republican votes could end the two-month shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security when combined with the regular funding bill for that department, which the Senate already approved but is stalled in the House. 

Thune, R-S.D., said during an afternoon press conference that House GOP leaders “could” add additional provisions to the reconciliation bill, but said he would like it to remain narrow. 

“My hope would be that if we can execute on getting that done here in the Senate, the House would be able to follow through,” he said. 

Thune said the Senate could vote as soon as next week on a budget resolution with reconciliation instructions. That is the first step of the complicated process. But the House must vote to adopt that budget resolution before Republicans can pass the funding bill for ICE and the Border Patrol.  

Speaker Mike Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Homeland Security shuttered

The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down since Feb. 14, after Democrats insisted on new guardrails for immigration enforcement following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers.

Without any bipartisan consensus on how to do that, Republicans have instead decided to use the same reconciliation process they used last year to enact their “big, beautiful” law to approve funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. 

The House would then likely pass DHS’ spending bill without those two line items, which the Senate has already approved. That would provide funding for the other agencies within the department, including the Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration.

Safeguards demanded

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during a separate press conference that Democrats have repeatedly asked for “common sense” safeguards that would require immigration agents to show identification, prevent them from wearing masks and require judicial warrants to enter someone’s home. 

“The bottom line is these are simple. These are common sense,” he said. “They’re what every police department uses and when you ask the American people, they’re on our side. It’s the intransigence, particularly of the hard right, who seem to like what ICE is doing.”

Schumer said Democrats would use the marathon amendment voting session on both the budget resolution and the later reconciliation bill to hold Republicans’ “feet to the fire on DHS, on the war, on so many other issues.”

Thune said he has been “trying to figure out exactly” what Democrats have gotten out of the DHS shutdown, especially considering that immigration enforcement operations haven’t been affected since there was funding for that in last year’s reconciliation bill, exempting those programs from the funding lapse. 

“All of the things that the Democrats made this about, which was supposed to be reforms to the way that ICE and CBP operate. They got none of that. Zero,” he said, referring to Customs and Border Protection, the larger agency that includes the Border Patrol. “And now we’re going to fund those agencies for three years into the future.”

Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt called a press conference Friday to push back against reports about a U.S. citizen who claimed last month that she was detained by federal immigration agents and held at the Dodge County Jail. Schmidt announced he is filing a civil lawsuit against the woman who made the allegations, saying, “it is important that we correct the facts, so today we’re here to talk about the fact vs. the fiction in the Sundas Naqvi allegations that were made.” 

In early March, Naqvi, 28, of Skokie, Illinois, claimed that she and her co-workers had been detained by federal immigration authorities at the O’Hare airport in Chicago after returning from a work trip abroad. Naqvi’s family and Kevin Morrison, a Cook County commissioner, said that Naqvi had been taken to the Broadview Detention Facility and was then transferred across state lines to the Dodge County Jail, then released without aid or transportation in the pre-dawn hours. 

Schmidt said during his press conference Friday that these allegations are false. “They gained significant attention, but they have not been supported by any — any — verified evidence at all,” he said. Schmidt noted that Morrison, a candidate in the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat, held a press conference to air the Naqvi allegations in the leadup to a the election, which he  lost. 

Naqvi’s alleged detention took place against a backdrop of news reports and widespread public outrage over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which targeted Chicago and Minneapolis. 

Research conducted by the Deportation Data Project found that 1,300 arrests made by federal immigration agents were listed as “collateral,” meaning they were not the intended targets of the enforcement, the Minnesota Reformer reported. The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office has also been criticized for assisting in detaining and transporting people arrested by federal immigration agents. 

Schmidt said that the initial claims about Naqvi’s arrest were “coordinated messaging designed to generate outrage and media attention.” He showed a picture posted to social media showing Naqvi being reunited with her family after her alleged detention.

Schmidt said that there “is no record of booking, there is no record of detention, there is no record of release, no contact with the individual, no transfer to any federal agency.” He also blasted media outlets that covered Naqvi’s allegations as factual, repeatedly saying those kinds of stories hurt the reputation of law enforcement. 

“Media coverage has impacts,” said Schmidt. “What you publish has impacts on more than just those readers and viewers. It has impacts on real human beings.” Schmidt showed hate mail the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office received after the Naqvi allegations surfaced, and revealed the names of the people who sent the messages. “These are the types of things that we as elected officials, that public officials get when media put out information that is not verified. And many times, it’s false information that goes out and we get these regularly. And I don’t think that the media understand the impact that these kinds of stories have on real people every single day.”

Schmidt stated that Naqvi had been briefly detained by Customs and Border Protection until 11:42 a.m. at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, after which she left and checked in at a Hampton Inn and Suites hotel in Illinois at 1:17 p.m, just minutes from the airport. While investigating the allegations, Schmidt made contact with a man he calls both a witness and a victim, who provided corroborating evidence refuting Naqvi’s story.

The witness — who Schmidt refused to identify citing Marsy’s Law — allegedly received texts from Naqvi telling him that she’d arrived to her hotel room, and asking to use his credit card to buy some food. Records from the hotel confirm when Naqvi checked in, and that she was not at the Dodge County Jail when she claimed. Naqvi also asked to use the witness’s card to pay for a spa treatment during this time. “Now I don’t know about you, and my staff have never recorded one, there is no spa at Broadview in Chicago Illinois,” said Schmidt. “I can also tell you there is no spa lady in our jail here in Dodge County.”

Schmidt said that on the morning Naqvi claimed she was released from custody, she’d actually asked the witness to drive her to Wisconsin to help her sister with car trouble. The witness allegedly told Schmidt in a recorded interview that he thought she was  going to the Kenosha area, but it turned out Naqvi wanted to go to another hotel in Beaver Dam. Schmidt showed images and played video of Naqvi at a gas station with the witness, wearing the same striped black and white shirt she wore in a social media post that purportedly showed her being reunited with her family. Schmidt called the witness “a true gentleman” for holding the door open for Naqvi as they left the gas station. 

It was around this time, Schmidt said, well-past 5:00 in the morning, that Naqvi claimed she was being released from the Dodge County Jail. The witness’s vehicle was also captured by several Flock cameras along the journey, Schmidt said. The sheriff wanted to check whether the timeline of events he believed occurred tallied with what the witness was saying. “So I put those times into A.I. and I said ‘what time would he have left?’” The software’s results lined up with what the witness described, Schmidt said.

Later, Schmidt played video of Naqvi at another location taking selfies. At 6:50 a.m. on the morning she was allegedly released, Naqvi’s sister and others arrived in a silver SUV to pick her up. The unnamed witness told Schmidt that he was then asked by Naqvi to pose for media as one of the coworkers who allegedly went with her on the overseas work trip, and who were allegedly detained with her upon returning to the country. Schmidt said that none of this happened, and that the witness refused to make those claims to the media, but did claim to be one of the coworkers to Naqvi’s attorney. 

Schmidt said that the witness paid for Naqvi’s trip to Turkey, and that the trip was not related to or paid for by an employer. In fact, later media coverage reported that the company where Naqvi claimed to work denied that she worked there. Schmidt said that while Naqvi was overseas, she wanted to get a medical procedure for which the witness took out a $3,000 loan. Schmidt said that Naqvi spent about $25,000 of the witness’ money, maxing out his credit card. The witness did all of this, Schmidt said, because he believed he might be able to have  a long term relationship with Naqvi.

The sheriff also discounted the images of Naqvi’s phone location showing her at Broadview and Dodge County. “I’m here to tell you that in the world of A.I., in the world of technology that they live in, things like this can be spoofed very easy,” he said. “I could do it on my phone in only a matter of minutes.” Schmidt noted that one of the screenshot images actually had two different time stamps. Schmidt also highlighted Naqvi’s past disputed allegations, including an accusation of sexual misconduct against a professor that the professor denied.  

In 2019, Schmidt said, Naqvi made a report to the Skokie police that she was violently sexually assaulted. Although officers observed injuries, took forensic evidence and arrested an ex-boyfriend of Naqvi’s, they later determined the report was false, Schmidt said. Another 2020 report with the Skokie police made by Naqvi accused a driver of being impaired in a Walmart parking lot. The driver showed no signs of impairment, and claimed he met Naqvi on a dating app and was waiting for her to come out of the Walmart. The report was classified as disorderly conduct and categorized as not made in good faith, Schmidt said. 

Schmidt said he has not had any success getting other law enforcement agencies interested in following up on what he regards as Naqvi’s bad acts, none of which are likely to be charged as crimes in the state of Wisconsin. He added that he does not know the status of any investigation the FBI may be doing, and the state police he reached out to in Illinois never got back to him. Schmidt said that he was told by local law enforcement officers that while they would like to act, that they can’t because Cook County prosecutors don’t take on cases of this nature. Later, Schmidt claimed that upon hearing this the witness allegedly said “it sucks to live in a blue state.” 

Schmidt is filing a lawsuit in an attempt to hold Naqvi and anyone else involved in her allegations accountable, he  said. “This is not a misunderstanding or a minor discrepancy,” said Schmidt. “This is not a violation of the constitutional or civil rights of Sundas Naqvi or those allegedly with her. The timeline claimed is not physically possible based on the evidence that we have, and that matters.” He also condemned the media and politicians for spreading false reports, saying they damaged respect and trust in law enforcement. 

“Let me be clear,” said Schmidt, “ICE is not the enemy. Law enforcement is not the enemy.” Schmidt said that he won’t stand by “while false narratives are used to portray law enforcement as something it is not.” He added, “I take it personally when my staff are called liars. These are men and women who do the job the right way every day and those accusations are simply not supported by facts.”

Schmidt said that a criminal investigation is ongoing, in addition to the federal civil lawsuit he’s filed, which seeks $1 million in damages. He wouldn’t comment on whether any phones were forensically downloaded as part of this investigation, which Schmidt said he used a lot of his own time to pursue. 

In a statement provided over email, Morrison said that he understands that a lawsuit has been filed, and that while he has not seen it, he cannot comment on pending litigation.  Morrison did not comment on whether he has been in contact with Naqvi or her family. The Examiner reached out to the office of attorney Robert Held, who represented Naqvi and her family when the allegations were first made, but no comment has been forthcoming.

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A new Wisconsin law aims to open up more jobs to people who came to the U.S. illegally when they were still children.

The post New Wisconsin law opens up professional licenses to DACA recipients appeared first on WPR.

The first immigration court hearing for the president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee who was recently detained by ICE agents has been pushed back.

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Mukta Joshi is an investigative reporter at Mississippi Today. She is spending a year as a New York Times Local Investigations fellow examining immigration and criminal justice issues. She can be reached at mukta.joshi@nytimes.com.

I first heard about Delvin Francisco Rodriguez four months ago when ICE published a notification about his death on its website. 

The agency shared only a few details.

According to the post, Rodriguez, 39, who was being held at the ICE detention center in Adams County, Mississippi, had died after a medical emergency landed him at Merit Health hospital in Natchez, in December. 

A second post two months later said that Rodriguez had tried to hang himself in the detention center. Staff members found him, tried to revive him and sent him to the hospital, the report said, but Rodriguez did not regain consciousness and his family agreed to remove him from life support about 10 days later.

At the time, that’s all we knew from official sources.

When I read ICE’s version of events, as sparse as they were, I didn’t have a specific reason to wonder if there was more to the story. Still, the unexpected deaths of people living in ICE custody were becoming a flashpoint.

When Rodriguez died, on Dec. 14, he was the fourth person in four days to die in ICE custody across the nation.

It was a grim year. ICE reported 33 in-custody deaths in 2025, making it the deadliest year for ICE detention centers since the agency was formed. Complaints of deplorable living conditions, spoiled food and medical neglect had been piling up.

The high rate of deaths has continued this year, with ICE reporting 15 more through early April. Several of the deaths have been ruled suicides. And last month, The Associated Press reported that guards in a Texas ICE facility had been overheard betting on which detainee would die by suicide next.

In light of all this, I started trying to learn more about what exactly happened to Rodriguez.

I knew that ICE was unlikely to share details beyond what it had already published on its website. In the five times I’ve reached out to its local spokesman, he has never answered my questions or provided a comment. Representatives for CoreCivic, a private prison operator that runs the Natchez facility, have been polite and responsive but not particularly informative. 

Regardless, I started working on a list of questions for ICE and CoreCivic. I knew Rodriguez had been arrested in September and held somewhere else before his transfer to Mississippi. Where had ICE held him, and what had happened there? Does ICE pass along details regarding the well-being of detainees when they change facilities? And if so, had it communicated any such information about Rodriguez to administrators at Adams?

In the meantime, I had been trying – unsuccessfully – to find Rodriguez’s family. But I had a breakthrough earlier this week when I came across a post about Rodriguez’s death that had been published in January by a nonprofit based in Colorado called Voces Unidas. I hadn’t seen this post before, and it raised some concerning questions from Rodriguez’s family about the circumstances surrounding his death. 

On Tuesday, I got in touch with Alex Sanchez, the president and chief executive of Voces Unidas. He explained how his organization had helped Rodriguez hire a lawyer for his immigration case, and how it was now trying to help Rodriguez’s family learn more about his death. 

Sanchez agreed to ask Rodriguez’s family if they would be willing to speak to me. He told me that they had been fearing retaliation and would want to remain anonymous. 

He also told me that there were several reasons Rodriguez’s family felt like ICE wasn’t telling the full story. 

He said Rodriguez had agreed to self-deport the same month he was arrested, in September 2025. Rodriguez had been in touch with his mother back in Nicaragua, making plans for his return – even asking her to buy clothing for him.

Up until the day before Rodriguez was taken to the hospital, he had been talking regularly to his sisters by phone. His biggest frustration had been that he was being detained indefinitely,  months after he had voluntarily agreed to leave the country. Rodriguez did not show any signs that he was going to harm himself, Sanchez said. 

Rodriguez had described his unit as one of the big ones, a large room where more than 100 people shared living space. But after his death, Sanchez said, Rodriguez’s family was told that he had been found hanging in a cell. They did not receive an explanation for why he was in a cell. By this point, multiple detainees I’d interviewed had told me that the individual cells in the Adams facility are used either to discipline detainees who break the rules or to quarantine sick detainees. 

Sanchez also recounted that Rodriguez’s family found his death suspicious because of a video conversation they’d had with the nurses who were taking care of Rodriguez in his final days at Merit Health in Natchez before he was finally removed from the ventilator. According to the family, the nurses said Rodriguez’s injuries seemed inconsistent with what ICE was telling them – that Rodriguez had hung himself with a sheet, Sanchez said. The nurses also noted that Rodriguez had an injury on his forehead that didn’t look like it could have come from hanging, Sanchez said.

On Wednesday, Brian Todd, a CoreCivic spokesman, responded to my questions with a written statement. I had asked specifically about where Rodriguez had been housed and where he was found, and for details of his mental well-being and security footage of the incident, but Todd didn’t answer any of those questions. 

He expressed sadness on behalf of the company and said Adams detainees had “daily access” to medical care, including mental health services. He noted that Rodriguez had been discovered around 4:15 p.m., which was new information. 

Nobody I reached out to at ICE has responded to the questions I emailed them earlier this week. But I have also filed a public records request with ICE asking for the report it is required to prepare after it reviews an in-custody death, Rodriguez’s detention history and footage of the incident. I’ll let you know how ICE responds. 

The email and statement from Brian Todd of CoreCivic regarding the death of Delvin Francisco Radriguez:

We are deeply saddened by the passing of any individual in our care, and we take each instance very seriously. The safety, health and well-being of the people entrusted to us is our top priority. 

As you previously reported, on December 4, 2025, at approximately 4:15 p.m., Adams County Correctional Center (ACCC) staff responded to a medical emergency involving an unresponsive detainee inside their living area. Staff immediately began lifesaving measures. EMS was called, and paramedics transported the individual by ambulance to a local hospital. Our partners at ICE were notified immediately.

On December 14, ACCC leadership was informed by the hospital that the detainee had passed away. As with all incidents of this nature, it has been thoroughly reviewed in accordance with established protocols and in coordination with our government partners.

We adhere to all applicable federal detention standards in our ICE-contracted facilities, including ACCC. These facilities are monitored very closely by our government partners, and they are required to undergo regular review and audit processes to ensure an appropriate standard of living and care for all detainees.

Solitary Confinement
Solitary confinement, whether as a term or in practice, does not exist in CoreCivic facilities. Restrictive housing is in place for various reasons, including medical and mental health observation and administrative or investigative purposes. Individuals in restrictive housing maintain full access to courts, visitation, mail, showers, meals, all medical facilities and recreation. We always strive to ensure detainees are cared for in the least restrictive environment necessary to maintain their safety and security, as well as that of the institution.

Medical and Mental Health Care
CoreCivic is committed to providing access to high-quality medical and mental health care for all residents. At ACCC, the onsite medical clinic is staffed by licensed health care professionals including physicians, nurse practitioners, psychiatrists, psychologists, mental health counselors and dentists who contractually meet the highest standards of care, as verified by multiple audits and inspections. All detainees have daily access to sign up for medical care, including mental health services. CoreCivic also ensures access to offsite care for residents by coordinating with staff, government partners, community physicians, hospitals and ambulatory care providers. In 2024 alone, there were over 800,000 onsite medical and mental health care encounters in CoreCivic facilities. All CoreCivic staff are trained in CPR and first aid.

Brian Todd
Manager, Public Affairs

Reading Time: 3 minutes

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. 

But more than half the people in the immigration court system are fighting the government alone, according to immigration court data analyzed by Vera. 

“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.

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.

Wisconsin attorneys team up with federal litigators as deportation cases grow more complex is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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.

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.”

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.

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

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.”

A date for sentencing Dugan has not yet been set.

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ICE arrested Salah Sarsour for accusations of lying on his immigration forms and posing a threat to U.S. foreign policy.

The post Milwaukee Islamic Society president awaits immigration hearing in ‘extremely uncommon’ case appeared first on WPR.

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.

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.” 

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. 

Out west, red states object

In Mullin’s own Republican-led state, officials in Oklahoma City met with the owners of a warehouse that DHS was looking to purchase, and the owners eventually backed out of talks with the federal government.

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.

“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.”

In response, Salt Lake City officials have placed restrictions on how much water ICE can use.

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.

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. 

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.”

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. 

A federal judge will not allow for a new trial for the former Milwaukee County judge who was convicted of impeding immigration enforcement. 

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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.

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.”

Elected leaders and clergy seek release of Wisconsin mosque president detained by immigration agents is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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.”

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Steady arrests, shifting targets: Explore latest data on ICE activity across Wisconsin is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In "Bamboo Son," Pao Lor revisits his teenage years in Green Bay and his lifelong search for identity as an orphan.

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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.”

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.  

“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. 

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. 

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.

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. 

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We found no evidence that liberal Wisconsin Appeals Court Judge Chris Taylor has supported allowing noncitizens to vote.

Taylor and conservative state Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar are running in the April 7 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

A Lazar ad claimed Taylor is “pushing for noncitizen voting.” 

Lazar’s campaign cited:

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.

Sources

• Maria Lazar campaign: The Warning
• Maria Lazar campaign: Email
• Urban Milwaukee: Taylor, Stakeholders Call on GOP to Fund Voter ID Information Campaign
• Wisconsin State Legislature: 2017 Assembly Bill 727
• PBS Wisconsin: Wisconsin appeals court upholds ruling on witness addresses for absentee ballots
• Wisconsin Watch: Do Wisconsin election officials verify citizenship when a person registers to vote?

Has Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Chris Taylor been ‘pushing noncitizen voting’? is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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