A federal judge heard from attorneys Monday about the treatment of Salah Sarsour, the Palestinian president of Milwaukee’s Islamic Society and a legal U.S. permanent resident who is being held in an Indiana immigration detention facility.

Sarsour’s lawyers say that since arriving at the Clay County Detention Center in Brazil, Indiana, following his arrest by federal immigration agents in March Sarsour has lost 30 pounds, is not receiving appropriate care for his type 2 diabetes, and has been denied the ability to practice his religion. Separate from Sarsour’s immigration proceedings, Sarsour’s attorneys pushed in federal court for his release, arguing that his treatment at the detention center amounted to a First Amendment violation. 

Luna Droubi, an attorney who represents Sarsour, said that the judge listened closely and asked questions about the 53-year-old business owner, activist and grandfather’s experiences. The judge “addressed and directed the facility to take a look at Salah Sarsour’s medical guidance, and I do think he has real concerns about his treatment,” said Droubi, adding that Sarsour “really has been tormented for exercising his religious beliefs.” 

Initially, Droubi explained, “he wasn’t able to pray five times a day; they would disrupt his prayers at certain hours and tell him to stop doing it.” Sarsour’s requests for Halal meals, foods which are considered permissible in Islam, have been denied, and obtaining a makeshift prayer towel proved challenging as well. When he asked for food that would help him maintain balanced blood sugar levels because of his diabetes, Sarsour was offered pork rinds by detention facility staff according to his attorneys, in violation of his religious dietary requirements.

“It’s been a very difficult time for him,” Droubi told the Examiner. “He’s the president of the largest Islamic Center in Milwaukee. … He is a type 2 diabetic and he has very clear medical instructions that he requires daily glucose testing. At today’s hearing, they represented that they had started daily glucose testing and then somebody at the facility was instructed that they only need to do it once a month.” That goes directly against medical guidance, she added, since glucose levels can drop and rise on a daily basis, “and that can be incredibly dangerous.” 

At one point, Droubi said, Sarsour experienced severe abdominal pain and then was told “there’s nothing we can do for it. There’s no medical professional here. You’re going to have to wait until morning.” She stressed that “he couldn’t even stand up, and it’s only been two months. So he’s really, really struggled.”

Since Jan. 1 of this year, there have been 18 deaths of people detained in immigration detention facilities nationwide. This has outpaced the deaths reported last year –  the highest in two decades. This comes as Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced that it will stop reporting the deaths of people who’ve been recently released by detention, the AP reported.

Sarsour’s attorneys argued that there are numerous reasons why Sarsour needs to be immediately released, and that it’s within the federal court’s authority to do so. Droubi said that Sarsour is being held “because of his speech and associations,” and that the arrest was purely punitive for that speech.

Sarsour grew up in the West Bank and became an outspoken critic of the Israeli government and a supporter of Palestinian rights and freedoms as an adult. That activism continued after the militant arm of Hamas attacked Israel in late 2023, killing 1,200 people, followed by a large-scale Israeli assault on Palestinians living in Gaza which has killed at least 75,000 people while displacing thousands more. 

The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly called Sarsour a “terrorist” who was convicted of throwing Molotov cocktails into the homes of Israeli forces.

“This was an Israeli military kangaroo court,” Othman Atta, executive director of Milwaukee’s Islamic Society, said of Sarsour’s conviction during a community gathering and press conference held in early April after Sarsour’s arrest. “Human rights groups will tell you that these claims are coerced under torture, under interrogation. So absolutely, that’s not true.” At the gathering Atta also said that Sarsour spent two years in Israeli detention as a teenager. “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.”

These experiences are widely reported by detained Palestinians. In 2024, United Nations experts found that due process rights for Palestinians in the West Bank, where Sarsour grew up and was detained, had been violated by Israeli authorities for the past 60 years. 

“He is also an illegal alien that lied on his green card application to fraudulently gain legal status in the U.S. under the Clinton Administration,” a DHS spokesperson said in an emailed statement to the Examiner. “Any accusation of discrimination by ICE agents is FALSE. All illegal aliens in ICE custody receive three meals a day and proper medical treatment. Sarsour is a criminal and a terrorist and will remain in ICE custody pending removal proceedings.”

Droubi said that the federal judge is considering the argument for Sarsour’s release. Attorneys representing the government say that the federal court has no jurisdiction over a claim of unlawful detention. 

“He should be home with his family,” Droubi told the Examiner. “He really should.”

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Controversy over Flock license plate reading cameras has rippled across Wisconsin, causing people to fill public hearings as some regions remove the cameras, and others overhaul auditing and oversight. Activists, elected officials and police departments are navigating disagreements over privacy, safety, freedom and the facts about the surveillance network.  

Communities including Dane County, Verona, Monona, Fitchburg, Appleton, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay are dropping contracts with the multi-billion company Flock Safety because of heightened awareness and public anxiety over surveillance. 

Officers and deputies from three different agencies and three separate counties stand accused of misusing Flock cameras, which compile images of vehicles and their license plates into a database which can be searched by police. When the Examiner reviewed five months of Flock data last year, it contained many thousands of searches conducted by 221 Wisconsin law enforcement agencies.

All three officers are accused of tracking their romantic partners, with officers Josue Ayala of Milwaukee and Cristian Morales of Menasha facing charges for which they have upcoming court appearances. Ayala is scheduled for sentencing in June and Morales has a jury trial in July. Kenosha County Deputy Frank McGrath was not charged for misconduct over his use of Flock to track another deputy he was dating and a John Doe petition seeking charges in the case has been sealed by a judge, according to court records.

“It’s powerful technology,” Heba Mohammad, an organizer with Milwaukee4Palestine — one of the local groups pushing against Flock cameras — told the Examiner.  

Milwaukee4Palestine has focused on police surveillance as cameras, automatic license plate readers like Flock, and facial recognition technology and drones came to Milwaukee. “As Palestinians, we know what that is a signal of,” said Mohammad, pointing out that similar surveillance tested on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has been adopted by U.S. law enforcement agencies. “The road to fascism is paved with well-intentioned surveillance technology.”

Milwaukee4Palestine organized to oppose facial recognition technology and then Flock. “We know this is what is next,” said Mohammad. “We’ve seen how surveillance can be used to oppress people.”

Although MPD stands by its use of Flock, the department has also been forced to revamp its auditing procedures. Over the last couple of months, the department has limited the number of officers who have access to Flock. James Lewis, risk manager for MPD, told the Wisconsin Examiner that access was restricted to an “as needed basis,” and that requests need to go through the chain of command, creating more of a paper trail when Flock is used. 

While some units or bureaus investigating serious crimes had clearer needs for Flock, “in patrol, we wanted to make sure that the officers who had it really had the need to have this software,” said Lewis. MPD is also using audit data to flag “outlier” data that indicate questionable Flock uses, such as an officer searching the same vehicle multiple times over a short period, or not attaching case numbers to searches. MPD shares its Flock network with state partners, but not with federal agencies. 

Nevertheless, community members have expressed a lack of confidence and trust in MPD surveillance, especially after the passage of Act 12, which stripped some of the Fire and Police Commission’s oversight powers in exchange for allowing Milwaukee to adopt a sales tax. 

“We are of the position that the risks far outweigh the benefits of this technology and again, particularly with a police force like the Milwaukee Police Department that has been granted a lot of impunity through Act 12 [and has] basically no accountability,” said Mohammad. “And they are demonstrating time and time again that they don’t care what the community thinks.”

Lewis said that the department is trying to nail down exactly how Flock affects the community. “I think a lot of what we’ve seen through public comment, through the commissioners’ comments, through news media coverage for this is, ‘Hey this is this big data surveillance network and it’s got a lot of these pitfalls in it,” said Lewis. “But I think the other piece of it that we’re really trying to get our hands on is how is this making police work more efficient? Is it driving public safety outcomes? Are we getting what we want out of it and through audit, we’re trying to tell those stories as well.” 

Lewis said MPD is working on answering some of those questions, especially the question of whether there is a return on investment in terms of public safety. “If there is outlier data generated, I want to know not just compliance or not, but also what did the city get out of this? Is it a safer place because of this?” Lewis said that MPD has chosen to overhaul its auditing practices on its own in a tailor-made fashion, rather than waiting on Flock Safety to develop a fix. 

The department highlighted 24 different situations where Flock was used, including felony firearms investigations, parole violations, narcotics trafficking, homicide, material witnesses needed at criminal trials, stolen vehicles, overdose death investigations, sexual assault, shootings and armed robberies. In one of the examples involving theft, MPD specified in an email that “Flock was used to develop patterns of movement in the suspect vehicle” to determine whether it was related to other thefts. 

Balancing tracking, privacy, and public safety

The extent to which Flock can track and surveil people has been a source of tension at public meetings. In December, Milwaukee County Sheriff Denita Ball and Chief Deputy Brain Barkow said that calling Flock a form of tracking is a misrepresentation. They argued that although Flock alerts officers that a vehicle has been sighted, they would still need to go to the area of the alert and search for the vehicle. In other words, Flock doesn’t see everything.

But the technology appears to have greater surveillance capabilities than some departments and even Flock itself have described.

The Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department has also said that Flock is “not used for general surveillance, traffic enforcement, or monitoring individuals not connected to an investigation.” However, the agency’s Flock data shows that officers entered “surveillance” and “traffic offense” as reasons for searching the camera network. 

Oshkosh officials voted to continue a Flock contract only to reverse course the next day, saying that they’d been misled by Flock representatives over the camera’s ability to produce heat maps visualizing where a vehicle has been. At a meeting in April, Oshkosh Police Chief Dean Smith told local elected officials that because of that “misrepresentation” he could “I can no longer recommend Flock.”

“I think it depends on how it’s used,” Green Bay Police Chief Chris Davis told the Examiner. “I think if it’s misused, you can misuse this technology in a way that would allow you to track someone.” Yet, Davis feels that Flock can be an asset when used for legitimate criminal investigations. “I think people sometimes misunderstand how the technology works.” 

Davis concedes of Flock use that in some ways, “yeah, that’s kind of tracking someone. But I have a legitimate criminal predicate for doing so.” At the same time, he condemns the use of Flock for personal reasons, like spying on ex-wives or partners. “The government doesn’t get to do that,” said Davis. “That’s unlawful overreach into someone’s life because there’s no legitimate public safety reason for getting access to that data.”

Davis was hired at Green Bay in late 2021, when the city was experiencing a rise in gun violence. After deciding not to adopt gunshot detection tech, the city pivoted to automatic license plate readers. 

“At the time Flock was one of very few, if not the only company that had stationary license plate reader technology,” said Davis. “With gun crimes, the faster you can develop a suspect and make an arrest, the better, because there’s a retaliatory cycle that happens.” The department has been able to locate homicide suspects who fled to other states, hit-and-run suspects, and stolen vehicles using Flock. 

Davis said that “license plate reader technology has been a game changer for all of us. On the other hand, you still have to take people’s privacy concerns seriously.” He stressed that “anytime you’re collecting that much data about people as they just go about their daily business, you have to be really careful with how that’s used.” 

How Flock can be layered with other surveillance technologies also worry community members. In May, officers in Wauwatosa used Flock surveillance and a drone to track a robbery suspect.

The debate reminds Davis of the words of a mentor, that being a police chief is “the great balancing act of municipal government.” He added that, “I think it would be a mistake for us to not take people’s privacy concerns seriously in this conversation.”

As cases of misuse have popped up, the Green Bay Police Department has also tightened its use of Flock. They used their own audit to look for suspicious searches, and didn’t detect any instances of misuse. “We didn’t find any of that in our audit that we did, but it doesn’t hurt to ratchet it down as much as we can,” said Davis. “Because again, I understand, like you’re talking about people’s sensitive information. We have to be responsible with how we use that, and there have to be safeguards in place.” 

The department has also restricted which outside agencies can access its Flock network. While there was an initial belief that “the bigger the network, the more valuable the tool,” Davis said that Green Bay PD has “re-thought that over the last few weeks.” Now only agencies in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, eastern Wisconsin from Green Bay to Milwaukee, and the Chicagoland area (including Racine, Kenosha, and Cook counties along with some Chicago suburbs and a small portion of Indiana around the city of Gary) can search within Green Bay’s network. 

“We figure that makes more sense to have more of a rationale for why we share data,” said Davis. “Because I don’t have control over how those other agencies manage their employees. It’s not that I don’t trust them, but if they want that information then they can call us and they can explain what they’re working on, and we’ll see if we can help them.”

Green Bay PD is also utilizing a drop down menu with pre-designated options for using Flock, rather than allowing officers to type whatever they want. When the Examiner conducted its first analysis of Flock last year, there were several departments which used vague search terms, even just putting a dot or “.” as the reason for searching Flock. When the Examiner brought it to the Waukesha Police Department’s attention, the department said an officer was re-trained and counseled. 

Captain Dan Baumann of the Waukesha PD said in an email statement that since then, the department has “strengthened its oversight of Flock Safety by increasing formal audits from twice per year to monthly.” There are also random audits in addition to the mandatory audit, as well as an AI-powered Flock audit assistance tool to flag suspicious searches. The department’s standard operating procedure has also been adjusted. No further instances of vague labeling have arisen, and no discipline has been issued in connection to use of Flock. 

Baumann said Flock has assisted investigations such as in a vehicle break-in where leads were limited, and using Flock allowed investigators to identify a suspect’s vehicle and connect it to cases in Dane County. Flock was also used to locate someone involved in a shooting, and who pointed a gun during a road rage incident, Baumann said.

Communities waking up to surveillance risks

While it may be encouraging that departments are changing procedures and upping auditing, advocates still have  questions about whether it will  be enough. Jon McCray Jones, policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin, hopes that people “don’t miss the forest for the trees” by focusing solely on Flock, when other companies sell similar technology. 

“I don’t believe that law enforcement are just acting out of good faith with a lot of these regulatory changes and auditing changes to Flock,” McCray Jones told the Examiner. “I believe that it comes from sustained pressure started at the most local level from people understanding and realizing the dangers associated with all these cameras and automated license plate readers, and specifically Flock, who is the worst company out of all of them so far.” 

It all also ties back to a growing mistrust and fear over the federal government. Under President Donald Trump, federal immigration agents have flooded Democratic-led cities across the country, resulting in multiple shootings and deaths in Minnesota earlier this year. The Trump administration has also directed federal agencies to begin investigating left-wing groups it has accused of domestic terrorism. 

Mohammad said that the ICE surges really brought surveillance to the forefront when people began to see “ICE agents scanning people’s faces in different cities, and telling them that we have a database and we can recognize your name. Or pulling people’s license plates and figuring out what their names were so that they could harass them directly by name.” She added, “I think this political moment is also a moral and ethical one.” 

McCray Jones also said the issue of police surveillance has new urgency as communities are “being targeted and their neighbors being disappeared by the federal government.” ICE and other federal agencies have access to Flock either directly, or through assistance from local and state agencies which have contracts with the company. Public officials, under pressure from voters, are “jumping on board,” McCray Jones said, “and they’re feeling courageous and empowered to take on these surveillance systems.”

Public meetings about surveillance technology in Milwaukee are energized, Mohammad said. “I don’t want to say exciting because I think that really betrays the seriousness of the moment,” she said. “But there is that buzz that often happens when that room is full, or there was a time when they had to open the overflow room.” It’s shown Mohammad that “people care about this stuff and that’s why I think that it’s really incredible that even though the FPC doesn’t really have any teeth to its accountability anymore, we as residents are using as many avenues as are open to us to make our voices heard.” 

McCray Jones suggests that people care about Flock because “at its core, it’s one of the easiest surveillance technologies for people to understand.” He believes that people understand that “anyone who drives is impacted by this technology in a way that other surveillance technologies, say like ShotSpotters or Stingray…I think people have a harder time one: knowing how these technologies work but two: viewing themselves as potential victims.” 

He added that in several cases, including in Milwaukee, officers who misused the technology were caught by people using websites like HaveIBeenFlocked, not by the department. “So we don’t know how much these systems are being abused,” he said. “And I think elected officials should use these moments of high, intense scrutiny from the community and in the media, and having anecdotal stories of officers doing this right now, to really be courageous and take the lead to fight for more accountability measures before the public forgets about this story, and forgets about the danger that they are under due to law enforcement’s ability to track where you are at all times.”

Mohammad said that she and her allies are not quitting anytime soon. “We understand our position, we understand the risks here,” she told the Examiner. “And so we’re not going to back down. We do not want our communities to be surveilled. And we believe that public safety comes from investments in other areas, not in police surveillance.”

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In the 2024 election, Republican messaging that marginalized transgender Americans and attacked Democrats got widespread attention.

Opinion is divided among political analysts about whether anti-trans messaging contributed to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s narrow loss — about 29,000 votes in Wisconsin and about a 1.5% margin nationwide — or was irrelevant. 

A 2023 Marquette University Law School poll found that a majority of respondents favored protecting trans people against workplace discrimination, but 70% also believed athletes should be required to play sports on teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth. 

But whether or not the strategy helped seal Donald Trump’s victory two years ago, Republican candidates in Wisconsin have been leaning into messaging that targets transgender and nonbinary people.

Sen. Melissa Ratcliff (D-Cottage Grove), whose adult son is transgender, sees little reason to “rehash” the 2024 election. “I think it’s always important to make sure that we are advocating for our trans community and for kids and speaking out against hate,” she said. “I think the bigger concern is why a party feels the need to attack our trans kids and use that as an issue to rile up part of their base ultimately.”

Transgender individuals account for less than 1% of the adult Wisconsin population, about 36,000 people, and 3.3% of teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, fewer than 13,000 people — or 180 per county. The Williams Institute at the University of California Los Angeles Law School calculated those estimates based on survey data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) collected between 2021 and 2023.

The Republican majority in the state Legislature has passed bills that would bar gender-affirming care for young people and ban kids from playing on sports teams that didn’t match the gender they were assigned at birth or their biological sex. Gov. Tony Evers has repeatedly vetoed those measures.

“We’ve seen this in the Legislature, that by somehow going after children and bullying them is something that they see as a winning issue,” Ratcliff said. “It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And that grown adults think it’s OK to bully kids is just gross.”

Meanwhile, with Trump’s inauguration to a second term, federal policy has turned against transgender people and also against a more expansive understanding of gender.

During the Wisconsin Republican convention in Wisconsin Dells on May 16, speakers attacked the transgender population, particularly youth, sounding the alarm about the possibility of trans girls playing high school sports, mocking the use of inclusive language and promoting the  policing of bathrooms. 

Republican nominee for governor Tom Tiffany opened his speech by asking the delegates, “Are you ready for a governor that’s going to protect girls’ sports?”

Sen. Ron Johnson inveighed against “Biological males competing against our little girls in sports. Biological males invading their locker rooms, their showers, their bathrooms.” He as well as former Gov. Scott Walker falsely claimed that minors identified as transgender can be subjected to surgical procedures.

And a May 19 press release by Republican press secretary Zach Bannon falsely claimed that more than 90 lawmakers were “emphasizing their support of sex-change surgeries for minors” in an open letter to two leading Wisconsin hospital systems.

The false claim was repeated three times in the press release, which attacked Democrats in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District who are running in the party’s primary to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden. 

The letter called on the healthcare providers, Children’s Wisconsin in Wauwatosa and UW Health in Madison, to resume gender-affirming care for minors, which both suspended early this year following threats to federal medical dollars from the Trump administration.

That form of care does not include surgery, however. A Children’s Wisconsin spokesperson said medical treatment prior to the suspension of care involved medication, and that Children’s still provides mental health and behavioral care. 

“UW Health does not offer gender-affirming surgery to minors,” said Sara Benzel, a spokesperson for the Madison-based system.

Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, a statewide LGBTQ+ advocacy group, said that for the youngest children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria — a deep-seated sense that their gender identity doesn’t match their biological sex — the first step is extensive counseling with a therapist.

Gender-affirming care “is also age-appropriate, and this is the part that I think people miss all the time,” Swetz said in a recent interview.  “There are no medical interventions until puberty for gender-affirming care.”

Interventions at puberty can involve medication but not surgery, Swetz said. Those can include hormone treatment to delay puberty and to redirect the body’s development.

“But that is all age-appropriate, and highly individualized, just like all good medical care is with the doctor,” Swetz said. “And always with full consent of parents and guardians. When we are talking about gender-affirming care for trans youth, that’s what we’re talking about. Not what the other side would like to pretend.”

Bannon did not respond to a Wisconsin Examiner email message seeking an explanation for the false statements in his press release.

A federal judge in April blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funds to hospitals that provide gender-affirming care. The judge’s order said the Department of Health and Human Services lacked the authority to override professional standards of care or to deny funding to healthcare providers following those standards.

Since then some health providers in other states, including Children’s Minnesota hospital, have resumed providing gender-affirming care for minors.

Both UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin said they sympathized with patients who had been undergoing that care and their families, but that they believe they would remain in legal jeopardy if they resume care involving medication.

Ratcliff said that as someone whose family has gone through the experience of addressing the needs of a transgender child, it was important to her “to make sure that all trans kids and the trans community know that there are people in the Capitol that care about our trans community, that see them, that are fighting for them, and that we can push back again and fight back against all the hateful rhetoric toward our trans community.”

She said she believes Republicans are ramping up  attacks on trans people as a deflection from the economic squeeze voters are feeling.

“We know that everyday costs are going up and they aren’t putting forward policies that actually help everyday lives of Americans or Wisconsinites,” Ratcliff said. “My child being trans is not causing these prices to go up. My child’s healthcare is not causing any difference in people’s lives except for my child’s life.”

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A group of more than 60 nonprofits, advocacy organizations and businesses wrote to two Wisconsin health systems Thursday, urging them to resume gender-affirming care for minors that they halted five months ago.

The hospital organizations — UW Health in Madison and Children’s Wisconsin in Wauwatosa — stopped providing hormone medication and puberty-blocking medication to minors with gender dysphoria following Trump administration actions targeting such healthcare.

Thursday’s letter, led by the LGBTQ+ rights groups Fair Wisconsin and GSAFE, cites a federal judge’s ruling in April that threw out the administration’s order blocking gender-affirming care.

“Gender-affirming care is legal in Wisconsin, but it is increasingly more and more difficult to access due to decisions made to pause the provision of this care at your institutions,” states the letter. “These decisions must be reversed and care restarted immediately.”

Thursday’s letter was the second this week to UW Health and Children’s Wisconsin. On Tuesday, more than 90 elected officials from around the state released a letter urging both hospitals to restore the suspended services, “reaffirm [their] commitment to evidence-based care, and rebuild trust with the transgender and gender diverse community.”

“The most important thing for people to understand is that the support for this care is so much broader and deeper than people realize,” Abigail Swetz, executive director of Fair Wisconsin, told the Wisconsin Examiner Thursday. “I hope the leadership of these hospitals are seeing that in this letter and the others that are coming through.”

She said local groups, Madison TRAC and Reproductive Justice Action Milwaukee, are organizing petitions in their communities as well for the general public to sign.

Both hospitals released statements Thursday that acknowledged the concerns of families and their children seeking gender-affirming healthcare, but cited legal risks of providing such care.

“We know this issue matters deeply to many in our community, especially the patients and families we serve,” Children’s Wisconsin said.

“Due to ongoing legal and regulatory uncertainty affecting organizations and providers across the country, we are not currently providing gender-affirming pharmacologic care,” it said. “We recognize the impact this has on patients and families.”

Children’s said it continued to provide related mental and behavioral healthcare.

UW Health said it paused gender-affirming medication therapy for minors “due to ongoing federal actions that threaten health systems that provide this care.”

“While we continue to believe this is evidence-based care, threats from those federal actions are not fully resolved,” UW Health said. “Therefore, the current risk is too great to resume this care. We recognize the challenges faced by impacted patients and families and remain committed to providing patient-centered care and supporting their health and well-being throughout this critical time.”

Gender-affirming care is a response to gender dysphoria, which the American Psychiatric Association has defined as  “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity.”

Based on survey data collected by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention between 2021 and 2023, the Williams Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles Law School estimated in an August 2025 report that 3% of adolescents ages 13 to 17 and 1% of adults 18 or older identify as transgender or nonbinary.

Swetz said that when health professionals provide gender-affirming healthcare, they do so because it is medically necessary.

“I think it is sometimes seen as something that is not essential, but it absolutely is medically necessary, because we know that when gender dysphoria is treated then the mental health of our trans youth just drastically improves,” she said.

Gender-affirming care is also provided based on what is appropriate for the person’s age, “and always, with the full consent of parents and guardians,” Swetz said.

For a child who hasn’t yet reached puberty, it entails counseling and other forms of behavioral therapy — not medication, she said. At the start of puberty, medication may be used to pause that process, along with hormone treatment, but it’s also “highly individualized,” she added.

“We’re talking about high quality care that is respectful and meets a trans youth exactly where they’re at, in the age appropriateness of the kind of care that will help move them forward in their lives and make it possible for them to live in a body that really feels like home,” Swetz said.

The two hospitals paused their use of gender-affirming care medication after a Dec. 18, 2025 declaration from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that threatened to withhold federal health dollars, such as Medicaid reimbursement, from providers offering gender-affirming healthcare for minors.

Wisconsin was one of 21 states and the District of Columbia that sued to block the federal rule. In late March, a federal judge in Oregon ruled for the states on summary judgment, and in April issued a written order that vacated Kennedy’s declaration.

The judge ruled that the declaration violated the Administrative Procedures Act; that Kennedy and HHS officials lacked the authority to override professional standards for gender-affirming care; and lacked the authority to exclude providers from federal programs for providing gender-affirming care that meets professional standards.

The order also includes an injunction forbidding “any materially similar policy which supersedes or purports to supersede the professionally recognized standards of care for gender-affirming care that exist” in the 21 states and D.C. that filed the lawsuit.

“They’re trying to make sure that the federal government can’t go around and just, like, do something in another name,” Swetz said. “And I think it’s important for people to know that Wisconsin specifically is one of the states.”

This report was updated to correct the organizers of local petitions in Madison and Milwaukee.

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Republicans on a U.S. Senate panel suggested Tuesday a recent Supreme Court decision weakening the federal Voting Rights Act invalidated U.S. House districts in Democratic states where most residents belong to a racial minority group. 

Sen. Eric Schmitt, a Missouri Republican who chairs the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, signaled that Republicans will target majority-minority districts in blue states as they seek to maximize their opportunities to reshape the political map ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. GOP-controlled Southern states are already rushing forward gerrymanders.

Schmitt urged the Department of Justice to crack down on states with maps drawn to protect majority-minority districts. A top DOJ official has suggested the agency supports scrutinizing the districts. The demand seems to extend the Supreme Court’s April 29 decision that limited states from using race to draw districts.

“These maps do not become constitutional because they’re already in use,” Schmitt said. “They do not survive because politicians call them voting rights maps. Yet, they will not disappear on their own. The Department of Justice has an obligation to act.”

The court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision gave states the OK to eliminate districts where most residents belong to racial minority groups in the pursuit of a partisan advantage. Alabama, Florida and Tennessee have advanced new maps, and Louisiana is expected to follow soon. South Carolina is debating its own gerrymander.

The new district lines, along with gerrymanders enacted before the Callais decision, could ultimately provide Republicans with a net gain of upwards of 10 seats.

The seats could prove critical as Republicans face political headwinds approaching the midterm elections amid sagging approval numbers for President Donald Trump. A successful legal campaign that forces Democratic states to break apart majority-minority districts could create additional competitive House races.

Breaking up Democratic districts

About one-third of all House districts drawn following the 2020 census were majority-minority, according to a Ballotpedia analysis — 148 in all. Democrats held 122 as of 2024. 

Assistant U.S. Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, wrote on social media on April 30 that the department continues to prioritize equal protection under the law, including in voting. Dhillon’s post came in response to a letter Schmitt sent to DOJ raising similar points to what he said on Tuesday.

“Senator — we are ON IT!” Dhillon wrote.

Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat and the subcommittee’s ranking member, said the Supreme Court’s decision leaves many communities of color with few enforceable tools to fight unfair maps. He called on the Senate to act by passing a federal ban on mid-decade redistricting and partisan gerrymandering.

“Our democracy depends ultimately on protecting and preserving the right of individual citizens to pick their politicians, not intensifying the control that politicians have about who the voters are that they will permit to be involved in the election,” Welch said.

‘The definition of racism’

Some Republicans have begun to cast majority-minority districts as racist. The loaded rhetoric suggests eliminating these districts is not just politically useful but also a legal and moral imperative.

Missouri, where Republicans hold six of the state’s eight congressional districts, exemplifies the new reality under Callais. The Republican-controlled General Assembly approved a map in September that divides Kansas City in a bid to oust Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat who has long represented the city core. 

State lawmakers left in place a St. Louis-area district held by Democratic Rep. Wesley Bell where fewer than half of residents are white. But some Missouri Republicans have called the district a racial gerrymander and want the General Assembly to split it apart, too.

“That’s the definition of racism, is drawing districts based on the color of one’s skin,” Missouri Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins told reporters last week. “We don’t want that in Missouri.”

The Supreme Court in the Callais decision did not formally strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race and other characteristics. In practice, however, it may be effectively impossible for gerrymandering opponents to prove discrimination, voting rights experts say.

“It begs the question whether or not lawmakers will have to say, ‘not only do I not like Black voters, but this is the reason why I’m drawing up this piece of legislation,’” Rebekah Caruthers, president and CEO of the nonpartisan voting rights group Fair Elections Center, said in an interview with States Newsroom days after the release of the Supreme Court opinion.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court cleared away a court order that had blocked Alabama from implementing a map passed by state lawmakers in 2023 that could hand Republicans another seat. A lower court had found the map violated Section 2.

In Louisiana, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry suspended the state’s ongoing congressional primary election in anticipation of a new map that will likely eliminate one of the state’s two majority-Black districts. The Supreme Court fast-tracked paperwork in its Callais decision to clear the way for state lawmakers to act quickly.

Obligation to act

During Tuesday’s Senate hearing, Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Article III Project, a conservative legal group, said all states with maps drawn to protect minority representation have a “clear duty” to redraw them using race-neutral criteria. 

The calendar should be no obstacle, he argued, saying state legislatures can be called into special session and primary elections delayed until new maps are in place.

“The fact that we are well into the 2026 election cycle provides no blanket exemption from these constitutional obligations,” Chamberlain said.

Callais has unleashed chaos and already undercut fair representation for Black voters, Todd Cox, associate director-counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, told the subcommittee. But he argued the decision doesn’t call into question the constitutionality of majority-minority districts or other districts that give voters of color an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.

Cox cautioned against using Callais to justify targeting majority-minority districts that provide that opportunity, saying it might indicate that states intentionally discriminated against minority voters.

WASHINGTON — The Congressional Black Caucus and NAACP on Tuesday urged pushback against GOP-led redistricting efforts in Southern states via college sports, including a boycott of public universities by athletes and supporters.

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and fellow Congressional Black Caucus members blasted a bill that sets forth a national framework for college athletes’ compensation. 

But the CBC’s backlash went beyond just the legislation — which was yanked from the House’s voting schedule this week following unanimous opposition from the major voting bloc. 

At a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol, the lawmakers rallied behind the NAACP’s call earlier Tuesday for Black athletes and fans to withhold “athletic and financial support from public universities in states that have moved to limit, weaken, or erase Black voting representation” following the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais.

The decision from the nation’s highest court gutted the federal Voting Rights Act and has prompted a major redistricting push in Southern states that could threaten Black representation in Congress. 

Southeastern Conference targeted

“We are here standing in solidarity with the NAACP and its call for athletes to boycott institutions within the (Southeastern Conference) that belong to states that have unleashed these Jim Crow-like racially oppressive tactics, which is unacceptable, unconscionable and un-American,” Jeffries said. 

“We believe that the silence of these institutions is complicity, and we will not stand for it,” the New York Democrat added.

The SEC, a major athletic conference under the NCAA, includes several member universities located in states that have joined the redistricting wave. The NAACP pointed to Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas as “eight priority states.”

“In this moment, our democracy is in crisis,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, at Tuesday’s press conference.

“This is not about partisanship — this is about true representation, and for the NAACP, we will fight with all we have in solidarity with the Congressional Black Caucus to ensure that we have representation, or if we don’t, we will withhold the talent that play on the football field or on the basketball court,” he said. 

SCORE Act under scrutiny 

The Student Compensation and Opportunity through Rights and Endorsements, or ‘‘SCORE” Act, seeks to allow compensation but bar student-athletes from being recognized as employees and provide broad antitrust immunity to the NCAA and college sports conferences. 

The college sports world continues to grapple with the fallout from the NCAA’s 2021 guidelines, which allowed student-athletes to profit from their name, image and likeness, or NIL. 

A federal judge in June 2025 also approved the terms of a nearly $2.8 billion antitrust settlement that paved the way for schools to directly pay athletes.

The college sports landscape is also grappling with gender inequity in NIL deals, a patchwork of state NIL laws, booster collectives and the NCAA’s controversial transfer portal, among other issues.

House GOP leadership had also pulled the SCORE Act from the House floor in December.

In a statement, the CBC said U.S. Reps. Shomari Figures, D-Ala., and Janelle Bynum, D-Ore., two of the bill’s lead sponsors, had been negotiating changes in the legislation to improve it but pulled their support, and the CBC did so as well.

The caucus said its members cannot support legislation that benefits large athletic institutions when their leaders are not speaking out about redistricting that weakens Black representation in government.

“This is not politics as usual. This is a defining moral moment for our country,” the caucus said.

“For generations, Black athletes have helped build college athletics into one of the most powerful and profitable industries in American life. The success, visibility, and cultural influence of major athletic conferences and institutions are inseparable from the talent, labor, leadership, and cultural contributions of Black communities. Yet at the very moment those same communities face coordinated attacks on their democratic representation, too many leaders across college athletics have chosen silence.”

Letters sent

The caucus also said it has sent formal letters to SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey, Atlantic Coast Conference Commissioner Jim Phillips and NCAA President Charlie Baker “demanding immediate engagement and a public response regarding the ongoing assault on Black political representation throughout the South and across the nation.”

Congressional Black Caucus Chair Yvette Clarke, a New York Democrat, said the caucus “cannot support legislation benefiting major athletic institutions that continue to remain silent while Black voting rights and Black political power are being systematically dismantled across the South.” 

Jeffries noted that “with respect to the SCORE Act, our position has been clear: If LSU is for it, we’re against it. If the University of Alabama is for it, we’re against it. If Ole Miss is for it, we’re against it. If the University of South Carolina is for it, we’re against it. If the University of Tennessee is for it, we’re against it, and if the SEC schools are for it, we are against it.” 

It’s been over six years since Tracy Cole learned that her 17-year-old son Alvin had become the third person killed by Joseph Mensah, at that time a Wauwatosa police officer. Alvin’s death in February 2020 was followed a few months later by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis officers, fueling months of protests and clashes with the Wauwatosa Police Department, followed by years of litigation in court. 

The Cole family is finalizing a confidential settlement over Alvin’s killing, and his mother has been reflecting on her personal journey to find solace amidst grief. The settlement, coming after two hung juries and as a third trial neared, will not come out of Mensah’s pocket despite what his attorneys implied during the trials, the Cole family’s lawyers told the Wisconsin Examiner. 

“We haven’t had time to grieve yet but it’s coming along,” Tracy Cole told the Examiner in an exclusive interview. The settlement, she said, brings some “closure to my family.” 

Alvin Cole was killed in February 2020 after a foot chase at Wauwatosa’s Mayfair Mall. The teen and his friends left the mall after being involved in a noisy quarrel, during which witnesses told police that a handgun had been displayed. The group ran as officers intercepted them outside the mall, with Mensah arriving in an unmarked squad car without first announcing his presence on the police radio. 

As Cole ran away from officers and mall security a single gunshot rang out and Cole fell to the ground, having shot himself in the forearm. Mensah shot at Cole five times shortly thereafter, while Cole was on his hands and knees listening to officers yell contradictory commands,  “Drop the gun” and “Don’t move!” 

Mensah told police investigators that Cole pointed a gun at him while he was on the ground. Further testimony gathered by the Cole family’s attorney’s, however, found that a security guard and Wauwatosa officer who were closest to Cole when he was shot asserted that neither the teen nor the gun had moved at all before Mensah fired. The only Wauwatosa officer who also said that Cole pointed a gun — Evan Olson — contradicted Mensah by saying that the gun had been pointed in a completely different direction, towards Olson and away from Mensah. 

The contradictions led to a federal civil lawsuit over Cole’s death that went to trial twice. Testimony at those trials revealed that Mensah and Olson were good friends on and off the job and had violated protocols requiring officers to be separated after a shooting. They got into a squad car alone together and turned off their dash cameras and audio equipment before driving back to the police department. According to trial testimony, they did not share those facts with police investigators. Both trials ended in hung juries, leaving jurors unable to decide unanimously whether Mensah’s killing of Alvin Cole was excessive. 

Tracy said that she still remembers those trials, and what it was like to see Mensah for the first time. 

“It’s like I could finally see a person instead of a name,” she said. “It never changed anything of how I feel about him.” 

She also recalled other officers taking the stand as she sat with her husband and remaining children “listening to the different testimonies, just listening to the videos.” Images of Alvin’s body were also briefly shown, something that Tracy said “I’ll never forget.”

The two trials were tense at times, as attorneys battled over what evidence could be shown or attempted to discredit each other’s witnesses while bolstering their own.  At various points, U.S. Marshals stood sentry or increased their presence, which confused both the Cole family’s attorneys and U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman. Several Wauwatosa officers also arrived to watch the proceedings in the gallery, dressed in full uniform, sitting around Mensah’s wife, who is a disgraced Milwaukee officer, or chatting with the pair in the hallways. The Cole’s attorneys argued that the presence of fully uniformed Wauwatosa officers could influence the jury, and that the officers were expressing a sort of solidarity with Mensah, which the Cole family was prohibited from doing for Alvin. 

Nevertheless, the two hung juries were encouraging for Alvin’s mother. “It was somebody in the jury [who] basically believed that my son was never a threat,” said Tracy. “It was somebody listening.” 

Although Alvin’s father was allowed to testify freely in the first trial, Tracy was not allowed to testify. The effort to keep her testimony out of the court record stuck out to Tracy and her attorneys, especially after her testimony was limited during a separate trial in 2023, when Wauwatosa PD stood accused of spying on and surveilling the Cole family and protesters who supported them in 2020. 

“I would basically had said how my son was,” she told the Examiner. “The events that I had with the Wauwatosa Police Department, what they did to me as a mother, that should never had happened.” 

After the Cole family began protesting in 2020, Wauwatosa PD put them, their attorneys, a Wisconsin Examiner reporter, and dozens of supporters on what they called a “target list” on at least one occasion. The list was shared with numerous local, state, and federal agencies. Wauwatosa officers also violently arrested Tracy and her daughters, one of whom claimed to have been stripped searched at a jail and questioned by the FBI. 

Tracy would have testified to all of this if asked, she said, “but they didn’t want a mother’s testimony,” because it would’ve been emotionally impactful to the jury. “But my husband, he was able to speak on my son’s behalf.” 

Tracy feels that the protests, held for over 400 days after George Floyd’s death, changed Wauwatosa for the better. 

“We changed laws,” she told the  Examiner. Wauwatosa PD adopted body cameras in 2021 after the protests, one of the family’s key demands. The department refused to adopt body cameras previously, even after Mensah killed three people over five years. Two of those were less than a year apart, when Mensah was still a rookie, and all the incidents were troubled by a lack of good video. The Milwaukee County District Attorneys Office declined to charge Mensah with any of the killings. The first jury in the Cole family’s case stated that a lack of good video was a main reason they couldn’t agree on a verdict. 

No other fatal police shootings occurred in Wauwatosa during Mensah’s time at the department, and the Cole family’s attorneys say that they’re unable to find other examples of fatal police shootings in Wauwatosa besides Mensah’s, no matter how far back they look.

The protesters also pushed for a ban on no knock warrants, and for Mensah and longtime Police Chief Barry Weber to be removed. Mensah resigned in late 2020 followed by Weber, who retired after leading the department for over 30 years as local media covered how Weber’s department had targeted anyone who was seen as anti-police. 

Finding forgiveness 

Memories of those days are still with Tracy, regardless of how much Wauwatosa officials claim their community has moved on. Fighting back was something she had to do, she said, even though it took a lot out of her. She also needed to learn to forgive Mensah, she said. 

“At the end of the day, I had to learn to forgive him, for what he did to my son,” she told the Examiner. “It took a process to learn to forgive him. I can’t hold a grudge, because that would take a whole part of me. I had to learn to forgive him.” Mensah left law enforcement in 2025 after a stint at the Waukesha County Sheriffs Office, following his time at Wauwatosa PD.

Alvin’s death was tragic and painful for the Cole family, yet it also brought them together.

“It made us stronger, it made us united as one,” said Tracy Cole. She’s had to learn again how to trust law enforcement after her experience with not just Mensah, but with Wauwatosa PD and the suburb as a whole. 

Yet, her experience of being surveilled remains with their family. Tracy watches her every move now. “I never had to, but now I’m very particular where I go, who I be around, who I talk to.”

Since Alvin’s death, more families have been touched by police-related violence and killings in Milwaukee County. 

“I would tell people that’s going through what I went through to never give up,” said Tracy. “Never give up. …the Devil wanted me to give up but I didn’t. Don’t give up. Keep fighting for your child.”

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Thousands of people joined demonstrations in Selma and Montgomery on Saturday to protest redistricting by southern Republican state legislatures targeting Black Democratic members of Congress.

An afternoon rally in Montgomery that drew over 5,000 people featured politicians, activists and civil rights dignitaries as part of the All Roads Lead to the South campaign, aimed at organizing voters to offset the advantages Republicans may gain from redistricting.

“Our democracy is on the line,” said Victor Coar, who traveled from Birmingham to Montgomery. “Our rights are on the line. They are trying to take it all away. They are suppressing our vote, trying to keep us quiet, trying to silence our vote.”

The events on Saturday deliberately invoked the Civil Rights Movement in cities that featured some of its most famous moments, and came just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court targeted one of its major legacies. In Louisiana v. Callais, decided last month, the nation’s high court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which bans racial discrimination in voting and election laws, by saying plaintiffs challenging maps under Section 2 would have to prove intentional discrimination, a significantly higher standard than the prior one.

The court’s decision led Republican-controlled legislatures across the South to introduce redistricting legislation targeting Black majority districts. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Alabama to use a 2023 congressional map it had previously ruled racially discriminatory. Gov. Kay Ivey set special primary elections in four congressional districts for August, though plaintiffs in the state’s major redistricting case, known as Allen v. Milligan, have continued litigation. A federal court Friday set a hearing in the case for Friday.

Earlier on Saturday, faith leaders gathered at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Selma and offered prayers, criticisms of the Supreme Court and President Donald Trump and calls for voting rights protections for vulnerable communities.

After an hour, 400 people then marched silently from the church to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where civil rights protestors were attacked on March 7, 1965, an assault that eventually led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

“I know how important moments like these are, and I am here because I know that one of us can go far but we cannot go far enough,” said Rev. Cece Jones-Davis, who traveled from Washington, D.C. to participate in the day’s events, in an interview after the march. “It is going to take all of us, and so I am just here to add my voice to the collective.”

At the Montgomery rally, speakers spoke to several grievances aimed at the Trump administration and at the U.S. Supreme Court regarding voting rights, but also urged the crowd to have resolve during the current political climate.

Bernice King, the daughter of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and CEO of the King Center, harkened to the past as a rallying cry for the present.

“Today we return to the very grounds where my parents and freedom families stood, when Black voter registration was scarce, when discrimination was the norm, and when violence was the price for seeking dignity. Their sacrifice opened the door to the Voting Rights Act,” she said.

Now, she said, people are called once again to act.

“Because the recent Supreme Court rulings demand our presence,” she said. “It was not only a legal decision, it is a moral disgrace and a shameless assault on Black political power.”

Lawmakers from Alabama took the stage to urge the crowd to continue their efforts to mobilize the vote.

“Sometimes I wonder what would I have done if I had been present and alive during the movement,” said Sen. Merika Coleman, D-Pleasant Grove. “Would I have marched? Would you have marched? Would I have participated in a boycott? Would you have done that? Would I be one of the lawyers who filed one of those lawsuits? Would I have been a freedom singer, singing and moaning for the movement like my grandfather? We are here to tell you, you don’t have to wonder anymore. This is our time, right now, and we are fired up and ready to go.”

Then Alabama’s congressional delegation and their colleagues in the U.S. House of Representatives took the stage to rally the audience and to meet the moment.

Changing Alabama’s congressional maps will significantly threaten the re-election prospects of U.S. Rep. Shomari Figures, D-Mobile, and could eventually put U.S. Rep. Terri Sewell, D-Birmingham, at risk.

“It is time to show up and show out, not just in one state capital, not just for one election but we need you to step up and show up for every one of our state legislators who are trying to get out the vote,” Sewell said.

U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, said that the freedom that we enjoy also requires responsibility.

“We also stand here with the understanding that the freedoms we inherited from our ancestors are not possessions that we hold, they are rights that we hold in trust,” he said to the crowd. “That we were given to be stewards of. A lot of people are drinking deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that they did not dig. They are eating from banquet tables prepared for them by their ancestors, sitting back, getting dumb, fat and ugly, and happy and comfortable. This is one of moments where we understand our blessings come with obligations.”

Khadidah Stone, one of the Allen v. Milligan plaintiffs, criticized Ivey’s decision to schedule the special session during an interview at Saturday’s event in Montgomery.

“I would really like those legislators to focus on the quality of life of Alabamians,” Stone said. “We have a lot of rural hospital closures, we have the highest maternal mortality rate in the country, 50,000 Alabamians just lost SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits, and most of the recipients are the elderly and children.”

Figures said after the rally that he was “inspired by what we see.”

“It is an incredibly humbling experience to see thousands come out and, in essence, help defend my seat, and defend Congresswoman Terri Sewell’s seat, so we can’t help but be overwhelmed by gratefulness and humility by what we are seeing, and encouraged because we think this is going to carry over until November,” he said.

Figures, however, said that he felt there were factual differences between the Callais case and the Milligan case, and expressed confidence that the Milligan plaintiffs could still win.

“The dispute with our district goes all the way back to the 2020 census, and the original maps that the state Legislature redrew, and the three-judge panel, two of whom were appointed by Trump and one by (Ronald) Regan originally, they found that the state had engaged in intentional discrimination in how they drew those maps.”

Several of those who attended the afternoon rally criticized attempts by the various legislatures to reconfigure their district maps.

“It is important for folks to understand what folks are getting taken away from them, and they are getting taken away their right to representation,” said former Sen. Doug Jones, D-Alabama, who is seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination to be governor, in an interview at the event in Montgomery. “We have come so far in the state of Alabama. We have 60 years of progress that has been thrown backwards by the Supreme Court and the Legislature just a few blocks from here.”

Reginald Mason, who also traveled from Birmingham, said voting is what matters.

“People who don’t actually vote are not informed, they don’t know about the struggle that our ancestors went through,” Mason said. “I never thought I would be standing here today fighting for what they have already fought for me.”

Religious and faith leaders expressed many of the same concerns when they led congregants in prayers prior to the morning march across the Edmund Pettus bridge.

“What I realize is that it is just our turn, and freedom is not fought for once, freedom has been fought for many times,” Jones-Davis said. “We are here to do our part.”

Watertown High School band students won’t be allowed to perform an instrumental piece of music tied to LGBTQ+ history at their spring concert.

The post Watertown school board pulls song tied to LGBTQ+ history from spring concert appeared first on WPR.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision gutting the federal Voting Rights Act could upend American politics and trigger a new rush to redraw congressional districts.

The opinion released on Wednesday, in a case called Louisiana v. Callais, holds sweeping consequences for how states and local governments draw district lines at all levels of government, from Congress to school boards. 

Louisiana, whose congressional map is at the center of the case, may even suspend an upcoming primary election so state lawmakers can pass a new map. Other states are also weighing new gerrymanders, either this year or before the 2028 election. 

Gerrymandering refers to drawing political maps for the purpose of gaining some form of unfair advantage — whether partisan or racial or to help or hurt an incumbent or candidate.

Following the decision, Democrats are calling for Congress to pass new federal voting rights legislation, but President Donald Trump would likely veto it. Others are urging more radical changes, including expanding the size of the Supreme Court.

As the nation responds to the decision, here’s a States Newsroom look at the decision, what it means and what could happen next.

What is Louisiana v. Callais?

After the 2020 census, the Louisiana Legislature passed a congressional map that included one district where a majority of residents are Black. About a third of the state’s population is Black.

States typically draw new congressional lines once a decade following the census, though several states have pushed through new maps this year after Trump called on Republicans to maximize their political advantage heading into the midterm elections this November.

Black voters challenged the Louisiana map and an appeals court ordered lawmakers to pass a new map. The legislature in 2024 approved a map that includes a second district where a majority of residents are Black, also called a majority-minority district.

In response, a group of white voters sued over the new map, claiming it violated the U.S. Constitution and was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. The Constitution’s 14th Amendment guarantees equal protection under the law and the 15th Amendment prohibits denying the right to vote on the basis of race.

The lead plaintiff in the case is Phillip Callais, hence the case’s name. The New York Times reported last year that Callais is a veteran who lives near Baton Rouge. 

The Supreme Court held its first oral argument on the case in March 2025. But instead of issuing a decision later that spring, the court held a second round of oral argument in October. 

At that time, comments by the conservative justices strongly suggested the court was interested in weakening the federal Voting Rights Act.

What is the Voting Rights Act and what role did it play in redistricting?

The Voting Rights Act, or VRA, is a 1965 federal law passed by Congress and signed by President Lyndon Johnson.

The law was designed to stop racial discrimination in voting and combat Jim Crow laws like literacy tests that Southern states used to prevent Black people from voting.

It contains several sections but the Supreme Court decision in Callais dealt with Section 2. That section prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race and other characteristics. In 1982, Congress expanded Section 2 to ban voting practices that have a discriminatory effect, whether or not the law was intended to discriminate.

Section 2 has acted as a ban on racial gerrymandering, or the practice of drawing districts to minimize the political influence of minority voters. Over time, that’s led to the creation of numerous majority-minority congressional districts.

Many of these majority-minority districts are located in Republican-controlled Southern states  but are held by Democrats. In the past, if states drew new maps to spread minority voters across several districts, they could face challenges in federal court under Section 2.

What did the Supreme Court decide?

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Louisiana’s congressional map was an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. 

The court found that because the Voting Rights Act didn’t require Louisiana to create a second majority-minority district, the state didn’t have a compelling reason to consider race when drawing its map.

Under the court’s reasoning, Section 2 only applies when evidence supports a strong inference that intentional discrimination occurred. In other words, lawmakers only violate Section 2 when they draw districts with the purpose of affording minority voters less opportunity because of their race.

The court’s majority opinion says “none of the historical evidence presented by plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion, which was joined by all of the court’s conservatives: Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

The court’s three liberal justices — Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissented.

Why is the decision a big deal?

The decision empowers states to gerrymander in ways that break apart districts where a majority of residents are Black, Hispanic or belong to another minority group.

In 2019 the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts would no longer take cases about partisan gerrymandering. That’s where states draw maps to help a political party.

Because many majority-minority districts in the South are held by Democrats, the Callais decision gives Republican states the power to break apart these districts if they can show they are doing so for a partisan purpose.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote in a dissent.

In the short term, the decision means several Black Democrats in the U.S. House may lose their seats if states pass new maps either this year before the November midterm elections or before the 2028 election. At least one projection has pegged the potential losses as high as 19 seats.

The loss of even a few Black representatives would constitute the largest drop in Black representation in Congress since Reconstruction following the Civil War, according to an NPR analysis. 

In the long term, minority voters will have a more difficult time electing their preferred candidates if they are moved into majority-white districts. The decision also applies to state legislative districts, meaning the number of Black state lawmakers may drop as well.

What impact does the Voting Rights Act have after the ruling?

Not nearly as much.

The Supreme Court’s decision didn’t strike down Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. But Kagan and other critics of the opinion say the protections once extended by Section 2 are effectively dead.

To block a map under Section 2, challengers will now have to show states intentionally discriminated against minority voters, a very difficult standard when states can say they drew maps for partisan advantage.

In a series of decisions during the past 13 years, the Supreme Court has also weakened other elements of the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, the court effectively blocked preclearance, another major portion of the law contained in Section 5. Preclearance required states and local governments with a history of discrimination to obtain federal permission before making voting changes.

Preclearance applied to most Southern states and a handful of others. The justices didn’t strike down preclearance, but ruled that the criteria used to determine whether governments should be subject to preclearance was unconstitutional.

The law required districts that had voting tests in place in 1964 and had less than 50% turnout in the 1964 presidential election as eligible for preclearance. The court found that the criteria no longer made sense and were outdated. 

In theory, Congress could pass new criteria that would restore preclearance.

How are Republicans responding?

Republicans in Southern states are pushing for new maps that could hand their party more seats in the November elections — but also oust Black Democratic members of Congress.

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, announced on Thursday that the state’s primary election, set for mid-May, would be paused. The suspension will give time for state lawmakers to redraw the state’s congressional map to eliminate the state’s second majority-minority district.

“We are working together with the Legislature and the Secretary of State’s office to develop a path forward,” Landry said in a statement.

Florida lawmakers passed a new map hours after the court’s decision that could provide Republicans with up to four additional seats. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis had introduced the map earlier in the week and had cited Callais in urging lawmakers to act.

In Tennessee, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican running for governor, called on state lawmakers to pass a new map. Prominent Republicans in Georgia said the state should pass a new map.

Not all Republicans are pushing for immediate action. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said that while she supports the Supreme Court’s decision, the state wasn’t in a position to hold a special session to redistrict.

How are Democrats responding?

Democrats have condemned the Supreme Court’s opinion and say lawmakers and the public should fight back.

Many Democrats say Congress should pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named after civil rights activist and Georgia Democratic Rep. John Lewis, who died in 2020. The legislation would set new criteria for preclearance, seeking to restore the practice after the Supreme Court stopped it in 2013.

The U.S. House passed the measure in 2021, but it didn’t advance through the Senate. 

Enacting the measure remains extremely difficult. If Democrats retake control of Congress in the November elections, Trump would almost certainly veto the measure. Republicans in the U.S. Senate would also likely block the bill, unless Democrats eliminate the filibuster.

Democrats are also weighing a new round of gerrymanders in blue states. While most attention has focused on Southern Republican states, Democrats can now also engage in racial vote dilution in states like California to secure additional U.S. House seats.

Some Democrats and opponents of the Supreme Court’s decision are pushing for other responses. 

They include expanding the size of the court from nine justices to dilute its conservative majority, implementing term limits for justices, banning mid-decade redistricting or requiring states to use independent commissions to draw congressional maps.

“We must continue to fight for a democracy in which every vote counts, and in which every vote holds equal power, starting by banning mid-decade gerrymanders nationwide and establishing fair redistricting criteria,” Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, said in a statement.

But those changes would require federal legislation, giving Republicans the opportunity to stop the proposals through filibusters in the Senate or by Trump’s veto.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office on Monday invoked an upcoming landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision on the role of race in drawing congressional districts to justify the Republican’s proposed gerrymander.

“The use of race in redistricting should never happen,” the governor’s general counsel, David Axelman, wrote in a memo unveiling a map that aims to hand Republicans four additional U.S. House seats in Florida.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court delivered an opinion sharply weakening a major portion of the federal Voting Rights Act.

Even before the decision, Republicans and Democrats across the country were scrambling to get ahead of the court’s anticipated ruling. 

The rush comes even as state legislative sessions wind down and the window to redraw maps rapidly closes ahead of the midterm elections in November — likely pushing most redistricting battles into the 2028 election cycle.

The opinion in the case, Louisiana v. Callais, could reverberate for decades. The court’s conservative majority significantly curtailed the consideration of race when drawing legislative maps. 

Until now, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has limited states from using maps that dilute the voting power of minority citizens.

“If the Supreme Court does decide to gut or significantly weaken Section 2 of the VRA, we’re very concerned that it would give, basically, the green light to states to racially gerrymander,” Michael McNulty, policy director at Issue One, a group focused on protecting American democracy, said in an interview ahead of the decision.

Republicans could ultimately secure up to 19 U.S. House seats nationally directly because of the Supreme Court’s decision, according to a projection by Fair Fight Action, a Georgia-based progressive voting rights group, and the Black Voters Matter Fund, which advocates on behalf of Black voters. At the state level, the groups have projected that Republicans could gain up to 200 state legislative seats across the South. 

“It is hard to overstate what an earthquake this will be for American politics,” Rick Hasen, a professor at UCLA School of Law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project, wrote in a blog post following the opinion’s release on Wednesday.

Louisiana case

A group of white voters challenged Louisiana’s congressional map as an unconstitutional racial gerrymander after the state in 2024 created a second district where a majority of voters are Black. 

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative justices agreed, ruling 6-3 that the map is an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because the state didn’t need to create a second majority-minority district.

In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “none of the historical evidence presented by plaintiffs came close to showing an objective likelihood that the State’s challenged map was the result of intentional racial discrimination.”

Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court’s three liberal justices, wrote in a dissent that the Supreme Court has “had its sights set” on the Voting Rights Act for more than a decade.

“Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power,” Kagan wrote.

Following the opinion, Republican-led legislatures across the South are expected to move to break apart Democratic districts where a majority of residents are Black or from other minority groups. 

U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Tennessee Republican, called on the state legislature to reconvene and redraw the state’s congressional districts to create another Republican-held seat in Memphis. Blackburn, who is running for governor, said an additional seat is essential to cement President Donald Trump’s agenda.

Mississippi Republican Gov. Tate Reeves last week announced a special session to redraw the state’s Supreme Court districts, to begin 21 days after the court releases its decision.

“It is a decision that could (and in my view should) forever change the way we draw electoral maps,” Reeves said in a statement announcing the session.

Although the Supreme Court case centered on Louisiana, state officials are likely out of time to adopt a new map for this year’s election. The primary election is set for May 16.

Still, Louisiana will be free to pursue redistricting next year.

U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, Sr., a Democrat who represents one of the state’s two majority-minority districts, said the court’s decision was a “devastating blow” to the promise of equal representation.

“This ruling is about far more than lines on a map — it’s about whether Black Louisianians will have a meaningful opportunity to make their voices heard,” Carter said in a statement.

The redistricting wars of 2026

As of 2024, roughly a third of U.S. House seats represented majority-minority districts — 122 held by Democrats and 26 held by Republicans, according to estimates by Ballotpedia. Texas and California account for nearly half of all the districts.

Seven states have already taken the extraordinary step of redrawing their maps this year after President Donald Trump urged Republicans to draw lines that maximize partisan advantage ahead of the midterms. Maps are typically redrawn every 10 years after the census.

Texas and California struck first, followed by Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio and Utah. Virginia voters last week approved a redraw, and Florida lawmakers approved a new map Wednesday. 

All told, Republicans may emerge from the redistricting war with a small net advantage of a handful of seats if the Florida plan is enacted and the other maps are upheld.

The calendar will prove a major obstacle to additional gerrymanders this year. Primary elections have already been held in some southern states and ballots have been distributed in others. 

Mississippi, North Carolina and Texas have already held primaries, while ballots have been distributed in Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. 

But after November the clock resets, giving states more than a year to pursue further changes to their maps before the 2028 election.

“We are much more concerned about the impact on 2028 and beyond that that would have, letting these politicians basically just pick their voters instead of the voters picking them,” McNulty said.

John R. Lewis bill

As Democrats look ahead to Callais’ likely fallout in the coming years, they have begun urgently calling for action in Congress and at the state level. They also say the decision emphasizes the stakes of this year’s elections.

“Today is a devastating day for democracy and a wake-up call for all those who seek to protect it,” Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said in a statement.

Democrats in Congress have repeatedly offered the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Named after the civil rights activist and Georgia congressman who died in 2020, the legislation aims to strengthen Section 2 and other elements of the current Voting Rights Act, though it’s unclear whether the bill would be constitutional under the Callais decision.

The U.S. House, under Democratic control, passed the legislation in 2021 but it was filibustered in the Senate. Some lawmakers are speaking about the measure again, and Democrats may take control of Congress in November’s elections—though they would still face President Donald Trump in the White House. 

“We can and must revive the Voting Rights Act,” Rep. Terri Sewell, an Alabama Democrat and the ranking member of the House Administration Subcommittee on Elections, said at a shadow hearing on voting rights on Monday.

For their part, Republicans hailed the Supreme Court decision as long overdue.

U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, a North Carolina Republican who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, in a statement said “activists” for too long had manipulated the redistricting process to achieve political outcomes, dividing Americans in the process.

“The Supreme Court made clear that our elections should be decided by voters, not engineered through unconstitutional mandates,” Hudson said.

Voting Rights Act over the years

Over more than a decade, the Supreme Court has narrowed the potency of the Voting Rights Act, a 1965 law banning racial discrimination in voting that came as Congress battled Jim Crow laws in southern states. 

The measure was intended to help enforce the U.S. Constitution’s 14th and 15th amendments, which guarantee equal protection under the law and prohibit denying the right to vote on the basis of race.

In 2013, the court effectively halted preclearance — the requirement that some states and local governments with a history of discrimination obtain federal permission before changing their voting practices. At the time of the decision, most southern states and a handful of others were subject to preclearance.

The Supreme Court in 2019 ruled that federal courts cannot review allegations of partisan gerrymandering. The decision cleared the way for state lawmakers to gerrymander their maps for political advantage without fear they would be second-guessed by federal judges. 

The opinion helped empower a wave of gerrymanders after the 2020 census and set the stage for this year’s mid-decade redistricting.

Turning to the legislatures

Facing a bleak federal landscape, some voting rights advocates are increasingly turning to state legislatures. The Supreme Court decision undercutting Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act will likely intensify efforts to advance state-level legislation.

“Because political participation is inherently local, it is imperative to press for protections at the ground level,” Todd Cox, associate director counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, a racial justice legal organization, said at the shadow hearing.

Some Democratic state lawmakers already introduced measures in anticipation of an unfavorable Supreme Court decision.

The Illinois House last week approved a state constitutional amendment that would require districts to be drawn “to ensure that no citizen is denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of his or her choice on account of race.”

The Illinois amendment would also require, where practical, the creation of racial coalition or influence districts — terms that refer to districts where racial minorities together constitute a majority of residents. The measure, which must also pass the state Senate before going to voters, was a pre-response to the Callais opinion.

“This will ensure that Illinois will always recognize the fundamental principle that a democracy of the people, by the people and for the people must include all the people,” Illinois Democratic House Speaker Emanuel Welch told reporters after the amendment advanced.

Illinois Republicans have cast the amendment as a Democratic power grab. The state has some of the most gerrymandered maps in the nation, Illinois House Minority Leader Tony McCombie, a Republican, said in a statement. The Princeton Gerrymandering Project has given Illinois’ maps an overall “F” grade.

“Let’s be clear: this has nothing to do with strengthening democracy,” McCombie said. “It’s about locking in one-party control at any cost.”

Over six years after 17-year-old Alvin Cole was fatally shot by then-Wauwatosa officer Joseph Mensah, the two sides in a contentious civil case have confirmed that they are close to reaching a confidential settlement deal, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports. 

A third jury trial in federal court has been set for early May. Each of the first two trials — both held in 2025 — ended in hung juries, with jurors unable to unanimously decide whether Mensah used excessive force when he shot Cole in February 2020. 

The shooting occurred at Mayfair Mall, after a group of teenagers got into an  argument. One of the teens flashed a handgun and Wauwatosa police officers responded to a call  and encountered the group outside the mall. The teens fled when they saw the police, Cole among them. As Mensah and other officers chased Cole, Cole accidentally shot himself in the arm when the handgun he was carrying went off. Cole fell to the ground as police surrounded him, shouting various commands. 

Mensah told investigators that he shot Cole, believing that Cole was raising or pointing the handgun at him. Other officers’ accounts contradicted Mensah’s.  An officer who was closer to Cole, David Shamsi, said that neither Cole nor the gun moved after Cole was on the ground. Another officer, Evan Olson said that the gun was pointed at him, even though he was in a different position from Mensah. After the shooting, Olson and Mensah — who said that they were friends on and off the job — went off alone together in a squad car, violating policies which state that officers need to be separated after shootings to avoid contaminating statements. 

During the trials, Mensah said that he fired to protect himself and others around him, and that he didn’t want to die. Mensah also testified that he did not remember much of what happened that night. Cole was the third person Mensah had killed on the job during his five years as a Wauwatosa officer. Mensah resigned from the department in 2020 following months of protests over the shooting, and was hired by the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Department before he  retired from law enforcement. Jurors  in the case were not allowed to know about Mensah’s two other shootings in 2015 and 2016, less than a year apart.

The terms of the settlement, including the amount awarded to the family, will remain confidential, lawyers said. During the first trial, attorneys representing Cole’s family asked for $22 million, and then $9 million in the second trial.

This article has been edited to correct the settlement figures sought during the first and second trials. 

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National leaders warned the Detroit NAACP of an ongoing attack on democracy during what organizers say is the largest sitdown dinner of its kind in the world Sunday.

Speakers at the 71st annual Fight for Freedom Fund Dinner, including U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Attorney General Letitia James, said efforts to obtain Michigan ballot data, require proof of citizenship to vote and potentially weaken the Voting Rights Act present a major threat to the rights of Americans.

James received the Ida B. Wells Freedom and Justice Award, which she said she shares with Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel after Nessel pledged to deny the federal government access to Michigan’s ballots from the 2024 presidential election.

“This award’s namesake once said, ‘The way to right wrongs is to light the truth upon them, to shine light in the darkness,’” James said. “AG Nessel is the holder of that light of liberty in Michigan, just as our ancestors grabbed the torch of freedom and used it to light the way forward for all of us.”

Jeffries said the election of President Donald Trump in 2024 “was definitively a setback,” but said that “a setback is nothing more than a setup for a comeback.”

He said 2026 will be the year of the “great American comeback.”

“We’re not here to step back,” Jeffries said. “We’re here to push back at all times and ensure that this country will have a free and fair election in November.”

The Democratic leader – who was introduced by several speakers as the next speaker of the House – said that “when the gavels change hands,” Democrats will pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act “so we can end the era of voter suppression in the United States of America once and for all.”

The theme of this year’s dinner was “Liberty or Oppression – The Choice is Ours.”

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said the “choice between liberty and oppression is really one between apathy and action.”

“They don’t want Detroit to have a voice. They can’t defend their record of failure, so they want to rig the game to win. But not on my watch, not on your watch, not on our watch,” Whitmer said. “I know it’s hard to feel energetic right now, but nothing changes if we take a back seat.”

The dinner came one day after a gunman opened fire near the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington, D.C., reportedly targeting Trump.

Jeffries condemned political violence and thanked law enforcement for protecting the attendees at both events.

“Here in America, we should be able to agree to disagree without ever being disagreeable with each other,” Jeffries said. “At the same time, I can assure you that we will continue to speak truth to power at all times as we navigate our way through the trials, the turbulence and the tribulations of this moment.”

James said political violence “has no place in society,” adding that she has faced threats to her own life.

But she added that she continues to “yearn and pray for a compassionate, civil, competent and inclusive government in Washington, D.C.”

The Detroit NAACP also honored civil rights activist Ruby Bridges, who was the first Black child to attend the formerly whites-only William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

Jeffries said “our community has always had the ability to imagine a better future here in America and then work hard to bring it about.”

James said Bridges set an example for everyone to follow.

“If a 6-year-old Ruby Bridges can find the courage to walk through an angry, screaming mob just to get to school, so can we,” James said.

A grand jury indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center on charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and money laundering brought by the U.S. Department of Justice, which alleges payments the organization made to informants in extremist groups functioned as financial support for them.

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday that a federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned an 11-count indictment against the SPLC, a civil rights nonprofit based in Montgomery, Alabama, that helped take down some of the most prominent white supremacist groups in the country.

“As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair said in a statement Tuesday evening that the organization was “outraged by the false allegations levied against SPLC — an organization that for 55 years has stood as a beacon of hope fighting white supremacy and various forms of injustice to create a multi-racial democracy where we can all live and thrive.” 

“Taking on violent hate and extremist groups is among the most dangerous work there is, and we believe it is also among the most important work we do,” Fair said. “To be clear, this program saved lives.”

Fair said in a video released earlier on Tuesday that SPLC was the subject of a criminal probe and that he believed it was connected with a now-discontinued paid informant program, which Fair said provided information and intelligence on extremist groups that was passed to law enforcement.

The indictment characterizes those payments, dating back to the 1980s, as funding for leaders and organizers of racist groups including the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation and the National Alliance.

No individuals were named in the indictment, but Blanche at the news conference, referred to one individual who was paid $270,000 over eight years. In total, according to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight people.

The indictment also pointed to an imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, as well as an alleged member of the online leadership chat group that planned the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

Additionally, the indictment accuses the organization of funneling money to violent extremist groups by using the informants SPLC recruited.

FBI Director Kash Patel said at the news conference that SPLC tried to hide criminal activity from banks.

“They set up shell companies and entities around America so that the financial institutions that we rely on as everyday Americans were deceived in believing that the money was not coming from the Southern Poverty Law Center in perpetuation of this scheme and fraud, but rather fictitious entities they stood up to perpetuate this ongoing fraud,” Patel said.

The indictment includes  six counts of wire fraud, alleging SPLC defrauded donors; three counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank and one count of money laundering.

Fair said earlier on Tuesday that the paid informant program operated “in the shadow of the height of the Civil Rights Movement, which had seen bombings at churches, state-sponsored violence against demonstrators, and the murders of activists that went unanswered by the justice system.”

The interim CEO said that SPLC did not “share our use of informants broadly with anyone to protect the identity and safety of the informants and their families.”

“And while we no longer work with paid informants, we continue to take their safety seriously,” he said.  

A spokesperson for the organization said Tuesday that the program “predates me and a lot of people here. Most people who were involved are not even with the organization, because it has been a very long time since it has ended.”

Fair accused President Donald Trump and the DOJ of targeting SPLC for political purposes.

“Today, the federal government has been weaponized to dismantle the rights of our nation’s most vulnerable people, and any organization like ours that stands in the breach,” Fair said. “We stood in the vanguard then, and we stand in the vanguard today. We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission or the communities we serve.”

The SPLC, founded in 1971, rose to prominence by bringing lawsuits against the Klan and other organizations that forced them to declare bankruptcy. Members of the Klan bombed the organization’s headquarters in Montgomery, Alabama, in July 1983. The group has also done work on voting rights, immigration and labor issues.

The group has often been outspoken and critical of Trump, and Republicans and conservatives have made it a target for years, saying it lumps right-wing groups in with extremist organizations. The Republican-controlled House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the SPLC in December.

Updated at 6:37 p.m. with details of indictment, comments from DOJ press conference and reaction from SPLC.

Two right-wing organizations are taking aim at the ban on conversion therapy in Wisconsin’s professional code for social workers, citing a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

But the head of a group that fought for the ban says professional standards are the central issue — and aren’t subject to free speech claims. 

In a joint letter Wisconsin Family Action and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty are demanding that Wisconsin repeal the ban. Conversion therapy is a widely discredited practice purporting to change sexual orientation or gender identity.

The Wisconsin Marriage and Family Therapy, Professional Counseling, and Social Work Examining Board included the ban in its updated professional code published in April 2024.

The code declares that it is “unprofessional conduct” for practitioners to use or promote “any intervention or method that has the purpose of attempting to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including attempting to change behaviors or expressions of self or to reduce sexual or romantic attractions or feelings toward individuals of the same gender.”

WILL has been at the center of many conflicts over trans-inclusive policies and gender identity. Wisconsin Family Action has also lobbied against including gender identity in state civil rights protections.

Their letter seeking the conversion therapy ban’s repeal cites a U.S. Supreme Court ruling March 31 in a lawsuit that challenges Colorado’s law banning conversion therapy on First Amendment grounds.

The high court ruling didn’t throw out the Colorado law directly. Instead, it instructed the federal court hearing the Colorado lawsuit to subject that law to “strict scrutiny” on First Amendment grounds because it seeks to “regulate speech based on viewpoint.”

The WILL-Wisconsin Family Action letter, first reported by Wisconsin Health News, was sent April 14 to Gov. Tony Evers, the Department of Safety and Professional Services and the chair of the social work examining board. 

The letter demands that the board stop enforcing the ban and start the process of repealing it. WILL represents a Christian counselor in a pending federal lawsuit to block a La Crosse city ordinance that bans conversion therapy.

Marc Herstand, executive director for the National Association of Social Workers’ Wisconsin chapter, said the U.S. Supreme Court ruling isn’t relevant to the Wisconsin rule.

“I don’t think it applies because we have a rule, and according to state statute, professional boards can create their own ethical standards,” Herstand told the Wisconsin Examiner. That is supported by both the general law that applies to the state’s licensing boards as well as specific provisions authorizing the social worker board, he said.

Herstand said rules against conversion therapy are to prevent harm. He compared the practice to an electrician’s bad advice that leads to a homeowner’s fatal electric shock or a health provider whose bad advice leads a patient with diabetes to lose a limb to nerve damage or the loss of circulation.

“That’s not free speech — that’s unprofessional conduct,” Herstand said. The electrician or health professional “would be held accountable by the [relevant professional] board. Conversion therapy is exactly the same thing.”

Republican lawmakers repeatedly blocked several previous attempts to update Wisconsin’s social work standards. In April 2024, after the Legislature’s session ended, the social work examining board updated its professional standards to restore the conversion therapy ban.

Then, in a landmark state Supreme Court ruling in July 2025, Chief Justice Jill Karofsky wrote that the statutes that state legislators had used to review and suspend administrative rules violated the Wisconsin Constitution. The examining board “exercised its statutory authority” when it revised its rules to ban conversion therapy, Karofsky wrote in the 4-3 decision.

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Clouds of tear gas engulfed the Ridglan Farms Biomedical research facility, as police repelled hundreds of animal rights activists attempting to breach the facility to carry away  thousands of beagles bred and housed inside. The activists gathered at Ridglan in the Dane County village of Blue Mounds on Saturday, a day ahead of the date  they’d publicly announced for the planned rescue action. 

Wayne Hsiung, a lawyer and animal rights activist from California who was one of the lead organizers of the action, was reportedly among the first people arrested. The Dane County Sheriff’s Office said on social media that he was arrested “within minutes” for conspiracy to commit burglary. As the activists attempted to enter the Ridglan facility for the second time in a little over a month, they were met with tear gas and rubber bullets. Activists  said some people  were severely beaten by law enforcement. One participant, Nicholas Dickman, lost multiple teeth after officers beat him after Dickman crawled through a hole activists made in the  fence around the facility, according to a press release prepared by the Coalition to Save the Ridglan Dogs. 

The conflict comes after weeks of escalating tensions around the controversial facility. Ridglan keeps thousands of beagle dogs bred specifically to be used in biomedical research. Ridglan maintains its own research wing, but also sells the dogs to other facilities for use in experiments. Critics of Ridglan have long accused the facility of subjecting the dogs to cruel and inhumane conditions. Last year, a special prosecutor appointed by a Dane County judge found that violations of Wisconsin’s animal cruelty laws had occurred at Ridglan. Instead of filing charges, the special prosecutor reached a settlement deal with Ridglan that gave the company until July to shut down its breeding operation. 

Animal rights advocates denounced the decision to let the beagles remain at Ridglan until July. This prompted a first attempted rescue by dozens of activists in March. More than 20 beagles were taken from the facility and  some were adopted. A few of the dogs were intercepted by police and returned to Ridglan. The group forced its way into the buildings housing the dogs, breaching fences and breaking locks. Some of the activists reported that the dogs they pulled from gated enclosures were living in cramped and unsanitary conditions. Although 27 people were arrested, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett didn’t refer charges to the district attorney’s office until last Thursday, after the activists announced their plans to return to try to get more beagles out. Barrett called the activists “outside groups” who used violence to breach the buildings and “stole dogs from the facility.”

On Saturday, at least 25 people were arrested, a coalition spokesperson said in an email statement to the Wisconsin Examiner. Two people have been charged with tresspassing, one with reckless driving, and four with felony burglary. Hsiung reportedly said in a call from jail that “only a deeply corrupt system will use tear gas and rubber bullets against peaceful activists saving dogs. We are seeing the worst in humanity today. But in the courage of the rescuers, also the best.” The coalition  said in a statement that Hsiung was questioned by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI refused to comment for this article. 

The Dane County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement on social media that a Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) had been used to warn people that they’d be arrested. The statement said  that hundreds of people attempted to breach the gate, while others “blocked roadways to slow the response of law enforcement and other emergency vehicles.” It also said that one of the activists reckless drove a vehicle around the property before “law enforcement stopped it and arrested the driver.” 

The sheriff’s office also said  that some protesters were peaceful while others ignored warnings and attempted to break into the facility, and that 40mm munitions (tear gas) and pepper balls were used. Dane County deputies were assisted by other law enforcement agencies, though the sheriff’s office  did not name them in its statement. 

Sheriff Barrett said that “it was clear from the beginning that this was not going to be a peaceful protest.” Barrett said the use of force was “appropriate and proportionate to the behaviors observed” and that “resorting to crime, chaos, and violence is not the solution.”

The sheriff’s post included pictures of activists dressed in white biohazard suits, carrying equipment like sledgehammers and power saws to breach the facility. 

Lisa Castagnozzi, a resident of Milwaukee County who participated in the action, told the Examiner that she’d been concerned about Ridglan for at least eight years, ever since she read about the facility’s 311 animal cruelty violations cited by the state, “and yet, they just keep reporting these violations and nothing ever happens.” 

“So everyone — myself included — have tried over eight or nine years now, for me eight, all of the legal channels. You know?” Castagnozzi said. “All the advocacy channels. Going to hearings. Signing petitions. Calling our Congress people. Going to Madison to talk to people at [the state Department of Agriculture and Trade], U.S.D.A., meeting with legislators, being part of Dane4Dogs…I mean literally trying to get any of the four major authorities in Wisconsin to take action. Like we know that there’s cruelty there. Why is no one taking action?”

In frustration, Castagnozzi said she and many others decided to go to Ridglan on Saturday. Originally, the second action was announced for Sunday, and Castagnozzi said that she, like many others, was surprised that the action was moved up a day to Saturday. When they arrived at Ridglan, Castagnozzi said she saw what she thought was smoke in the air as the police fired tear gas and people tried  to get through the gates. Castagnozzi’s team decided to keep their distance, and then people started coming down the hill towards them with injuries. 

One man, she said, “had been pepper-sprayed in the eyes, like brutally. And then from that moment on, for the rest of the day, for me…my team was scattered and there’s so many people and chaos. …  people were shot with rubber bullets. People went to the hospital. Knee injuries. A professor from Sheboygan I know, she was shot in the chest and she had to go to the hospital and make sure it wasn’t a broken rib. A lot of injuries, and tons of people with serious chemical, you know, in the eyes, in the face, in the skin, in their lungs, I mean people were just passing out.”

Castagnozzi also said that she saw people who identified themselves as neighbors and supporters of Ridglan blocking roads with their vehicles and not allowing people to pass. 

On Sunday, sheriff’s deputies were still in the area blocking a road to Ridglan and monitoring passing cars. A planned vigil was not held at the farm. Instead, dozens of activists gathered at the Capitol, saying they would not give up on freeing Ridglan’s beagles.

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On Sunday, more than 2,000 people plan to enter the Ridglan Farms biomedical research facility to free thousands of beagles bred in Dane County under conditions prosecutors last year said violated state animal cruelty laws. Self-described rescuers from across the country have been preparing for Sunday’s non-violent direct action, building on the momentum that started with a smaller rescue last month. 

Wayne Hsiung, an attorney and organizer of the rescues, posted on social media that rescue participants will “use every non-violent means to breach the facility walls and rescue the dogs.” Hsiung continued, “if police illegally attempt to stop us, we will shield one another from their attempts to hurt the dogs, and pressure them to enforce the law and protect the dogs. Nothing will stop us from getting all 2,000 beagles out of cages into the sunlight for the first time.”

In 2024, animal rights groups including Dane4Dogs and the Alliance for Animals filed a court complaint against Ridglan, following years of activism drawing attention to the breeding operation. Ridglan has bred beagles for 60 years to be sold and used in biomedical research, while also maintaining its own research area separate from where the dogs are kept. The controversial but legal experiments are a separate issue from the living conditions of the beagles.

Activists allege that the dogs are being housed inhumanely, had been subjected to the removal of eyelids and vocal cords without anesthesia, and were experiencing deteriorating health as a result. A special prosecutor, La Crosse County District Attorney Tim Gruenke, was appointed after a Dane County judge found that there was probable cause that Ridglan was violating  Wisconsin’s animal cruelty laws. 

Instead of filing criminal charges, Gruenke offered Ridglan a deal that allows the facility to close its breeding operation by July 2026. Gurenke told Fox6 that he didn’t have authority to seize the dogs because the crimes being investigated had occurred in the past. Ridglan has denied the allegations, saying in a statement that “no credible evidence of animal cruelty has ever been presented or substantiated. Nor has any court, agency, or investigator ever made a finding of animal cruelty.”

Ridglan said in a emailed statement to the Examiner that Gruenke’s investigators questioned the credibility of witnesses who distributed claims it said were “misinformation” and “untrue.” Ridglan also said that inspections by the U.S. Department of Agriculture conducted from May 2014 to January 2026 found “no non-compliant items” besides a dog with an injured paw in 2017, a request for new flooring in the puppy kennel in 2023, and three separate instances of “paperwork” issues in 2023 and 2026. 

Taking matters into their own hands 

Hsiung organized the first rescue attempt on March 15, an action he said “showed the power of open rescue.” Participants carried  22 beagles out of the facility and drove them away. Eight of the dogs were intercepted by police and returned to Ridglan. 

During the rescue, participants Ingrid Andersson and Jennifer Tourkin say they glimpsed what daily life is like for a Ridglan Farms beagle. The most immediate and overpowering impression they had was from the stench emanating from the long shed buildings housing the dogs, Andersson said. The smell reached the rescuers when they were yards away, having just crossed a field freshly covered with manure. 

“That smelled like, wholesome to me,” Andersson, a midwife in Madison, told the Examiner. “That was nothing. When we got to the sheds where the dogs are kept, it was overpowering stench. It was very, very rank. That was the first thing. And then of course there was the sound.” 

Each long shed, which Andersson compared to the sort used by massive Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO’s), housed about 1,000 dogs, she said. Tourkin, a substitute pre-school teacher and mother from Denver, Colorado, called the sounds echoing from the sheds “profoundly disturbing.” She said, “picture a thousand barking, screaming, suffering beagles running in circles. That’s what it sounded like and I mean…Smells were horrific and it was more than I was prepared for.” Andersson said that the barking and crying must have been yet another stressor for the dogs. “It certainly was for me,” she added. 

As they approached, Tourkin could also hear the sound of the fence being breached. Once the activists got past the fence, it took another 15-20 minutes to actually get into a building. Tourkin was part of a “red team,” or a group willing to get arrested, and was also one of the first people who entered a building that housed dogs. “By the time we came in we could hear alarms, we could hear sirens, so at that point we had to move quickly to save beagles,” she said. 

The activists weren’t hiding from the police, and in fact Hsiung called local law enforcement once they arrived at Ridglan, hoping that officers would assist them in getting the dogs out. While Tourkin and her teammates went inside and retrieved the beagles, Andersson and the others waited outside and helped carry them to vans idling nearby. 

“My own experience in carrying beagles to vans and helping them to freedom was very similar to how I held many laboring mothers in my arms,” said Andersson. “You know, the feeling of a dog melting in my arms really trusting that they were being brought to safety was very clear for me.” Tourkin also said that the dogs “pretty much just melted into our arms.”

Despite Ridglan’s claims that reports of abuse are false, Andersson said she saw dogs with sores on their feet, legs, eyes and ears. Others seemed depressed or shut down. “It was pretty obvious what was going on here, like you didn’t need an expert investigator to tell that these animals were in distress.” She added, “clearly many of them were not used to being held, but there was no resistance.” 

Even wearing biohazard suits, some participants had a difficult time with conditions inside the sheds. Participants said they had difficulty breathing, and the ventilation fans didn’t appear to be working. Enclosures stacked two high and arranged in long rows were filled with dogs inside, some held alone and others in groups. Trays filled with dog droppings rested beneath the enclosures, Andersson said. 

Tourkin recalled carrying one of the beagles to a van as alarms, sirens and a clap of thunder sounded. Tourkin decided on the spot to name the beagle Etta Harriet after her late mother, who would have turned 90 years old this year. “I immediately fell in love with her and looked into her eyes,” said Tourkin. “This beagle puppy just made me think of my mom.” 

As far as Andersson knew, the beagle she carried to the vans made it to safety. Etta Harriet, however, was not so fortunate. She was in a van that was later pulled over by police. Tourkin said that Etta Harriet was one of the eight beagles that were returned to Ridglan. Some of the beagles that made it off the farm have been adopted. Fox6 reported on one of the rescued beagles now named Ivy, who had never seen sunlight since she was born last summer. Instead of a name, Ivy had a code number tattooed inside of her ear. 

Both women said that while law enforcement didn’t assist the rescue as activists hoped, many officers appeared sympathetic to their cause. Andersson said she heard some officers say that they would  be out there if they could. Tourkin, as a member of a red team, said that officers and activists had lengthy and informative conversations. “Many of them didn’t know about the facility until they had arrived there because they were from neighboring communities,” said Tourkin. “And they listened. One of my colleagues saw tears.”

Nevertheless, arrests were made. Jon Frohnmayer, an environmental attorney who answered questions about the arrests, wrote in an email statement to the Examiner on Tuesday that 27 people were arrested during the March action on suspicion of misdemeanor trespass. Most were released hours after booking, while five were kept in jail for more than two days. 

Not everyone was sympathetic. Andersson said that there was at least one person she called a “vigilante” who drove his truck in a “very menacing, threatening way at us,” slashed tires, and confronted activists. Andersson heard that the man may have been an ex-employee. She told the Examiner that he also deserved empathy. 

No charges had been referred to the Dane County district attorney for the March action until Thursday. Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said in a video statement that 70 charges against 63 people have now been referred to the district attorney’s office. Barrett said that it’s up to the DA whether those people will be charged. Although Barrett said he empathized with people who care about animals and said people may exercise their First Amendment rights, he also described the March action as a violent break-in by “outside groups” which “stole dogs from the facility.” Barrett said that charges had been referred against activists and someone whom the sheriff described as “a nearby neighbor who tried to intervene with the activists.”

Earlier this month, Congressman Mark Pocan responded to Ridglan Farms, after the company requested Pocan’s assistance in repelling the planned action on Sunday. Pocan encouraged the facility to work directly with law enforcement, adding that confronting animal cruelty is an important issue to the congressman, and that the “documented treatment of beagles on your property is alarming.”

Pocan encouraged Ridglan to promptly comply with the ruling of special prosecutors to discontinue their breeding operations. “In addition to my concerns about the ethical treatment of the beagles on your property, I encourage the prioritization of safe rehoming to every beagle possible,” wrote Pocan. “No dog should lack the decency of a safe and loving environment.”

In a statement to the Examiner, Ridglan Farms said that despite the 2025 settlement, it maintains a federal license to continue research, most of which it says benefits dogs by improving veterinary medicine in rabies, canine parvovirus, heart work, dog allergies, dog arthritis, and other ailments. Ridglan also shared video showing dogs housed in gated kennels, arguing that it shows that the dogs are healthy, happy and living in large social groups.

Sunday’s action will mark an escalation, as thousands of people are expected to attend, compared with the dozens who participated in the first rescue action. Frohnmayer said that the activists’ legal team is prepared. “We are expecting a large turnout for the second rescue and have planned accordingly, with expanded jail support, legal resources and coordination with local groups,” he said. “We are prepared to support everyone who chooses to participate, regardless of the scale.”

Returning to Ridglan to get the remaining 2,000 dogs

Participating in the first rescue attempt at Ridglan was a powerful  experience for both Andersson and Tourkin. “That was the best day of my life,” Andersson told the Examiner. “Next to the birth of my son, that was the best day of my life.” Tourkin said, “I’m proud that I’m in a place in my life where I was able to actually do something tangible in this world where I so frequently feel powerless.” 

“I think that Americans have forgotten what citizen action is like,” Andersson added. “It’s not a march at the Capitol. Direct non-violent action is what you do when your legal system, or your health care system, or whatever it is, is broken.” 

The people who participated in the first direct action included vegans and meat eaters, people as young as 18 and some in their 70s. “The experience was transformational to me,” said Tourkin. “These people are the loveliest, most compassionate humans I’ve had the honor to know. And even if there weren’t going to be another rescue, I consider these people my family.” She added, “These aren’t radicals. I wouldn’t have labeled myself an activist. Now, super proud, because what is an activist? Someone who takes action.”

Wisconsin community members and animal welfare activists have been raising the alarm about what they say is Rigland’s abuse for many years, Tourkin said. “And these people have worked tirelessly. So regular people like me have this very short window to get these abused dogs out.”

On Sunday the rescuers will likely encounter more resistance. Since the March action, Ridglan Farms has constructed a barrier around the facility consisting of a ditch hardened by obstacles and wire. Animal rights activists have also captured pictures of masked men dressed in black, which the organizers say are armed security guards hired by Ridglan. 

The Marty Project — an animal rights organization — on Wednesday posted on Facebook the text of an email it says was sent to the Dane County Sheriff’s Office by a former law enforcement officer acting as a liaison between the animal rights group, police and Ridglan. The post claimed that masked men at Ridglan have followed vehicles on public roadways, harassed people, and brandished firearms.

Dane County Executive Melissa Agard on Thursday called for de-escalation at Ridglan Farms, urging demonstrations to remain non-violent and lawful. “This is an emotional issue for many people, and understandably so,” Agard said. “But the path forward must be rooted in respect, safety, and the rule of law. Dane County is at its best when we come together to solve problems, not escalate them.”

Ridglan denied reports of armed masked men acting as security guards near the farm’s property. “No one from Ridglan Farms is doing anything like that,” the company said in a statement emailed to the Examiner. It called the reports “wild claims” by activists “to generate negative coverage of Ridglan Farms and if that has happened to activists or anyone else, they should certainly document it and report it to police immediately.”

Meanwhile, the activists are moving forward with their plan. Andersson said, “there is no limit to the power” of direct action.

Tourkin said,  “I did see true bravery by others, including Ingrid. I carried a dog to safety — to what I thought was safety — and those beings, they’re the focus.”

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