The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office is denying reports that a U.S. citizen from Illinois was transferred to its jail and then released over the weekend, after being detained by immigration authorities. Multiple local media outlets reported that Sundas “Sunny” Naqvi, 28, was detained upon returning to the U.S. after traveling abroad. 

Naqvi’s family, protesters and local county officials gathered outside the Broadview detention facility in Illinois on Sunday saying that Naqvi had been detained alongside her coworkers. Her family tracked Naqvi’s phone to the Broadview facility and then later to Dodge County Wisconsin, where the jail has long doubled as an immigration detention facility.

During a press conference, CBS News reported, Cook County Commissioner Kevin Morrison — who’s also a family friend of Naqvi — said that “it is our belief” that six people were transported from Broadview to Wisconsin. Naqvi was reportedly released on Saturday along with her coworkers in Dodge County. Naqvi and her coworkers are all of Pakistani descent and headed to India for a work trip with a layover in Turkey, WGN9 reported. Naqvi’s sister, Sara Afzal, said that the group’s flight was canceled due to visa issues. This caused the group to separate and travel to different countries, with Naqvi going to Bulgaria and Austria. They reunited in Turkey and flew back to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago. 

Describing what happened to Naqvi, Morrison said in his speech at Broadview, “All she was told was there was curious travel history, but they had no cause to detain her for those 30 hours.” During the press conference Morrison said of Naqvi that “her first shower was actually today, and she was able to eat some food.” Naqvi’s family members say that she has still not received her passport back. “The fact that this could happen to any U.S. citizen should terrify us all,” said Morrison. 

Naqvi’s family said that federal authorities denied that she was at Broadview. Family members were able to track her cellphone, which was turned off and back on again and showed a location in Dodge County. Federal authorities, however, denied that Naqvi was being detained there.

In a press release issued Monday, Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt refuted the reports. Schmidt’s office “has no record of the individual referenced ever being booked, detained, or released from the Dodge County Jail,” the sheriff said in the statement. “Jail logs confirm that no female inmates or detainees from the federal government were admitted or released during the timeframe in which these events were alleged to have occurred.”

Schmidt said that he takes all allegations about the jail seriously, and that a review and investigation is underway. “We encourage anyone who believes they have evidence related to this matter to provide that information — along with any available electronic metadata — to the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office so it can be properly evaluated,” said Schmidt, who also encouraged Naqvi herself to contact the office. “We are also asking that the unknown individual who reportedly picked her up in the Juneau area and drove her to the Holiday Inn contact the Sheriff’s Office to provide a statement.”

The sheriff said he will not comment further pending investigation into the matter, and that he does not speak on behalf of federal authorities. Late last year, Dodge County sheriff’s deputies were spotted transporting immigration detainees to and from the Broadview facility. 

Wisconsin officials expressed outrage over initial reports of the detention.  Sen. Chris Larson posted on BlueSky  that federal agents “repeatedly lied, saying she was not in custody. After nearly two full days she was released, needing to hitchhike to a nearby hotel to call for a ride home. This should not happen in any nation that purports to call itself the ‘Land of the Free.’”

Naqvi’s family said that she is still recovering from her detention. On Tuesday morning a spokesperson from Customs and Border Protection, a component of the Department of Homeland Security, also refuted Naqvi’s allegations. “The passenger’s claims are blatantly false,” the spokesperson said, adding that Naqvi arrived at O’Hare the morning of March 5. “CBPD officers referred her to Secondary, for additional inspection based on law enforcement checks and conducted a baggage exam. Ms. Naqvi departed CBP within 90 minutes of her arrival to the United States. Ms. Naqvi was not taken into custody or transferred to ICE for detention.”

This article has been updated with comment from the Department of Homeland Security.

With rising costs for health insurance purchased through the Affordable Care Act, Democrats in the Legislature are proposing another tactic to help more people afford health coverage.

Rep. Tara Johnson (D-Town of Shelby) announced legislation Tuesday that would enable members of the public buy into the state’s BadgerCare Plus health insurance plan.

BadgerCare Plus is Wisconsin’s name for Medicaid and is available to families and individuals with household incomes up to the federal poverty guideline — $15,960 for a single person and $33,000 for a family of three.

Johnson’s bill would expand BadgerCare’s coverage by creating a “public option” — allowing families with higher incomes to pay for the health plan out of pocket. Democrats in Wisconsin have offered similar proposals in the past that have not advanced. At the same time, the idea has been catching on in some other states, Stateline reports, although not all of them are connected to Medicaid. 

“When this law is passed, Wisconsinites will have an affordable option instead of the sky-high premiums and massive deductibles currently available from private insurance carriers,” Johnson said at a news conference in the Capitol Tuesday morning. “Public health care keeps prices down because it is not beholden to insurance company stockholders or bonuses for executives, and those savings will get passed on to Wisconsinites.”

“This will dramatically increase, for a large number of people, the number of affordable insurance options at a time when there is a crisis in affordability generally, and health care is one of the top reasons why,” said Robert Kraig, executive director of the advocacy group Wisconsin Citizens Action.

Sen. Chris Larson (D-Milwaukee) said the bill would provide an affordable health care alternative for people who had relied on plans purchased through the federal marketplace, HealthCare.gov, that was created by the Affordable Care Act. Enhanced subsidies that had lowered the cost of policies bought through the marketplace expired at the end of 2025.

On HealthCare.gov policies, “average premiums more than doubled when Republicans in Congress allowed those enhanced subsidies to expire at the end of last year,” Larson said. The subsidies were eliminated for families with incomes of more than 400% of the federal poverty guideline — around $86,000 for a couple.

For a 55-year-old couple at that income level, the premiums on the second-tier of plans sold at HealthCare.gov would increase “from $601 a month to $2,311 per month this year,” Larson said — or about $20,000 a year.

The legislation would “move us closer to the point where we need to get, where health care is a right for all and anyone can get the care that they deserve without a speck of fear that they are going to go broke just so that they can survive,” Larson said. “The fact that that is an open question right now is shameful for our state. It’s shameful for our country.”

The bill also would allow small businesses with fewer than 50 employees to enroll in BadgerCare plans. Madison chef and restaurateur Evan Danells said some of his employees had relied on ACA plans but were also confronted with increased premiums that many would have trouble being able to afford. Danells is a member of Main Street Alliance, a small business group that has organized support for the ACA among other policies.

“One of the coolest things about having a public option is it allows people to go in and get affordable preventative care,” Danells said. As a result, “they don’t become wards of the state health care system when they’re all of a sudden broke and the problem has snowballed.”

Indiana Hauser of La Crosse said she works two part-time jobs, neither of which provides health insurance. Last year she was able to purchase health coverage for $12 a month with the enhanced subsidies. “This year it went up to $400 a month for worse coverage,” said Hauser, who is active with the advocacy group Citizens Action of Wisconsin.

Hauser said she has life-long health complications due to a traumatic brain injury when she was a teenager. Nevertheless, she said, she has had to go without insurance this year because she cannot afford it.

An affordable community clinic helps her, she added, but many communities don’t have such resources.  While rationing her medications and visits to the doctor, Hauser worries that she’s “one small accident away from a financial crisis,” she said.

“Across the state, there are people and families making life or death decisions, and it doesn’t have to be that way,” Hauser said. “The BadgerCare public option could change my life and the lives of people all across our state.”

Larson and Kraig said that due to changes made by the federal tax- and spending-cut bill that President Donald Trump signed in July 2025, the likely premiums people would pay for BadgerCare under the Public Option haven’t yet been calculated. A 2025 analysis by the Legislative Fiscal Bureau projected premiums could cost about $971 a month, but also noted that a variety of factors could increase or reduce that cost.

According to the Feb. 17, 2025, fiscal bureau memo, “It is possible that the purchase option population could be, on average, less costly, which could make the premium lower” compared with the medical needs of BadgerCare patients who qualify for Medicaid. “If, on the other hand, the purchase option attracts older individuals or individuals with more significant health conditions, the premiums may be similar to, or even higher than, the average cost of BadgerCare Plus coverage.”

With the legislation being introduced after the Assembly has already wrapped up its floor period for 2026, the proposal seems unlikely to advance this year.

“I would say it’s always a good idea to introduce good bills,” Johnson said when asked about the timing of the announcement. Gov. Tony Evers, she noted, earlier Tuesday called for a special session to pass a resolution against gerrymandering the state’s legislative maps.

“We have five days on the calendar in March. We have five days in the calendar in April, I think it’s three days in May,” Johnson said. “There’s no reason that we cannot take up this legislation.”

Then she corrected herself. “Well, there is one reason, and it’s because the speaker chooses not to call us into session,” Johnson said.

“A lot of these bills are sitting in Google Drives,” added Rep. Supreme Moore Omokunde (D-Milwaukee). “All this session, we have bills ready to go. It’s a matter of will they be heard? It’s a matter of what is the appetite to have the debate about them? We know that this is something that Wisconsinites care about. They want us to stay here. They want us to get this done.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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