The current Trump administration claims its mass deportation efforts have expelled nearly a million people through July of this year, but those include both voluntary returns and people turned around at the border, according to a new analysis by the former chief statistician for the Department of Homeland Security.

The level of deportations is sharply higher than during the Biden and first Trump administrations but well below the level of the 2000s. Deportations peaked at about 1.9 million in fiscal year 2000 as border enforcement ramped up under a sweeping immigration enforcement law in 1996.

Former DHS official Marc Rosenblum did the analysis, using only public records, for the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank for immigration research. Rosenblum resigned in protest in July against what he called the Trump administration’s “war on immigrants.” He had been with DHS since 2016 and executive director of the statistics office since 2023. 

Rosenblum emphasized in his analysis how many non-criminals have been either forcibly deported or pressured to leave voluntarily. Only 20% overall — and 28% of those in the U.S. for at least two years — have a criminal conviction.

“These data here do not suggest the administration is deporting the worst of the worst,” Rosenblum said.  

Even among convicted criminals, he added, the records were more likely to be immigration or traffic infractions rather than violent or other more serious crimes. 

DHS officials have maintained that living in the country illegally is enough reason to be deported. Tom Homan, the administration’s so-called border czar, told a Florida audience Oct. 1 that deportations have ramped up this fall and will be even higher in 2027. He was speaking to a Hispanic leadership event near Miami sponsored by the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank.

“Mass deportation is happening,” Homan said. “I think September’s going to be the highest deportations of any month in the history of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Right now we’ve arrested more people than in the history of this nation.” 

He added later, “Wait until you see what we do next year.”

Rosenblum tallied 980,000 deportations, including arrangements to leave voluntarily after arrest, during the second Trump administration through July 31, about 18 months. About 300,000 had been arrested inside the United States, but most deportations were from the U.S. border with Mexico. There, 680,000 people were either turned around at the border or arrested at the border and deported after processing. 

The number of people leaving the country without being arrested is disputed — DHS earlier this year claimed more than 2.2 million “self-deportations,” apparently based on a decline in immigrant population in surveys. Others dispute that number, saying it’s more likely immigrants are avoiding government surveys. 

In his analysis, Rosenblum estimated the number of immigrants leaving of their own accord — not including people who had formal agreements to leave voluntarily — at between 310,000 and 1.5 million for immigrants who had been here at least a year. The departures include legal immigrants and those who had been living here illegally. 

Rosenblum’s estimate of departures, other than deportation, is imprecise, relying on Mexican census data on its returning citizens to estimate a “plausible level of departures” for other nationalities. 

The numbers in his analysis include people making arrangements to leave voluntarily rather than continue their court cases or contest a return at the border, about 170,000.  It may not include some people who came forward voluntarily to claim financial assistance to leave from the Project Homecoming program. 

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

Thousands of Wisconsin’s migrant seasonal workers face barriers to getting basic healthcare. A Wautoma-based charity is helping fill that gap by taking its mobile clinic to farm fields, providing low-cost primary care medicine to workers mostly from Mexico.

The post Wisconsin’s seasonal migrant workers lack access to healthcare — until a mobile clinic pulls up to the farm appeared first on WPR.

Single-family home completions remain stuck at early pandemic levels as of September as costs, labor supply shortages and high interest take a toll on home builders, especially in the Northeast and South. 

Apartment building was a more mixed picture, down nationally but up sharply in the Midwest (53%) and West (18%). 

New single–family homes dropped to an annual rate of 840,000, the lowest since May 2020, according to new U.S. Census Bureau survey results released Oct. 20. 

Single-family home completions fell in every region, especially in the Northeast (-17%) and South (-15%).  

Builders of single-family homes are stymied by rising mortgage rates, costs for energy and materials, and worsening labor supply, according to an October survey by the National Association of Home Builders. 

More than a third of home builders said immigration enforcement activity caused construction delays and discouraged legal workers from reporting for work, said  Bill Owens, chairman of the home builders group, in a statement. 

Buyer interest in new homes has fallen as costs rise, NAHB chief economist Robert Dietz said, and 43% of builders cut prices in October, the largest share in recent years. 

“Housing remains squeezed by supply-side constraints and significant affordability challenges,” Dietz said in a statement. 

New apartments came in at an annual rate of 339,000, an increase from August’s 295,000, which was the lowest since 2022. Apartment completions were down 64% in the Northeast and 37% in the South. 

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

As Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney face off again this year in a rematch of their 2022 race, the issues shaping the campaigns are different than they were four years ago. 

Kaul, a Democrat, is running for his third term as attorney general after two years in which he joined other state attorneys general in suing the administration of President Donald Trump more than 70 times. Those lawsuits have included challenges to Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, restrict healthcare access for transgender youth, freeze federal funding and make last-minute changes to federal voting rules. 

“Unfortunately we’re in a place where protecting the freedoms of Wisconsinites, in significant part, means standing up to the federal government,” Kaul told the Cap Times.

In comments on the campaign trail, Kaul has said standing up to overreach from the White House is one of the most important roles he can fill at the moment. 

“We have consistently fought back, and we have won case after case, and what that has meant is that those funds either are not illegally conditioned or they’re not frozen or ultimately cut,” Kaul said of Trump administration changes to federally funded programs. “Instead they can come to our communities and support critical programs in Wisconsin.”

Toney has argued that Kaul has been distracted from his job as top lawyer for the state by federal fights with the president and accuses Kaul of being too partisan for constantly challenging Trump. 

“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen from the attorney general is it depends on who is in the White House, who’s in the governor’s office when he makes those types of decisions,” about joining federal lawsuits, Toney said when the two debated on WISN’s UpFront earlier this month.

Toney has pointed out that when Kaul first came into office, he was critical of former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel’s lawsuits against the Obama administration. 

“He campaigned against all of the political lawsuits when he first ran, and now that’s effectively what he’s running his entire campaign on is those lawsuits where he’s putting politics over public safety,” Toney said.

But in an election cycle in which Trump’s record low popularity is threatening to kneecap Republican chances, Kaul has countered by saying Toney wouldn’t do anything to protect Wisconsinites from Trump’s actions. 

During the debate, Toney was pressed on what, if any, lawsuits he would have joined. Toney said he would have signed on to a lawsuit against West Virginia’s ban on transgender girls playing sports. 

“One of the federal lawsuits I would have joined was out of West Virginia to protect women and girls sports that the attorney general failed to stand up and protect,” Toney said.

Kaul said Toney was “ducking saying if he’ll stand up to Donald Trump.”

In 2022, the two men ran shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and abortion was a major issue. Kaul had brought a lawsuit seeking to overturn the state’s 1849 abortion ban. In the years since, the Wisconsin Supreme Court sided with Kaul in that lawsuit, restoring abortion access for Wisconsinites. Toney argued in the 2022 race that Kaul’s lawsuit was a “stunt” but has said he wouldn’t try to change the state’s abortion policy if elected. 

Toney has previously said he supports the state’s current 20-week limit on abortions and tied the issue to Republican efforts to restrict access to gender-affirming care for transgender people and limit the ability of trans kids to play sports. In an interview with Wisconsin Watch, he tied his beliefs on abortion to a fight over trans locker room access in the New Richmond school district that has become a frequent GOP campaign reference this year. 

“We have five-month, or 20-week, protections in the law right now,” Toney said. “I’m not advocating for any changes to that, and if there is going to be any change, that needs to be something that’s voted on by the people and not decided on by politicians in Madison. We know how difficult this decision can be for women and girls and their families, and we need to make sure here in Wisconsin that we’re creating a supportive environment for women and girls that I hope life may be the choice that they decide to make. And that support has to extend beyond that as well and making sure that we’re protecting women and girls’ private spaces, bathrooms, locker rooms and sports. And we’ve seen the attorney general has failed to stand up in New Richmond, Wisconsin, where we’ve seen the school district allowing biological boys in the girls bathrooms.”

The 2022 race was also much closer to the racial justice protests of 2020, the pandemic-era increase in crime rates and the subsequent backlash against proposals to reassess police authority. Toney is running with the support of county sheriffs and police unions from across the state, but with crime at its lowest level in more than a decade, and the George Floyd protests six years in the past, the issue is not as much of a flashpoint statewide. 

This year, Toney has criticized Kaul for an increase in homicides since he first took office in 2019.  

“If we want to talk about crime data we’re seeing under this attorney general’s watch since he’s taken over, homicides are up over 30% in Wisconsin. We’ve seen on his watch record drug deaths,” Toney said.

Meanwhile, Kaul has blamed Toney for a recent increase in violent crime in Fond du Lac County. 

“We’ve been making important progress on crime statewide,” Kaul said. “Crime overall is at its lowest number in decades, and violent crime is the lowest number since 2011, but we also have more work to do.

Under the Trump administration, the White House has often focused heavily on allegations of election fraud and aggressively stepping up immigration enforcement — including in Wisconsin where the federal government has sought to obtain the private information of Wisconsin voters and Immigration and Customs Enforcement has made record numbers of arrests. 

Toney has previously supported both efforts. 

In an interview with Wisconsin Watch, he said the state needs to do more to root out non-citizens who are registered to vote — an issue that Republicans have repeatedly raised without much evidence. 

“We need to have a similar process that reviews noncitizens that could be on our voter rolls,” he said. “We have people that are lawfully in the country that are noncitizens, whether it’s for work or school, that may get a driver’s license or an ID card, and we don’t know what that problem could be because there’s no process in place to review it. And that’s where I’d like to see a similar process that we use for felons for that noncitizen process, just to make sure that people have confidence in those results. And if somebody is doing that, that they’re being prosecuted.” 

He has also testified before Congress to argue for stepped up immigration enforcement. 

Toney has focused on delays in testing at the state’s crime laboratories, which the attorney general is responsible for managing. Crime lab backlogs have often been a major issue in Wisconsin’s attorney general races. Kaul was first elected in 2018 after a controversy over a backlog of untested sexual assault kits. 

Toney has pointed to data that shows it’s taking longer for the state labs to test DNA evidence and blamed Kaul for the slowdown, saying he’s “passing the buck” on his responsibilities. 

Kaul has blamed the Republican-led Legislature for failing to provide proper funding to fully staff the labs. In the 2023-25 state budget, Kaul requested 16 additional crime lab positions while the final budget granted him three. In the most recent budget signed into law last summer, Kaul requested 19 additional crime lab staffers and received none.

Throughout the year, the criminal justice issue drawing the most public attention has been the increased scrutiny of law enforcement’s use of Flock license plate reading cameras. The AI-powered cameras are able to track the movement of people and vehicles through communities, drawing complaints that their use is an invasion of privacy and a violation of people’s rights. 

Both Kaul and Toney have said the cameras can be useful, but that there need to be guardrails on their use. 

“It’s clear that we need more action from the Legislature and the governor’s office, and until then local municipalities are the ones that are having to make these decisions with local sheriffs and chiefs that are having to maintain that public trust,” Toney said, pointing to a homicide case he’s working on in which the cameras were used to identify a suspect. 

Kaul said the cameras have been helpful in finding missing persons, but the technology should not be misused. 

“I want to make sure there’s a limit on the disclosure of data, so it’s being limited by law enforcement. I don’t want to see this going to private entities. And then there should be regular auditing in place and punishments if folks are misusing the technology,” Kaul said.

Every four years, the race for attorney general is largely overshadowed by the race for governor. In most cycles, the party that wins the governor’s race also wins the attorney general’s race. 

The last time the two races diverged was in 2006 when Wisconsin elected Democratic Gov. Jim Doyle and Republican Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen. 

In 2022, Toney performed better than Republican gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels, earning about 30,000 more votes, but still losing narrowly. 

“I’m running my own race from when I got into this back in October of 2025,” Toney told PBS Wisconsin. “I talked about the forensic testing failures, the fentanyl epidemic and how partisan our attorney general has become. I mean, we have driven home issues that affect people in all 72 counties. And that’s what I’ve been focused on, is what our Department of Justice can do to help protect everybody in Wisconsin by putting public safety over politics.”

Kaul acknowledges he’s been elected by thin margins in two nail-biter elections, but is confident his record will be enough to carry him to victory again. 

“The results tend to be fairly close, but in Wisconsin we have a lot of close elections, and so sometimes those small differences can make a big difference in the outcome,” Kaul told PBS. “But I’m running based on my record and my time as AG, and the focus can be different. My top priority as attorney general has been public safety, and we’ve made significant progress on really important public safety issues.”

WASHINGTON — Immigrants living in the United States with humanitarian status from Ukraine and Sudan will retain their deportation protections and work authorizations for now, the Department of Homeland Security said over the weekend. 

More than 100,000 Ukrainians and roughly 2,000 Sudanese with Temporary Protected Status will keep their protections until “such an announcement is made,” the agency said.

It’s the same move the Trump administration made as the deadline for TPS renewal for more than 200,000 Salvadorans approached last month. 

While immigrants with TPS from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine will have deportation protections, it places more than 300,000 people in limbo because it’s not clear how long the protections will last.

“Families who depend on this status to stay safe and keep working deserve a formal decision in writing, not a weekend statement to press,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, which helps resettle refugees and advocates for immigrants, said in a statement. “Keeping protections in place is the right call, but a promise to a reporter is not a policy.” 

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has not indicated if DHS will renew protections for those TPS recipients who were granted the designation because they hail from countries deemed too dangerous for return.

Ukrainians received TPS in 2022 after Russia invaded their country and Sudanese were granted the designation several times, most recently in 2022, because of an ongoing civil war. The State Department currently has a do-not-travel advisory, its highest advisory level, for Ukraine and Sudan.

If no decision is made, an automatic six-month extension kicks in, based on the TPS statute. But DHS has not confirmed whether any such extension is in place for Salvadorians, Sudanese or Ukrainians. 

After Monday, the last remaining country with TPS will be Lebanon, which is set to expire Nov. 27.

The second Trump administration has moved to wind down the TPS program established by Congress in the 1990s. The Supreme Court cleared the way for that initiative after it ruled this summer that decisions from the executive branch regarding a TPS designation are not subject to judicial review. 

So far, more than 1 million immigrants who have TPS have been stripped of their legal protections from the 17 countries that initially had the designation at the start of the second Trump administration.

WASHINGTON — More than 100,000 Ukrainians and roughly 2,000 Sudanese immigrants are bracing for the possibility they’ll lose their humanitarian protections by Monday.

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has not indicated if he will renew protections for Ukrainians, who first received Temporary Protected Status after Russia invaded their country in 2022, and for Sudanese nationals, who were granted the designation several times, most recently in 2022, because of an ongoing civil war.

The Trump administration has moved to eliminate legal protections for more than 1 million immigrants that have TPS. Of the 17 countries with the designation at the start of the second Trump administration, the only remaining protections are for Ukraine and Sudan, which are set to end on Monday, and Lebanon, which is set to expire Nov. 27. 

Mullin is supposed to declare his decision at least 60 days before a TPS designation expires, but he’s made no announcement. 

The lack of an announcement would put Ukrainian and Sudanese TPS holders in the same situation as 200,000 Salvadorians, who are still in limbo after DHS did not renew protections set to expire on Sept. 9. 

If no decision is made, an automatic six-month extension kicks in. DHS has not confirmed whether the extension is in place, only that Salvadorians have deportation protections and work authorization, for now. 

DHS did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment about TPS extension for Ukraine or Sudan.

Situation unchanged

TPS is granted when a person hails from a country deemed too dangerous to return to because of conflict, natural disaster or another destabilizing event. The Trump administration has sought to wind the program down, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court this summer determined that decisions by the executive branch regarding TPS designations could not be challenged in court. 

Immigration advocates say the rationale for providing TPS to Ukrainians has not changed.

“With the war in Ukraine still ongoing and conditions remaining unsafe, the administration should extend TPS for Ukrainians,” Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the advocacy group National Immigration Forum, said in a statement. “Forcing people to return to Ukraine in these circumstances is dangerous and a departure from longstanding U.S. policy.”

If Mullin ends TPS for Ukraine, it wouldn’t be the first time Ukrainians have lost humanitarian protections under the second Trump administration. 

Last year, the Trump administration moved to end new applicants for a humanitarian program created by the Biden administration that allowed more than 220,000 Ukrainians to enter the U.S.

The State Department has a do-not-travel advisory, its highest advisory level, for Ukraine and Sudan.

Trump-Zelenskyy tensions

Fraught relations between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy further complicate the issue as Monday’s deadline approaches.

Trump has grown frustrated with the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and has blamed Ukraine for a spike in oil prices, ignoring the effect of his war in Iran. 

On Oct. 9, Trump moved to ease sanctions on Russian diesel exports. Zelenskyy called the decision “a weak decision by strong partners,” according to The Associated Press.

On Oct. 10, Trump told reporters that Ukraine should “get a new leader.” 

In an interview with NPR, Zelenskyy said the Trump administration said unless Ukraine stops long-range drone strikes on oil refineries in Russia, it could cut off U.S. intelligence-sharing with Ukraine. 

The two leaders have clashed in the past.

In February 2025, during a visit to the White House, the president got into a heated exchange with Zelenskyy, appearing to break with Ukraine and its resistance to Russia’s invasion. 

Trump’s relationship with Ukraine was also the center of his first impeachment, after a U.S. House inquiry found the president threatened to withhold military aid unless Ukraine investigated his political opponent at the time, Joe Biden.

The U.S. Senate acquitted Trump in an impeachment trial. 

Lawmakers push for extensions

There is a bipartisan congressional push to extend protections for Ukrainians at least until the end of 2029. 

In a letter to Mullin and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, 31 senators urged for Ukrainians to be granted an 18-month extension, the longest renewal for TPS holders.

“The ongoing war has caused a humanitarian crisis and damage to critical civilian infrastructure that has left many with limited or no access to heat, electricity or medical services,” the senators wrote. “Ukrainian nationals cannot safely return at this time, and allowing TPS to terminate on October 19, 2026, would risk sending more than one hundred thousand individuals back to an active war zone.”

The Republicans who signed the letter were Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. 

The Democratic senators who signed the letter were Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland, Michael Bennet of Colorado, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, Chris Coons of Delaware, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Tim Kaine of Virginia, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Patty Murray of Washington, Gary Peters of Michigan, Jack Reed of Rhode Island, Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Adam Schiff of California, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Tina Smith of Minnesota, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Mark Warner of Virginia, Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Peter Welch of Vermont, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois.

Independent Sen. Angus King of Maine, who caucuses with Democrats, also signed the letter. 

A handful of Democratic senators also urged Mullin to extend TPS protections for Sudanese in an Aug. 17 letter. 

“The ongoing armed conflict, catastrophic humanitarian crisis, and widespread human rights abuses make the safe return of Sudanese nationals impossible at this time,” they wrote. “TPS for Sudanese nationals in the United States remains both a humanitarian necessity and a prudent policy to ensure that individuals are not forced to return to conditions that continue to threaten their safety and well-being.”

Those senators were Warner, Kaine, Schiff, Van Hollen, Warnock, Booker, Bennet and Duckworth.

As the nation’s physician shortage worsens, some fear the Trump administration’s immigration policies will dissuade or prevent doctors who earned their medical degrees in foreign countries from practicing in the United States.

Among all U.S. doctors, an estimated one quarter were educated abroad. But they make up an even larger proportion of physicians in many specialties, including internal medicine (41%), endocrinology (46%) and geriatrics (52%).

The U.S. has long welcomed foreign-educated physicians as a way to ameliorate its doctor shortage. Already, an estimated 102 million Americans live in communities that don’t have enough primary care providers, according to the federal Health Resources and Services Administration. The agency projects a shortage of 141,160 full-time physicians by 2038.

Foreign-educated doctors are slightly more likely than American ones to work in areas with a shortage of primary care providers. And doctors who are here on H-1B visas — a federal program that allows U.S. employers to temporarily hire non-citizen workers for health care jobs and other positions requiring specialized knowledge — are more likely to work in high-poverty areas.

But last August, the Trump administration issued a rule increasing the fee for employers hiring workers through the H-1B visa program to $100,000, up from between $2,000 and $5,000. It also has issued a travel ban on residents of 39 countries. And earlier this month, the U.S. State Department broadened its “online presence review” of applicants for H-1B and other visas to ensure that they do not “pose a threat to national security or public safety.”

“The United States remains vigilant throughout the visa issuance process to confirm that applicants do not intend to cause harm to Americans or threaten U.S. interests,” the State Department said in its announcement of the expanded vetting.

Dr. Tarun Ramesh, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital and a health policy researcher at Harvard Medical School, said Trump’s policies will make it more expensive for hospitals and other healthcare employers to hire foreign physicians and might dissuade many international doctors from coming here at all.

“We’ve created a system where we depend heavily on physicians trained abroad, and at the same time, we create immigration policies that make it harder for those physicians to enter, to train, to remain in the country,” Ramesh said. “And that intersection of both the health workforce and immigration workforce and immigration policy makes it a clear tension.”

Both left-leaning and conservative states have taken steps to attract foreign physicians.

As of the middle of this year, about two-dozen states of every political bent had enacted laws to make it easier for foreign nationals to get their U.S. medical licenses.

Georgia Republican state Sen. Dr. Ben Watson, who co-sponsored a law in his state, said there simply aren’t enough U.S. medical school graduates to keep pace with population growth. He said one of his main goals is to increase the number of doctors in rural areas.

“We did it in several different stages to assure quality,” Watson said. “Hopefully we can encourage rural migration from that standpoint, also.”

Since 1994, states also have used the federal Conrad 30 Waiver Program to boost the number of doctors in underserved areas. The law allows a limited number of foreign medical school graduates who have trained in the U.S. using a J-1 visa to waive the normal requirement that they return to their home countries for two years before applying to come back — as long as they practice in an underserved area.

In increasing the H-1B visa fee, the Trump administration argued that some employers, especially tech companies, have abused the program by using it to replace native-born workers with foreigners who will work for less, rather than using it to fill jobs they can’t find Americans to do.

“American IT workers have reported they were forced to train the foreign workers who were taking their jobs and to sign nondisclosure agreements about this indignity as a condition of receiving any form of severance,” President Donald Trump said in the executive order he issued in September 2025. “This suggests H-1B visas are not being used to fill occupational shortages or obtain highly skilled workers who are unavailable in the United States.”

But 20 Democratic-led states sued to stop the fee increase, and in June a federal judge ruled in their favor. The administration was thwarted again in September, but it isn’t giving up: its latest proposal is to levy a $103,265 fee for a subset of H-1B applicants.

Even as the legal wrangling continues, the administration’s proposal has had an effect. In November survey of its members, the American Hospital Association found that 64% of hospitals that utilize the H-1B program had paused, deferred or limited recruitment because of the possibility of the $100,000 fee.

Andrew Wizner, an attorney who represents medical institutions that hire foreign medical school graduates, said the onslaught of new rules, legislative holdups, and confusing court decisions almost certainly has dissuaded some H-1B and J-1 visa applicants from applying to practice or train here.

“If you’re outside the U.S. and loosely following, (you might think) ‘Oh, there’s this rule, and I heard a court may have set it aside, but I don’t really know how their system works, their judicial system, and what that means,’” Wizner said.

He said the message that foreign-educated doctors are receiving is a simple one: “Don’t come here.”

Bradley Cunningham, a regulatory affairs and policy analyst at the Association of American Medical Colleges, said most hospitals simply can’t afford to navigate the new legal challenges and fees associated with H-1B visas.

“There’s a tremendous amount of confusion and misinformation about what’s going on,” Cunningham said. Like Wizner, he said he suspects the uncertainty swirling around H-1B visas is causing many would-be applicants to think twice about coming to the U.S.

“We can’t determine causality, but I can’t imagine that that is helping the situation any more when you’re talking about having to commit your family to come overseas to train at an institution and not having security or assurance that you can complete your training.”

Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.

A perfect storm of harsh immigration enforcement, aging journeymen and a building boom for data centers is wreaking havoc on the nation’s supply of skilled trade workers. 

Automakers and construction contractors say they need more access to workers through accelerated training, steady immigration and a cultural shift to encourage young people to do the hard, dirty work of skilled trades. They’re looking for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, machinists and technicians — specializations increasingly in short supply. 

Worker shortages are the top reason for construction project delays, a September survey by the Association of General Contractors of America found. Applicants are there, but half of the contractors who were surveyed said too many job candidates are unqualified and need more training. 

The association cited both the demand for workers building data centers and tougher immigration enforcement as contributing causes for the shortage.  

“Over 50% of craft workers are born outside the United States. We don’t know that they’re illegal but frankly DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) is not being that discriminating in whom they pick up or who feels threatened by them,” said Ken Simonson, the chief economist for the Association of General Contractors of America. One answer is for the government to allow more worker visas for construction and other trades, he said. 

“We’ve been stymied for 20 years or longer trying to get construction treated similarly to agriculture, where if you can demonstrate that there isn’t enough Americans interested in a job you can bring in somebody,” Simonson said. 

Pay is rising for the skilled trades, but it’s hard to say how soon higher wages would attract more people. On social media, trades workers complain of long commutes to work sites, long waits through low-paid apprenticeships and a feeling they’re not valued as much as office workers.

“Getting up at 4am-5am. Driving 50 plus miles to random job sites. Obviously the dirty part which is construction sites and inhaling dust and dirt all day. Seeing people in corporate jobs in nice clothes while I’m dirty going on lunch break,” wrote a 30-year-old on a Reddit social media post in July, concluding that they should have finished a college chemistry degree.

Thousands agreed, including a 31-year-old tradesperson from Michigan who said top pay in their field, plumbing and HVAC, is attractive but that many make less than $70,000. 

“Been in the trades since I was 16 and recently started going back to college,” the person wrote. “Everybody I know who chose a degree over an apprenticeship is starting to outpace me in life buying houses and having kids while we’re check to check and getting less healthy by the day. “

These are the concerns employers have to address if they’re going to find enough workers to build homes, cars and data centers for artificial intelligence. Ford Motor Company and the Ad Council announced a publicity campaign to bring more young people into the trades, with a video declaring “millions of skilled trade jobs are waiting for people ready to do something, with great pay, job security and work you can take pride in.” 

Ford and the alliance didn’t mention immigration enforcement as an issue, but the Association of General Contractors and an unrelated survey of roofers both mentioned it as a prominent factor in reducing the supply of skilled workers. 

John Burns Research and Consulting, an independent housing research company, reported that many of the roofers it surveyed earlier this year saw immigration enforcement as hurting their business. 

“There are no American kids willing to install roofs in Central Texas,” said one roofing contractor in anonymous quotes published by the group. 

“Tough immigration reform and not enough Americans to fill the void,” said another. 

“A lot of these people have been deported. The next generation is complacent and does not want to do physical work,” said a Florida roofer. 

Elizabeth LaJeunesse, vice president of building products research at John Burns, said the vehemence of responses about immigration was surprising. 

“Most of these firms are pretty conservative, so this is a real phenomenon we’re picking up on, that level of concern over immigration enforcement,” LaJeunesse said.

Duane Musser, vice president for government relations for the National Roofing Contractors Association, said the responses are typical of what he hears from members. Immigration as well as better trade education are critical to roofing, he said. 

“Advocating for solutions to workforce shortages, including expanded career and technical education programs and bipartisan immigration reform, is a top priority,” Musser said. 

The DHS told Stateline in an unattributed statement that “those who are here legally and are not breaking other laws have nothing to fear” and that “we will continue to enforce our nation’s laws and remove illegal aliens from American communities.” 

In September a Trump-appointed federal judge stayed a federal practice of entering construction sites without a warrant to investigate immigration status. One construction worker of Mexican descent in Alabama complained that he had been detained three times since 2025 despite showing a state driver’s license demonstrating that he was a citizen born in Florida. 

Immigrant workers make up a majority of roofers, painters and stucco masons, according to a Stateline analysis last year.  

The nation will need 1.7 million new skilled trade workers every year through 2035, according to a September report by Alliance for America’s Skilled Trades, a trade group including Ford Motor Company, toolmakers and other businesses. Training programs produce just more than half the numbers needed, and only half of those who enroll in skilled training programs finish, the report found.  

Nine states were identified by the alliance report as having high demand but low supply of skilled labor: Arizona, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas. 

Florida ranks first for demand for skilled workers, but nearly last for supply, higher only than Maine. Not enough new Florida workers are coming online as building in the state booms and current workers near retirement age. The state’s Association of General Contractors’ chapter hopes the advancements in workforce AI will drive more young adults into construction jobs since those can’t be replaced by chatbots.

Other states have the opposite issue: ranking high for new workers but low in demand for them, based on recent hiring and future projections. 

In the top 10 for worker supply but bottom 10 for demand: Indiana, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Wyoming. 

The alliance report suggested employers themselves need to help train future workers. The companies building data centers, in particular, want those tradespeople.

“America needs hundreds of thousands of electricians, welders and fiber technicians to build AI infrastructure,” said Dina Powell McCormick, president and vice chairman of Meta, in a statement, adding that the alliance is “paying for the training, removing the barriers that keep people from stepping into these careers, and guaranteeing a job at the end of it.”

Shoua Thao, 40,  is straddling the line between trades and AI as a machinist in the computer-assisted manufacturing business known as CNC machining, which uses computer code to control production. The son of Hmong refugees in the Twin Cities area of Minnesota, Thao is now experimenting with AI production techniques. 

“Trades are the one career path that doesn’t lie,” he said. “You can’t hide lower skills in a trade, whereas middle management and white collar jobs are protected by the vagueness of the job.”

Eventually trades could become a more valued career path than college, Thao said, though he has been discouraged at times by low pay and long hours that take time away from family.

“I think it will be a slow process but eventually, sometime in the future, maybe my children’s future, trades will take over,” Thao said. 

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

WASHINGTON — Leading immigration advocates and experts sounded the alarm Wednesday on the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to undo state laws allowing some immigrants to pay in-state college tuition in the states where they reside. 

The U.S. Department of Justice has sued 24 states, Washington, D.C., and the University of Delaware since President Donald Trump retook office over laws or policies that allow noncitizen students who meet certain requirements access to in-state tuition, regardless of their immigration status.  

The lawsuits are part of a larger push from the administration to curb any benefits that could extend to immigrants more broadly.

Leaders of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration and TheDream.US defended the state laws during a virtual press conference, while warning of the setbacks noncitizen students face to accessing affordable higher education when these policies are struck down. 

The groups also released a joint report Wednesday charting the landscape of such laws and the DOJ’s legal challenges against the policies. 

The administration’s challenges “limit opportunities for thousands of students and undermine the social and economic well-being of communities across the country,” said Miriam Feldblum, president and CEO of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, a nonprofit and nonpartisan organization. 

“When access to in-state tuition is taken away, many undocumented students cannot bridge the gap between in-state and out-of-state rates,” Feldblum added. 

Gaby Pacheco, president and CEO of TheDream.US, called the Trump administration’s efforts “coordinated assaults on tuition equity.”

They are “just one part of a larger pattern of legal and policy barriers and restrictions being put in place that threatens Dreamers and immigrants’ educational opportunities, their stability, their safety and their futures,” she said. 

TheDream.US grants scholarships to immigrant youth, including individuals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, who are also known as Dreamers. 

DACA is intended to help people brought into the country without legal documentation as children. The program, created in 2012, protects participants from deportation and allows them to receive work permits and obtain driver’s licenses.

Six state laws blocked

In six of the lawsuits the DOJ filed — targeting Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas — courts have already struck down the laws. 

But in a blow to the administration’s efforts against Virginia’s in-state tuition policies, a federal judge earlier this week scrapped the DOJ’s challenge, upholding the Virginia law.

Lawsuits are also pending in Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont and Washington state.

Debate over 1996 law

The DOJ’s challenges center on the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, which bars a state from offering in-state tuition benefits to people not lawfully present in the country if that same benefit is not granted to U.S. citizens from another state. 

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the DOJ’s Civil Division has noted that “colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens” and that the agency “will not tolerate American students being treated like second-class citizens in their own country.”

Thomas A. Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, which has sought to intervene on behalf of affected students in cases targeting the laws, described “extraordinary” aspects of the DOJ’s “litigation campaign,” including that “the administration uses very sharp tactics to attempt to prevent anyone from coming in to defend the state tuition-equity laws.” 

Saenz also pointed out that all of the state tuition-equity policies across the country were enacted after the 1996 law was enacted. 

“What that means is that they are using a provision that was on the books when all of these legislators acted to create laws like the Texas Dream Act,” Saenz said, pointing to the Lone Star State’s 2001 law — the first of its kind in the country — that has since been blocked.

He added that “no administration prior to this one has ever gone to court contending that that 1996 law somehow renders these tuition-equity laws passed beginning in 2001 unconstitutional or preempted.” 

New Beginnings for Refugees is helping central Wisconsin families navigate school routines, language barriers and cultural differences as they build new lives in the Wausau area.

The post Central Wisconsin refugee families find their footing as the school year gets underway appeared first on WPR.

Reading Time: 9 minutes

This article was produced in partnership with the nonprofit journalism publication Bolts, which covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments.

Click here to read highlights from the story

• Voters in Sauk and Winnebago counties will choose sheriffs who hold different views on local cooperation with ICE.
• Both Democratic candidates pledge to end their counties’ 287(g) agreements while their Republican opponents support continuing them in some form.
• In Sauk County, both candidates would maintain a contract allowing ICE to house detainees in the county jail, despite disagreeing over the financial and humanitarian implications.
• In Winnebago County, residents have also raised concerns about the law enforcement use of Flock license plate cameras.

Half an hour into a packed June candidate forum in Baraboo, the moderator turned to the issue looming over the race for Sauk County sheriff: immigration enforcement. 

“As chief law enforcement officer of Sauk County, how will you separate the demands of ICE from your duty to uphold the law and protect the residents of Sauk County?” Baraboo Optimist Club President Joseph Viney asked.  

The six candidates at the front of the public library conference room offered well-rehearsed responses.

Three months and a primary later, one Republican and one Democrat remain, with the question still central to the race ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

“People are fired up and they’re frustrated with ICE in general from a national perspective, and it does have local consequences,” Ryan Jesberger, the Democratic nominee, told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts.

ICE agents haven’t turned up in large numbers in the largely rural south-central Wisconsin county to check homes, jobsites and cars for undocumented immigrants. Unlike in neighboring Illinois and Minnesota, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has relied on jails and prisons to make most of its arrests in Wisconsin since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. 

Sauk County is no exception. ICE has recorded about 100 arrests in the county during that period, almost all through custody transfers at the local jail. An agreement between the sheriff’s office and federal authorities makes a small portion of those arrests possible by allowing county jail supervisors to play a limited role in immigration enforcement.

The Sauk County Sheriff’s Office is one of 20 county law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin that cooperate with ICE through 287(g) agreements: voluntary partnerships allowing designated local officers to carry out some immigration enforcement tasks. Voters in two of those counties — Sauk and Winnebago counties, 90 miles apart — will have a say in the future of their sheriffs’ ICE partnerships this fall. Trump won both counties by less than 5 percentage points in 2024.

The Trump administration has tapped local law enforcement agencies across the country for help in its immigration enforcement push, often in the form of 287(g) agreements. Those arrangements are drawing pushback from immigrant rights organizations and, in some cases, shaking up local elections.

Sheriffs are “the most important state(-level) race for immigration purposes,” said Hannah Schwarz, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Wisconsin. The civil liberties organization opposes local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. 

Sauk and Winnebago county voters will now choose between Republicans promising to stay the course and Democrats campaigning to dial back cooperation with immigration authorities. Both Democrats promise to quit the 287(g) program as soon as they take office.

But the partisan split conceals a more complicated policy landscape in Sauk County, where both candidates in the race favor keeping in place a contract that allows ICE to rent out space in the local jail to detain immigrants.

In Sauk, ICE cooperation takes multiple forms

Sauk County sits on the edge of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, a region of sandstone bluffs and organic farms that has veered toward Republicans over the past three presidential elections after more than a decade of favoring Democrats. 

Baraboo, the county seat, peters out into cornfields within city limits. Wisconsin Dells, the Midwest’s waterpark capital, spills across the county’s northern boundary. The city’s resorts hire foreign workers on temporary visas ahead of the summer rush; other immigrants, many without visas, milk cows on the county’s dairy farms. 

Signed by Sheriff Richard “Chip” Meister in November 2025, Sauk County’s 287(g) agreement enables the county’s six jail supervisors to execute immigration warrants on people in county custody — a task ICE officers would otherwise perform. Executing an immigration warrant transfers them to ICE custody. 

The Sauk arrangement “streamline(s) our existing relationship with ICE,” Meister wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch and Bolts.

But Meister is set to retire this year after 16 years, leaving the future of this arrangement uncertain. He endorsed Capt. Matt Burch, a Republican, ahead of the August primary; Burch won the primary by a wide margin. 

He takes a position similar to Meister’s. 

“Our focus remains strictly on removing individuals who commit serious crimes rather than targeting members of our community solely based on their immigration status,” Burch wrote in an email. He does not, however, plan to extend the office’s partnership with ICE beyond the county jail. “Our authority applies exclusively to individuals who are already in our custody for violating local or state laws.” 

About half of people transferred from the Sauk County Jail to ICE during Trump’s second term had prior criminal convictions, a Wisconsin Watch and Bolts analysis shows; the other half had pending criminal charges. At least 8% of those transferred to ICE custody inside the jail had a prior conviction for driving while intoxicated — by far the most common conviction among Sauk County arrestees.

Jesberger, the Democratic candidate running against Burch and a University of Wisconsin-Madison police lieutenant, promises to end the county’s 287(g) agreement “on day one.”

“It’s not an anti-ICE or pro-ICE view,” he said. “We’re not talking (about) not doing any interaction,” he added, but instead about scaling back the county’s role. Jesberger also argues the 287(g) agreement sidesteps a contentious and unresolved question about the limits of local law enforcement’s arrest powers.

Law enforcement agencies with or without 287(g) agreements can choose to honor ICE “detainer” requests, which can entail holding people in jail up to 48 hours past their scheduled release to give immigration agents time to take them into custody.

The ACLU of Wisconsin petitioned the state Supreme Court in September 2025 to take up a lawsuit claiming five Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices — including Sauk County’s — violate state law by honoring the requests. The lawsuit argues that jailing someone beyond the person’s scheduled release date on an ICE detainer qualifies as an arrest and that state law does not authorize law enforcement to make arrests solely on the agency’s administrative warrants. 

The lawsuit is currently caught in a jurisdictional tug-of-war.

Jesberger shares the ACLU’s view on detainers, which he called “request(s) to take an action we are not authorized to take.” 

“It’s easy to say we should just hold onto someone,” he wrote in an email. “The problem is that under Wisconsin Law, there is no legal authority to conduct an arrest on this civil detainer.”

Jesberger would, however, honor warrants signed by a judge.

A 287(g) agreement enabling jail supervisors to serve immigration warrants is not the same as honoring ICE detainers, he added, but it still blurs jurisdictional lines. “Entering into the agreement to act as federal agents,” he said, “is going around state law.”

Jesberger also argues that even the county’s current agreement can strain sheriff’s office resources.

“Our deputies are busy enough doing things for the citizens of Sauk County,” he said, “so adding roles and responsibilities and, frankly, liability on top of all that is a concern of mine.”

Alongside its participation in the 287(g) program, Sauk County built on its partnership with ICE last year when it extended a long-standing agreement to hold federal detainees to include people held on immigration grounds. 

The county’s original agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service dates back more than two decades. The sheriff’s office modified that agreement in April 2025 to also include ICE. More than 200 ICE detainees have since passed through Sauk County, most of whom entered ICE custody either at the jail or in other Wisconsin correctional facilities.

ICE reimburses the county $106 per day for housing a person in removal proceedings, plus $38.45 per hour for staff time spent transporting ICE detainees. That contract yielded more than $150,000 for the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office between January and June – less than 1% of the office’s annual budget, and about 15% of what Burch calls its “flexible” budget, or the portion not already devoted to wages and benefits. 

“That money is important to us,” Burch said at the June forum.

Jesberger also promises to maintain the county’s contract to provide jail space for ICE detainees, though he pushes back on Burch’s focus on the revenue it yields, calling on law enforcement to “stop talking about human beings as numbers or revenue generation.” 

Instead, he sees the housing contract as a way to protect immigrants’ due process rights while they await rulings in their removal cases. 

Aside from offering Wisconsin-based attorneys easier access to their clients, Jesberger argues that a responsibly managed contract can ensure people in custody “are treated with respect and dignity, are not laying on a concrete floor with a foil blanket in overcrowded cells (and) are not being shipped out of state to detention facilities with inhumane conditions.”

Some Wisconsin immigration attorneys and immigrant rights advocates aren’t sold on that pitch. “Any amount of custody is an incentive for ICE to continue” its crackdown, said Aissa Olivarez of the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison.

Schwarz of the ACLU of Wisconsin agrees, saying that housing contracts like Sauk County’s make it easier — and cheaper — for the agency to scale up its operations.

Cooperating with ICE in any capacity has a “chilling effect” on immigrant communities, Milwaukee-based immigration attorney Marc Christopher said, and can make immigrants less likely to contact law enforcement in an emergency.

But Christopher also noted that Sauk County is far easier to reach than the larger detention facilities in Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana and Texas where many Wisconsin arrestees land while awaiting outcomes in their removal cases. “I can meet with them in person,” he said. “Their families know where they are, and their families can meet with them.”

Jesberger and Burch have no debates scheduled ahead of Election Day, but a local coalition that opposes all cooperation with federal immigration authorities is planning an Oct. 3 event featuring the ACLU of Wisconsin and immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. 

In Winnebago, sheriff candidates diverge amid a broader debate on surveillance

Eastern Wisconsin’s Winnebago County is more than twice as populous as Sauk County. Sheriff John Matz entered its 287(g) agreement — also a warrant service model — in March 2025. 

ICE has recorded roughly 25 arrests in the county since last January, almost all inside its jail. Capt. Darin Rice, the Republican running to replace the retiring Matz, says that low number is no reason to end the agreement. 

“I do believe that it needs to continue,” he told a packed audience in an Oshkosh City Hall conference room in September. Still, he underscored that he isn’t interested in “street-level enforcement” or renting jail beds to ICE.

Rice is running against his colleague, Patrol Officer Jason Rippl.

Rippl, the Democratic candidate, has broader 287(g) qualms than Jesberger. 

“I feel like the 287(g) agreement may open the door for additional involvement with (ICE),” he told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts, “and I think that by any modern law enforcement standards, we’ve seen pretty clearly that their tactics are sloppy.”

He promises to void the county’s 287(g) agreement on his first day in office, which he argues would free up time to “clean up our own backyard” by digging out of a backlog of warrants unrelated to immigration.

Rippl said he would honor warrants signed by a judge, but he doesn’t “feel it is the responsibility of local jails” to hold inmates beyond their release date based solely on a non-binding ICE request. 

Though Winnebago County isn’t named in the ACLU lawsuit, a ruling could affect any Wisconsin county’s ability to honor ICE detainer requests. Sheriffs could also refuse to honor detainers absent a court ruling, as some have done elsewhere.

The early attention on Winnebago County’s relationship with ICE may be shifting to law enforcement’s use of surveillance technology. Both Rice and Rippl said they had reservations about the handling of sensitive data from the license plate cameras, citing the well-documented recent history of the technology’s misuse.

The Winnebago County sheriff’s office decided in early September to suspend its partnership with Flock, the embattled tech company that has built up an extensive camera network nationwide and has drawn increasingly bipartisan backlash this year. 

Sauk County’s sheriff’s office continues to operate Flock cameras, introduced as part of a pilot project last year. Burch, the GOP nominee for sheriff, called the program a  “pet project” and credits the cameras for solving several high-stakes cases. Other law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin have, like Winnebago County, ended their contracts with Flock.

“We had a lot of pushback early on to the 287(g) program,” Rice told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts. “That’s now taken a back seat to Flock cameras.”

Rippl agreed that Flock is “certainly the more prevalent conversation topic” in his conversations with constituents, though he does not believe it has “overshadowed” the 287(g) debate.

Ongoing controversies over ICE’s use of Flock camera data link the two issues.

404 Media revealed last year that local law enforcement agencies across the country have queried data from Flock cameras on ICE’s behalf, including some in states with strict restrictions on local cooperation with ICE. Wisconsin has no such restrictions. 

The Sauk and Winnebago County sheriffs did not reply to a request for comment on how often their Flock cameras have been used for immigration enforcement. In Verona, a Madison suburb with a population roughly one tenth of Winnebago County’s, public records revealed hundreds of searches tied to ICE last year.

Correction: This story has been updated to note that Ryan Jesberger is a University of Wisconsin–Madison police lieutenant. A previous version incorrectly reported that he was a former lieutenant.

Two Wisconsin sheriff races test the future of local ICE cooperation is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Voters in Sauk and Winnebago counties will choose between sheriff candidates with competing visions for local law enforcement’s relationship with ICE.

The post 2 Wisconsin sheriff races test the future of local ICE cooperation appeared first on WPR.

Children in ICE detention from Wisconsin may have to go without a lawyer in court after President Donald Trump halted millions in appropriated federal funds.

The post Trump funding halt means more children in ICE detention in Wisconsin won’t have a lawyer appeared first on WPR.

A federal immigration judge ruled Wednesday that Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, can be deported. Judge Jayme Salinardi rejected accusations made by the Department of Homeland Security that Sarsour lied on his green card application over 30 years ago, and that he registered to vote despite not being a citizen. Salindari did, however, give what Sarsour’s attorneys called “extreme deference” to a 2025 memo by Secretary of State Marco Rubio stating that Sarsour — a vocal advocate for Palestinian rights  — is deportable “because his actions undermine” U.S. foreign policy.

The same morning Salindari ruled on Sarsour’s case, he announced his retirement. A different immigration judge will preside over further proceedings in Sarsour’s case. During a press conference Wednesday, attorneys representing Sarsour called the decision “unjust,” and said the timing of  Salindari’s retirement announcement was “odd.” 

Immigration attorney Patrick Taurel said that Sarsour — who is not taking interviews at this time — was “disappointed but not shocked” by the judge’s ruling, and that he understands that immigration judges are under pressure from the Trump administration. Last year, nearly 100 immigration judges were fired by the Trump administration, shrinking the number of judges by about a quarter, NPR reported. 

“It does feel odd,” said attorney Luna Droubi, who is representing Sarsour in a separate federal case arguing First Amendment retaliation by the government. 

Taurel said he plans to appeal Salindari’s ruling down the road. Now that Sarsour has been found deportable, the next question is whether he is eligible for any kind of relief, such as asylum. Taurel said that Sarsour will eventually be able to appeal his case to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which he described as more neutral than the immigration courts. Proceedings are expected to continue into next year and under a different judge, Taurel said. 

Sarsour was in Milwaukee when immigration agents arrested him in late March. They then transported him out of Wisconsin and to a detention center in Indiana. DHS accused Sarsour of lying on his green card application in the 1990s, and claimed that he had been convicted as a teenager in Israeli military courts of throwing Molotov cocktails in 1988, during the First Intifada uprising. Sarsour grew up in the West Bank under Israeli military occupation. DHS also said that Sarsour had been charged in Israel with illegally attempting to possess weapons and ammunition in 1995. Prosecutors also accused Sarsour of registering to vote in 2004 despite not having full citizenship.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, reached for comment on the ruling, reiterated the department’s assertion that Sarsour “is a terrorist who was convicted of throwing Molotov cocktails at the homes of Israeli armed forces.” The spokesperson wrote in an email to the Examiner that “due to a previous court order, this public safety threat was loose on our streets,” and said that the judge in Sarsour’s case sustained the government’s case that there were grounds to deport Sarsour. “All illegal aliens receive due process,” the spokesperson wrote. “If a judge finds an illegal alien has no right to be in this country, we are going to remove them. Period. Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, if you break the law, you will face the consequences. Criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the U.S.”

Sarsour is a legal permanent resident and has lived in the United States for over 30 years, during which time he has not been arrested or convicted of any crime prior to his immigration arrest. 

Sarsour’s attorneys dispute the accusations, saying that their client was  convicted of throwing stones, not explosives. They also introduced evidence that Israeli authorities tortured Sarsour to get his confessions which were signed in Hebrew, a language Sarsour can neither speak nor read. Experts and witnesses called to the stand by Taruel testified to the use of torture by Israeli authorities, a lack of due process rights afforded to Palestinians like Sarsour, and that Sarsour continues to suffer from PTSD due to his time in Israeli detention. Another expert said that Sarsour passed a polygraph test in which he denied having registered to vote. Prosecutors did not call any witnesses or experts for their side during the proceedings. 

Although Salindari rejected the accusations that Sarsour lied on his green card application and that he registered to vote, Taurel said that the judge did give “extreme deference” to Israeli documents concerning Sarsour’s convictions. Despite the testimony involving the nature of the Israeli military court system, Salindari found the convictions against Sarsour to be valid. 

Droubi said that Sarsour’s immigration case has no bearing on his federal First Amendment retaliation case, which she and Taurel believe is the reason the Trump administration targeted Sarsour for deportation and is supported by Salinardi’s ruling that he could be deported on foreign policy grounds. After Rubio said Sarsour’s “actions undermine U.S. foreign policy,” the Justice Department announced it would begin targeting the group American Muslims for Palestine, for which Sarsour is a board member.

Sarsour’s First Amendment claims, his lack of any criminal record in the U.S. and  his deteriorating health, contributed to a federal judge’s ruling that he should be released due to having a “substantial” claim of First Amendment retaliation.

“You have to ask yourself,” Droubi told  the Examiner, “if you are an immigrant, ‘Do I have the right to speak out about issues that matter to me? What if I draw a political cartoon? Am I going to be arrested and detained because of that? Is the government going to bring charges against me and potentially remove me from this country?’” Droubi added, “That is significant, and I think it does chill the speech of immigrants and non-citizens in this country, and it should really terrify all of us.”

Taurel said that the cases of Sarsour, Mahmoud Khalil, and other Palestinian activists targeted for deportation underscore “the need for Congress to repeal the foreign policy ground of deportability.” Senator Peter Welch (D-Vermont); Senator Alex Padilla (D-California) introduced a bill titled  the Land of the Free Act to repeal the rarely-used Cold War provision of immigration law last year, saying the Trump administration had “weaponized” it to punish political speech.

Like many Palestinians born before or around the Six Day War between Israel and a group of Arab nations, Sarsour has travel documentation issued by Jordan but is not a citizen of that country. If he were deported, he would likely ultimately end up back in Israeli territory.

“We feared this outcome,” Taurel said of the judge’s decision. “But Salah is determined to keep speaking out.”

A federal grand jury indicted 10 noncitizens for unlawfully voting in Minnesota, U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said Wednesday, highlighting the administration’s effort to keep election security a top issue, in line with President Donald Trump’s longstanding unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.

The indictments, which include nine counts of unlawful voting and nine counts of falsely claiming citizenship to register to vote, bring the number of noncitizens charged nationwide with election-related crimes since Trump re-took office last year to 90. The census reports 154 million people voted in the 2024 election.

Blanche said at a news conference at Justice Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., that the indictments show how seriously the administration takes election security.

“We have talked repeatedly about the importance of election integrity, and we’re certainly not going to stop talking about that now,” he said. “Voter fraud erodes the public’s trust in our electoral system, and it’s vital to our democratic process that we do everything that we can to restore that trust.”

Blanche’s participation in a press conference, alongside fellow Cabinet member Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, underlined the administration’s continuing focus on noncitizen voting, though numerous studies have shown it to be rare. Trump has for years amplified debunked conspiracy theories centered on election fraud.

Mullin made that connection explicit Wednesday, saying the indictments confirmed Trump’s accusations.

“The president said it for a long time, and the Democrats were sitting there denying it and saying, ‘There’s no fraud. That wasn’t taking place. There’s no fraud. There’s nothing, nothing here. Don’t look over here,’” he said. “We’re realizing there’s actually a lot. And we believe that some of these states probably even knew about it, chose not to look into it. Well, we are.”

But the allegations of illegal voting in Minnesota in the 2022 and 2024 general elections and 2026 primaries made virtually no difference to election results. 

The seven alleged illegal votes in the 2024 presidential election, for example, would account for only .0002% of votes cast in that election in Minnesota.

An immigration judge has ruled that the leader of Wisconsin’s largest mosque can be deported, his legal team announced Wednesday.

The post Judge rules leader of Wisconsin’s largest mosque can be deported appeared first on WPR.

Five weeks before Election Day, President Donald Trump’s sprawling effort to identify and remove noncitizen voters hasn’t produced the kind of large purges that could meaningfully affect the midterm elections.

Even a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision giving states access to a supercharged Department of Homeland Security computer program to verify voters’ citizenship will have a limited immediate impact, election experts say. 

As Republicans fight to retain control of Congress, Trump and his allies have spent the past year aggressively seeking to root out noncitizen voting. 

They have called into question the security of the upcoming elections, following the lead of the president, who has long made spurious claims of voter fraud to dismiss unfavorable results.

Those efforts are now colliding with federal law — and the reality long shown by studies and available data that noncitizen voting is rare.

Little impact seen from court ruling

The Supreme Court on Sept. 25 ruled in a 6-3 decision that states can access Homeland Security’s SAVE system, which draws upon citizenship information stored across the federal government to scour voter rolls in the hunt for possible noncitizens. A district court judge had blocked the program in June.

But the high court’s decision came during a quiet period under the National Voter Registration Act that prohibits most states from conducting mass purges of voters in the 90 days before a federal election. 

The timing limits election officials to only searching for information on individual voters, even though Homeland Security has touted SAVE to states as a tool that can quickly scan millions of names.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority acknowledged as much, writing in its unsigned opinion that the quiet period “limits the potential impact” of the court’s decision. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing for the court’s three liberals, agreed the decision would have minimal short-term effects but argued the possibility of disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighed any risk of harm to the government.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation & Research, in a statement emphasized that voters will continue to experience the same safe, secure and reliable voting process this year as in the past.

“This decision will not have any significant impact on the 2026 election, as systematic voter list maintenance is prohibited within 90 days of a federal election, which the Supreme Court explicitly confirmed,” Becker said.

Post-2026

The more significant fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision may come in the weeks and months after the election, when states can once again remove large numbers of voters from their rolls. 

The Supreme Court is also set to hold oral arguments in December in a case that involves the reach of the National Voter Registration’s Act’s quiet period — leaving open the possibility the justices could give states more leeway to purge voters ahead of elections.

But for now, the restrictions remain in place.

“Until the Supreme Court says, reinterprets otherwise, the quiet period is still the quiet period,” Aaron Blacksberg, federal policy counsel at the Institute for Responsive Government, said in an interview.

Separately, a U.S. district court judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to require states to use SAVE as a condition of receiving some Federal Emergency Management Agency grants. Judge Amir H. Ali, an appointee of President Joe Biden, wrote that FEMA exceeded its authority in imposing election-related requirements.

Is the data reliable?

SAVE’s critics, which include Democrats and privacy advocates, warn that the system relies on incomplete and sometimes outdated data, resulting in false positives. SAVE was previously used to check whether noncitizens were eligible for various government benefits before the Trump administration last year repurposed it into a tool to check citizenship.

When U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, a President Joe Biden appointee for a district court based in Washington, D.C., ruled against the program in June, she highlighted sworn declarations by naturalized citizens that Texas had threatened to revoke their voter registrations because of inaccurate Social Security data in SAVE.

“SAVE was never designed to verify citizenship: it relies on outdated and inaccurate data that produces false matches, risks disenfranchising eligible voters, and exposes sensitive personal information to misuse and bad actors,” Tim Harper, a project lead focused on elections and democracy at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a nonpartisan organization focused on civil liberties in the digital age, said in a statement.

The Trump administration and some Republicans hail SAVE as a powerful tool to ensure the accuracy of voter rolls and identify noncitizens who shouldn’t be registered to vote. They note that its use by states is voluntary.

“It’s remarkable that we had to file an emergency petition in the Supreme Court just so we can use government data to stop noncitizens from voting illegally. American elections are for Americans,” James Percival, Homeland Security’s general counsel, said in a statement.

In an email to States Newsroom, White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis faulted Democrats for not voting for the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require voters to produce documents proving their citizenship before voting. The bill has stalled in the U.S. Senate amid bipartisan opposition.

“The American people overwhelmingly support this commonsense legislation that enacts basic election security measures like voter ID and ensures only Americans are electing America’s leaders. President Trump is absolutely right: we fix this now, or we lose our country,” Bis said..

How many instances of noncitizen voting?

The Trump administration’s intense focus on noncitizen voting — which also includes a legal effort to force states to turn over voter data to the Department of Justice — contrasts with the extremely rare nature of noncitizen voting, according to past studies and election experts.

The U.S. Census in August identified about 24,000 instances of noncitizen voting in the 2020 election out of roughly 160 million votes cast, or 0.015% of all votes. One study of the 2016 election placed the prevalence of noncitizen voting at 0.0001% of votes cast.

But Homeland Security has suggested large numbers of noncitizens may be registered to vote. In July, the department said it had identified over 250,000 potential noncitizens on the voter rolls in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.

On Monday, U.S. Senate Democrats in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin wrote that they couldn’t trust those numbers. For instance, DHS initially floated nearly 16,000 possible noncitizen voters in Nevada. In the end, the agency provided state officials with a list of 185 people that officials said were noncitizens. All turned out to be citizens.

“Federal law already prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and every eligible voter across America has the right to cast a ballot — and should be able to do so without fear of being wrongly purged from the voting rolls,” Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s decision.

The alleged scale of potential noncitizen voter registration by Homeland Security also doesn’t match the scope of the agency’s law enforcement actions. Earlier in September, Homeland Security Investigations, a DHS agency, reported making 160 recent arrests from 1,600 open voter fraud cases.

When noncitizens do end up on voter rolls, administrative errors are sometimes to blame. In July, New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, announced that a software glitch caused about 6,600 noncitizens to become registered to vote and that about 400 had cast ballots. 

And in April, then-Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, wrote in a letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that some noncitizens had been registered to vote because of a clerical error despite acknowledging on a voter application that they weren’t U.S. citizens.

“That is why we urge voter registrars to use all available sources to confirm a person’s citizenship status — including SAVE data and other information about the registrant — when they are investigating whether the person is eligible to be a registered voter,” Nelson wrote in an email obtained by Democracy Forward, a pro-democracy legal organization.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday granted, for now, the Trump administration’s request to continue rapid third-country deportation of immigrants to countries not their own. 

The decision will allow the Trump administration to carry out its aggressive deportation method of quickly removing immigrants to one of the countries — some with human rights concerns — the administration has agreements with to take third-country removals from the United States. 

The high court will hear oral arguments in December, and directed the parties to answer several questions including if the district court has jurisdiction over the issue, if the lower court can deliver classwide relief and whether the Trump administration’s rapid third-country removal policy is lawful. Tuesday’s order will remain in effect until the justices reach a decision in the case.

The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, noted they would have denied the emergency request.

The lower court’s order did not bar third-country removals, but prevented the deportation from occurring unless adequate time was given for a noncitizen to verify that they would not face harm in the third country.

Third-country removals are when a noncitizen is deported from the U.S. to a nation other than that person’s home country. It occurs when the home country of a person with a removal order from the U.S. does not accept the person’s repatriation. 

A district court and appeals court found that immigrants must have an opportunity to challenge their removal to a country where they do not have citizenship if they fear for their safety or if they might be returned to their home country where they could experience harm.

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has, once again, infuriated lawmakers from both political parties by using a controversial maneuver to cancel funding previously approved by Congress. 

The $810 million in the “pocket rescission” would have gone to refugee assistance programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, a Treasury Department program that provided “debt forgiveness to foreign countries that make climate change-related investments for coral reefs and tropical forests” and a grant program at the Minority Business Development Agency, among several others. 

The decision by the White House budget office to cancel the funding could make it much more difficult for negotiators to reach agreement on the dozen full-year government funding bills later this year. 

Those bills cannot become law without bipartisan support, a requirement that’s unlikely to happen if Democrats believe the administration will simply cancel funding they don’t wish to spend. 

Collins issues criticism

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, R-Maine, wrote in a statement released Friday evening, shortly after the White House’s Office of Management and Budget announced the latest pocket rescission, that she sharply disagreed with its tactics. 

“This move shows that OMB intentionally withheld these funds for months to execute this unlawful cancellation of appropriations that were approved on a bipartisan basis and signed into law,” Collins wrote. “Not only is the delay itself an impoundment that was not reported to Congress, but also it is a usurpation of Congress’s appropriations powers. OMB is an agency of the executive branch. It does not get to decide which programs are worth funding.”

Collins, who is up for reelection in an increasingly close race, added that she planned to work with other lawmakers “to address these illegal actions.”

Washington state Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member on the Appropriations Committee, wrote in a statement the pocket rescission represented “theft from the American people, plain and simple.” 

“These are funds Congress has delivered on a bipartisan basis and should be helping people—not cut off by a president more focused on building a ballroom than investing in families,” Murray wrote. “Every Republican who voted for these bills should be furious because Vought is saying their votes don’t count.”

Russ Vought runs the Office of Management and Budget, which is supposed to oversee the distribution of federal funding after Congress approves a spending bill. 

Government Accountability Office spokesperson Sarah Kaczmarek wrote in a statement shared with States Newsroom that the agency “stands behind its legal position that pocket rescissions are illegal and not authorized by the Impoundment Control Act.” The GAO is a nonpartisan congressional watchdog agency.

The 1974 Impoundment Control Act established the rescissions request process, which allows the administration to legally freeze the funding for 45 days while lawmakers decide whether to approve the request in full, or in part. 

If Congress doesn’t take any action during that time, then the administration is supposed to spend the money. 

The Trump administration believes that sending the request to lawmakers within the 45 days that precede the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30 allows the administration to revoke the funding, even if Congress doesn’t vote to approve.

Other funding canceled

The Trump administration sent Congress its first pocket rescission in August 2025 when it clawed back $4.9 billion in funding. 

That money was intended for several programs, including international peacekeeping and democracy programs as well as development assistance to other countries. 

The Trump administration sent lawmakers a regular rescissions request in June 2025 that called on lawmakers to revoke $9.4 billion in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and foreign aid programs. 

Both chambers signed off on canceling $9 billion after the Senate voted to preserve hundreds of millions of dollars for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Click here to read highlights from the story

• A federal judge ruled Sept. 21 that the Trump administration did not give the required notice and public comment period when it released a controversial new rule in 2025.
• The rule would have required state officials to check the immigration status of anyone who uses federally funded adult education classes, Head Start programs, community health centers, and more. 
• The rule excluded undocumented immigrants and several categories of immigrants with legal status from accessing federally funded services.
• Wisconsin was among the states that sued to block the rule, arguing the measure would require them to “dramatically restructure their social safety nets and render them inaccessible to countless of the States’ most vulnerable residents.”
• An official who runs a group of Wisconsin community health centers told Wisconsin Watch he will continue to watch this case.

A federal judge has thrown out a controversial rule that would have required states to check the immigration status of anyone seeking to use federally funded adult education, Head Start, community health centers and other programs. 

The government did not give the required notice and public comment period when it released the rule last year, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy wrote in a Sept. 21 ruling. 

The ruling means millions of Wisconsinites — immigrant and native-born — won’t have to jump through hoops to prove their legal status before attending classes, seeing a doctor or receiving assistance at a food pantry. 

Federal agencies overhauled the rule in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump that dramatically reinterpreted a 1996 welfare law that had long barred many categories of immigrants from cash assistance and Medicaid. For three decades, the federal government has deemed that that law — the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act — does not apply to social safety net programs open to everyone, including a variety of educational, health and community services. 

Calling that exemption too broad, the Trump administration declared that nearly all federally funded programs would be available only to U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, refugees and people granted asylum or certain other humanitarian statuses.  

The new rule excluded undocumented immigrants and several categories of immigrants with legal status. Those ineligible included people with Temporary Protected Status, student or work visas and U visas for survivors of serious crimes, as well as people with pending asylum or U visa applications.

Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul and 20 other state attorneys general quickly sued to block the new rule. The states argued that checking the immigration status of every participant in federally funded services would create unreasonable burdens for program staff and would discourage eligible people from seeking services.

“For the first time, millions of people are facing a new demand before they can access the Nation’s most essential programs: ‘show me your papers,’” the states wrote in a July 2025 complaint. 

The states argued that they would “suffer continued, irreparable harm if forced to dramatically restructure their social safety nets and render them inaccessible to countless of the States’ most vulnerable residents.” They accused the administration of violating a law that requires the federal government to give notice and seek public comment before releasing a new rule. 

The lawsuit put the rule on hold in those 21 states, first because of a voluntary agreement and later because of a temporary injunction. 

Now the judge has issued a final decision finding the rule violated the notice-and-comment requirement. Her ruling this week blocks the federal government from implementing or enforcing the new rule, but it doesn’t prohibit it from trying again. Federal agencies could issue a new rule if they comply with the notice and comment requirements, McElroy wrote.

Sabin Sidney, a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education, called the ruling “an unfortunate betrayal of hardworking, American taxpayers.” 

“This lawsuit demonstrates again that Democrats will adamantly defend federal taxpayer dollars supporting illegal aliens,” Sidney said, though the rule would also have excluded various groups of authorized immigrants.

Asked whether the agency planned to appeal or issue a new rule, Sidney referred Wisconsin Watch to the U.S. Department of Justice, which did not respond to a request for comment. 

Wisconsin clinics, classrooms keep welcoming immigrants

The rule, if it takes effect, could bar immigrants from receiving health care at the nation’s more than 17,000 community health center clinics, despite the fact that federal law requires those clinics to accept all local residents. One in seven people across the country use those clinics, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers. In rural areas, it’s one in three.

Uncertainty surrounding the rule has already interfered with medical care, said Dr. Ken Loving, CEO of Access Community Health Centers, which provides medical, dental and mental health care at five southwest Wisconsin clinics. Many patients may not know the specifics of the case, Loving said, but they know politicians are trying to restrict access to care. 

“I think what does (register) is the drumbeat of questions about whether they’re going to be able to access care in the longer term. … It undermines trust in the system at large,” Loving said. 

“We try to focus on the health care we’re delivering to people, and we wind up having to spend a lot of time and effort just reassuring people that we’re there for them.”

In Wisconsin and the other states that sued, the rule has been on hold for more than a year while the lawsuit played out. But many other states have already adopted the restrictions, said Jacob Hofstetter, a policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute who is tracking the lawsuit and its implications for adult education students and teachers.

Many immigrants take classes to improve their English, build job skills or earn a high school equivalency. In some cases, these classes receive federal funding, which would have made them subject to the restrictions. A staff member at one adult education program — in a state that implemented the new rule  — told Hofstetter the program had kicked out a third of its students to comply.

The rule also created a “huge implementation burden” for adult education providers, who would now have to check — and understand — the specific immigration status of every student, Hofstetter said. 

“This isn’t just, ‘Do you have legal status or do you not have legal status?’” Hofstetter said, noting that programs, many of which are already stretching their resources to serve students, would need to develop expertise in immigration law.  

Under the rule, all students must provide proof that they qualify — not just immigrants. Hofstetter said he talked with some providers who’d been forced to turn away U.S.-born students who lacked the paperwork to prove their citizenship or just didn’t want to jump through another hurdle.

“(Staff) knew they were eligible to participate, but because they didn’t have that documentation, or they were unable to participate in that extra administrative step, they had to exclude those students as well,” Hofstetter said.

The new rule, if implemented, would make it harder for immigrants to learn English and obtain the skills employers need, Hofstetter and colleague Margie McHugh wrote in a January article, calling those “widely supported goals that the administration itself has publicly endorsed.” 

Worries remain

For now, Loving said, he and his colleagues at community health centers nationwide will keep watching this and other ongoing court cases that could discourage patients from seeking health care when they need it.

So too will staff at Wisconsin’s 16 technical colleges, which would have to check the immigration status of all adult education students and some career training students if the administration reintroduces the restrictions. 

“As the legal process is likely still ongoing and the decision may be appealed, it may be premature for us to speculate on any potential future actions or changes,” said Katy Pettersen, a spokesperson for the Wisconsin Technical College System.

Hofstetter agrees. While the ruling offers some “relief,” he said, the Trump administration has consistently sought to create a hostile environment for immigrants as part of its wider push to limit new immigration and deport millions already here. 

“I don’t expect this to be a settled issue at all, especially since this has been such a priority for the administration,” Hofstetter said.

Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.

Wisconsin immigrants can keep using clinics, Head Start and adult education, judge rules is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.