But the company’s troubles didn’t entirely ground its fleet. Flight tracking data indicate that Air Wisconsin continued to provide regional air service through the end of 2025, primarily connecting its Wisconsin hubs to mid-sized Midwestern airports as it had for decades.
Air Wisconsin sent recall notices to the company’s furloughed flight attendants after the sale to CSI Aviation, and the Association of Flight Attendants — the union representing the furloughed workers — negotiated an immediate raise for returning members. In a January press release announcing the recall notices, the union noted that only a third of the furloughed flight attendants opted to return.
Neither CSI nor Harbor Diversified responded to requests for comment.
CSI is central to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown.
It has provided charter services for ICE since 2024, transporting detainees and deportees both directly and through subcontractors.
The company entered its current $1.5 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security in November of last year.
Demand for private charters surged after 2010, when the Obama administration moved away from relying solely on the U.S. Marshals Service.
Air Wisconsin isn’t alone. Avelo Airlines began deportation flights last spring, but backed out last month following intense public backlash.
A transformed network
CSI’s acquisition of Air Wisconsin transformed the airline’s flight patterns within a matter of weeks. The airline’s website no longer lists passenger routes, but flight data collected between Jan. 9 and mid-February indicates that the airline has largely ceded its role as a Midwestern regional carrier.
Instead, the airline increasingly looks south: Destinations in Louisiana and Texas replaced the mid-sized Midwestern airports that were, until recently, the airline’s most frequent destinations.
Flight data indicates Air Wisconsin planes made at least 125 trips in January 2026, up from roughly 60 in December 2025. Thicker lines on the map indicate more frequent routes.
Part 2: Air ICE
Many of Air Wisconsin’s new destinations are within easy reach of ICE detention facilities in Texas and Louisiana, including some of the agency’s largest.
The Minnesota operation
Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is among the busiest in the country, but Air Wisconsin rarely provided service to the Twin Cities in the final months of 2025.
That changed in January, just weeks after the Trump administration dispatched thousands of federal agents to Minnesota for an immigration enforcement offensive dubbed Operation Metro Surge.
The modest airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, is now the epicenter of ICE’s deportation flight operations. Air Wisconsin has flown to or from Alexandria at least 30 times since the airline’s acquisition by CSI, on par with the airline’s service to Madison and outpacing service to Appleton, home to the airline’s corporate headquarters.
The GEO Group, an international private prison operator, runs an ICE detention facility on the airport’s tarmac. A dozen other ICE facilities sit within easy reach. Among them is the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, where Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan national, died in custody on Dec. 14, 2025. ICE acknowledged the incident in a press release four days later, though the agency did not specify the cause of Rodriguez’s death.
El Paso
Camp East Montana, ICE’s largest detention facility, sits just east of El Paso International Airport. Air Wisconsin flights took off from or landed in El Paso at least 32 times in January and early February, second only to Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport.
Lunas Campos’ death came a month after Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old from Guatemala and detained at Camp East Montana, died in an El Paso hospital; ICE attributed Gaspar-Andres’ death to liver and kidney failure.
Another detainee, 36-year-old Victor Manuel Diaz of Nicaragua, died at the camp on Jan. 14 in what ICE described as a “presumed suicide” — an explanation his family questions. ICE agents detained Diaz in Minneapolis only days before his death.
Back at home
Air Wisconsin hasn’t entirely withdrawn from its home state hubs. Many of the airline’s remaining pilots, flight attendants and ground crew are still Wisconsin-based, and Milwaukee remains the airline’s primary hub.
The airline is now hiring for more than a dozen Wisconsin-based positions — including legal counsel.
About the data
Wisconsin Watch used FlightAware AeroAPI data (Sept 2025 – Feb 2026) to reconstruct patterns before and after the Jan. 9 sale to CSI Aviation.
Hubs on these maps represent the 10 airports most frequently used. While the routes align with ICE operations, the data does not confirm if specific flights carried detainees.
Air Wisconsin turns to ICE is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.
The backlog of unresolved felony-related matters in Milwaukee County has surpassed the pandemic-era peak, topping more than 10,000 as of Oct. 13, according to data obtained from the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office through an NNS open records request.
As cases linger, people throughout the criminal justice system feel the effects, including victims and their families, people accused of crimes and the broader community, said Kent Lovern, Milwaukee County district attorney.
“‘Justice delayed, justice denied’ applies to everybody,” Lovern said.
One recent high-profile incident reaffirms how case backlogs could have tragic and life-altering consequences.
On Feb. 5, a Milwaukee man, Mile Dukic, allegedly stabbed and killed 44-year-old Amanda Varisco on West National Avenue and S. 36th Street. At the time of the killing, Dukic had separate open felony cases in Milwaukee County Circuit Court – for bail jumping and stalking. He was charged with another felony, first-degree intentional homicide, on Feb. 9.
Dukic is currently in custody with bail set at $500,000.
Two backlogs
The district attorney’s office plays a pivotal role at both ends of the felony pipeline, said a spokesperson for the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Office: referrals from police awaiting a charging decision, plus charged felony cases working their way through the courts.
The Milwaukee Police Department made 5,650 summary felony arrests in 2025, according to an MPD spokesperson. The department continues to work with the Milwaukee County District Attorney’s Office to best address the felony backlog, the MPD spokesperson said.
District attorney records show 2,924 pending uncharged felony cases as of October 2025.
State office wants county to change approach, charge fewer felonies
The spokesperson for the Wisconsin State Public Defender’s Office said the district attorney’s office can and should do more to address the growing backlog by adjusting its approach.
“We believe prosecutors should be exercising more discretion in which referrals they are charging,” the spokesperson said. The spokesperson said the office regularly sees clients charged with relatively minor offenses lose jobs or housing as a result – consequences that can outweigh the underlying charge.
When the prosecutor’s office officially presses felony charges, these cases can get bogged down and stay in the courts. Resolution to the cases depends not only on prosecutors but also on defense attorneys, judges, court staff and other resources that are strained as well, Lovern said.
Based on the district attorney’s internal case-tracking system, more than 7,000 felony cases were charged but not yet resolved as of Oct. 13.
“The influx of felony charges coming out of the DA’s office isn’t benefiting the court system or public safety,” said State Public Defender Jennifer Bias. “It’s a waste of our scarce attorney resources.”
Increase in serious criminal activity
Milwaukee County District Attorney Kent Lovern is shown being interviewed by reporters for Wisconsin Watch, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and TMJ4 News in January 2025. Lovern oversees the county’s felony prosecutions. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the backlog of felony cases in the county has only grown. (TMJ4 News)
Lovern pushes back on the idea that prosecutors are charging too many cases.
“I want to make it very clear: I don’t have goals for what we ought to be charging,” he said. “I don’t have a directive of what the percentage of our charging rate should be.”
Prosecutors decline to move forward on many referrals, said Jeffrey Altenburg, Milwaukee’s chief deputy district attorney.
On a basic public safety level, there are simply more serious felonies being committed, Lovern and Altenburg said.
“I think that that’s exactly what we’re seeing,” Altenburg said. “We’re seeing more referrals coming to this office that involve firearms, violence, sexual violence.”
Milwaukee Police Department data show reports of the majority of the most serious offenses declined from 2024 to 2025, with the exception of homicides and human trafficking, which increased slightly.
Violent crime in Milwaukee has generally declined in the past few years – but from historic highs seen during the pandemic, according to data from the Council on Criminal Justice.
When to charge
Charging decisions begin with a decision about whether a case is provable beyond a reasonable doubt, Altenburg said.
“We adhere to that standard very scrupulously in this office,” he said.
Once that is determined, the district attorney’s office moves to the question of whether prosecution is necessary or a different kind of intervention is more appropriate, Altenburg said.
Alternatives to traditional prosecution
In Milwaukee, there are two alternative interventions: diversion and deferred prosecution.
Diversion allows a person to complete requirements, such as treatment, restitution or community service, without a criminal charge.
Deferred prosecution involves issuing charges with an agreement in which a conviction is withheld if the person meets various conditions.
Lovern said local prosecutors created an early-intervention approach designed to steer nonviolent cases driven by substance use or mental health challenges out of the criminal justice system when appropriate.
In 2020, Milwaukee County intervened in roughly 600 cases, Altenburg said. Last year, the county intervened in roughly 1,600 cases.
Lovern said the nature of modern policing – and modern evidence – has fundamentally changed prosecutors’ workload.
The sheer volume of evidence that must be reviewed contributes to growing wait times before charging decisions can be made, Lovern said.
More evidence is generated because of modern technologies and other tools used by police. A single incident can, for example, generate hours of body camera footage that prosecutors review before making charging decisions, Lovern said.
In 2020, there were 84,000 pieces of evidence in Milwaukee’s database. In 2024, there were 1.7 million items.
“I’m sure last year, it was even higher. That’s just where we’re headed,” Lovern said.
Staffing and system capacity
Something that adds to both backlogs – uncharged cases awaiting a decision and charged cases in the system – is insufficient staffing levels throughout the court system, a trend that has continued since the pandemic.
The district attorney’s office has about 125 full-time prosecutors, Lovern said.
“Now that is a lot. It’s the same number that we had when (Altenburg) and I started in this office 28 years ago, though.”
The State Public Defender’s Office also faces staffing challenges, according to its spokesperson.
“Broadly speaking, our agency needs more staff statewide,” the spokesperson said. “This wouldn’t address delays caused by prosecutors, but it would help to decrease the time it takes to appoint attorneys to indigent defendants and reduce the turnover in staff that office experiences due to burnout.”
There is also a need for support staff who help with administrative tasks, freeing up attorneys.
Lovern said unstable funding adds to staffing pressures.
About a third of legal staff in the county had been funded with federal grant money, which has been a little less predictable in the last couple of years, Lovern said.
“We can use more positions,” Lovern said. “There’s no question about that.”
For many Milwaukee residents returning from incarceration, the difference between stability and setback can hinge on a single document: a valid driver’s license.
Without one, everyday responsibilities can become barriers that undermine a person’s successful return to the community, said Jay Tucker, administrator of community reintegration services at Wisconsin Community Services.
Tucker helps oversee the organization’s long-running driver’s license recovery program, which helps people get back their licenses after suspensions or revocations.
Although the program serves a broad range of low-income Milwaukee residents, Tucker said the loss of a driver’s license is especially destabilizing for people returning from incarceration, particularly as they look for work.
“There’s already a stigma there,” Tucker said. “If I’m already checking a box on an application just to get the job, and now I may not have this valid work credential, it amplifies that stigma.”
Black and poor residents overrepresented
Suspended and revoked driver’s licenses disproportionately affect the city’s Black and low-income residents, said Clarence Johnson, president and CEO of Wisconsin Community Services.
In Wisconsin, most license suspensions and revocations are not tied to dangerous driving but to unpaid fines and forfeitures.
According to Wisconsin Department of Transportation data from 2024, failure to pay forfeitures accounted for more than 44% of revocations and suspensions statewide – far more than operating while intoxicated or point-based violations.
For many, that process starts with a single ticket, said Taffie Foster-Toney, lead case manager for the license recovery program.
“You get one citation, you’re not able to pay it and then it snowballs,” Foster-Toney said.
Breaking a cycle
Shakia Thompson, 33, utilized the Wisconsin Community Services program to get her license back. (Courtesy of Shakia Thompson)
Shakia Thompson, 33, a Milwaukee resident, mother and student, said the cycle was hard to break.
“My license was suspended because I had a lot of operating-after-suspension tickets,” Thompson said. “I would get on a payment plan, get my license back and then get another ticket.”
With work and family responsibilities, she said, staying on top of court appearances became difficult.
“With me working a lot, I wasn’t always able to attend court,” Thompson said. “So it just kept keeping me behind, and I kept owing and owing.”
How the program works
The driver’s license recovery program at Wisconsin Community Services began in 2010.
It serves Milwaukee residents who meet federal poverty guidelines, have a suspended or revoked Wisconsin driver’s license and meet other eligibility guidelines.
Foster-Toney said the process begins with intake and a detailed review of a participant’s driving record.
Individuals are then paired with attorneys through Legal Action of Wisconsin and work case by case to resolve issues across multiple courts and counties.
Options may include payment plans or community service.
Thompson said the payment plan option helped her considerably.
“There were times that I wasn’t able to pay a fine, and then I would get backed up on other bills. So it really helped in the long run,” she said.
Participants can also attend a financial literacy workshop. In return, the program pays up to $60 in Wisconsin Division of Motor Vehicles fees once an individual is eligible for reinstatement.
Public safety benefits
Johnson said helping people regain licenses benefits the broader community.
“People who have valid driver’s licenses tend to be safer drivers,” he said. “When you have assets in your life, you’re much more inclined to make good judgment decisions. The driver’s license program offers hope. It’s a lifeline.”
Thompson said she shares information about the program widely, especially with people balancing many responsibilities, such as family and work.
“I tell a lot of people about it,” she said. “A lot of ladies in school that don’t have their license.”
After getting her license back last summer, Thompson said she’s focused on keeping it.
“I’m doing great with my payment plans, and I have my license,” she said. “I’m moving forward.”
How to connect
Wisconsin Community Services receives referrals from courts, parole agents, nonprofit organizations, city agencies, police officers, Milwaukee Area Technical College and the mayor’s office.
The program is housed at Milwaukee Area Technical College’s downtown campus and accepts walk-ins.
Eligibility requirements are:
A suspended or revoked Class D driver’s license
City of Milwaukee residency
Income that meets federal poverty guidelines
No valid license within the past eight years and completion of the DMV written test within the past 12 months
No operating-while-intoxicated charges, suspensions or revocations related to operating while intoxicated
People can contact Wisconsin Community Services at 414-297-6407 for more information.
A jury found a Wisconsin man guilty Thursday of forging threats against President Donald trump in an attempt to get the victim in a robbery case against him deported.
Online court records show the Milwaukee County jury found 52-year-old Demetric Scott guilty of felony identity theft and witness intimidation after deliberating for most of the day. He represented himself during the three-day trial and was immediately taken into custody after the verdicts were read, leaving no way to reach him for comment on Thursday evening.
According to court documents, Mexican immigrant Ramon Morales Reyes was riding his bike in Milwaukee in September 2023 when Scott approached him and kicked him off the bike. He stabbed Morales Reyes with a box cutter before stealing the bike and riding away.
Scott was arrested hours later. While he was in jail, Scott wrote multiple letters posing as Morales Reyes to state and federal officials threatening to kill Trump at a rally. Federal immigration authorities took Morales Reyes into custody in May after he dropped his daughter off at school.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem blasted his photo on social media, along with an excerpt of a letter he purportedly wrote in English promising to shoot Trump at a rally. The White House and Trump supporters played up his arrest as a major success in the administration’s crackdown on immigration.
Investigators determined that Morales Reyes couldn’t have written the letters since he doesn’t speak English well, can’t write in the language and the handwriting in the letters didn’t match his.
Cain Oulahan, center, Ramon Morales Reyes’ immigration attorney addresses the media, May 30, 2025 in Milwaukee about the detention of his client Ramon Morales Reyes. (Andy Manis / Associated Press)
Meanwhile, Scott was making calls from jail in which he talked about letters that needed to be mailed and a plan to get U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement authorities to pick someone up so his trial could get dismissed. He admitted to police that he wrote the letters.
Scott was charged separately with armed robbery, battery, and reckless endangerment in connection with the bike incident. The jury on Thursday acquitted him on the robbery and battery counts but found him guilty on the endangerment charge.
Court records show prosecutors charged Scott in 2022 with being a party to burglary. He was out on bail in connection with that case when the bike incident happened and wrote the letters, prompting prosecutors to charge him with three counts of bail jumping. The jury on Thursday found him guilty on one of those counts but acquitted him on the remaining two charges.
All together, he faces up to 26 years in the state prison system when he’s sentenced on Feb. 27. The burglary charge is still pending.
The Noem news release with Morales Reyes’ photo touting his arrest is still posted on the DHS website but now includes a disclaimer stating that he’s no longer under investigation for threatening Trump but remains in ICE custody pending deportation. The release says he entered the U.S. illegally nine times between 1998 and 2005 and has a criminal record that includes arrests for felony hit and run, property damage and disorderly conduct with a domestic abuse modifier.
Morales Reyes was released on $7,500 bond in June and is currently residing with his family in Milwaukee, his deportation defense attorney, Cain Oulahan, said. He has applied for a U-visa, a document that allows crime victims and their family members to remain in the U.S., but Oulahan said it could take years to obtain one.
Ramon Morales Reyes is seen in a photo provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Wisconsin online court records do not show any criminal cases involving Morales Reyes. Oulahan, his attorney, said that all the background checks he has conducted on Morales Reyes have turned up nothing.
Morales Reyes moved to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1980s. He worked as a dishwasher in Milwaukee, is married and has three children who are U.S. citizens, according to his attorneys. He said Scott’s conviction is a huge relief for Morales Reyes and his family.
“He’s been traumatized by going through all this, all these different levels that feel like victimization,” Oulahan said. “He just wants to work and be with his family again.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
Last week we asked for your questions about immigration enforcement in Wisconsin, particularly as thousands of federal immigration agents patrol Minnesota’s Twin Cities, conducting door-to-door searches for immigrants and clashing daily with protesters and observers.
One reader reached out for information about Wisconsin’s firearms laws, citing the example of armed civilians at anti-ICE protests in Minnesota. The question preceded the Jan. 24 killing of Alex Pretti by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officer in Minneapolis — a shooting that escalated tensions in Minnesota, sparked national protests and reignited questions about unchecked federal power.
The episode also renewed a national conversation about the implications of exercising Second Amendment rights during protests and interactions with law enforcement. Pretti, a 37-year-old nurse at Minneapolis’ Veterans Affairs hospital, held a concealed carry permit for the handgun he carried that day. Video of the incident shows a CBP officer confiscating the handgun shortly before other agents shot Pretti multiple times, killing him.
Here’s the reader’s question and our answer below:
I would like to know more about open carry in Wisconsin. I know Wisconsin has more permissive open carry laws compared to Minnesota. But, I know there are some restrictions as to locations as well. Wisconsin law is, at least on the surface, fairly permissive on the matter of carrying firearms in most public spaces — a practice often referred to as “open carry.”
“As long as you’re not a prohibited possessor for a firearm and you’re an adult, you are allowed to lawfully open carry a firearm in the state of Wisconsin,” said Milwaukee defense attorney Tom Grieve, a former state prosecutor and Second Amendment commentator.
Protesters gather to protest U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement and the Trump administration, Jan. 25, 2026, in Madison, Wis. The protest came after a federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis the day before. (Angela Major / WPR)
Those prohibited from possessing a firearm under federal or state law include those with a felony conviction, anyone convicted of misdemeanor domestic violence or anyone subject to a domestic violence protective order. Others prohibited include people found not guilty of a felony by reason of mental illness, those adjudicated incompetent by a court or those with a history of involuntary commitments for mental illness or drug dependence.
But carrying openly, particularly without a concealed carry license, can be a legal minefield. Carrying a firearm on federal property — including post offices — or on school grounds is a felony, and Wisconsin law sets a 1,000-foot radius around all school properties in which possessing a firearm is generally illegal. In urban areas, Grieve added, “you’re almost always within 1,000 feet of a school.”
The right to carry — either open or concealed — also does not extend to police stations, courthouses or correctional facilities. Private property owners may prohibit guns on their premises and direct anyone violating their rules to leave. “Signs or no signs, if you’re asked to leave, you have to leave,” said Nik Clark, president of the advocacy group Wisconsin Carry, Inc. Private property owners cannot, however, bar people from keeping a gun in their personal vehicle while on their premises.
Concealed carry license holders are allowed to carry within 1,000 feet of a school under state law, but they are not exempt from the law prohibiting firearms on school grounds. Licensees may also carry their guns in bars and taverns, but only if they do not drink alcohol.
Wisconsin residents over the age of 21 who are permitted to own a firearm can apply for a concealed carry license through the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Applicants must prove they have completed a firearms training course and background check and pay a $40 fee to obtain their first license, which remains valid for five years.
A sign on a University of Wisconsin-Madison campus building in 2018 warns that weapons are not allowed inside. (Dee J. Hall / Wisconsin Watch)
Most states either honor Wisconsin concealed carry licenses or do not require a license to carry a concealed firearm. Neighboring Illinois and Minnesota do not honor Wisconsin licenses, nor do 12 other states and the District of Columbia.
A growing number of states, including Illinois, prohibit openly carrying “long guns” — meaning rifles and shotguns — at protests. Those rules aim to prevent armed confrontations between protesters, counterprotesters and law enforcement, said University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor John Gross. “What (law enforcement) don’t want,” he said, “is a situation where you have two armed groups facing off against one another with the police in between them.”
But Wisconsin law generally allows both open and licensed concealed carry at political demonstrations. A few demonstrators carried rifles outside the Wisconsin State Capitol during a massive protest against COVID-19 restrictions in 2020, for instance.
Minnesota also allows concealed carry permit holders to bring firearms to political demonstrations.
Family members have confirmed that Pretti held a concealed carry permit for the handgun that a CBP agent confiscated moments before the shooting. Minnesota laws allow concealed carry permit holders to openly carry their firearms, although videos show Pretti had his handgun holstered and was holding a phone camera.
Wisconsin attorneys and gun rights advocates argue gun owners considering openly carrying their firearms at protests should think carefully about their decision.
“We have a right to our own self-defense, and the defense of our family and of our communities,” Voss said. “(But) I usually advise people against open carry. I find that there are very few situations in which that makes anyone feel better or really does you any good. Worst case scenario, it makes you the target.”
“When you are open carrying a firearm people generally think, ‘Oh, this is a great way to deter someone,’” Grieve said. “It might (be), or they’re just going to make sure the first thing they do is grab your firearm.”
Clark broadly cautioned against bringing firearms to protests against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
“I would encourage anyone who wants to go ‘demonstrate’ armed to keep a safe distance from law enforcement,” he wrote in an email. “Wave your flag, say what you want to say, but don’t get in close contact with law enforcement. I would advise anyone not to try to interfere with law enforcement at all. But if you do interfere with law enforcement, doing so armed is presenting yourself as a deadly threat and that is dangerous for both law enforcement and agitators.”
A protester holds a sign Jan. 25, 2026, as hundreds gathered outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis., to protest the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. (Jim Malewitz / Wisconsin Watch)
Still, Grieve said, carrying a firearm in the presence of law enforcement is not intrinsically grounds for officers to react with deadly force, as some Trump administration officials suggested in the immediate aftermath of Pretti’s killing.
“If that’s the case, then game wardens in the United States would be slaughtering tens of thousands of Americans every year,” he said, “because those are law enforcement officials who, by their very nature, are dealing with armed Americans on a daily and hourly basis.”
Voss challenged the White House’s initial efforts to blame Pretti’s death on his decision to carry a firearm. In his view, none of Pretti’s actions captured on video justified the shooting. “At what point did (Pretti) do something that invited an immediate execution?” he asked.
Gross shares a similar view of the shooting. “He was a lawful gun owner legally carrying his firearm in a public space, and any arguments from the Department of Homeland Security or the FBI or other members of federal law enforcement that his possession of that weapon by itself indicates some intent to harm federal law enforcement (are) completely ridiculous.”
“If that were true, it would eviscerate the Second Amendment right to possess a firearm,” Gross added. “It would essentially be saying, ‘If federal agents believe you have a gun, and you potentially could use that firearm against them, then they have the authority to disarm you or even use deadly force against you to protect themselves.’”
If you are considering carrying a firearm in Wisconsin either openly or concealed, consult with the Wisconsin Department of Justice and, if possible, an attorney to learn more about how to legally and safely exercise your Second Amendment rights, Grieve said.
A video posted on Twitter shows Kyle Rittenhouse approaching police with his hands up after killing two people in Kenosha and wounding another on Aug. 25, 2020. Rittenhouse later stood trial for homicide, reckless endangerment and other charges. He was acquitted in 2021. (Courtesy of Brendan Gutenschwager via Twitter)
Wisconsinites may remember another incident that placed the intersection of firearms rights and protests in national headlines: In August 2020, then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse of Illinois shot and killed two men in separate confrontations while patrolling Kenosha as part of an informal volunteer militia amid civil unrest following the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha police officer. Rittenhouse later stood trial for homicide and reckless endangerment, among other charges. A Kenosha County jury acquitted Rittenhouse in 2021.
Rittenhouse has since become a gun rights advocate, and the shooting of Pretti prompted some national pundits to compare his exercise of Second Amendment rights to Pretti’s. Rittenhouse himself weighed in on Monday via Twitter. “Carry everywhere,” he wrote. “It is your right.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Protesters across the state gathered Sunday to speak out against the fatal shooting of a former Wisconsin man by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis.
Alex Pretti, 37, was an ICU nurse at a Veterans Administration hospital. He was killed as he protested the presence of thousands of agents with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol in the Twin Cities. His death Saturday morning came just weeks after federal agents shot and killed Renee Macklin Good.
Pretti was a graduate of Preble High School in Green Bay. At a rally on the steps of the state Capitol on Sunday, Pepe Barros of Madison told the crowd of about 400 people that he had been on a bicycle racing team with Pretti.
“Until yesterday, I was choosing to think that what ICE and the current administration was incorrect, but I was … thinking that was not my problem,” Barros said. “Until it became my problem. Until it was so close that I couldn’t dodge it anymore.”
In addition to direct ties to Pretti, many in Wisconsin have close ties to neighboring Minnesota. Libby Meister of Madison said she attended the protest to show support for loved ones.
“I have friends and family that live there,” she said. “I’m scared. I’m scared for them and for me.”
Amanda Husk of Madison carried a sign that read “Nurses against ICE.” For her, the fact that Pretti was also a nurse made his death resonate.
Pepe Barros addresses a gathering outside the Wisconsin State Capitol to protest the U.S. Border Patrol killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Barros says had bonded with Pretti in recent years during Milwaukee’s Riverwest 24 bike race. “He always talked to me with an unexpected amount of joy and an unrequested amount of care,” Barros says. “Alex was a victim of unnecessary violence and unjustified disrespect for his humanity.” (Jim Malewitz / Wisconsin Watch)
“As nurses we do everything we can to care for our patients and Alex was absolutely out there caring for the woman that fell,” she said. “He was trying to care for her and his life was taken in a very criminal and inhumane way.”
In videos that circulated on social media, federal agents surrounded Pretti after he checked on a woman who had been pushed to the ground by an agent. Pretti was legally carrying a handgun, which an agent appeared to take from him before two other agents shot Pretti while he was facedown on the ground.
Trump administration officials said agents acted in self-defense and called Pretti a “domestic terrorist” who intended to “massacre” officers. Videos and eyewitness accounts contradict these claims.
For Husk, the goal of the protest is to tell the Trump administration that its approach to immigration enforcement is wrong.
“It is bringing terror; it is harming communities,” she said. “People are being killed. They need to hear that this is not OK, and it has to stop now.”
Protesters gather to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Trump administration, Jan. 25, 2026, in Madison, Wis. The protest came after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis the day before. (Angela Major / WPR)
A protester holds a sign, Jan. 25, 2026, in Madison, Wis. The protest came after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis the day before. (Angela Major / WPR)
In Oshkosh, protesters gathered at the Opera House Square. A woman wearing a pink bikini stood along the street, holding a sign that read “It Was Murder.” Other signs read “No ICE” and “ICE = Murderers.”
Emily Tseffos, chair of the Outagamie County Democratic Party, estimated at least 500 people also turned out to protest in Appleton.
In Superior, around 150 protesters gathered at the Douglas County Courthouse. Cars honked their horns as people rang cowbells and held up signs that read “ICE out of Minneapolis” and “Immigrants Belong.”
Protesters gather to protest U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement and the Trump administration, Jan. 25, 2026, in Madison, Wis. The protest came after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis the day before. (Angela Major / WPR)
Ron Petite, who lives on the south shore of Lake Superior, held a sign that read “In Honor of Pretti and Good, Killed By ICE!” His voice shook as he described his reaction to Saturday’s shooting.
“Pretti … was trying to help a lady, for crying out loud. I don’t understand,” he said. “I’m just very upset that our country has come to this.”
Other protests took place Saturday in Green Bay, La Crosse and West Allis. Wyatt Molling, chair of the La Crosse County Democratic Party, said on social media that what’s happening in Minnesota is scary.
Protesters gather to protest U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement and the Trump administration, Jan. 25, 2026, in Madison, Wis. The protest came after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis the day before. (Angela Major / WPR)
More demonstrations are set to be held this week. Earlier this month, hundreds of Wisconsinites in Madison, Milwaukee, Ashland, Green Bay and La Crosse joined thousands in Minneapolis to protest the fatal shooting of Good.
High school classmates remember Alex Pretti as kind, charismatic
A makeshift memorial is placed where Alex Pretti was fatally shot by a U.S. Border Patrol officer on Jan. 24, 2026 in Minneapolis, Photographed Jan. 25, 2026. (Adam Gray / Associated Press)
In a statement to CNN, Pretti’s family said they were “heartbroken but also very angry” and called the Trump administration’s statements about Pretti “reprehensible and disgusting.”
“Please get the truth out about our son,” they wrote. “He was a good man.”
Several people who knew Pretti told WPR on Sunday they remembered him as a kind person who cared about helping others.
Michael Waak, 37, was a year behind Pretti at Preble High School. Waak, a civil engineer who immgrated to Norway in 2018, said he was a lab partner with Pretti in a biology class.
“He was a very charismatic guy, and also just a very genuine and positive person,” Waak said.
Protesters gather to protest U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement and the Trump administration, Jan. 25, 2026, in Madison, Wis. The protest came after a Border Patrol agent shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis the day before. (Angela Major / WPR)
They dissected a frog together and joked around in class. They weren’t close friends, Waak said. But he felt that Pretti, who was older and more popular, showed him kindness in multiple ways — including after Waak came out as gay.
“Alex never changed his behavior to me, he never stopped saying hi, never stopped being friendly,” Waak said. “This popular, well-known person kept on acknowledging me and being friendly to me. It was a small thing, but it’s something that’s always stuck with me.”
Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, was an avid outdoorsman who enjoyed getting in adventures with Joule, his beloved Catahoula Leopard dog who also recently died. He worked for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and had participated in protests following the Jan. 7 killing of Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs officer .
Alex Jeffrey Pretti is shown in an official U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs portrait.
“He cared about people deeply and he was very upset with what was happening in Minneapolis and throughout the United States with ICE, as millions of other people are upset,” said Michael Pretti, Alex’s father. “He thought it was terrible, you know, kidnapping children, just grabbing people off the street. He cared about those people, and he knew it was wrong, so he did participate in protests.”
Pretti was a U.S. citizen, born in Illinois. Like Good, court records showed he had no criminal record and his family said he had never had any interactions with law enforcement beyond a handful of traffic tickets.
In a recent conversation with their son, his parents, who live in Colorado, told him to be careful when protesting.
“We had this discussion with him two weeks ago or so, you know, that go ahead and protest, but do not engage, do not do anything stupid, basically,” Michael Pretti said. “And he said he knows that. He knew that.”
The Department of Homeland Security said that the man was shot after he “approached” Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semiautomatic handgun. Officials did not specify if Pretti brandished the gun. In bystander videos of the shooting that emerged soon after, Pretti is seen with a phone in his hand but none appears to show him with a visible weapon.
Family members said Pretti owned a handgun and had a permit to carry a concealed handgun in Minnesota. They said they had never known him to carry it.
Alex Pretti’s family struggles for information about what happened
The family first learned of the shooting when they were called by an Associated Press reporter. They watched the video and said the man killed appeared to be their son. They then tried reaching out to officials in Minnesota.
“I can’t get any information from anybody,” Michael Pretti said Saturday. “The police, they said call Border Patrol, Border Patrol’s closed, the hospitals won’t answer any questions.”
Eventually, the family called the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, who they said confirmed had a body matching the name and description of their son.
As of Saturday evening, the family said they had still not heard from anyone at a federal law enforcement agency about their son’s death.
Alex Pretti grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where he played football, baseball and ran track for Preble High School. He was a Boy Scout and sang in the Green Bay Boy Choir.
After graduation, he went to the University of Minnesota, graduating in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in biology, society and the environment, according to the family. He worked as a research scientist before returning to school to become a registered nurse.
Alex Pretti had protested before
Pretti’s ex-wife, who spoke to the AP but later said she didn’t want her name used, said she was not surprised he would have been involved in protesting Trump’s immigration crackdown. She said she had not spoken to him since they divorced more than two years ago and she moved to another state.
She said he was a Democratic voter and that he had participated in the wave of street protests following the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, not far from the couple’s neighborhood. She described him a someone who might shout at law enforcement officers at a protest, but she had never known him to be physically confrontational.
She said Pretti got a permit to carry a concealed firearm about three years ago and that he owned at least one semiautomatic handgun when they separated.
Pretti had ‘a great heart’
Pretti lived in a four-unit condominium building about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from where he was shot. Neighbors described him as quiet and warmhearted.
“He’s a wonderful person,” said Sue Gitar, who lived downstairs from Pretti and said he moved into the building about three years ago. “He has a great heart.”
If there was something suspicious going on in the neighborhood, or when they worried the building might have a gas leak, he would jump in to help.
Pretti lived alone and worked long hours as a nurse, but he was not a loner, his neighbors said, and would sometimes have friends over.
His neighbors knew he had guns — he’d occasionally take a rifle to shoot at a gun range — but were surprised at the idea that he might carry a pistol on the streets.
“I never thought of him as a person who carried a gun,” said Gitar.
Federal immigration officers deploy tear gas at protesters after a shooting Saturday, Jan. 24, 2026, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/Abbie Parr)
Pretti was also passionate about the outdoors
A competitive bicycle racer who lavished care on his new Audi, Pretti had also been deeply attached to his dog, who died about a year ago.
His parents said their last conversation with their son was a couple days before his death. They talked about repairs he had done to the garage door of his home. The worker was a Latino man, and they said with all that was happening in Minneapolis he gave the man a $100 tip.
Pretti’s mother said her son cared immensely about the direction the county was headed, especially the Trump administration’s rollback of environmental regulations.
“He hated that, you know, people were just trashing the land,” Susan Pretti said. “He was an outdoorsman. He took his dog everywhere he went. You know, he loved this country, but he hated what people were doing to it.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
A vast majority of the roughly 1,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in Wisconsin between January and October of last year had prior criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. But arrests in Wisconsin of immigrants with no criminal history were ticking upward. Roughly 17% had no prior criminal convictions or pending charges. Roughly half of those without criminal histories were arrested at DHS’ downtown Milwaukee office, often while checking in on the status of their immigration cases.
DHS’s claims about arrestees’ criminal histories do not always match court records. Among the two dozen immigrants arrested in Manitowoc last October — the largest ICE raid in Wisconsin since Trump took office — was Abraham Maldonado Almanza, a dairy worker from Mexico. DHS claimed he had a prior conviction for identity theft, but court records in Wisconsin and Iowa, where Maldonado Almanza lived before moving to Manitowoc, show nothing to corroborate the claim. DHS also claimed that the Manitowoc operation netted a Honduran national charged with sexual assault of a child, but that man, Hilario Moreno Portillo, had been in ICE custody for months at the time of the Manitowoc arrests, court records showed.
Even without enforcement surges like those in Illinois and Minnesota, the Trump administration’s immigration policy overhauls are reshaping Wisconsin. We recently documented the consequences for two immigrant workers in key sectors of the state’s economy: a Mexican engineer at an aluminum foundry in Manitowoc and a Nicaraguan herdsman who lacks legal status while working on a dairy farm near Madison. Their employers, who rely on immigrant labor to expand or maintain their operations, are also feeling the pinch, as will consumers if farmers’ and manufacturers’ hiring woes drive up prices.
You can find more of our immigration coverage here.
As we continue reporting on the White House’s immigration crackdown, we want to hear from you. What questions would you like us to answer? What are we missing? Where should we look next?
Time is quickly approaching for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to potentially launch a significant operation in Wisconsin, warns Darryl Morin, national president of Forward Latino.
“Unless there is a significant change in priorities, there will be a large enforcement action in Wisconsin,” Morin said in an email to supporters Saturday night.
Forward Latino is a national nonprofit advocacy organization based in Milwaukee that addresses community empowerment, democracy, civil rights and other issues such as hate crimes, gun violence and immigration.
Darryl Morin, national president of Forward Latino, speaks during a news conference in April 2025 after two arrests by federal immigration agents at the Milwaukee County Courthouse complex. (Devin Blake / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service)
The organization is a host of the annual Emergency Gun Violence Summit in Milwaukee.
Morin said there is general consensus at various levels of government that leads him to believe a wide-scale ICE operation is coming to the state. He’s urging residents and others to prepare for that possibility.
“It is important that we do not cause panic, but encourage thoughtful planning and preparation,” he said.
Morin shared a number of resources in his email, including family-planning “to-do lists”; constitutional rights cards; and information for employers if ICE comes to their workplace. The information is available in English and Spanish on the Forward Latino website.
A surge of more than 2,000 federal officers in the Twin Cities has pitted city and state officials against the federal government, sparked daily clashes between activists and immigration officers and left Renee Good, a mother of three, dead.
President Donald Trump initially threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota in response to the protests, which would allow the deployment of active-duty military troops there. He backed off on that threat Friday.
Critics have accused Trump of abusing his power.
Protesters try to avoid tear gas dispersed by federal agents, Jan. 12, 2026, in Minneapolis. (Adam Gray / Associated Press)
Residents prepare for ICE operations in Milwaukee
Drea Rodriguez, global program officer at WomenServe, which works for gender equity, said she’s received more requests than ever from residents to coordinate “know your rights” training in Milwaukee.
“Trump has already proven he cares more about profit over people. We are an immigrant city,” Rodriguez said. “Soon we will be in his crosshairs again. No one is safe. Stay ready.”
Rodriguez said that while the protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Minnesota and elsewhere are important, people should also limit business with companies that support Trump.
Hundreds of people gather outside the Wisconsin State Capitol in Madison, Wis., for a Jan. 9, 2026, vigil memorializing Renee Good, who was killed by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in Minneapolis. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
South Side resident Juanita Lara said her intuition is to carry her birth certificate as a precaution in case she’s stopped by an ICE agent.
Erika Wilson-Hale, who also lives on the South Side, said she believes parents should be careful about sending their undocumented children to school and that residents should take caution.
“If ICE does come you better be prepared, you better be ready,” she said. “Be wary because your rights will be violated. We are in scary times.”
Elected officials discuss possibility of ICE operations
State Rep. Ryan Clancy, D-Milwaukee, wrote in a Facebook post Saturday, Jan. 17, that “it’s not a matter of if (ICE) comes, it’s when.”
Clancy said Milwaukee doesn’t have a substantial plan to keep the community safe from ICE, but he and others do.
“The plan is that the community keeps us safe, through Voces de la Frontera’s ICE hotline and Comité Sin Fronteras ‘community verifier‘ program, through legal observers, through legislation and through mass mobilization,” he said.
Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley said in a prior email to NNS that, although the county cannot legally impede or interfere with the actions of federal immigration agents, “we will do everything in our power to keep our communities safe, informed and prepared.”
Mayor Cavalier Johnson said during a news conference after the Good shooting that federal immigration enforcement poses a risk to public safety.
“Occupying cities and targeting immigrant communities simply does not make our communities safer,” Johnson said.
Milwaukee Ald. Alex Brower is hosting a town hall on Feb. 2 to discuss ICE activities and operations in Milwaukee. That meeting will be held at The Vivarium, 1818 N. Farwell Ave., at 6:15 p.m.
Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, who is running for governor, said in a Jan. 12 statement that there had been credible reports of increased ICE activity in Wisconsin. She called on state and local officials to take immediate action to protect public safety and civil rights “by adopting strong protections and transparency standards governing federal immigration enforcement operating in Wisconsin.”
Work starts around sunrise for many of the federal officers carrying out the immigration crackdown in and around the Twin Cities, with hundreds of people in tactical gear emerging from a bland office building near the main airport.
Within minutes, hulking SUVs, pickup trucks and minivans begin leaving, forming the unmarked convoys that have quickly become feared and common sights in the streets of Minneapolis, St. Paul and their suburbs.
Protesters also arrive early, braving the cold to stand across the street from the fenced-in federal compound, which houses an immigration court and government offices. “Go home!” they shout as convoys roar past. “ICE out!”
Protesters gather in front of the Minnesota State Capitol in response to the death of Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE officer last week, Jan. 14, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. (Abbie Parr / Associated Press)
Things often turn uglier after nightfall, when the convoys return and the protesters sometimes grow angrier, shaking fences and occasionally smacking passing cars. Eventually, the federal officers march toward them, firing tear gas and flash grenades before hauling away at least a few people.
“We’re not going anywhere!” a woman shouted on a recent morning. “We’re here until you leave.”
This is the daily rhythm of Operation Metro Surge, the Trump administration’s latest and biggest crackdown yet, with more than 2,000 officers taking part. The surge has pitted city and state officials against the federal government, sparked daily clashes between activists and immigration officers in the deeply liberal cities, and left a mother of three dead.
The crackdown is barely noticeable in some areas, particularly in whiter, wealthier neighborhoods and suburbs, where convoys and tear gas are rare. And even in neighborhoods where masked immigration officers are common, they often move with ghostlike quickness, making arrests and disappearing before protesters can gather in force.
“We don’t use the word ‘invasion’ lightly,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, told reporters this week, noting that his police force has just 600 officers. “What we are seeing is thousands — plural, thousands — of federal agents coming into our city.”
Those agents have an outsized presence in a small city.
It can take hours to drive across Los Angeles and Chicago, both targets of Trump administration crackdowns. It can take 15 minutes to cross Minneapolis.
So as worry ripples through the region, children are skipping school or learning remotely, families are avoiding religious services and many businesses, especially in immigrant neighborhoods, have closed temporarily.
Drive down Lake Street, an immigrant hub since the days when newcomers came to Minneapolis from Norway and Sweden, and the sidewalks now seem crowded only with activists standing watch, ready to blow warning whistles at the first sign of a convoy.
At La Michoacana Purepecha, where customers can order ice cream, chocolate-covered bananas and pork rinds, the door is locked and staff let in people one at a time. Nearby, at Taqueria Los Ocampo, a sign in English and Spanish says the restaurant is temporarily closed because of “current conditions.”
A dozen blocks away at the Karmel Mall, where the city’s large Somali community goes for everything from food and coffee to tax preparation, signs on the doors warn, “No ICE enter without court order.”
The shadow of George Floyd
It’s been nearly six years since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer, but the scars from that killing remain raw.
Floyd was killed just blocks from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed Renee Good, a 37-year-old American citizen, during a Jan. 7 confrontation after she stopped to help neighbors during an enforcement operation. Federal officials say the officer fired in self-defense after Good “weaponized” her vehicle. City and state officials dismiss those explanations and point to multiple bystander videos of the confrontation.
For Twin Cities residents, the crackdown can feel overwhelming.
Protesters try to avoid tear gas dispersed by federal agents, Jan. 12, 2026, in Minneapolis (Adam Gray / Associated Press)
“Enough is enough,” said Johan Baumeister, who came to the scene of Good’s death soon after the shooting to lay flowers.
He said he didn’t want to see the violent protests that shook Minneapolis after Floyd’s death, causing billions of dollars in damage. But this city has a long history of activism and protests, and he had no doubt there would be more.
“I think they’ll see Minneapolis show our rage again,” he predicted.
He was right.
In the days since, there have been repeated confrontations between activists and immigration officers. Most amounted to little more than shouted insults and taunting, with destruction mostly limited to broken windows, graffiti and some badly damaged federal vehicles.
But angry clashes now flare regularly across the Twin Cities. Some protesters clearly want to provoke the federal officers, throwing snowballs at them or screaming obscenities through bullhorns from just a couple feet away. The serious force, though, comes from immigration officers, who have broken car windows, pepper-sprayed protesters and warned observers not to follow them through the streets. Immigrants and citizens have been yanked from cars and homes and detained, sometimes for days. And most clashes end in tear gas.
Drivers in Minneapolis or St. Paul can now stumble across intersections blocked by men in body armor and gas masks, with helicopters clattering overhead and the air filled with the shriek of protesters’ whistles.
ICE anxiety spread to western Wisconsin
Western Wisconsin residents are following the protests and clashes with concern.
In Wisconsin border communities including Hudson, many people make daily commutes to the Twin Cities for work, shopping or recreation. A Hudson resident who asked to remain anonymous over safety concerns told WPR she has been involved in organizing to support protesters in the area. She said people all across the metro area have been making sure protesters and organizers have rides, are fed and are safe.
But the psychological effects of the unrest have been widespread. She said some of the students at the elementary school where she teaches are afraid to come to class.
“It is just the saddest thing to see tiny children who are just starting school have this kind of fear and uncertainty,” she said.
That echoes the experience of others in immigrant communities.
“Everybody is terrified,” immigration attorney Marc Christopher told “Wisconsin Today.” “They see what’s been broadcast on TV. They see the indiscriminate arrest of people. … The level of fear and anxiety in our immigrant community is off the charts.”
And Berge, who is also a Democratic candidate for Congress, said people in the Hmong community worry they will be targeted for being members of a minority group, regardless of legal status.
“Even though they’re American citizens,” she said, “they have to bring their documents with them, their passports or ID with them when they leave the house — even to walk their dog or bring their kids to school.”
Unfounded rumors of ICE agents staging or planning large-scale operations in Wisconsin are spreading widely on social media. Officials in Baldwin, Wausau and Stevens Point all told WPR that social media chatter was false.
Still, officials in many communities have felt pressure to review policies and plans should federal immigration enforcements scale up.
The Hudson School District this week sent a message to parents reiterating its visitors policy and how district officials work with law enforcement.
Shovel your neighbor’s walk
In a state that prides itself on its decency, there’s something particularly Minnesotan about the protests.
Soon after Good was shot, Gov. Tim Walz, a Democrat and regular Trump target, repeatedly said he was angry but also urged people to find ways to help their communities.
“It might be shoveling your neighbor’s walk,” he said. “It might mean being at a food bank. It might be pausing to talk to someone you haven’t talked to before.”
He and other leaders have pleaded with protesters to remain peaceful, warning that the White House was looking for a chance to crack down harder.
Federal immigration officers confront protesters outside Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building, Jan. 15, 2026, in Minneapolis. (Yuki Iwamura / Associated Press)
And when protests do become clashes, residents will often spill from their homes, handing out bottled water so people can flush tear gas from their eyes.
Residents stand watch at schools to warn immigrant parents if convoys approach while they’re picking up their children. They take care packages to people too afraid to go out and arrange rides for them to work and doctor’s visits.
On Thursday, in the basement of a Lutheran church in St. Paul, the group Open Market MN assembled food packs for more than a hundred families staying home. Colin Anderson, the group’s outreach director, said the group has seen a surge in requests.
Sometimes, people don’t even understand what has happened to them.
Like Christian Molina from suburban Coon Rapids, who was driving through a Minneapolis neighborhood on a recent day, taking his car to a mechanic, when immigration officers began following him. He wonders if it’s because he looks Hispanic.
They turned on their siren, but Molina kept driving, unsure who they were.
Eventually, the officers sped up and hit his rear bumper, and both cars stopped. Two emerged and asked Molina for his papers. He refused, saying he’d wait for the police. Crowds began to gather, and a clash soon broke out, ending with tear gas.
So the officers left.
They left behind an angry, worried man who suddenly owned a sedan with a mangled rear fender.
Long after the officers were gone he had one final question.
“Who’s going to pay for my car?”
This post is a combination of stories from the Associated Press and WPR.
This story was originally published by ProPublica.
Craig Stingley had no legal training, no big-name lawyer or civil rights advocate by his side. Yet for 13 years, he refused to accept that the judicial system would hold no one responsible for the killing of his 16-year-old son, Corey.
The quest for justice dominated his life.
He gathered police reports, witness statements and other evidence in the Dec. 14, 2012, fatal incident inside a Milwaukee-area convenience store. The youth had tried to shoplift $12 worth of flavored malt beverages at the shop before abandoning the items and turning to leave. That’s when three men wrestled him to the ground to hold him for the police.
The medical examiner determined that he died of a brain injury from asphyxiation after a “violent struggle with multiple individuals.” The manner of death: homicide.
When prosecutors chose not to charge anyone, Stingley waged a legal campaign of his own that forced the case to be reexamined. A 2023 ProPublica investigation pieced together a detailed timeline of what happened inside the store, recounted what witnesses saw and examined the backgrounds of the three customers involved in the altercation.
Finally, this week, in an extraordinary turn of events, Stingley will see a measure of accountability. On Monday, a criminal complaint filed in Milwaukee County Circuit Court charged the surviving patrons — Robert W. Beringer and Jesse R. Cole — with felony murder. The defendants were set to appear in court on Thursday.
Beringer’s attorney, Tony Cotton, described the broad outlines of a deferred prosecution agreement that can lead to the charges being dismissed after the two men plead guilty or no contest. The men may be required by the court to make a contribution to a charity in honor of Corey Stingley and to perform community service, avoiding prison time, according to Cotton and Craig Stingley.
In Wisconsin, felony murder is a special category for incidents in which the commission of a serious crime — in this case, false imprisonment — causes the death of another person. The prosecutor’s office in Dane County, which is handling the matter, declined to comment. Cole’s attorney said his client had no comment. Previously, the three men have argued that their actions were justified, citing self-defense and their need to respond to an emergency.
Craig Stingley waged a legal campaign that forced the death of his son to be reexamined. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica)
For Stingley, a key part of the accountability process already has taken place. Last year, as part of a restorative justice program and under the supervision of a retired judge, Stingley and the two men interacted face to face in separate meetings.
There, inside an office on a Milwaukee college campus, they confronted the traumatic events that led to Corey Stingley’s death and the still-roiling feelings of resentment, sorrow and pain.
Craig Stingley said he felt that, after years of downplaying their role, the men showed regret and a deeper understanding of what had happened. For instance, Stingley said, he and Cole aired out their different perspectives on what occurred and even reviewed store surveillance video together.
“I have never been able to breathe as clearly and as deeply and feel as free as I have after that meeting was over,” Stingley said.
Restorative justice programs bring together survivors and offenders — via meetings or letters or through community panels — to try to deepen understanding, promote healing and discuss how best to make amends for a wide range of harms. The approach has been used by schools and juvenile and criminal justice systems, as well as nations grappling with large-scale atrocities.
Situations where restorative justice and deferred prosecution are employed for such serious charges are rare, Cotton said. But, he said, the whole case is rare — from the prosecution declining to issue charges initially to holding it open for multiple reviews over a decade.
“Our hearts go out to the Stingley family, and we believe that the restorative justice process has allowed all sides to express their feelings openly,” Cotton said. “We are glad that a fair and just outcome has been achieved.”
A medical examiner determined that Corey Stingley died of a brain injury from asphyxiation after an altercation with three men at a convenience store in 2012. Prosecutors assigned to the case declined to press charges. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica)
The legal quest
Milwaukee’s district attorney at the time of Corey Stingley’s death, John Chisholm, announced there would be no charges 13 months later, in January 2014. Cole, Beringer and a third man, Maurio Laumann, now deceased, were not culpable because they did not intend to injure or kill the teen and weren’t trained in proper restraint techniques, Chisholm determined.
Craig Stingley, who is Black, and others in the community protested the decision, claiming the three men — all white — were not good Samaritans but had acted violently to kill a Black youth with impunity. “When a person loses his life at the hands of others, it would seem that a ‘chargeable’ offense has occurred,” the Milwaukee branch of the NAACP said in a statement at the time.
Looking for a way to reopen the case, Stingley reexamined the evidence, including security video. In a painful exercise, he watched the takedown of his son, by his estimation hundreds of times, analyzing who did what, frame by frame. What he saw only reinforced his view that his son’s death was unnecessary and his right to due process denied.
Corey Stingley and his father lived only blocks from VJ’s Food Mart, in West Allis, Wisconsin. That December day, Stingley made his way to the back of the store and stuck six bottles of Smirnoff Ice into his backpack. At the front counter, the teenager provided his debit card to pay for an energy drink, but the clerk demanded the stolen items. Stingley surrendered the backpack, reached toward the cash register to recover his debit card, then turned to exit.
Cole told police he extended his hand to stop Stingley and claimed that the teen punched him in the face, though it is not evident on the video. The three men grabbed the youth. During a struggle, the men pinned Stingley to the floor.
Laumann kept Stingley in a chokehold, several witnesses told investigators. ProPublica later discovered that Laumann had been a Marine. His brother told ProPublica he likely learned how to apply chokeholds as part of his military service decades ago.
Beringer had Stingley by the hair and was pressing on the teen’s head, a witness told authorities. Cole helped to hold Stingley down. Eventually, Stingley stopped resisting. The police report states that Cole thought the teen was “playing limp” to trick them into loosening their grip.
“Get up, you punk!” Laumann told the motionless teen when an officer finally arrived, according to a police report. Stingley was foaming at the mouth and had urinated through his clothes. The officer couldn’t find a pulse. Stingley never regained consciousness, dying at a hospital two weeks later.
Craig Stingley unsuccessfully sought a meeting with Chisholm in 2015 to discuss the lack of charges. “Feel free to seek legal advice in the private sector regarding your Constitutional Rights,” an assistant to Chisholm replied to Stingley in an email. “I extend my deepest sympathy to you and your family!”
Stingley’s review of the video, however, did bring about another legal opportunity in 2017, after he notified West Allis police that there was footage showing Laumann with his arm around the teen’s throat. (Laumann had denied putting him in a headlock.) A Racine County district attorney was appointed to review the evidence again. She issued no report for three years, until pressed by the court, then concluded that no charges were warranted.
Finally, Stingley discovered an obscure Wisconsin “John Doe” statute. It allows private citizens to petition a judge to consider whether a crime had been committed if a district attorney refuses to issue a criminal complaint.
A former process engineer for an electrical transformer manufacturer, Stingley had no legal training. Still, in November 2020, he filed a 14-page petition with the then-chief judge of the Milwaukee County Circuit Court, Mary Triggiano. It cited legal authority and “material facts,” including excerpts from police reports, witness statements and stills from the surveillance video. Stingley quoted former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in the petition and the British statesman William Gladstone: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
That led to the appointment in July 2022 of Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne to review the case. But that process was slowed by procedural hurdles. Stingley took the delays in stride, saying he trusted that Ozanne and his staff were treating the matter seriously and acting appropriately.
In 2024, Stingley said, Ozanne’s office advised him that they had found sufficient evidence to issue charges against Cole and Beringer but could not guarantee that a jury would deliver a guilty verdict. Stingley, researching the family’s options, said he inquired about the restorative justice process. The DA’s office supported the idea, arranging for him and the two men to meet under the supervision of the Andrew Center for Restorative Justice, part of the law school at Milwaukee’s Marquette University. The program is run by Triggiano, who’d retired from the court.
The concept of restorative justice can be traced back to indigenous cultures, where people sat together to talk through conflict and solve problems. It emerged in the United States in criminal justice systems in the 1970s as a way to provide alternatives to prison and restitution to victims. Elsewhere, it has notably been used to address the aftermath of genocide in Rwanda, where beginning in 2002 truth-telling forums led to forgiveness and reconciliation.
Stingley, who has three remaining grown children and four grandchildren, desperately wanted “balance restored” for his family. He decided the best path forward was to meet with the men he considered responsible for his son’s death.
Craig Stingley now sees the charges as a message of accountability in his son’s case. (Taylor Glascock for ProPublica)
The quest for closure
Stingley brought photos of Corey to the restorative justice meeting with Berringer in April.
The goal: to respectfully share their perspectives on the tragedy and how it impacted each of them personally. What was said was not recorded or transcribed. It was not for use in any court proceeding.
The sessions began with the Stingley family sharing heartfelt stories about Corey as a son, brother, student and friend. They spoke of their great bond, Corey’s love of sports and their struggle to cope with his absence.
When discussion turned to what happened in the store, Stingley said, Berringer described having only faint memories of the fatal encounter. He recalled a brief struggle and grabbing the teen by his jacket, not his hair.
Before departing the meeting, a tearful Beringer told Stingley he was looking for peace, Stingley recalled.
Cotton, Beringer’s attorney, told ProPublica that the incident and the legal steps affected his client in profound ways. “He’s had anxiety really from this from day one,” Cotton said.
The result, he said: “Sleeplessness. Horrible anxiety. Fearful because he has to go to court.”
Does the resolution ease Beringer’s mind? “I don’t know,” Cotton said, adding that the hope is that the Stingley family finds solace in the resolution process.
Cole, in a meeting in May with Stingley and some of his family, brought a gift: a pair of angel wings on a gold chain with a small “C” charm and several clear reflective orbs. With it came a handwritten note, saying: “I hope this sun catcher brings a gentle reflection of the love & light of Corey’s memory and that you feel his presence shining on you each day.”
“I told him I appreciate the gesture,” Stingley said.
Cole, according to Stingley, told him that he felt something other than the altercation — perhaps some health ailment — led to Corey’s demise.
Stingley invited Cole to watch the surveillance video together at a second session. As that day neared, in July, Stingley considered backing out. “It was almost as if I had to drag myself up out of the car,” he said. But he said he realized that he’d been preparing for such an event for 13 years: to come to some honest reckoning with the men involved.
After watching the video, he and Cole reviewed the death certificate, showing the medical examiner’s conclusions. Stingley said Cole stressed that he did not choke Corey but came to realize that what happened in the store caused the teen to lose his life, not any preexisting condition. The acknowledgment eased Stingley’s burden.
“I felt like I was reaching a place where I was finally going to get the justice that I’ve been pursuing,” Stingley said, “and this is one of the steps I had to go through to get that completed.”
Triggiano commended each of the participants for their courage in meeting and the Stingley family for “seeking the humanity of their son as opposed to vengeance.” She said Beringer and Cole “keenly listened, reflected and really acknowledged their connection to the events that led to Corey’s death.”
“The conversations were emotional and difficult but deeply human,” she said.
After the loss of his son, Stingley wanted to see the three men imprisoned. But so many years later, justice now looks different. Now Laumann is dead. Beringer is changed by the experience. And Cole is a father eager to protect his own children.
Now, in Stingley’s eyes, prison is beside the point. Criminal charges will stand instead as a strong signal of accountability, of justice — and of a father’s unyielding love.
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
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More than a month since an immigration judge agreed to grant a Sheboygan Falls mother a green card, she was still sitting in an ICE jail waiting for a required background check, which Department of Homeland Security officials said staffing issues had delayed.
The predicament illustrates how President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has strained some of the immigration system’s most basic infrastructure. Immigration attorneys say increased pressure from mass arrests has “exponentially inflamed” many of its long-standing flaws.
Defendants in felony cases have been deported before a judge can issue a verdict, fast-changing asylum rules have led to inconsistent outcomes, and inefficiencies like the mother’s background check delay have dramatically affected residents’ lives.
Update, Dec. 19, 2025, 12:50 p.m.:
Cleveland immigration court Judge Richard Drucker cancelled Elvira Benitez’s removal from the country on Friday, her attorney Marc Christopher told Wisconsin Watch. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reserved the right to appeal his ruling within the next 30 days, but Christopher expects she will be able to return to Wisconsin before the end of the year.
Original story:
Elvira Benitez of Sheboygan Falls is just one step away from receiving her green card.
But more than a month since an immigration judge agreed to grant her permanent residence pending a biometric background check, she’s still sitting in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Ohio, where she has spent half of 2025.
The reason? The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, told an immigration court judge that a staffing shortage delayed the background check, which requires running her fingerprints through a national registry.
The ongoing immigration crackdown has strained some of the immigration system’s most basic infrastructure, and Benitez is one of many stuck as a result. Many immigration attorneys, including Benitez’s, say increased pressure on the system from mounting arrest numbers and rapidly shifting policies has “exponentially inflamed” many of its long-standing flaws, even as the Trump administration spends billions trying to keep up with its own demands.
Those flaws have appeared in many forms: defendants in felony cases deported before a judge can issue a verdict, inconsistent application of ever-changing asylum rules and inefficiencies that cost the administration little while dramatically affecting the lives of people like Benitez.
How has that played out in Wisconsin? Wisconsin Watch has documented the shifting landscape in a range of stories during a chaotic year for immigration policy.
Accidental Canadian trip triggers arrest
Benitez, 50, fled an abusive home in Michoacán, Mexico, as a teenager, crossing the border with her 8-year-old sister and making her way to the Midwest, said Crystal Aguilar, Benitez’s eldest daughter. She lived without legal status for more than three decades, entering the immigration court system only after her arrest this year.
She landed in ICE custody in July after accidentally crossing the Canadian border due to a GPS mixup during a family road trip in Michigan. In her absence, her two adult daughters – both U.S. citizens – took charge of their school-age siblings and the family’s painting and cleaning business.
“I have four kids of my own,” Aguilar said. “So we’re kind of just all over the place, taking turns.”
Elvira Benitez, a Sheboygan Falls resident, waited over a month in custody for federal immigration authorities to complete a biometric background check, extending her time in detention as she awaits a possible green card. She is shown at a birthday party. (Courtesy of Crystal Aguilar)
Benitez was among more than 25,000 people ICE arrested in July alone, a Wisconsin Watch analysis found. Monthly arrests eclipsed 30,000 by September, including at least 143 in Wisconsin. Relatively few of those detainees have remained in the U.S. More than 65% of those arrested from January through mid-October have already left the U.S., either through deportation or, less frequently, voluntary departure.
The Dodge County jail in Juneau, for instance, held an average of more than 100 ICE detainees per day in September – the most recent complete month of detention data.
Other county sheriffs have supported ICE enforcement efforts by honoring agency detainer requests by holding inmates suspected of immigration violations past their scheduled release dates, buying time for ICE agents to take them into custody. The Wisconsin Supreme Court this month agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging the legality of such practices.
While Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has claimed the administration is prioritizing “the worst first” for deportation, just over 40% of immigrants arrested by ICE nationwide between January and mid-October had prior criminal convictions, and nearly a third had no prior criminal history or pending charges.
In Wisconsin, however, nearly 60% of immigrants arrested by ICE during that period had at least one prior criminal conviction, while less than 20% had no prior criminal history or pending charges.
Most immigrants with prior convictions or pending charges arrested by ICE in Wisconsin this year have been deported. Roughly half of arrested immigrants with no criminal record — such as Benitez — have not.
But even the quicker deportations of immigrants facing pending criminal charges pose challenges. When defendants land in ICE custody, their criminal cases generally go on without them, often with no explanation of their absence.
The immigration crackdown has left Wisconsin courts with loose ends: missing defendants, victims without a chance to testify and thousands of dollars in forfeited bail. For some defendants facing serious prison time, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne argued that deportation can serve as a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Asylum seekers face legal whiplash
Immigrants with no criminal history have often landed in drawn-out legal proceedings complicated by sudden rule changes.
Reversing decades of precedent, DHS announced in July that most immigrants in ICE custody would be ineligible for bond and instead subject to “mandatory detention.” Benitez, whose arrest nearly coincided with the rollout of the policy, was among the detainees unable to leave custody as a result.
In November, DHS prosecutors moved to deport the Nicaraguan asylum seeker arrested in Manitowoc to Honduras. His attorney said he ultimately chose to return to Nicaragua, where he risks retaliation for his involvement in protests against authoritarian President Daniel Ortega, to avoid landing in Honduras, where he spent only a few days on his trek north to the U.S.
But DHS did not suggest third-country deportation when a fellow ICE detainee in Dodge County appeared in court just over a week later.
Diego Ugarte-Arenas, a 31-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, was arrested alongside his wife during a routine check-in at a DHS office in Milwaukee in late October. An immigration court judge in Chicago granted the couple asylum last week, though Ugarte-Arenas will remain in ICE custody while DHS appeals the judge’s ruling. Meanwhile, his wife, Dailin Pacheco-Acosta, just returned to Madison, where the couple has lived since 2021. Pacheco-Acosta spent the past two months in an ICE detention facility in Kentucky, but a federal judge approved her release earlier this month.
“When you move this quickly and have this volume of cases, not every case gets treated the same,” said Ben Crouse, an attorney representing the Venezuelan couple. The inconsistency, Crouse added, reflects the “crazy arbitrariness of the system.”
Arrest brings opportunity
The peculiarities of federal immigration law turned Benitez’s arrest into an opportunity to secure permanent residency. She had few pathways to legal status as an undocumented immigrant, her attorney Marc Christopher said, but her placement in deportation proceedings brought her before a judge who could cancel her removal and issue her a green card.
Judge Richard Drucker of the immigration court in Cleveland signaled his intent to do just that on Nov. 6, citing the hardships Benitez’s absence would impose on her U.S.-born children.
But the long-delayed background check stood in the way.
DHS notified the court on Wednesday that it was finally complete, setting the stage for what may be Benitez’s last hearing by the end of this week.
The agency did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s questions about whether staffing shortages were delaying background checks systemwide.
Aguilar says the step forward in her mother’s case does not resolve the systemic problems that have kept her jailed.
“The disorganization surrounding my mom’s detention underscores a broader failure,” she wrote to Wisconsin Watch. “When families cannot get basic information or timelines, it reflects a system that has lost its ability to function responsibly.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A deputy known for making a large number of arrests, but who had a history of unreliability in his reports and court testimony, resigned from the Waushara County Sheriff’s Office in early December.
Scott Schaut had worked for the sheriff’s office since 2018 and was making about $34 per hour, according to county administration.
After The Badger Project requested records of his disciplinary record in September, Scott Schaut resigned a few days later from his leadership position as the night shift sergeant, dropping himself down to a patrol deputy. In November, The Badger Project published a story about Schaut’s work history, including a performance improvement plan he had been under, and at least two documented instances of the officer’s changing testimony led to a dismissal of criminal charges.
“After careful consideration, I have decided that it is best for me to move on,” he wrote in his resignation letter, which The Badger Project obtained from the county via a records request. “The current direction and internal environment of the department no longer align with what I believe is necessary for me to be successful in my role. For that reason, I feel it is in everyone’s best interest for me to step away at this time.”
The Waushara County Sheriff’s Office has been under great scrutiny in recent months, as an investigation from The Badger Project found that Sheriff Wally Zuehlke had collected more than $20,000 in stipends for his K9 after quitting the law enforcement trainings with the dog. The county board voted to force Zuehkle to repay that sum plus interest.
And the sheriff’s office’s second-in-command, Chief Deputy Jim Lietz, resigned in October after pressure from citizen journalist Sam Wood, who makes online videos watched by thousands in the county and beyond, regarding his handling of the lewd photo investigation and other accusations.
Schaut had previously been on a performance improvement plan with the department, during which he conducted what may have been an illegal search, documents from the plan note.
Wood had also been criticizing Schaut in his recent videos, derisively calling him “Schnauzer” due to his aggressive and frequent searches for drugs.
But documents show that, on at least a couple occasions, Schaut failed to follow department policy, and the law, when executing searches.
Before conducting a house check in the village of Coloma in April, Schaut and other deputies received verbal permission from a caller to ensure no person was in the home. But body camera video showed Schaut looking in boxes, the refrigerator and a washing machine, areas too small for a person to hide, according to a sheriff’s office report.
For his breaking of department policy, the top administration of the sheriff’s office decided Schaut would be penalized with two unpaid days off, Lietz wrote in the report.
Upon Schaut’s resignation from the sergeant’s position, Lt. Stacy Vaccaro ended the improvement plan.
“Overall, Sgt. Schaut’s performance has been mediocre without much change,” Vaccaro wrote in the final report. “After speaking with Schaut about concerns or issues, he would acknowledge his understanding, improve for a short period of time, and then regress back.”
Schaut, Vaccaro and Zuehlke did not respond to messages seeking comment.
Schaut also had trouble with reliability in his police work in other documented instances.
In a case from 2024, Schaut reported receiving consent to enter a man’s home, in which he found drug paraphernalia. However, when a judge asked Schaut to note on an audio recording where he had received that consent, the officer said he could not, according to the court transcript. That led to the judge dismissing the paraphernalia charge because Schaut had not obtained consent and had no warrant.
In another case involving underage drinking in 2023, Waushara County District Attorney Matthew Leusink and Assistant District Attorney Joshua Zamzow alerted the court that Schaut had misremembered facts during his testimony, leading to the dismissal of a citation.
The Badger Project is a nonpartisan, citizen-supported journalism nonprofit in Wisconsin.
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Prisoners say there aren’t nearly enough work release jobs to go around, and officials at the Department of Corrections say they’re not keeping count.
Several neighboring states routinely track how many people have work release jobs or are eligible for them.
One prisoner told Wisconsin Watch he believes less than a third of those eligible at his facility have work release jobs.
Officials at the Wisconsin Department of Corrections say not everyone who is eligible for work release wants to work. Some are in education, therapy or substance use treatment programs that don’t allow them to work full time.
Most of the jobs available to Wisconsin prisoners are paid not in dollars, but cents. Minimum wage laws don’t apply behind bars, so some people scrub toilets for less than a quarter an hour.
But one type of job lets people leave prison for the day to earn the same wages as anyone else.
Wisconsin was the first state to offer this opportunity, known as work release. The century-old program matches the lowest-risk prisoners with approved employers, who are required by law to pay them as much as any other worker. In some cases, that’s more than $15 an hour.
Through those jobs, prisoners boost their resumes, pay court costs and save up for their release. Employers find needed workers. And taxpayers save money, since work release participants must pay room and board.
Ten of the state’s 16 minimum-security correctional centers are dedicated to work release. But prisoners at those facilities say there aren’t nearly enough of those jobs to go around, and officials at the Department of Corrections say they’re not keeping count.
Sturtevant Transitional Facility is shown Oct. 2, 2025, in Sturtevant, Wis. It includes a minimum-security unit focused on work/study release, which includes matching lowest-risk prisoners with approved employers. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
One prisoner told Wisconsin Watch he believes less than a third of those eligible at his facility have such work release jobs. Prisoners routinely wait many months for the opportunity, he said, and many never get it at all.
“Having that money saved up to, say, get an apartment or get furniture, or even money for transportation?” said Ben Kingsley, 47, who wrote to Wisconsin Watch in August from Winnebago Correctional Center, a work release center in Oshkosh. “These guys know what’s at stake … They want to go out to work.”
Only prison officials can add more positions, and he questions whether they’re trying. This summer, he began lobbying prison officials and lawmakers to expand the opportunity.
“The DOC/State employees are doing the bare minimum in trying to put more people out to work,” he wrote to legislators in October.
Work release jobs are scarce, prisoners say
To qualify for work release in Wisconsin, a prisoner must be classified in the lowest custody level (“community custody”) and have permission from prison officials. In some states, eligible prisoners search for jobs on their own and can work in any role that meets Department of Corrections standards. In Iowa, for example, work release participants are barred from bartending or working in massage parlors.
In Wisconsin, prison officials hold the cards. Here, people approved for work release can work only for one of the Department of Corrections’ partner employers.
“Placements cannot be guaranteed for all eligible inmates,” reads Winnebago Correctional Center’s official webpage. “Work release and offsite opportunities are a privilege, not a right, and are provided at the discretion of the center superintendent and warden.”
About 70% of eligible people incarcerated at Winnebago don’t have work release jobs, Kingsley estimates.
Kingsley, who hopes to qualify for work release after his custody status is reevaluated next year, said he began advocating for more jobs after hearing from eligible prisoners waiting to be “put out to work.”
To find out how many people were working, he asked prisoners who work as drivers, shuttling work release participants to and from their jobs.
Of the 295 people incarcerated at Winnebago at the end of October, 224 had the lowest custody status, which is required for work release, according to the Department of Corrections. By Kingsley’s calculations, just 67 have work release jobs. That’s less than one in three.
“Oh gosh, it’s a huge concern,” Kingsley said.
Officials offer explanations. Not everyone who’s eligible wants a work release job, said Department of Corrections spokesperson Beth Hardtke. Some are in education, therapy or substance use treatment programs that don’t allow them to work full time. And those who seek work release must first work at least 90 days in a prison job, followed by a stint on a “project crew” supervised by Corrections staff, before getting permission from the warden or superintendent.
“The capacity of the work release program is not just about the number of jobs available,” Hardtke said when asked whether the department is looking to add more jobs. “The program must be limited to the number of individuals that DOC staff can safely support and in settings where we can safely support them.” As Wisconsin Watch has previously reported, the Department of Corrections has been plagued by crippling staff shortages in recent years.
Additionally, Hardtke said, some can’t do manual labor. “Some individuals may not meet the employer requirements or standards, and some individuals may not have the level of training or skills necessary to complete certain tasks or jobs … As the prison population ages, some individuals may not be able to succeed in those types of work or have an interest in doing work that can have a physical toll.”
Officials and prisoners tout benefits
Progressive Republican lawmaker Henry Allen Huber as shown in the Wisconsin Blue Book. His “Huber Law” created work release opportunities at county jails.
Work release got its start in 1913 when the Huber Law, named for Progressive Republican lawmaker Henry Allen Huber, created the opportunity at Wisconsin’s county jails. It later spread to state prisons and to nearly every state in the country.
More than a century later, Wisconsin prison leaders continue to extol the virtues of letting people leave prison and return at the end of their shifts.
“Work release gives the men and women in our care the opportunity to feel like they belong to something, to feel like they’re part of a positive contribution to the community, to feel like they belong in the workplace,” said Sarah Cooper, then-administrator of the Division of Adult Institutions, at a virtual presentation for prospective employers in 2022.
Research suggests people who participate in work release programs are less likely to return to prison. A study of former prisoners in Illinois from 2016 to 2021 found those who had held work release jobs were about 15% less likely to be rearrested and 37% less likely to be reincarcerated.
“Work release really is a significant part of keeping our community safe,” Cooper said.
Work release also offsets some of the taxpayer costs of imprisonment. Each participating prisoner must pay $750 a month for room and board, about 20% of the roughly $3,650 a month the state pays to incarcerate each prisoner in the minimum-security system. They must also use their wages to make any legally mandated payments, including child support and victim restitution.
In 2010, for example, 1,726 work release prisoners collectively paid more than $2 million in room, board and travel costs; more than $320,000 in child support and more than $350,000 in court-ordered payments, according to a department report.
Work release jobs aren’t without controversy. In Alabama, a 2024 investigation by the Associated Press revealed prisoners were being pressured to work and faced retribution if they refused. Some were denied parole, despite working for years in fast-food restaurants and other jobs in the community. Critics argue the program is a modern version of the post-Civil War practice of convict leasing, in which prisons rented incarcerated people out for forced labor.
In many states, including Wisconsin, work release participants aren’t classified as employees and don’t have all the same workplace rights. But advocates for incarcerated workers told the AP that many people behind bars want to work and that eliminating the program would only hurt them.
For men in Wisconsin prisons, work release jobs are usually in manufacturing. For women, there are jobs in food service or cosmetology too. They’re “low-level, intensive labor jobs,” Kingsley said, but people are eager for the chance to start saving, especially since a criminal record and gaps in work history could make it tough to find work when they get out.
“When you get locked up, you lose everything,” Kingsley said. “You lose all your possessions, your … credit score goes down, all your bills go unpaid … The benefit (of working) far outweighs the negatives.”
No statewide data available
How many prisoners participate in work release statewide? Corrections officials don’t consistently keep track, Hardtke said.
An Oct. 7, 1965, Green Bay Press-Gazette story, written shortly before the Wisconsin Senate ultimately approved legislation to allow prisoners to work in a delayed apple harvest.
The department’s public data dashboards show prisoner demographics, recidivism rates and enrollment in educational or treatment programs, among other things. Employment numbers are not included.
Prison staff record each prisoner’s jobs and privileges in the person’s individual file but don’t routinely gather that data across the system, Hardtke said.
“What’s important from a correctional standpoint is that you know where everybody is,” Hardtke said, adding that such jobs data “would need to be compiled from multiple sources.”
The latest numbers Wisconsin Watch could find are from 2024. Responding to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau request for a report on state prisons, the department’s research team manually calculated that 781 people had work release jobs in July 2024, Hardtke said.
Asked for a current figure, Hardtke said “that number is not something we have readily available nor is it something you could accurately pull from a single source or document.”
Officials also don’t track how many people are eligible for work release. As of Oct. 31, 2,778 Wisconsin prisoners were at the department’s lowest custody level.
Several neighboring states routinely track how many people have work release jobs or are eligible for them. Of the 11 other Midwestern states Wisconsin Watch asked, seven responded.
Four said they track the number of participants but not the number of people eligible: Minnesota (186), Missouri (202), North Dakota (13) and South Dakota (183).
Iowa officials said they track eligibility (418) but don’t track how many people have work release jobs.
Nebraska officials said they track both: 378 were eligible, and 374 were working.
Officials in Michigan said they don’t offer work release.
Prisoner pushes for more jobs
In July, Kingsley wrote to Warden Clinton Bryant, who oversees the men’s minimum-security centers, asking him to add 100 more work release jobs.
“By writing you first, I hope that changes can be made. Changes that not only benefit the guys here or at other centers, but also the DOC and the state as a whole,” Kingsley wrote. Adding those jobs would generate $75,000 a month in room and board payments, along with state taxes, he wrote.
Bryant responded that Winnebago Correctional Center “collaborates with community employers on a daily basis” and that prison officials can’t require employers to hire anyone.
Jobs aren’t particularly hard to find near Winnebago Correctional Center. Like the rest of the state, Winnebago County faces a growing worker shortage as baby boomers retire. Prisoners aside, the share of the county’s population that’s working or actively looking for work has fallen 7.4% since 2000, according to the Department of Workforce Development.
Winnebago County’s unemployment rate — which excludes people in prison — was among the lowest in the state in 2024, according to DWD data.
Wisconsin’s labor market has softened since last year but remains strong, said Dave Shaw, a regional director of the Department of Workforce Development’s Bureau of Job Service, which manages the state website that matches employers and job seekers.
“It’s still fairly easy to find work, and there are a lot of jobs out there,” Shaw said.
It can be harder to find a job with a criminal record, but Shaw said his team works with a variety of companies that are “interested in giving individuals a second chance” to get back in the workforce.
“There are employers all around the state who are willing to do that,” Shaw said, noting that the state offers tax credits and free insurance to employers who hire people with criminal records.
When Kingsley contacted Bryant again, urging the department to establish minimum job placement rates for work release centers, the warden ended the conversation.
“My office addressed these matters and provided you a response,” Bryant wrote. “No further correspondence on these matters will be addressed by my office.”
So Kingsley took the issue to the State Capitol. In May, Republican lawmakers introduced legislation that would give bonuses to probation and parole officers who increase the employment rate among the people they supervise. Kingsley asked them to do the same for work release centers.
All of the bill’s authors and cosponsors either declined Wisconsin Watch’s request for comment or did not respond.
As of publication of this story, Kingsley has yet to receive a reply.
Help Wisconsin Watch report on work release
Have you served time and qualified for work release? Or do you know someone who has? We’d like to hear about your time working or waiting for work. We’re also looking for any other story ideas about jobs and education behind bars. And we’d like to hear perspectives from those who have hired people with criminal records. Click here to fill out a short form. Your answers will not be published without your permission.
Natalie Yahr reports on pathways to success statewide for Wisconsin Watch, working in partnership with Open Campus. Email her at nyahr@wisconsinwatch.org.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky directed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release Dailin Pacheco-Acosta from custody on Wednesday, less than a day after an immigration court judge in Chicago granted asylum to Pacheco-Acosta and her husband, Diego Ugarte-Arenas.
Pacheco-Acosta did not immediately leave Campbell County Detention Center in Kentucky, which contracts with ICE to hold detainees facing immigration charges. The couple’s attorney, Ben Crouse, told Wisconsin Watch he filed a new bond motion for Pacheco-Acosta on Wednesday afternoon, and she will return to Madison once the immigration court approves her bond.
But her husband will remain in custody in the Dodge County Jail while awaiting the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s potential appeal of the couple’s asylum claim.
If DHS appeals and Ugarte-Arenas remains in custody, their next legal phase could take another 6 months. But Crouse noted another lawsuit winding through federal courts could reopen the more straightforward path for immigrants in ICE custody to be released on bond. That case sits in the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes Wisconsin.
If ICE releases Ugarte-Arenas from the Dodge County Jail, the couple’s case would shift to the immigration court system’s “non-detained docket,” Crouse said, where cases move far slower than those of immigrants in custody.
Judge Eva Saltzman sided with Dailin Pacheco-Acosta and Diego Ugarte-Arenas on Tuesday afternoon, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) – ICE’s parent agency – reserved the right to appeal.
The ruling does not automatically free the couple from ICE custody.
“It’s not over,” said Ben Crouse, the couple’s Milwaukee-based attorney.
Ugarte-Arenas remains in the Dodge County jail, which contracts with ICE to hold immigrants facing deportation, and Pacheco-Acosta sits in a county jail in northern Kentucky. A recent Trump administration policy has prevented them from posting bond and continuing their asylum case from Madison, where they settled in 2021 after fleeing Venezuela.
The couple crossed the U.S.-Mexico border without a visa, but because of a clerical error by Customs and Border Patrol officers they encountered near Eagle Pass, Texas, they did not initially land before an immigration court and were instead able to file for asylum with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services upon reaching Wisconsin. The couple refiled for asylum with the immigration court in Chicago after their arrests in October. Neither has a past criminal conviction nor a pending criminal charge.
As they await the next step in their legal battle, the Trump administration is defending the policy that has kept the couple in custody for more than a month, even after a federal judge in California challenged its legality. How higher courts rule will determine whether thousands of immigrants in ICE custody can post bond for the first time in months.
A U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office at 310 E. Knapp St. in Milwaukee. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
Trump officials seek ‘mandatory detention’
Reversing decades of precedent, DHS announced in July that most immigrants in ICE custody would be ineligible for bond and are instead subject to “mandatory detention.” The Board of Immigration Appeals, a body within the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) that sets rules for immigration courts, sided with DHS in September.
But a Nov. 20 ruling by U.S. Judge Sunshine Sykes of the Central District of California gave the Madison couple and ICE detainees nationwide a moment of optimism.
Sykes partially ruled on the side of four undocumented immigrants ICE picked up during a June immigration raid in Los Angeles. The four immigrants, represented by attorneys from multiple immigrant rights organizations, had filed a class action lawsuit challenging the rule after they were denied bond.
But both DHS and DOJ, which oversees immigration court judges, argue Sykes’ decision doesn’t apply to all immigrants in similar positions nationwide. Many immigration court judges, including in Chicago, the court with jurisdiction over most immigrants detained in Wisconsin, have continued to deny bond hearings for immigrants in custody, citing the administration’s reasoning.
DOJ spokesperson Kathryn Mattingly said department leaders are not instructing immigration judges to specifically reject bond motions.
“Immigration judges are independent adjudicators and decide all matters before them on a case-by-case basis,” Mattingly wrote in a statement to Wisconsin Watch.
Next steps for Madison couple
Crouse, the couple’s attorney, filed motions seeking the Madison couple’s bond before the California ruling. Their motions, even if futile, could help clarify the scope of Sykes’ ruling, he said.
Crouse and other attorneys are separately testing the last remaining pathway to release: filing “habeas petitions” asking judges to rule on the lawfulness of their clients’ detention. A district court judge in Milwaukee denied a petition for Ugarte-Arenas on Monday, and Pacheco-Acosta is still awaiting a decision from a judge in Kentucky. If Pacheco-Acosta’s petition is successful, she will receive a bond hearing.
Back in Chicago, Judge Saltzman is preparing a written order outlining her reasoning for granting the couple asylum. DHS signaled plans to challenge her decision before the Board of Immigration appeals. It has 30 days to do so after Saltzman releases her written order.
Though Crouse called the couple’s case strong — not least because of mounting U.S. military actions in Venezuela — he noted that recent board decisions siding with DHS mean nothing is assured.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will move its Milwaukee processing operations from a downtown building owned by the Milwaukee School of Engineering to a site on the Northwest Side, an ICE spokesperson said in an email to NNS.
A spokesperson for the General Services Administration, the real estate arm of the federal government, said the GSA “remains focused on supporting this administration’s goal of optimizing the federal footprint, and providing the best workplaces for our federal agencies to meet their mission,” the spokesperson wrote in a statement to NNS.
Students and others protest in front of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement building leased from the Milwaukee School of Engineering on Oct. 31, 2025. The protests have taken place every Friday at 9 a.m. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
Demonstrators have been calling on the university to cut ties with the agency.
MSOE officials say the university inherited the federal lease when it purchased the building in 2023 and does not have the legal authority to remove ICE.
Alan Madry, professor emeritus at Marquette University Law School, said there is no question the federal government has eminent domain authority in such situations.
The federal government has the legal power to take or use property for public purposes even if a private landowner or local government objects.
A ‘phased’ transition
In a statement to NNS, ICE said the transition “will follow a phased approach to ensure a smooth and efficient process” and that the agency “remains committed to maintaining continuity of operations as the office becomes fully operational.”
Processing centers are typically used to conduct interviews and sometimes hold people for the short term rather than overnight detention.
The ICE spokesperson did not provide a timeline for the move, but said the new location at 11925 W. Lake Park Drive will operate as a processing center, not a detention facility.
In a statement, Jeremy McGovern, spokesperson for the Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services, said the city has no additional inspections scheduled for the Lake Park Drive site and that the certificate of occupancy is already in place.
Because the federal government is not subject to local zoning and permit requirements, McGovern said, the city cannot determine when the site becomes active and has limited knowledge about the federal timeline.
Protests continue
Noah Dinan, left, and Steve Szymanski protest in front of the building used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Oct. 31, 2025. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
The university says it intends to use the Knapp Street building for academic purposes once ICE leaves. But Noah Dinan, a sophomore studying software engineering at the school, said the lack of clarity about the move raises troubling possibilities.
The transition could take years, or ICE could expand its Milwaukee operations rather than relocate, said Dinan, who is a member of the university’s chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America.
The organization has circulated petitions, contacted alumni and joined the weekly Friday protests.
Dinan also pointed to the financial incentives of leasing to ICE.
According to the General Services Administration’s September 2025 lease inventory, the federal government is paying the university about $2.1 million per year to occupy the Knapp Street site through April 2028.
Despite the news that ICE has plans to transition from Knapp Street to its new property, Dinan said he and other students plan to continue protesting.
“Our campaign is one of sanctuary,” Dinan said.
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
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ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July 2025. Nearly 40% were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case.
While defendants sit in ICE custody, their criminal cases generally continue without them — sometimes with no explanation of their absence.
That leaves defendants without their day in court, victims without a chance to testify and thousands of dollars in forfeited bail paid by family and friends.
Stacey Murillo Martinez arrived at the Fond du Lac County courthouse in June to pay a $1,500 cash bond for her husband, Miguel Murillo Martinez, as he sat in jail facing drunken driving, bail jumping and firearms charges.
Scraping the funds together was no small feat. Stacey lives on a fixed income, so Miguel’s boss chipped in. She expected the court to eventually return the $1,500. Bond is meant to serve as collateral to incentivize defendants to show up for their court dates, as she believed Miguel would.
She did not know U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would wait inside the Fond du Lac County Jail later that day to take Miguel, an immigrant from Honduras, into their custody.
Five months later, Miguel still sits in an ICE facility near Terre Haute, Indiana. His detention caused him to miss a court date in September, prompting the Fond du Lac County judge to issue a bench warrant for his arrest.
“They didn’t tell me, ‘You’re guilty’ or ‘You’re not guilty,’ ” he said, his voice muffled and distorted by the facility’s phone system.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Stacey said in early November, referring to the fate of her husband and the bail money – three times the monthly rent for the couple’s double-wide in a Fond du Lac manufactured home park.
ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July 2025. Nearly 40% were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case.
While defendants sit in ICE custody, their criminal cases generally continue without them — sometimes with no explanation of their absence to the court. As ICE ramps up its enforcement efforts nationwide, Wisconsin courts are increasingly left with loose ends: defendants without their day in court, victims without a chance to testify and thousands of dollars in forfeited bail paid by family, friends and employers.
“If I get out, I’m going back to my house, and then I have to appear in county court,” Miguel said.
Miguel is not the only recent example: ICE picked up his nephew, Junior Murillo, at the Fond du Lac County Jail in October as he faced charges for disorderly conduct and domestic abuse.
The Fond du Lac County Jail has transferred 10 people into ICE custody this year, Sheriff Ryan Waldschmidt said. His county is among 15 Wisconsin local governments to have signed agreements with ICE to assist in identifying and apprehending unauthorized immigrants. These are often called 287(g) agreements, referencing the section of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing the program.
Fond du Lac is also among the more than two dozen Wisconsin counties participating in the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, through which the Department of Justice partially reimburses incarceration costs for agencies that share data on unauthorized immigrants in their custody. Fond du Lac County received nearly $25,000 through the program in fiscal year 2024, according to Waldschmidt.
Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney said ICE has been “very easy for us to communicate and work with,” and his prosecutors inform judges if a defendant is arrested in the courthouse. Waldschmidt noted that while his office communicates with prosecutors about inmates in county custody with ICE holds, it lacks a written policy requiring them to notify prosecutors of handoffs to ICE.
Criminal and immigration courts collide
Wisconsin courts do not consistently track whether a defendant has entered ICE custody, but multiple Wisconsin defense attorneys told Wisconsin Watch that immigration authorities frequently arrest defendants shortly after they post bail.
“The judge will issue a $500 cash bond, somebody in the family will post it before I’m able to tell them, ‘please don’t,’ and the client will get transferred into immigration custody, where they’re really not able to make the appearance in circuit court,” said Kate Drury, a Waupaca-based criminal defense and immigration attorney.
In rare cases, prosecutors work with ICE to extradite defendants from detention centers in other states – or, even rarer, from other countries. Doing so is complicated and expensive, especially for smaller counties.
Toney said his office can’t justify expenses for bringing any out-of-state defendant back to prosecute lower-level cases, such as driving without a license.
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne is similarly reluctant to spend thousands to extradite defendants from faraway detention facilities. “If it’s a misdemeanor retail theft (charge), let’s say, and the person is in California, that extradition cost may be $5,000,” he said. “We’re probably not going to spend $5,000 or bring that person back.”
Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been responsive to his office’s questions when defendants in criminal cases face immigration enforcement. He is shown at the 1st District GOP Fall Fest, Sept. 24, 2022, at the Racine County Fairgrounds in Union Grove, Wis. (Angela Major / WPR)
Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne says he is reluctant to spend thousands of dollars to extradite criminal defendants from faraway detention facilities. He is seen in Dane County Circuit Court in Madison, Wis., in December 2019. (Coburn Dukehart / Wisconsin Watch)
Defendants in ICE custody can sometimes appear for Wisconsin court hearings via video call, though some attorneys report struggling to schedule those from immigration detention centers.
“Jails and private prisons that operate immigration detention facilities aren’t super focused or motivated in helping defendants make their scheduled court appearances,” Drury said.
When a defendant misses a court date, Toney’s office typically requests a bench warrant and moves to schedule a bail forfeiture hearing — regardless of whether ICE detention caused the absence, he said.
Making exceptions for ICE detainees would mean “treating somebody differently because of their immigration status,” Toney said. Still, attorneys in his office can exercise their own discretion when deciding whether to seek a warrant or bail forfeiture, he added. The prosecutor responsible for Junior Murillo’s case, for instance, did not request that the court forfeit his bail after his ICE arrest.
Ozanne argued against forfeiting defendants’ bail if they miss a court date while in ICE custody.
“It wasn’t their unwillingness to show up” that prevented them from appearing in court, he said, adding that his office would be willing to return bail money to whomever posted it on the defendant’s behalf.
“The problem is that we don’t necessarily know” whether a person is in custody, Ozanne added. While he, like Toney, has reported no difficulties communicating with ICE, the agency doesn’t proactively inform his office when it arrests immigrants with active cases in Dane County.
ICE did not respond to emailed questions from Wisconsin Watch.
Mindy Nolan, a Milwaukee-based attorney who specializes in the interaction between criminal cases and immigration status, said judges generally issue warrants for defendants in ICE custody to keep their criminal cases alive if ICE releases them or they return to the country after deportation.
“Over the years, what I’ve heard from judges is (that) if the person is present in the United States in the future, they could be picked up on the state court warrant,” she said.
Hearings without defendants
Wisconsin law gives courts at least 30 days to decide whether to forfeit a defendant’s bail.
“The default assumption seems to be that the immigrant could appear and the statute places the burden on the defendant to prove that it was impossible for them to appear,” Drury said. “But how does the defendant meet that burden when they’re being held in immigration custody, transferred all over the country, potentially transferred outside the United States?”
Wisconsin courts have held more than 2,700 bail forfeiture hearings thus far in 2025, though the state’s count does not provide details on the reasons for defendants’ absence. If the defendant misses the hearing, the defendant’s attorney or those who paid the bail can challenge the forfeiture by demonstrating that the absence was unavoidable.
On a Friday morning in late October, a Racine County judge issued a half-dozen bail forfeiture orders in just minutes. The court had scheduled a translator for most of the cases, and she sat alone at the defense table, occasionally scanning the room in case any defendants slipped in at the last minute.
“The problem is getting someone at the bond forfeiture hearings to assert those arguments on behalf of clients,” Drury said. Public defenders are often stretched thin, and family members may be unaware of upcoming hearings. Court records indicate Miguel Murillo lacks a defense attorney assigned to his case in Fond du Lac, leaving only Stacey to argue against bail forfeiture.
Such hearings tend to be more substantial when attorneys are present, boosting the likelihood of bail money being returned.
Fond du Lac County Jail is shown in Fond du Lac, Wis., Nov. 8, 2025. (Paul Kiefer / Wisconsin Watch)
Miguel Murillo’s case does not involve an alleged victim, meaning forfeited bail would go to Fond du Lac County. Court costs typically exceed the value of forfeited bail, Toney said.
When cases involve alleged victims, Wisconsin law requires that courts use forfeited bail for victim restitution – even without a conviction.
What’s missing are judicial findings that the defendant is responsible for the alleged actions and caused suffering to the victim, Drury said.
“Without a conviction, I don’t understand how you maintain that policy and the presumption of innocence, which is such an important constitutional cornerstone of this country.”
Immigration arrests often throw a wrench in the gears of the criminal justice system, Ozanne said.
“It’s most problematic for us when the person hasn’t gone through their due process,” he said. “We have victims… who don’t really get the benefit of the process or have the ability to communicate with the courts about what they think should happen.”
“In a sense,” he added, “that person has a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Months in ICE detention
Miguel Murillo left Honduras a decade ago, initially settling in Houston. While in Texas, he says he survived a shooting and sought, but never obtained, a U-visa, which provides temporary legal status to victims of certain crimes.
The shooting prompted him to head north to Wisconsin, where he found construction work and married Stacey, a lifelong Wisconsinite. Court records mark occasional run-ins with law enforcement and misdemeanors over the last five years, culminating in the April 2025 charges that preceded his ICE arrest.
Stacey, who is receiving treatment for breast cancer, relied on her husband to keep their household afloat. In his absence, she said, “I have to beg, plead, and borrow to get any assistance.”
“Right now, as I go through this situation… there’s no one to take care of her,” Miguel told Wisconsin Watch. The couple hope that argument will sway a Chicago immigration court judge to release him from ICE custody. The court held its final hearing on his order of removal case in late October, Stacey said, but has yet to issue a ruling.
Junior’s case progressed far more quickly. After his arrest in October, he spent just over a week in ICE custody before immigration authorities put him on a plane to Honduras.
Miguel, on the other hand, has spent roughly five months in various ICE detention facilities. He was scheduled to appear by video in Fond du Lac County court Thursday morning. He never joined the call.
“I don’t know what happened,” he wrote to Wisconsin Watch afterwards. “I was waiting and (facility staff) didn’t call me.”
Stacey couldn’t attend the hearing for health reasons, and Miguel has yet to secure an attorney for his Fond du Lac case. Court records do not indicate whether the prosecutor requested forfeiture of his $1,500 bail.
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