The Democratic-led states and voting rights groups suing to block enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order to restrict mail-in voting warned in briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday the policy would have disastrous consequences for the upcoming midterm elections if it is allowed to move forward.

Less than two months before the Nov. 3 elections, at least two states have already begun sending ballots to voters, and officials in several others have voiced serious concerns that complying with the U.S. Postal Service rule this election cycle is impossible, opponents said.

The Democratic attorneys general of 23 states, the District of Columbia and the governor of Pennsylvania told the high court they strongly object to the Trump administration’s request that justices allow the rule to move forward.

“Whatever else may be said of USPS’ new rule, it would wreak havoc on States and their voters if it takes effect at this late point—when some States, including North Carolina and Wisconsin, have already begun to mail out ballots,” they wrote.

Only Democratic state officials have sought to challenge the rule in court, but Wednesday’s brief noted that top elections officials in the Republican-led states of Utah, Florida and Ohio have also warned the rule would cause “catastrophic harms.”

The suit, now at the Supreme Court, was brought by the attorneys general of California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin, along with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

“Allowing USPS’ new rule to take effect would be virtually certain to prevent many millions of Americans from casting mail ballots in this fall’s elections,” opponents wrote.

The record in the Massachusetts federal court that issued the preliminary injunction blocking the rule’s enforcement that the administration is seeking to overturn includes “unrebutted evidence” that “establishes that compliance with USPS’ rule would be impossible ahead of the midterms,” the state officials wrote.

Spokespeople for the White House, Postal Service and U.S. Department of Justice, which is representing the Trump administration in the case, did not respond to messages seeking comment Wednesday.

The case is on what’s known as the court’s emergency docket, and it’s not clear when a decision on whether or not to keep the preliminary injunction in place will be issued.

Voting rights groups echo Dems

A coalition of voting rights groups also filed a response Wednesday, making similar arguments.

The groups, led by the American Civil Liberties Union, emphasized the likelihood of disenfranchisement for many of the roughly 50 million voters set to receive ballots from the states challenging the rule.

Even if the mail specifications under the rule could be met in time for the election, the online portal the Postal Service has rushed to develop is not ready, the challengers wrote. 

Several friend-of-the-court briefs also made that argument, including the federal employee whistleblower who reported last week that the portal’s rushed development would lead to numerous errors if used this election. 

As of late last week, states had not yet been given access to the portal, which is supposed to be the mechanism for verifying compliance with the rule, even as some began mailing ballots.

“USPS’s Rule gives states mere weeks to implement sweeping changes to their election systems—even though USPS has not yet established the necessary infrastructure to administer its new requirements,” they wrote. “The Rule would disrupt the administration of mail voting mid-election and disenfranchise eligible voters nationwide, including voters in all-mail states like Colorado and Utah and elderly, rural, and disabled voters who must vote by mail.”

Beyond Postal Service power

In addition to the impossibility of states’ complying with the Postal Service rule, which places new requirements on ballot mail and requires states to transmit voter data to the federal government, less than two months before Election Day, the regulation impedes states’ constitutional authorities and oversteps the executive branch’s powers, the state officials and groups wrote.

The U.S. Constitution specifies that administering elections is a state responsibility, though Congress may pass laws governing certain elements. The executive branch has virtually no role unless specifically delegated by Congress, the rule’s challengers wrote.

And Congress never passed a law to give the Postal Service the kind of power over election mail that the rule claims, they said.

“To the contrary, Congress has exhaustively enumerated the types of materials that USPS can lawfully refuse to deliver,” the state officials wrote. “Ballots are not among them.”

The rule bans postal workers from delivering ballots that do not meet any of the conditions specified in the rule, including pre-approval of envelope designs and lists of eligible voters that the administration plans to check against a citizenship database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

Outsiders weigh in

A flurry of 17 friend-of-the-court briefs hit the Supreme Court docket Tuesday and Wednesday. 

None sided with the administration.

The briefs, representing bipartisan former governors, state and local election officials, military voters, the Postal Service workers’ union, good government organizations, Democratic campaign groups and others all said the rule was impossible to comply with at this point in the election cycle.

“The late-breaking USPS Final Rule—which was promulgated mere months before the November 3, 2026 general midterm elections, and which mandates sweeping, costly, and burdensome changes to mail-in voting procedures—would prove disastrous for election officials and election administration,” local officials and the pro-democracy group Center for Election Innovation wrote. “And it would seriously undermine the upcoming elections.”

In another filing, a bipartisan group of current and former local and state election officials said it was impossible to comply with the rule this year. 

Their brief noted that many of their members were Republicans or represented Republican-majority districts and emphasized that they took no position on the rule’s legality. 

But they said implementing it now was infeasible and ran afoul of a Supreme Court principle that changes in election policy should not happen during or close to an election.

“The principle rests on incontestable facts about voters and about the people who run elections: that late changes breed confusion, that confusion keeps eligible voters from voting, and that a chaotic election erodes confidence in the result,” they wrote. They “therefore suggest only this: that the November 3, 2026 general election be conducted under the rules that were in place when the election’s administration began.”

The hotly contested U.S. Postal Service rule restricting mail-in voting usurps Congress’ authority, as well as states’ power to administer elections, more than 250 current and former members of Congress said in a filing to the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday.

All 47 members of the U.S. Senate Democratic Caucus, 199 current House Democrats and 15 former House Republicans signed the friend-of-the-court brief opposing President Donald Trump’s policy to add several requirements to mail ballots. 

The U.S. Constitution “is unambiguous” in empowering states to run elections, while Congress can enact laws to oversee elections generally, they argued.

“Congress has passed several laws regulating federal elections—though it has always done so surgically, deliberately leaving the States with considerable room to maneuver,” they wrote.

The executive branch has no role, they said. 

The Trump administration has argued the rule, published last month, requires only “modest” technical specifications for mail ballots and that states transmit lists of eligible voters to receive the ballots. The rule is a targeted measure affecting mail delivery, not elections, the administration says.

But the lawmakers say that argument fails. 

The agency cannot take action related to elections without a congressional directive, they wrote. Congress never wrote a law asking for the requirements included in the USPS rule, they said. 

Executive order

In this case, Trump spurred the Postal Service to write the rule in a March executive order, based on the unsubstantiated premise that vote-by-mail is vulnerable to fraud. 

That shows the rule is meant to address Trump’s concerns about election administration, not mail specifications, the lawmakers said.

“The integrity of our constitutional system depends on each branch keeping to its assigned role,” they wrote. “The Framers set up a two-part system that gave States default authority to regulate federal elections subject to Congress’s authority to override the States. The Framers did not provide the President with any authority to interfere in that system, nor has Congress imbued the Executive Branch with any such authority by statute.”

Spokespeople for the White House, USPS and the Department of Justice, which is representing the Trump administration in the case, did not immediately return messages seeking comment Tuesday.

In a separate brief, the legal advocacy group the Society for the Rule of Law made a similar argument, saying the federal postal law the administration has cited provides only broad language that does not empower the agency to regulate election mail.

“The non-election, boilerplate … provisions on which Applicants rely are not a secret, alternative way for the USPS to bar ballot mail, conditionally or otherwise, on the eve of election day,” the group wrote. “Under the federalism presumption and the major question doctrine, the USPS needed a clear statement of statutory authority.”

Rushed delivery

The rule would require technical elements such as unique barcodes on ballot envelopes. Elections experts say those requirements are unworkable in time for the fall’s midterm elections because states have already designed, printed and — in some cases — begun sending ballots.

The rule would also require states to send to the federal government lists of eligible voters, which would be checked against a Department of Homeland Security database to verify citizenship. 

The rule bans the Postal Service from delivering ballots to registered voters who are not verified through that method.

The online portal that the rule says states should use for this process has still, less than two months until Election Day, not been introduced to states. A whistleblower last week reported the rushed development has led to myriad problems with the tool, which could result in legitimate ballots being rejected.

Opponents, including more than 20 Democratic state officials and voting rights groups that sued to challenge the rule, say it would risk disenfranchisement for the millions of voters, including Trump, who vote by mail.

High court ruling pending

The rule has been the subject of rapidfire legal fighting over the past several weeks, and the Supreme Court is now weighing whether to overturn a Massachusetts federal judge’s order pausing the rule while litigation continues, after the Trump administration filed an appeal over the weekend.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Sunday asked the states and voting rights groups challenging the rule to file their response to the application by Wednesday at 4 p.m. Eastern.

That district court injunction from Judge Indira Talwani, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, held that the rule was likely unconstitutional and unlawful for reasons the members of Congress articulated Tuesday: The Constitution grants states and Congress the power to oversee elections and states would be harmed if they are forced to comply with the regulation before courts can determine its legality.

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McKenna and Celia Olson expanded their family by adopting four children, completing their South Side Milwaukee home. The adoption closed a chapter in their journey as foster parents with the Wellpoint Care Network. 

McKenna and Celia, closed their foster care license in May after spending the past eight years fostering 10 children. 

In June, the couple celebrated their 6, 5, 2 and 9-month-old children with an adoption party at Milwaukee’s Humboldt Park.

“We have four kids now and they’ve been with us since birth,” McKenna said. “This is our family unit now and we’re grateful to be alongside the kids as they grow.”

Adjusting to a new parenting lifestyle

As the Olson family has grown, McKenna and Celia have adapted to new parenting routines such as staying home when a child is sick, making multiple drop-offs to daycare or extracurricular activities and more.

“As the older kids are growing up, they’re getting more involved in things,” McKenna said. “We’re being aware of what works and understanding what’s best for each kid.”

McKenna said she’s also adjusting to no longer having to follow certain policies and procedures.

Last month, McKenna and Celia took the kids on vacation without going through an approval process.

“One part of being a foster parent is you have to get approval if you want to go out of state, and sometimes you might have to share your itinerary or birth parents have to get involved,” she said. 

As they navigate new parenting routines, McKenna and Celia are excited to create memories as a family such as celebrating birthdays and capturing moments from the first and last days of school. 

“In my dream ideal world, I would love to have so many people around the table during Thanksgiving and birthdays and that would include the birth families of my kids,” McKenna said. “I really just look forward to being a family, spending quality time and having our extended family come together.”

Feeling mixed emotions

No longer foster parents, McKenna and Celia still reflect on the bittersweet moments they’ve shared with other foster children.

“The kids that have left us, we still think about them and miss them,” McKenna said. “You’re in people’s lives for a reason during certain stages of their life.”

McKenna and Celia said they were grateful to care for all 10 children over the years. 

“Every kid that came into our home, we open our hearts,” McKenna said.

Using resources to help with trauma

McKenna and Celia chose to become foster parents through Wellpoint Care Network because of its Trauma Informed Care Program, which teaches principles for responding to people who have experienced trauma.

“Children who experience trauma, their brains formulate differently than children who may have not gone through trauma,” said Emily Davis, Wellpoint foster care recruitment and retention supervisor. 

In addition to supporting foster parents, the training has helped social workers, librarians, educators, police officers and others. 

According to Julie Scott, Wellpoint director of trauma-informed strategy and practice, the organization developed the training after discovering its former residential boys group wasn’t receiving enough mental health support. 

“We found that traditional mental health services and therapies weren’t enough,” Scott said. “Because of adversity and trauma there are particular needs that aren’t always met.”

Davis said there are five levels of foster parents, all of whom are required to take the free Trauma-Informed Care training to become licensed through Wellpoint Care Network. 

“We don’t want children to be moved from home to home, and our biggest goal is to only have a child in one placement the entire time they’re in foster care,” Davis said. “Providing foster parents with the training allows them to have the knowledge and ability to be that one foster parent the child needs rather than multiple.”

The training helped McKenna and Celia understand that no parent is perfect and that they shouldn’t take a child’s response to trauma personally. 

“It’s about being aware that everyone comes with their own story and situations,” McKenna said. “It’s all a work in progress because the kids are changing and you’re changing right with them.”

Scott and the Olson family encourage foster parents to meet children where they are instead of expecting them to reach a certain development stage.

“Be compassionate, understanding and stick around a little longer,” Scott said. “A child may behave a certain way because they don’t understand their trauma.”

McKenna wants aspiring foster parents to know that the process requires them to embrace change. 

“If you’re entering a new world, you shouldn’t be going in the same person you were,” she said.

Information for new or aspiring foster parents

To become an eligible foster parent in Wisconsin applicants must meet the following requirements:

• Be at least 21 years of age.
• Pass a background check. 
• Show proof of income.
• Meet all home safety requirements.
• Have car insurance with valid license. 
• Have no past history with child welfare agency involving child neglect or abuse. 
• Be willing to work alongside the child’s biological family. 
• Demonstrate positive qualities such as patience and humor.

McKenna said she and Celia could always reopen their license if they wanted to. They are grateful for the support Wellpoint Care Network provided them as foster parents. 

“Wellpoint Care Network has been a part of our life, and because of this nonprofit, our family is the way that it is,” she said.

Milwaukee couple adopts four children after eight years as foster parents 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.

A U.S. Postal Service rule restricting mail-in voting, like the executive order from President Donald Trump that spurred it, is unconstitutional, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said in a Friday order extending a freeze on the policy.

The Trump administration quickly appealed the order to the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday.

Then Sunday, the administration also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the preliminary injunction, saying Talwani rushed it without considering the actual text of its final rule.

“The district court’s continuing prejudgment of the rule is baseless, and an immediate stay is warranted,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a Sunday application to the court.

Sauer described the rule as containing “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail.” He added that USPS had long recommended the design requirements it was seeking to codify in the rule.

The Supreme Court will consider the application on its emergency docket. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Sunday asked the states and voting rights groups challenging the rule to file their response to the application by Wednesday. It’s unclear when a ruling would come.

Friday injunction

Talwani, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, issued a preliminary injunction late Friday, 60 days before Election Day, blocking the U.S. Postal Service rule from going into effect while court challenges play out. The injunction converts a 14-day pause she ordered a week prior.

The Massachusetts federal judge voiced several serious concerns about the policy, including that it infringes on states’ constitutional power to administer elections and Congress’ power to legislate election policy.

The rule, which the Postal Service published last month based on a Trump executive order in March, would disenfranchise voters who depend on mail voting, give states the impossible task of overhauling their election systems ahead of a fast-approaching election and assert power the agency does not have under the U.S. Constitution, Talwani said.

Not an election regulation, USPS says

The administration and a handful of GOP state attorneys general have defended the rule as regulating mail, not elections. 

A statement from U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner restated the claim earlier Friday.

The portions of the rule establishing technical standards for ballot envelopes were based on longstanding best practices and were not “breaking new and uncharted ground,” Steiner wrote.

Similarly, a more controversial provision requiring states to send the Postal Service a list of eligible voters was also not complicated for the agency, he said, noting that USPS would not amend the lists.

“The USPS does not edit, change, review or question the contents of the list—the list is merely a list of voters that a State says are receiving a ballot through the mail,” he wrote. “So basically, the State provided list is a manifest identifying the recipients of ballot mail.”

Clash with law passed by Congress

Talwani said Friday the federal government’s denial that the rule is an election regulation “rings hollow.” 

“Throughout its body of election legislation, Congress has never delegated its Elections Clause power to the USPS,” she wrote. “Unauthorized by the Elections Clause, the Final Rule clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional where it intrudes not only on Congress’s Elections Clause powers but also that power left to the States.”

In addition to the constitutional principles the rule violates, it is unworkable ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections that will determine control of Congress, she said. 

All states allow some form of mail-in voting. The first ballots were sent Friday, with North Carolina starting to mail ballots to certain voters. 

Sauer noted that ballots had begun to “enter the mailstream,” with more states set to send ballots in the coming weeks.

That added urgency for justices to act, he said. If courts eventually allow the rule to take effect and states have not taken action to comply, it could threaten voters’ ability to cast mail ballots in those states, he said.

“There is a grave risk that States may not have taken the necessary steps to comply, due to the false sense of latitude created by the court’s improper injunction, potentially depriving those States’ citizens of the ability to vote by mail,” he wrote.

In a statement, Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, one of the Democratic attorneys general who sued to block the rule, said Talwani’s order would keep the commonwealth’s election administration on track.

“This order protects our ability to effectively deliver mail ballots to all residents relying on them to make their voices heard in the November election,” she said. “Voters should continue to vote-by-mail as usual and know that this system is safe and secure.”

President Donald Trump’s executive order placing new restrictions on mail-in voting would assign state officials a Herculean task to reach compliance before the crucial midterm elections.

The order directed the U.S. Postal Service to strictly regulate the envelope design of mail-in ballots and to collect voter data from each state through an online portal, among other things. 

The Postal Service has argued in court that its rule is not an election regulation, but is within the agency’s purview as a standard for a specific type of mail.

But some state officials tasked with fitting their systems to the new regulations say it presents massive — if not impossible — challenges to reach compliance for the November midterms, when voters will decide whether to continue Republican control of the U.S. House and Senate. 

Ballot designs and printing are typically done months in advance of ballots being sent to voters, which begins this week. North Carolina is set to mail out ballots for the Nov. 3 general election on Friday. 

“In some States, it would be impossible at this point to comply with the last-minute rollout of USPS’ novel ballot-verification program,” more than 20 Democratic-led states suing to block the order said in a Wednesday court filing. “In other States, there will be chaos.”

The states presented a list of tasks state and local elections administrators would have to complete. 

That list includes: redesigning ballot envelopes and obtaining USPS approval “on an unprecedented timetable,” purchasing new envelopes, developing technological systems to meet barcode standards in the rule, uploading voter-specific information to the USPS portal that they have not yet received access to and training state and local officials and voters on the new standards.

“Each step of this process is fraught with an extreme risk of error,” they said.

‘Courts will stop it’

Because of the unworkable timeline and a general principle not to change voting policy too close to an election, officials believe courts will ultimately block the rule from going into effect for this year.

“There’s a pretty universal feeling that the courts will stop it from happening,” Katy Owens Hubler, the director of elections at the National Conference of State Legislatures, said in an interview.

“In general, you don’t want to be changing things right before the election. So in a lot of ways, it is already too late. Part of the rule relates to the absentee ballot envelopes themselves. And … almost universally, those have already been designed and printed.”

A Massachusetts federal judge has paused the rule from taking effect through Sept. 11 while multiple legal fights play out.

Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer at the National Association of Election Officials, a nonpartisan industry group for state and local elections officials, said in a court declaration filed Aug. 28 the timeline was unworkable for the midterms.

“None of the Rule’s requirements can feasibly be implemented before the November 3, 2026, General Election,” she wrote. “Administration of the 2026 election is already well underway, with timelines, budgets, and staffing already set, many of which are unmovable or unchangeable.” 

The rule’s requirements “will place new and heavy burdens” on election offices whose budgets are “already constrained,” she added.

Election officials and USPS began preparing for the 2026 election months ago, she said. And states already set funding levels.

“The infeasibility of the Rule for election officials is obvious when you consider the calendar and preparation for the 2026 general election next to the Rule’s requirements and implementation,” she wrote.

The rule would force states to push through in a matter of weeks what should take a year, Matthew Weil, the vice president for democracy and bipartisanship at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank, said.

“A year of lead time is the best practice before any new policy,” he said.

Envelope design

Some of the requirements themselves are not objectionable, according to experts. 

The standards for envelope design, for example, largely codify best practices the Postal Service has recommended for years.

But the rule also requires that USPS approve each design, possibly through an online portal that has yet to be introduced and has reportedly seen major problems in development.

Nationwide, there are about 40 mail design analysts who would be qualified to judge mail ballot designs. Asking every state, and many counties that have their own designs, to submit them at the same time would be unworkable.

“If even a fraction of election offices has to submit their new envelopes and materials … before the 2026 election, it would take weeks for USPS to work through the sudden volume,” Patrick wrote.

A similar problem could face election offices seeking to order printing of new ballots and envelopes, she said. The turnaround time for new envelopes could stretch 12 to 16 weeks, she said.

Despite those obstacles, the rule would mean any ballots that do not fit the new specifications would be rejected, possibly stopping many voters from casting ballots.

IT problem

Like the implementation of ballot envelope standards, the rule’s requirement that states electronically share voter files with the federal government has suffered from a rushed process, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint published Tuesday.

The Postal Service lacks the capacity to implement the executive order, David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, said in a statement Tuesday.

“They secretly rushed development of the technology the order demanded, trying to piece it together in a few months rather than taking the time required for a proper rollout,” he said. “This slapdash effort is guaranteed to result in significant problems just weeks before the election, potentially disenfranchising thousands of voters.”

Owens Hubler said states have not yet gained access to the portal.

“It’s a pretty big (information technology) project to have done very quickly,” she said. “And I don’t know that anybody’s actually seen it yet. So, that’s another aspect of putting it into place before the election that could be pretty tough.”

The Bipartisan Policy Center predicted the difficulty in building the portal in a July 6 comment on the notice of proposed rulemaking by the USPS. The center noted that state and local officials would have difficulty complying.

“Whether election officials can meet this burden at all depends on the successful deployment of a tool that does not yet exist,” the group wrote. “Building, testing, deploying, and training election officials to use a portal before October 4 (the beginning of the 30-day window during which election officials will be supplying lists to USPS) will be an enormous undertaking, and the risk of delay in the deployment of this portal is significant.”

The Postal Service did not respond to a message seeking comment Wednesday.

In a Tuesday statement, a spokesperson said the agency was finalizing the portal’s development, and called it “just one part of a broader, year-round effort” to ensure election mail is properly handled.

“The Postal Service is now finalizing the portal and will soon make it available to election officials who voluntarily wish to familiarize themselves with the platform,” the spokesperson said. “USPS will also provide tools, presentations, and other resources to help election officials understand the platform and make informed decisions about whether and how they wish to use it.”

Universal mail states

States that already mail ballots to every registered voter, and the large jurisdictions within those states, may have an easier time meeting the standards, Owens Hubler said. If they are not already in compliance, they likely have a relationship with a commercial printer that could possibly handle a short order.

But smaller, less-resourced counties and states that don’t have a robust mail-in voting program may have more trouble finding last-minute fixes.

The eight states that have universal mail voting — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont and Washington — “will be affected, but everyone’s affected,” Owens Hubler said. “And I think it is important to think of the ones that just don’t have to do this as often. They may, in the end, be more affected.”

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All three of the Milwaukee Police Department’s automatic license plate reader systems will be subject to new security safeguards, department officials confirmed Wednesday.

The department’s confirmation follows Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s announcement regarding new restrictions aimed at preventing officer misuse and protecting privacy.

An MPD spokesperson said the changes will be incorporated into the department’s official policy. 

The mayor’s initial announcement focused on Flock Safety, one of three automated license plate reader systems used by MPD. NNS previously reported that the department also uses Genetec and Axon systems. 

All three systems automatically capture license plate information that can be searched later.

As of June, MPD had access to: 35 Flock cameras; 39 Genetec cameras; and Axon license plate readers installed in 80 patrol vehicles.

New limits

Only MPD supervisors will be allowed to access automatic license plate reader systems, Johnson said in his announcement.

Some MPD personnel have been accused of misusing Flock. MPD officer Josue Ayala was convicted in June of attempted misconduct in public office in connection with his use of Flock cameras.

Access to Milwaukee’s license plate reader systems will also be limited to MPD, excluding other law enforcement agencies. 

Supervisors may use the systems only to investigate Part I crimes, which include homicide, rape and aggravated assault, among others. They may also use the technology to investigate critical missing persons, drug trafficking organization and abductions.

A department said automatic license plate reader cameras will continue to passively capture data, but supervisors may access it only for appropriate investigations.

Transparency efforts

The mayor announced transparency measures as well. 

MPD will create a public dashboard detailing its use of license plate reader systems, and the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission will conduct semi-annual independent audits of use.

Johnson said the commission has already initiated an audit of Flock systems.

The announcement does not specify what information will appear on the dashboard or what metrics the audits will examine.

NNS asked the mayor’s office whether MPD will write the changes into its policies and for additional details about the dashboard and audits.

The mayor’s office referred the questions to MPD, confirming that the police chief has authority over department policy.

Risks and concerns

After Johnson’s announcement, Amanda Merkwae, policy and advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, said in a written statement the changes are “a step in the right direction” but that “Flock is still an incredibly invasive technology that has the power to indiscriminately surveil our communities on a mass scale.” 

Merkwae argued that using Flock should require a warrant based on probable cause. She also called for independent oversight and written policies for all MPD surveillance technologies use.

“We cannot only accept a solution where police are responsible for policing themselves,” Merkwae 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.

Milwaukee police: Flock restrictions will apply to other license plate reader systems is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Editor’s note: This story has been updated with new information from the Milwaukee Police Department. 

Although Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson has announced new safeguards for the Milwaukee Police Department’s use of Flock Safety cameras, it remains unclear whether the rules will apply to all three of the city’s license plate reader systems or only to Flock.

Flock is one of three automated license plate reader systems used by MPD. NNS previously reported that the department also uses Genetec and Axon systems. 

All three systems automatically capture license plate information that can be searched later.

As of June, MPD had access to: 35 Flock cameras, 39 Genetec cameras and Axon license plate readers installed in 80 patrol vehicles.

New limits

According to Johnson’s announcement, only MPD supervisors will be allowed to access Flock. Officers and detectives will no longer have access.

Some MPD personnel have been accused of misusing Flock. Former MPD officer Josue Ayala, was convicted in June of attempted misconduct in public office in connection with his use of Flock cameras.

Access to Milwaukee’s Flock cameras will also be limited to MPD, excluding other law enforcement agencies. 

Supervisors will be allowed to use Flock cameras only for investigating Part I crimes, which include homicide, rape and aggravated assault, among others. They can also use the cameras in cases involving critical missing persons, drug trafficking organization investigations and abductions.

The mayor also announced transparency measures. 

MPD will create a public dashboard with information about its use of Flock, and the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission will conduct twice-annual independent audits of the department’s Flock use. 

Johnson said the commission has already begun an audit. 

The announcement does not specify what information will appear on the dashboard or what metrics the audits will examine.

NNS asked the mayor’s office whether the safeguards would extend to Genetec and Axon, whether the changes would be written into MPD policies and what the dashboard and audits would include. 

The mayor’s office referred the questions to MPD, saying that the police chief has authority over department policy.

MPD did not respond to questions from NNS.

Risks and concerns

After Johnson’s announcement, Amanda Merkwae, policy and advocacy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, said in a written statement the changes are “a step in the right direction” but that “Flock is still an incredibly invasive technology that has the power to indiscriminately surveil our communities on a mass scale.” 

The use of Flock, Merkwae argued, should require a warrant based on probable cause. MPD should also face independent oversight and adopt written policies for all of the surveillance technologies it uses, she added.

“We cannot only accept a solution where police are responsible for policing themselves,” Merkwae 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.

Milwaukee limits Flock cameras, leaving other license plate reader rules unclear 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 U.S. Postal Service rushed the development of electronic tools to comply with a Trump administration policy placing new restrictions on mail-in voting, and defied a court order to stop work on the system, according to an explosive whistleblower complaint published Tuesday by Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal.

The unnamed whistleblower predicted the result could be “foreseeable catastrophic disruption to our coming nationwide elections based on the reckless pursuit of readying a new, insufficiently tested, poorly planned mail-in ballot screening system.”

The system contains several massive flaws and, with virtually no time to spare before the November elections, USPS officials kept on developing an online verification system in violation of a Massachusetts judge’s injunction, the whistleblower said. 

The system’s verification standard is “a zero percent failure rate,” meaning that any batch of ballots that contain any single ballot with an error would result in an entire batch being rejected, the whistleblower said. 

The verification system itself is suspect due to a hurried and untested development of an online portal that states were to use to upload voter and ballot information for verification by federal officials, the whistleblower said. 

Up against a tight timeline ahead of the midterm elections, the agency also continued to develop an online tool related to the regulation, despite the federal court order to pause the work, according to the whistleblower.

No specific USPS officials were named as responsible for directing the work to continue in defiance of the courts. USPS did not immediately return a request for comment from States Newsroom.

States were expected to begin using the system as soon as Tuesday, according to the whistleblower.

Potential for millions of missing ballots

The allegations from the whistleblower, a federal official whose exact role is not specified, were detailed in a report by Whistleblower Aid, a nonprofit legal group that is representing the whistleblower. 

Blumenthal, of Connecticut, attached the report to a letter to U.S. Postmaster General David Steiner.

“The apparently sloppy and rushed manner in which the Federal Ballot Mail Portal and supporting IT systems are being built poses significant risk,” the report said. “Potentially millions of American voters may not receive their mail-in ballot this election cycle in a timely manner, or at all.”

The new policy, which President Donald Trump initiated in a March executive order, has been the subject of intense legal fighting over the past few weeks that continues with an appeal now sitting at the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals. Democratic state officials and voting rights groups have said the regulation would likely disenfranchise voters.

Blumenthal said the USPS should reject the policy entirely.

“We urge you to abandon this ill-conceived, unconscionable plan and ensure that all Americans can exercise their constitutional right to vote, including by mail, without interference by USPS,” he wrote.

‘Problems at every stage’

In a final rule published Aug. 21, the Postal Service said states would use a to-be-developed online portal to upload information about the envelopes being used for mail ballots and the voters who received them. USPS would also use the portal to verify that all ballots and voters complied with the requirements set out in the new rule.

But the project was beset with several challenges, in part spurred by the unrealistic timeline for development, the whistleblower said.

The whistleblower’s disclosure “identifies problems at every stage of USPS’s development of the Portal, demonstrating deeply flawed plans for implementation,” Blumenthal wrote.

A project of the portal’s size and importance would normally “take nine months to a year or more” to finish, according to the whistleblower’s disclosure. Smaller current Postal Service IT projects have been given eight-month timelines, according to the whistleblower. 

USPS began developing the mail ballot portal in June, just three months before it was to be introduced and less than five months before Election Day, according to the disclosure.

Individual elements of the tool have not been sufficiently tested, “rendering meaningful testing of the project impossible,” the whistleblower said.

“The Whistleblower believes that there has been insufficient internal testing of the system,” the disclosure said. “Such testing is critical to determine whether it will work on September 1, when states could be expected to start using it.”

Software developers on the project have “considerable concern” that the project skipped “standard principles of testing and debugging new software before launch,” the whistleblower said.

One faulty barcode

The IT problems heighten the danger of another major issue: a policy of rejecting entire batches of ballots based on a faulty barcode on a single ballot.

According to the whistleblower, “the administration has hidden the high likelihood” that standard raises for major disruptions in ballot delivery. 

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state – effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the report said.

A misread barcode could result from something as simple as a voter’s changed name after marriage or a move of address, Blumenthal said.

Court order

The whistleblower said the USPS paused work for about a month after Judge Indira Talwani in the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts issued an injunction against Trump’s executive order, finding, in part, that it likely violated the U.S. Constitution’s provision granting states the power to administer elections.

But USPS officials then ordered work to resume on the project, in defiance of the judicial order that remained in effect, the whistleblower said.

The whistleblower added that the agency ignored another temporary restraining order Talwani, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama, issued last week and upheld Monday, and continued to work on the project.

In his letter to Steiner, Blumenthal asked if that was true and posed several other questions stemming from the whistleblower’s report, and asked for a response by Friday.

A Massachusetts federal judge on Monday declined the Trump administration’s request to overturn the temporary restraining order she signed last week that blocks the U.S. Postal Service from carrying out a rule placing new restrictions on mail-in voting.

The 14-day order published Aug. 27 was not appealable, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani wrote in a brief order Monday. But even if the order could be appealed, the administration would lose on the merits, Talwani wrote. 

“It is likely that the USPS lacked authority to issue the Final Rule and that the Final Rule is substantively unconstitutional and contrary to law,” she wrote.

She dismissed the administration’s argument that the temporary restraining order came too close to Election Day as a “cynical interpretation” of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Aug. 24 decision that allowed President Donald Trump’s related executive order to move forward on procedural grounds.

The high court found that Trump’s executive order, which directed the Postal Service to create the rule, could not be challenged until the rule itself was in place. It made no determination on the merits of the rule.

“A Final Rule has now issued and, contrary to Defendants’ cynical interpretation, the Supreme Court has not endorsed the view that any challenge to the Final Rule is now too late,” Talwani, whom President Barack Obama appointed to the bench, wrote.

She added that she disagreed with the USPS argument that the requirements of the rule, which would force states to overhaul their vote-by-mail systems ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections and to gain federal government approval of lists of voters who requested mail ballots, were “modest.”

The administration is also fighting Democratic-led states and voting rights groups in the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals over Talwani’s temporary restraining order and in Talwani’s court over a longer pause of the final rule.

Several Republican state attorneys general, representing Alabama, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas, joined the suit on the federal government’s side.

The rule’s challengers say it is an inappropriate incursion of states’ power to administer elections, and would likely disenfranchise people who depend on mail ballots to vote. 

Trump has long claimed, without evidence, and despite his personal use of the service, that mail voting enables election fraud. 

The administration has said its rule is needed to ensure that noncitizens do not vote in federal elections, which studies have shown is rare.

Trump issued the executive order March 31. States and voting rights groups immediately sued to stop it, but the legal battle heated up last week with the Supreme Court’s procedural decision on its emergency docket. 

The states and groups challenging the law quickly refiled their lawsuits to reflect that the rule had been published Aug. 21.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

A man who was being held at the Milwaukee County Jail is disputing the account from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office about the events leading up to the in-custody death last week of Kourtney Edwards, a 45-year-old Milwaukee man.

Alex Williams, 33, said officials at the jail ignored initial pleas to help Edwards. 

He said he heard people in a nearby holding cell banging on the door and yelling through a slot that someone was vomiting, wasn’t doing well and needed help.

“Those calls went ignored for a while,” Williams said, estimating that they lasted several minutes.

Williams said officers eventually removed the man from the holding cell and began walking him toward the nurses’ station. He said Edwards made it about halfway there before appearing to have a seizure and collapsing. Williams said he was foaming at the mouth.

“He was not assessed by nurses until he was passed out on the ground,” Williams said. “I wouldn’t even call that an assessment. That was them trying to save his life.”

Williams said he arrived at the jail around 2 p.m. Monday, Aug. 17, and remained in the booking area until early Wednesday morning. He said he was still going through the booking process when Edwards became ill Tuesday morning.

Timeline from sheriff’s office

The account from the sheriff’s office previously reported by NNS stated that Edwards was brought to the jail the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 18, had been initially medically cleared and was awaiting a secondary screening when he reported vomiting and feeling ill shortly before 8:30 a.m.

Nurses then assessed him and determined he needed to be taken to a hospital. While an ambulance crew and two deputies prepared to transport the man to the hospital, he experienced a medical emergency. 

He lost his pulse and stopped breathing.

Emergency personnel attempted life-saving measures, but he was pronounced dead at 9:30 a.m.

A representative from the Milwaukee County Medical Examiner’s Office told NNS Tuesday that it would “be a while” before the cause and manner of Edwards’ death was determined.

Concerns about in-jail deaths

Alan Chavoya, treasurer and organizer for the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, said Williams’ account reaffirms concerns he already had about Edwards’ death.

“It’s deeply upsetting and infuriating if he was able to be assisted sooner – if that would have saved his life,” Chavoya said. “Could this have been prevented? It seems like yes.”

The sheriff’s office told NNS Friday that it had no comment beyond saying that it is an active, ongoing investigation and that questions should be directed to the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Office, which is conducting the investigation.

The Waukesha County Sheriff’s Office has not responded to a request for comment.

Edwards’ death is at least the 10th of a person in Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office custody since June 2022, including six deaths during a 14-month period in 2022 and 2023 and three in 2025.

Other allegations

Williams also said the man’s death took place amid overcrowding, booking delays and repeated instances in which staff failed to promptly respond to requests for assistance.

He described the cells as hot, with little or no airflow, and said people repeatedly yelled through slots in the cell doors that they needed water or to use the bathroom.

“It was often ignored,” Williams said.

He said the jail was overcrowded. 

His holding cell was marked for 12 people but held between 13 and 20 people at different points, he said. Williams said the overcrowding made the toilet difficult to access because people were sleeping or standing around it.

Williams also described significant booking delays, made worse because there was no third-shift booking staff Monday night.

He said his bail was posted at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, but that he was not booked into the system until about 2:30 p.m. that day and was not released until around 1 a.m. Wednesday.

Nothing changed after death

Williams said he noticed no real changes after Edwards died during the time he spent in custody until he was released. He said officers still sometimes ignored pleas for assistance.

Williams believes the conditions at the jail contributed to the man’s death.

“They should take every call for help seriously,” he said.

Chavoya said the allegations from Williams fit what he sees as a broader pattern at the jail, including neglect and perhaps abuse “of the people who are supposed to be, as we’re reminded, under their care.”

Chavoya said he wants investigators to determine what happened and for the sheriff’s office to release video of the incident.

Last Friday, a spokesperson for the Office of Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley told NNS in a written statement that the incident doesn’t raise concerns about medical care at the jail.

“The jail’s medical staff and Milwaukee Fire Department EMS performed lifesaving measures, but, despite best efforts, the individual died,” the spokesperson for Crowley’s office said. 

When NNS reached out with Williams’ account, a spokesperson for Crowley’s office said that the initial report from the sheriff’s office of the incident did not indicate cause for immediate concern.

“The matter is now under review by the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Office,” the spokesperson said. 

Williams said he is worried about potential retaliation for speaking publicly about what he witnessed but believes coming forward is important.

He said he wants “to model morals, bravery and humanitarianism” for his family.

---

Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

Eyewitness says Milwaukee jail officials initially ignored pleas to help man who died in custody 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.

Public EV charging is expensive compared to juicing up at home, but $16,000 for 4.91 kWh is really taking the electrons. That’s the bill ($CAD22,308) one Canadian Kia owner says he received after a charging session apparently remained electronically open for more than 15 months.

Reddit user IntelliDev posted the incredible invoice more than a year after he’d topped up his EV9 with Hypercharge Networks. It shows the session beginning at 6.57 p.m. on May 17, 2025, but not ending until 1.09 p.m. on August 25, 2026.

Related: The Best Fast Charging Experience In America Isn’t From Tesla

The Kia EV9 is among the faster-charging electric cars, capable of swallowing up to 235 kW when hooked up to the right kind of equipment. But if this bill was to be believed, and the EV9 really did need 15 months to chug down just 4.91 kWh, its effective charge rate would have been less than half a Watt per hour. “And I thought my Bolt charged slowly,” one Reddit commenter joked, alluding to the 2017-23 Chevy‘s modest 55 kW rate.

The invoice itself offers a clue besides the price to there being some major mix-up going on here. It says the session “took place in the past on a terminal that was out of communication.” That suggests the actual charging stopped long ago, but the network didn’t receive or correctly process the message telling it the session was finished.

Billed By the Hour

And because the charger appears to have billed by time rather than electrical units, the meter apparently kept running. At roughly CAD$2 ($1.44) per hour, the elapsed time between those start and finish dates gets you close to the enormous invoice total.

In another glitch, the invoice lists the session duration as only seven days, 18 hours, 12 minutes and 40 seconds, apparently omitting the preceding year and three months even though the billing calculation seems to have remembered them.

IntelliDev said he emailed Hypercharge to dispute the bill but hadn’t received a response at the time of his latest update. We’ve also found nothing suggesting the company has publicly explained what happened yet.

Kia, IntelliDev

H/t to Auto Evolution

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Postal Service took another step Thursday in implementing a Trump administration policy to restrict mail-in voting, even as a high-stakes legal battle plays out and midterm elections approach.

The agency published an FAQ about its new rule that compels states to send their voter rolls to the federal government and only deliver mail ballots to voters who match federal citizenship data. The rule also updates standards for mail ballots that states have said would be difficult to implement before the Nov. 3 elections that will determine the balance of Congress.

The controversial rule, which two dozen Democratic states and voting rights groups are challenging in federal court, increases the federal government’s role in elections and voting. 

The states have argued the rule violates the U.S. Constitution, which grants them the power of administering elections.

In a Thursday brief defending the rule, the U.S. Justice Department said it only contained “modest improvements and modernizations of the Postal Service’s infrastructure” and would have minimal effect on states’ election administration.

“The Rule does not displace a single State election law,” the brief said. “And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

Democrat-led states and voting rights groups re-filed lawsuits Wednesday to block the Trump administration from executing the rule after a Supreme Court ruling Monday that temporarily greenlit the policy on procedural grounds.

USPS acknowledged pending litigation in the FAQ, and noted it would make any changes spurred by the suits. 

Republicans, including Trump, have long made the accusation that noncitizens vote in federal elections, which multiple studies have shown occurs rarely.   

On Thursday, Trump said he believed states could implement the new rule, even in North Carolina where ballots are set to be mailed next week.  

“North Carolina is great,” Trump said. “And they do some mail-in ballots. But basically they ruled on the legitimacy and the way we want to make them legitimate. And it was a great ruling for the Republicans.”

Those states suing to block the rule are California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, as well as the District of Columbia.

Jennifer Shutt contributed to this story.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Local jail reform advocates say they have serious concerns about the death of a 45-year-old man in custody at the Milwaukee County Jail on Aug. 18.

Many of their concerns are not new.

“It’s a very painful sort of flashback of the different cases we’ve encountered where people are in for a bit, or for a duration of time … and assistance isn’t provided,” said Alan Chavoya, treasurer and organizer with the Milwaukee Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression.

The alliance is a Black and brown-led grassroots organization that says it aims “to end police crimes, advance community control of policing, and build collective power.”

Last week’s death is at least the 10th death of a person in Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office custody since June 2022, including six deaths during a 14-month period in 2022 and 2023 and three in 2025.

According to the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office, deputies picked up the man from the West Allis Police Department at 4:25 a.m. Aug. 18 and brought him to the Milwaukee County Jail.

During the booking process, Wellpath nursing staff medically cleared him, although a secondary medical screening remained pending. Shortly before 8:30 a.m., the man told jail staff he had vomited and did not feel good.

Nurses assessed him and determined he needed transportation to a hospital.

While an ambulance crew and two deputies prepared to transport him, the man experienced a medical emergency, lost his pulse and stopped breathing.

Emergency crews and Milwaukee Fire Department first responders attempted lifesaving measures, but officials pronounced him dead at 9:30 a.m.

“The timeline just seems very, very odd,” Chavoya said. “How is it that people are approved or like given the green light to be administered into the jail, and then less than a couple of hours later, the person is vomiting? Where was the failure there?”

Chavoya said the initial medical screening by Wellpath, the jail’s contracted health care provider, also raises questions.

“We’ve had our eye on Wellpath for quite some time, and it’s not just a Milwaukee issue – it’s a nationwide issue,” he said.

Robert Thibault, vice president of Prison Action Milwaukee, an advocacy and support group for people affected by the criminal justice system, and a member of the Sheriff’s Community Advisory Board, shared some of Chavoya’s concerns. 

“Did everybody do everything they possibly could have? Was everything done that could have possibly been done in a reasonable time?” Thibault asked. 

He pointed to an independent audit completed in 2024 that identified deficiencies in several areas, including mental health services, suicide prevention and staffing.

Thibault said he recently toured the jail and saw improvements compared with several years ago.

NNS contacted the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office but did not immediately receive a response.

County Executive David Crowley’s office responds

In a written statement to NNS, a spokesperson for the Office of County Executive David Crowley said the office is confident that everything possible was done for this man.

“The cause of death is still under review by the Medical Examiner’s Office, but this incident doesn’t raise concerns about medical care at the jail,” the statement read. “The jail’s medical staff and Milwaukee Fire Department EMS performed lifesaving measures, but despite best efforts, the individual died.”

Milwaukee County Supervisor Justin Bielinski, chair of the County Board’s Judiciary, Law Enforcement and General Services Committee, said he spoke with jail officials about the death, but the investigation will ultimately make clear what happened.

As the investigation proceeds, Chavoya said he wants accountability and concrete steps to prevent another death in custody. 

“Maybe you can’t give us everything, but, at least, get some public trust again by explaining what the steps you are taking to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” he said.

What happens next

Bielinski said he expects the investigation, being conducted by the Waukesha County Sheriff’s Office, to take several months. Meanwhile, he said he is exploring changes that could identify medical emergencies sooner.

Bielinski said his focus after incidents like this is to figure out “how can we improve process.”

Specifically, Bielinski wants the county to explore providing wearable health monitors to people awaiting booking.

The devices could track measures such as pulse and blood oxygen levels and then alert staff to a medical emergency sooner. He said he asked Wellpath to explore a pilot program for the use of such devices.

“We just give ourselves the chance to get ahead of whatever medical emergency might be happening sooner,” Bielinski said.

Milwaukee jail death raises familiar concerns among reform advocates 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.

WASHINGTON — With just over two months until the November midterms, the U.S. Supreme Court gave way Monday for President Donald Trump to have a hand in regulating mail-in ballots nationwide, a voting method he has falsely claimed is rife with corruption since he lost the 2020 presidential election.

In an unsigned emergency docket opinion, the court’s conservative majority wrote the Trump administration is likely to prevail on its argument that 23 Democratic-led states do not have standing to stop his executive order to change how the U.S. Postal Service processes mail-in ballots. 

The majority justices also wrote that a lower court’s injunction is “causing irreparable harm,” but left open the possibility that the executive order could still be considered unconstitutional.

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell,” the majority wrote. 

The legality of a Massachusetts federal district court order, which paused the executive order to overhaul vote-by-mail systems before the Nov. 3 midterms, will now be decided by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

In a lengthy dissent, Jackson wrote the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

The principle of courts not altering voting systems too close to the election has been eroded, she said, amounting to a “Kafkaesque nightmare.”

“States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion,” she wrote.

Final rule issued

The March 31 executive order at the heart of the case in part directs USPS to direct the redesign of mail-in ballot envelopes, including adding a unique barcode. It also asks USPS to collect voters’ names and addresses from state elections officials and directs the U.S. Justice Department to investigate and prosecute state officials who violate the order.

The Postal Service issued a final rule Friday detailing how the process would be carried out.

Whether an overhaul of mail-in ballots for each state could be completed in time for the Nov. 3 election remains to be seen, as vote-by-mail documents are sent to voters well in advance of Election Day.

A federal district judge in Massachusetts chastised the Trump administration for sowing confusion and “creating” an emergency by noticing a rule Friday that the U.S. Postal Service will eventually require federally regulated mail-in ballot voting envelopes and state data.

A 95-page notice alerting that the final rule would appear in the Federal Register on Aug. 26 outlined justifications for federal requirements on states to redesign ballot envelopes and provide a list of recipient names and addresses to USPS. The final rule became effective Friday, according to the document.

The final rule runs contrary to U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani’s Aug. 11 preliminary injunction barring the federal government from changing states’ mail-in voting rules prior to the Nov. 3 midterm elections, the judge wrote in a brief order on the docket Sunday. 

“Defendants did not file an appeal and did not seek, let alone obtain, a stay of the preliminary injunction,” Talwani wrote. “Nonetheless, on August 21, 2026, USPS issued its Final Rule, with an anticipated publication date in the Federal Register of August 26, 2026.” 

Talwani was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2013 and unanimously confirmed by the Senate the following year. 

Effective date delayed

The rule includes a provision that it will not be in effect for this year’s midterm elections if Talwani’s injunction is still in place, but the judge said it would still create significant confusion for voters.

The Trump administration asserted the rule would “have no effect on the rules themselves while the injunctions are in place, while ignoring the confusion that the publication will engender,” Talwani wrote.

It’s unclear what effect the final rule will have on the active litigation on the issue.

The federal government had appealed Talwani’s injunction because, it argued, Trump’s order could not be challenged until an agency published a final rule.

Groups want quick order 

The voting rights advocacy groups, led by the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts, who sued President Donald Trump and administration officials over a March executive order overhauling mail-in voting procedures swiftly filed an emergency motion Saturday. 

They urged Talwani to quickly enforce her injunction, and to order expedited responses from the administration, citing “immediate, ongoing, irreparable harm caused by Defendants’ violation of the preliminary injunction, and in light of these fast-approaching dates.”

“There are now only 73 days before the November 2026 election, and far fewer before mail ballots begin to go out,” they wrote.

The Trump administration appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in late July a similar district court ruling against its mail-in voting restrictions order in a case brought by nearly two dozen Democrat-led states.

The states argued that the federal government has no constitutional role in election administration, that the executive order unfairly limited vote-by-mail, which some states use exclusively, and that an overhaul of ballot requirements this close to an election was unworkable. 

High court appeal

In a supplemental brief filed to the Supreme Court justices Monday, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the USPS’s rule issuance “underscores the need for relief from the district court’s improper, unripe injunction.”

“The Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest requirements for preparation and envelope design for federal ballot mail — requirements that fall well within its traditional authorities to impose mailing standards for particularly sensitive types of mail,” wrote Sauer, who formerly worked as Trump’s personal defense attorney. 

Democratic officials in 23 states — California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — and the District of Columbia brought the suit challenging the executive order. 

Twelve states with Republican attorneys general — Alabama, Missouri, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas — joined the appeal to the Supreme Court on the federal government’s side.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This story is part of The uprising in Sherman Park: 10 years later, a Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service series examining resilience, collective action and ongoing efforts to address the inequities that sparked a pivotal moment in Milwaukee’s history.

Ten years after the Sherman Park unrest, the Sherman Phoenix Marketplace in Milwaukee stands as a reminder of how the neighborhood chose to rebuild. 

The marketplace, opened in a former bank building at 3536 W. Fond du Lac Ave. that was damaged during the unrest, has helped dozens of small businesses grow while becoming a gathering place for the community.

As Milwaukee marks 10 years since the tragic events that unfolded after a police officer shot and killed Sylville Smith on Aug. 13, 2016, business owners reflect on what the Sherman Phoenix has meant to them and their businesses.

Some businesses have stayed

When the Sherman Phoenix opened in November 2018, it was home to 27 small businesses. It has since been home to about 60 small businesses. Now, the marketplace houses about 16 businesses. 

For Alan Moore, an owner of 2 Kings Barbershop, the Sherman Phoenix has been home since the day it opened. He says being part of the business collective has been unlike any other experience in his career.

“I love it,” Moore said. “I’m a people person, so I like working with other people. A lot of people here were becoming business owners for the first time, so we were all taking the same journey together.”

He spent more than two decades cutting hair before moving into the Sherman Phoenix. But unlike the stand-alone barbershops he owned previously, the Phoenix put him alongside restaurateurs, retailers, artists and other service providers.

“I’m working next to people selling clothes, people selling food, people providing all kinds of services,” Moore said. “Listening to their experiences and watching them grow helps me grow as a businessman.”

That diversity, he said, is what makes the Sherman Phoenix unique.

“I like to call it Black Wall Street,” Moore said. “It’s like a small city of businesses all under one roof.”

The model didn’t just attract customers – it drew attention from across the country.

Moore remembers visitors traveling from places like New York and Chicago to see the Sherman Phoenix firsthand, hoping to re-create the concept in their own communities.

“People came here to study it,” he said. “They wanted to duplicate what they saw here and take it back to their state.”

Businesses grow

Several successful businesses, including Funky Fresh, The Classic Shoppe and Honey Bee Sage Wellness & Apothecary, had their beginnings inside the Sherman Phoenix. 

Among the entrepreneurs who took the journey was Adija Greer-Smith, owner of Confectionately Yours.

Greer-Smith joined the Sherman Phoenix just months before it opened in 2018 after meeting JoAnne Sabir.  

Sabir, co-developer and co-founder of Sherman Phoenix, encouraged her to turn her successful home-baking business into her first brick-and-mortar location. 

“I told her I didn’t have the resources,” Greer-Smith said. “She said, ‘I’ll help you. Don’t worry about all those particulars you’re worried about. If you think you really want to run a business, I can help you be successful.’ ”

With support from community leaders and loyal customers, she opened her bakery that November.

But just over a year later, the COVID-19 pandemic threatened everything.

“I just didn’t believe for a second that that was it for me,” she said. “I was like, all this didn’t come up this fast just for me to be closed this fast.”

Instead of shutting down completely, she launched a cookie drive that donated nearly 30,000 cookies to organizations and corporations while the bakery was closed to the public.

When businesses reopened, she says those acts of service came back around. Corporate catering orders helped sustain the business during one of the most difficult periods for small businesses across the world.

In 2021, Confectionately Yours expanded with a second location inside the African American Chamber of Commerce of Wisconsin, 1920 N. Martin Luther King Drive. 

Greer-Smith says the Sherman Phoenix gave her the opportunity to grow but also exposed the realities of running a business.

“There’s so much more to opening a brick-and-mortar than just your desire and your ability to do good work,” she said. “You have to know so much and have different resources to help you be sustainable.”

Looking back, she believes the Sherman Phoenix fulfilled its mission but there are lessons to be learned.

“I think the idea, the concept, the leadership, all of those things were great,” she said. “But it moved so fast. The resources for businesses to sustain and grow weren’t all in place yet.”

She says that changed over time as leadership added more support for entrepreneurs.

“You don’t know what you don’t know,” Greer-Smith said. “The developers created the opportunity, but over the years everyone learned that businesses needed more support to stay successful.”

Confectionately Yours has evolved from a bakery into a full-service cafe, catering company and event venue. It employs eight employees at its North Martin Luther King Drive location. 

“We’ve shown strength. We’ve shown resilience, and we’ve shown growth,” she said. “With growth, change is necessary.”

Challenges for Sherman Phoenix

The organization experienced leadership turnover, with Stacia Thompson departing as president and CEO in October and being replaced by Interim Executive Director Romero McCants. 

The marketplace’s delinquent property taxes made headlines in 2025, though it has made some payments since then. 

McCants told NNS in December that the organization was working on three-year strategic planning, with an emphasis on building internal capacity, expanding community engagement and increasing support for tenant businesses. 

According to McCants, retail and food-based businesses continue to face challenges amid broader economic pressures, making community support especially important.

The goal was growth

For Sabir, seeing the Sherman Phoenix reach its seven-year milestone is both humbling and gratifying.

“My co-founder, Juli (Kaufmann), and I were able to create an institution that lives beyond us,” Sabir said. “It lives beyond the community vision and into a new community vision.”

Today, Sabir watches from a different vantage point as new businesses, new leadership and new collaborations continue to shape the space.

“In a time where a lot of brick-and-mortar businesses are not surviving, the Sherman Phoenix is still going strong,” she said. “When you ask me how I feel, I feel grateful.”

Sabir says the project has grown far beyond what she imagined when it began.

“We answered a call to action,” she said. “I don’t think I could have imagined how broad and expansive it would become beyond the bricks and mortar, beyond the desire to support emerging entrepreneurs.”

She describes the Sherman Phoenix as more than a collection of storefronts.

“It’s an entrepreneurial home,” she said. “An ecosystem, a hub and a model for community advancement.”

Although entrepreneurs have come and gone over the years, Sabir says she still follows many of their journeys.

“Watching everybody and seeing what’s possible when people bring their collective gifts to the table has been incredible.”

These days Sabir has relocated to Florida but works as a strategic consultant focused on community development and land reclamation projects across the Midwest, helping organizations acquire land and develop projects designed to strengthen neighborhoods. 

She says the Sherman Phoenix helped shape that path, and she’s grateful to everyone who has carried its mission forward.

As the Sherman Phoenix begins its second decade, there continues to be both promise and challenge. For some businesses, the Phoenix became a permanent home. For others, it served as a launchpad.

Its greatest legacy, people say, isn’t just the businesses that have occupied its storefronts. It’s the entrepreneurs, relationships and community that continue to grow because of it.

“For me, it’s a model of cooperative economics, a model of being stewards of relationships and gifts that I have been able to look into across the nations,” Sabir said. “It’s more than what I could have imagined.”

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

Sherman Phoenix remains a symbol of growth for Milwaukee business owners 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.

Reading Time: 6 minutes

This story is part of The uprising in Sherman Park: 10 years later, a Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service series examining resilience, collective action and ongoing efforts to address the inequities that sparked a pivotal moment in Milwaukee’s history.

Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Marcelia Nicholson-Bovell remembers hearing the pain of community members who felt unheard and disenfranchised during the Sherman Park uprising of 2016. 

The unrest occurred after Milwaukee Police Officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown shot and killed 23-year-old Sylville Smith. Heaggan-Brown was acquitted of Smith’s killing but was later sentenced to prison on unrelated sex crimes charges. His death sparked days of protest in Sherman Park, with clashes between residents and police and significant damage to property.

“I think a lot of it had to do with the community’s relationship to public safety, but also the historic disinvestment,” said Nicholson-Bovell, who was a new county supervisor representing parts of Sherman Park in District 10 at the time. 

Milwaukee’s manufacturing industry once supported good-paying jobs for Black residents, said U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore. But when many of those family-sustaining jobs vanished, residents faced structural inequalities that impact maternal health outcomes, incarceration rates and poverty and unemployment, she said. 

“Years of facing disinvestment and these challenges cultivated tensions that reached a breaking point after Sylville Smith’s death,” Moore said. 

In the aftermath of the uprising, many government leaders, community members and philanthropists shared an interest in addressing longstanding systemic issues that contributed to the summer’s tensions. 

Ten years later, those investments have led to some changes, although it’s unclear how many Sherman Park residents directly benefited.

Home renovations

An investment of $4.5 million in state funding to improve housing stock and employment opportunities in Sherman Park and Milwaukee was announced a few weeks after the uprising by then-Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett and Milwaukee County Executive Chris Abele. 

The initiative promised $1.5 million for employment programs, $2 million to help the city demolish and renovate tax-foreclosed properties and $1 million in Wisconsin Fast Forward grants awarded to Milwaukee businesses and nonprofits for job training. 

With $1 million, the city launched the Milwaukee Employment/Renovation Initiative, or MERI. The program helped six developers purchase distressed tax-foreclosed homes for $1 and receive grants of $10,000 per property to rehabilitate them to go back on the market. 

The program faced early criticism from residents, and progress was slow initially.

The developers eventually renovated and sold 104 homes, 81 in the greater Sherman Park area, with most projects wrapped up by mid-2019, according to a presentation to a Common Council committee at the time. Additional private donations and funding led to a $7.9 million total investment in the properties. 

Each property renovation had to employ at least one worker certified in the city’s Residents Preference Program for unemployed, underemployed or low-income workers. A total of 33,000 hours were logged by Residents Preference Program workers.  

Jim Gaillard, vice president of Ezekiel Community Development Corp., said the initiative fit naturally with the nonprofit’s model of training chronically unemployed people, minority contractors or those impacted by the justice system to develop skills in the construction trades while rehabbing homes. The nonprofit, also known as Ezekiel HOPE, works to sell the properties to first-time homeowners.

“We needed to show some people that they could do more than what they thought they could do, so it gave people hope,” Gaillard said.

The city later launched another round of funding, dubbed MERI 2.0, that was open to a wider boundary of tax-foreclosed properties. 

Lafayette Crump, commissioner of the Department of City Development, said both iterations helped shape the Homes MKE program, under Mayor Cavalier Johnson’s administration, which has fully renovated 77 homes with 20 more properties still in progress. 

“It’s really a great example of how strategic public investment could improve property values, return homes to the tax rolls but also strengthen neighborhood stability by moving more of these properties back into productive use,” Crump said. 

Ezekiel renovated five homes through MERI, three during the second phase and three in Homes MKE.  

“I think the other big thing is that it opened people’s eyes to what can be done if you put a concentrated effort together,” Gaillard said.

Reasons for Hope MKE Fund

Darlene C. Russell, director of community engagement for the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, remembers the period of unrest as a painful and emotional time.

“I also remember neighbors checking on one another, community leaders stepping forward and residents asking what they could do to help,” she said. 

That spirit of community care inspired the Greater Milwaukee Foundation to launch Reasons for Hope MKE with $200,000 in initial funding. The micro-grant fund is designed to provide immediate and flexible support for community-led efforts throughout the city, Russell said. 

Over the last 10 years, the fund awarded 312 grants totaling over $2 million. 

While Sherman Park was central to its creation, the fund is open to grassroots organizations throughout the city for neighborhood-strengthening initiatives such as youth and arts programming, community events and leadership development, according to Russell. 

“It was never intended to be a quick fix to systemic issues. Instead, it was designed to invest in trusted neighborhood leaders already doing the work,” Russell said. 

Residents from a variety of neighborhoods serve on the fund’s Community Advisory Council and receive training on grant administration. The current 13-member council reviews Reasons for Hope MKE grant applications and makes funding recommendations.

Community members have donated $146,800 to the Reasons for Hope MKE Fund in addition to institutional funding.

This year, the fund has supported Sherman Park through grants for activities like community gardening and wellness programming with Iwigara Holistic Hub in the 2800 block of North 35th Street and the UpStart Kitchen Food Crawl with PRISM Economic Development Corp.

Other projects

The BMO bank branch, O’Reilly Auto Parts, Jet Beauty Supply and a former BP gas station, which were damaged or destroyed during the uprising, were rebuilt. The BP gas station is now a Citgo. 

Other investments supported the Sherman Phoenix Marketplace development, the county park and other initiatives.

The city provided $225,000 for the Sherman Phoenix Tax Incremental District. Moore and Sen. Tammy Baldwin advocated for federal funds for the neighborhood, including a $750,000 grant to the Wisconsin Women’s Business Initiative Corp. to support the Sherman Phoenix and neighborhood entrepreneurs.

Milwaukee County received a $250,000 Community Development Investment Grant in 2018 from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp. to support construction costs of the entrepreneurial hub, according to Nicholson-Bovell. 

Milwaukee County funded $2.3 million in heating, ventilating and air conditioning system upgrades for the Mary Ryan Boys & Girls Club at Sherman Park in 2016.

More recently, Nicholson-Bovell and the County Board helped leverage nearly a million dollars of American Rescue Plan Act funding to build public and private partnerships to support a multimillion-dollar revitalization of the park. Improvements included a new splash pad, improved lighting and pathways, resurfaced athletic spaces and more.

“When you go into Sherman Park today, it looks a lot different than it did 10 years ago,” Nicholson-Bovell said. “It feels more open, more airy, it’s better lit.”

Reflections

Looking back, Crump said he’s glad there was political will at local and higher levels of government to make some determinations after the Sherman Park uprising, and later in 2020 and 2021 after the COVID pandemic and death of George Floyd prompted similar conversations.

“But it’s unfortunate that it takes those major incidents that draw a lot of attention in order to make those things happen,” he said. 

Going forward, Mabel Lamb, who became executive director of the Sherman Park Community Association in 2018, said she would like to see even more investment in the neighborhood’s housing stock, upgrades for businesses and the community as a whole. 

As their work continues, Moore, Crump and Nicholson-Bovell plan to keep listening to residents.

“My constituents didn’t want just jobs, but an opportunity to have a voice in their community and to feel respected,” Moore said. “There is still so much work to do.” 

Russell said after 15 years with the Greater Milwaukee Foundation, she’s learned that hope is not simply an idea. 

“It is something you can witness. It is something you can nurture. It is something you can invest in,” she said.

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

Investments changed Milwaukee’s Sherman Park after 2016 uprising, but who benefited remains unclear 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.

Reading Time: 7 minutes

This story is part of The uprising in Sherman Park: 10 years later, a Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service series examining resilience, collective action and ongoing efforts to address the inequities that sparked a pivotal moment in Milwaukee’s history.

Ten years after the Sherman Park uprising, many of the economic conditions residents and activists pointed to as problematic – even dangerous – in 2016 still remain, according to U.S. Census Bureau and local data analyzed by NNS.

Many residents at the time said the unrest on Aug. 13, 2016, was about more than the fatal police shooting of Sylville Smith by a Milwaukee police officer. They pointed to long-standing poverty, decades of disinvestment and a lack of opportunity as some of the conditions that fueled the uprising.

Today, even as some measures of economic progress have improved, many of those same challenges are still present in the Sherman Park neighborhood.

“Some good changes have happened,” said Vaun Mayes, a community organizer and one of the city’s violence interrupters. “But for the most part, Sherman Park is still basically the same and has the same general issues.”

What we looked at

To examine how Sherman Park has changed since the uprising, NNS analyzed U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey five-year estimates, comparing the 2016 and 2024 datasets, the most recent five-year data. 

Because the Census Bureau does not define Sherman Park as a neighborhood, NNS approximated the neighborhood using census tracts and a city neighborhood map. 

NNS examined:

• Population
• Race and ethnicity
• Poverty
• Employment
• Educational attainment
• Median household income
• Homeownership
• Housing vacancy
• Median gross rent

The comparison between indicators then and now shows a mixed picture.

Taken together, the findings suggest that although some measures associated with upward economic mobility improved, many of the economic outcomes often associated with those indicators, including higher incomes and greater housing stability, did not.

For example, the share of adults age 25 and older holding at least a bachelor’s degree increased from 7.2% to 8.9%, and the unemployment rate declined from 20.1% to 15.8%. However, poverty rose across every age group at the same time. 

Poverty increased most among elderly residents, increasing from 15.9% in 2016 to 33.0% in 2024. 

Similarly, median household income, adjusted for inflation, and homeownership declined: Roughly seven in 10 occupied housing units were renter-occupied in 2024, compared with roughly two-thirds in 2016.

Although incomes declined, the average cost of rent, adjusted for inflation, increased from $1,126 to $1,196. Population also declined in the area since 2016.

The neighborhood remained overwhelmingly Black, though it became slightly more racially diverse.

Public safety

Public safety trends also show a mixed bag.

Through Aug. 10, Milwaukee police recorded 97 aggravated assaults, 12 nonfatal shootings and three homicides in Sherman Park this year. All three types of crimes were up from the same point last year when police recorded 67 aggravated assaults, five nonfatal shootings and two homicides in that time span.

At the same time, robberies, thefts and carjackings were all below last year’s levels.

Specific types of violence in Sherman Park have fluctuated over the course of the past 10 years, according to data from the Milwaukee Homicide Review Commission. 

The neighborhood recorded 35 shooting victims in 2016, including homicides and nonfatal shootings. That number rose to 47 in 2017 – the year following the uprising. 

The number of homicide and nonfatal shooting victims has fluctuated over the decade, rising sharply during the pandemic years before falling to 17 in 2024.

ShotSpotter data from MPD gives a sense of the frequency of gun shots throughout the neighborhood over the past few years. 

Sherman Park accounted for roughly 7% of gunfire calls citywide between 2021 and 2025.

Community response

“There’s still good people there that are working to improve things that are happening on the ground in that neighborhood,” Mayor Cavalier Johnson said.

Johnson pointed to the Sherman Park Community Association; Sherman Phoenix, a marketplace built on the grounds of a bank that was set ablaze during the unrest; the neighborhood’s new Business Improvement District; and his administration’s Year of Housing initiative as examples of continued investment in the neighborhood.

Karin Tyler, executive director of the city’s Department of Community Wellness and Safety, said the Sherman Park uprising was a defining moment for Milwaukee, one that exposed deep challenges but also sparked action, resilience and a stronger commitment to community-led public safety. 

From that moment came critical investments, she said, including Milwaukee’s Blueprint for Peace and Program the Parks, which created safe spaces and positive opportunities for young people.

“Sherman Park also has one of the strongest networks of block captains through the Alert Neighbor Program, a reflection of residents taking ownership of the safety and strength of their neighborhood,” Tyler said. “Local businesses throughout Sherman Park and the surrounding area have stepped up as well, investing in and working alongside the community.” 

Johnson said that Black homeownership has improved citywide, though those gains haven’t appeared yet in the Sherman Park data analyzed by NNS.

Despite the challenges, Mayes has also seen signs of progress.

“SPCA (Sherman Park Community Association) has become a stronger and more vocal and invested organization for the area and have taken up and advocated for more issues,” he said.

“But has housing changed? Has job access changed? Quality of life?” he asked. 

Mayes said he’s also noticed a gap between investment and outcomes in youth services. 

“Investment and grants focused on issues of youth have been prioritized. However, the impact from those investments could be more impactful and intentional,” he said.

Work to be done

While citing progress, Johnson also acknowledged work that still needs to occur in the neighborhood, especially given its recent past. 

“Certainly, there are challenges. There can be lagging things, especially when something traumatic like that happens,” Johnson said. “It is like a bomb going off in a place like that.” 

Johnson said the city needs to do more work on housing in Sherman Park.

He said his administration’s plans to focus on housing this year will eventually impact neighborhoods such as Sherman Park.

Though the changes will take time, Johnson said, some of the issues that have plagued Sherman Park and other neighborhoods for years have historic roots. He pointed to decades of deindustrialization that continues to affect Milwaukee.

“What it did is leave cities, communities like Milwaukee and the Upper Midwest … holding the bag, looking around like, ‘Where are the opportunities?’” he said. “That is not a city of Milwaukee issue, it’s more of a national and international sort of issue.”

Milwaukee Public Schools also recognizes the deep pain that sparked the unrest in Sherman Park, said Stephen Davis, the district’s media relations manager. He stressed the district’s commitment to serving students and families across every neighborhood in Milwaukee.

“Specifically, we are actively directing investments toward schools in historically disinvested communities,” Davis said, citing MPS’ investment of nearly $13 million in four schools on the North Side as well as a new districtwide literacy plan to address the “multigenerational literacy crisis.” 

The Milwaukee Police Department stressed its commitment to Sherman Park and other communities as well. 

The department remains committed to strengthening trust and partnership, a spokesperson for the department said. 

“We continue to enhance police-community relations and ensure our training, policies and risk-management practices align with nationally recognized best standards,” the spokesperson said.

Mayes said he’s seen some fruit of efforts to improve police-community relations, describing the relationship as “leaps better than back then.”

The city’s formal body that pays close attention to how the police and community are relating to each other is the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission. 

“The (Fire and Police Commission) is planning some more meetings out in the community, which is exciting,” said Commissioner Krissie Fung.

“I’m also looking forward to continuing to improve the complaint process with the new investigator that is coming on board,” she said. 

Fung acknowledged that the commission’s role in overseeing the Police Department has changed significantly over the past decade, particularly following the passage of Act 12, which shifted some crucial authority of the commission to the police chief.

At the time, both the chair and vice chair of the commission resigned in protest.

“Act 12 was a blow to the whole city,” Amanda Avalos, the commission’s former vice chair, previously told NNS. “It took away something that was a really positive thing that the city had. … It was a really unique form of community power.”

Fung said one high point for transparency was the adoption of Standard Operating Procedure 575 governing the public release of police video.

Police video of Sylville Smith’s shooting death wasn’t released until June 2017, when it was shown during the murder trial of Milwaukee Police Officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown. He was eventually acquitted of Smith’s killing but sentenced to prison on an unrelated sexual assault charge. 

Why these metrics?

The symptoms residents said helped give rise to the unrest in 2016 reflected what researchers describe as the social determinants of health — the economic and social conditions that shape people’s health and quality of life.

Those conditions include employment, education, income, housing stability and neighborhood conditions.

“Limited access to stable employment, economic opportunity and resources can contribute to the conditions that increase the risk of violence,” Tyler said. “Public safety cannot be separated from economic stability and opportunity.”

Tyler said improving conditions means investing in local leaders like Vaun Mayes and programs that support youth engagement, violence prevention, economic opportunity and community-centered public safety.  

Today, many Milwaukee leaders continue to describe violence prevention in those terms.

Michael Levas, a specialist in pediatrics and emergency medicine at Children’s Wisconsin, says that while parenting plays an important role in preventing violence, parents also need stable housing, economic opportunity and community support to help children succeed. 

In other words, economic conditions can increase the risk factors associated with violence.

Mayes said the data trends in Sherman Park since the uprising acknowledged the good, bad and yet to come:

“We have some great things and progress, yet there is still much work left to do.”

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Paul Kiefer of Wisconsin Watch contributed to this report.

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

10 years after uprising, stubborn challenges persist in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood 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.

Wisconsin rail service to Chicago and the Pacific Northwest will share in a $140 million upgrade from the federal government.

The investment, awarded by the Federal Railroad Administration, will be used to overhaul 41 passenger locomotives that pull trains on the popular Hiawatha route connecting Milwaukee and Chicago and trains that pass through Wisconsin enroute to Washington state.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) announced the award Wednesday. The contract was a joint application involving the Wisconsin Department of Transportation and corresponding agencies in Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Oregon and Washington, all of which will also have passenger routes that will be served by the upgraded motive power.

“Investing in this rail line is an investment in the Main Streets that will get more customers, in families’ safety, and in our state’s future,” Baldwin said.

“This grant will help keep the locomotive fleet in a state of good repair, enhancing rail line resiliency, and preventing unplanned outages,” said Wisconsin DOT Secretary Kristina Boardman.

The funding came from the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law enacted in the first year of former President Joe Biden’s term. Baldwin’s office noted that the law was enacted without the votes of any Wisconsin Republicans in Congress.

Reading Time: 3 minutes

The U.S. Department of Education is investigating  whether Milwaukee Public Schools uses race as a factor when considering disciplining students.

The investigation comes as the department on Tuesday issued new guidance to educational institutions. The department argues that using race as a factor when disciplining is a violation of Title VI. Title VI prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin in programs that receive federal financial assistance. 

MPS media relations manager Stephen Davis said the district received notice from the department’s Office for Civil Rights on Tuesday morning. 

A statement released Tuesday by the Department of Education doesn’t specify what prompted the investigation, but says that education leaders in Milwaukee “derided facially neutral school policies as reflecting systemic ‘whiteness,’ seemingly encouraging school officials to consider race in disciplinary practices.”  

Davis said the district will need more information from the department to respond appropriately.  

New school discipline policy guidance

The Department of Education’s new guidance, referred to as a “Dear Colleague Letter,” is not a legal statute, but instead explains how the administration interprets existing laws. It details how discipline policies “must treat students even-handedly and must neither favor nor disfavor any student based on their race.” 

The letter argues that the Constitution protects against intentional discrimination, not unintentional impacts. 

“Mere statistical disparities generally cannot show discriminatory intent or disparate treatment,” the statement said.

If discipline policies are adopted and applied without wrongful racial intent, are facially neutral and applied even-handedly without regard to race, the Department of Education argues that those policies do not violate Title VI.

A letter sent to Milwaukee Public Schools did not provide information about the investigation past a basic notification and information on how to get in contact with the Office of Civil Rights.

MPS was one of only two school districts, the other in Fayetteville, Arkansas, being investigated.

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, a conservative public-interest law firm, issued a statement praising the Trump administration for investigating race-based discipline practices at MPS.

“(Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty) has sounded the alarm on race-based approaches to school discipline for years, beginning with federal guidance issued during the Obama administration and renewed under the Biden administration,” read the statement.

Oversuspension of Black and Latino male students at MPS

David Castillo, who was part of the founding team of the district’s Department of Black and Latino Male Achievement, helped establish the curriculum formed largely as a solution to the oversuspension of Black and Latino boys in the district. 

The Office of Civil Rights pushed MPS to reform its disciplinary policies in 2018 after a multi-year investigation found over 100 instances over a two-year span where Black students were expelled when white students were suspended for similar infractions. Black students also received harsher discipline than white students.

Castillo said he saw lower suspension rates for Black and Latino boys for fighting while participating in Black and Latino Male Achievement because the program helped to see students like them reflected in a positive light.

Because the data showed that these students were disproportionately suspended at higher rates, Castillo said, it was important to target that demographic specially. 

Castillo said focusing on solutions for those most marginalized and affected by an issue opens the potential to find solutions for everyone else. 

“You’re going to want to start where you see things are ineffective,” Castillo said.

Racial disparities in suspensions remain

Black students are still disciplined at disproportionate rates at MPS.

Black students were involved in 54% of the incidents that resulted in disciplinary action during the 2024-25 school year but made up 78% of suspensions and 86% of expulsions, according to data from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction.

White students at MPS were involved in 9.5% of discipline incidents, made up 2% of suspensions and had no expulsions. 

Henry Leonard, an MPS board member until 2025, pushed for the district to experiment with restorative practices as an alternative to suspensions and expulsions. He saw student behavior successfully change after trying restorative practices in his own classroom when he was a teacher.

He said when he got evaluations, the district’s administration was impressed by how his students listened to and respected him.

“They would say … you have almost no suspensions and fights are to a minimum,” Leonard said. “Over time, it became really clear … this was by far a better way to at least work in a classroom.”

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Alex Klaus is the education solutions reporter for the Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service and a corps member of Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and communities. Report for America plays no role in editorial decisions in the NNS newsroom.

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Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.

US Education Department investigates Milwaukee Public Schools over race-conscious discipline practices 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 Trump administration will move ahead with plans to end more than 25 years of sweeping protections for tens of millions of wild, federally managed acres across the U.S.

Brooke Rollins, head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, on Tuesday filed a rule to rescind “in its entirety” the national 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which prohibits road construction, logging and mining on about 30% of lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service, mostly in forested areas of the West. Rollins had last year filed a notice of intent that the agency was considering “rolling back” some protections under the rule.

A draft environmental impact statement will be posted Wednesday, and the public will have until 11:59 p.m. Eastern time/8:59 p.m. Pacific time on Sept. 21 to comment before changes are finalized.

The Roadless Rule prohibitions are intended to protect wildlife, watersheds and old-growth forests from human development and human-caused wildfires. But in her announcement, Rollins said she was rescinding the rules on nearly 45 million acres under the banner of wildfire prevention, saying the protections instead have led to “overgrown stands, insect outbreaks and disease” turning “healthy landscapes into tinderboxes.”

“For too long, outdated restrictions have kept tens of millions of forested acres off-limits to the very treatments that improve forest health and reduce wildfire risk to our communities,” she said.

Rollins’ assertions are not borne out by research, including from Oregon State University Professor Chris Dunn, a forest ecologist and wildfire expert. Dunn and his colleagues found that most wildfires in Western national forests between 1984 and 2018 started near roads, showing an increased likelihood of wildfires where roads exist because the No. 1 cause of wildfires is people.

The U.S. Forest Service’s own research also shows the majority of human-caused ignitions occur on roadsides, and 20 years of monitoring data does not support assertions that repealing road prohibitions will improve forest health, researchers found.

No public meetings

Rollins first proposed rolling back the rule in August 2025, saying at the time the move would support President Donald Trump’s executive orders meant to increase logging and energy development on federal lands.

That notice of intent set off a 21-day public comment period that brought in more than 600,000 comments, most of which expressed opposition to any changes that would erode the Roadless Rules prohibitions on development. Federal officials have not held a single public meeting since then.

In the two years leading up to final passage of the 2001 rule, Forest Service officials held 600 public meetings across Western states and received more than 1.6 million public comments.

Roughly 96% of the Forest Service’s inventoried roadless areas are located in 12 western states, including 2 million acres in Oregon within places like Iron Mountain in the Willamette National Forest, Joseph Canyon in Wallowa County, Tumalo Mountain in central Oregon and Lookout Mountain in the Ochoco National Forest.

Last year, U.S. Rep. Andrea Salinas, a Democrat representing Oregon’s 6th Congressional District based in the Willamette Valley, introduced the Roadless Area Conservation Act to enshrine the rule in federal law, but it does not yet have enough support to pass. In the House, 88 of her Democratic colleagues have signed on as co-sponsors, including Oregon Reps. Suzanne Bonamici, Janelle Bynum and Maxine Dexter, as have 25 U.S. senators. The state’s two other representatives, Democrat Val Hoyle and Republican Cliff Bentz, have not signed on as sponsors.

No state would be more affected by the rule termination than Alaska, which has almost a third of the 45 million acres affected by the pending change.

Alaska is home to the Tongass National Forest, a West Virginia-sized stretch of islands and waterways in the Southeast Alaska panhandle that make up the largest surviving temperate rainforest in the world.

Idaho and Colorado would not be impacted by the rule changes because the two states negotiated their own agreements with the federal government more than a decade ago to permit projects that would “reduce hazardous fuels” near wildfire prone communities and to allow some local and state decisions about development on the federal acres.

Different takes on the past 25 years

U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Schultz, who previously worked for one of the country’s largest lumber producers in Idaho, said in a statement last year that the Roadless Rule has frustrated land managers for years and served as a barrier to commercial logging.

“More than 40% of inventoried roadless areas, primarily in the West, have high or very high wildfire hazard potential. And only 5% of those areas have received hazardous fuels reduction treatments since 2014,” he said.

Rollins’ announcement included praise from the Republican governors of Montana, Utah and Wyoming, who said rescinding the federal protections would give their states flexibility to manage land locally. Democratic governors and other elected officials in states including Oregon, Washington and New Mexico have criticized the administration’s efforts and blame a century of largely unrestricted logging on federal lands, climate change and recent losses to Forest Service staff for worsening fires and declining forest conditions in the West.

Statements following Rollins’ announcement made clear conservation and logging groups have seen the last 25 years of the Roadless Rule quite differently.

Abigail Dillen, president of the nonprofit environmental legal group Earthjustice, said in a statement that the group will likely sue to stop the rule changes from moving forward.

“For 25 years, the Roadless Rule has kept our wildest forests intact. The benefits have been incalculable for people, for water, for wildlife, and for the climate,” she said. “Earthjustice has successfully defended the Roadless Rule for a quarter century, and we are not going to stop now.”

Travis Joseph, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a trade association representing the timber industry, said in a statement that the Roadless Rule is among “failed policies” meant to protect forests.

“The Forest Service is right to take a hard look at a policy that was written for forest conditions that looked very different 25 years ago,” he said. “Our national forests are experiencing severe wildfire, drought, insects and disease on a scale that few anticipated when the Roadless Rule was adopted.”