Gov. Tony Evers celebrates "historic" tax cuts in the last state budget. Schools are still facing austerity. Photo via Gov. Evers' Facebook page

As Republicans in Congress struggle to deliver President Donald Trump’s massive cuts to Medicaid, food assistance, education, health research and just about every other social good you can think of, in order to clear the way for trillions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest people in the U.S., here in Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers and state lawmakers are working on the next state budget.

The one thing our Democratic governor and Republican legislative leaders seem to agree on is that we need a tax cut.

After throwing away more than 600 items in Evers’ budget proposal, GOP leggies now say they can’t move forward with their own budget plan until  Evers makes good on his promise to meet with them and negotiate the terms for the tax-cutting that both sides agree they want to do. Evers has expressed optimism that the budget will be done on time this summer, and said the tax cuts need to be part of the budget, not a separate, stand-alone bill. Evers wants a more progressive tax system, with cuts targeted to lower-income people. In the last budget, he opposed expanding the second-lowest tax bracket, which would have offered the same benefits to higher earners as the lower middle class.

But what if we don’t need a tax cut at all?

It has long been an article of faith in the Republican Party that tax cuts are a miracle cure for everything. Trickle-down economics is  a proven failure:  The wealthy and corporations tend to bank their tax cuts rather than injecting the extra money into the economy, as tax-cutters say they will. The benefits of the 2017 tax cuts that Congress is struggling to extend went exclusively to corporations and the very wealthy and failed to trickle down on the rest of us. 

 In the second Trump administration, we are in new territory when it comes to tax cutting. The administration and its enablers are hell-bent on destroying everything from the Department of Education to critical health research to food stamps and Medicaid in order to finance massive tax breaks for the very rich. 

If ever there were a good time to reexamine the tax-cutting reflex, it’s now.

Evers has said he is not willing to consider the Republicans’ stand-alone tax-cut legislation, and that, instead, tax cuts should be part of the state budget. That makes sense, since new projections show lower-than-expected tax revenue even without a cut, and state budget-writers have a lot to consider as we brace for the dire effects of federal budget cuts. The least our leaders can do is not blindly give away cash without even assessing future liabilities.

But beyond that, we need to reconsider the knee-jerk idea that we are burdened with excessive taxes and regulations, that our state would be better off if we cut investments in our schools and universities, our roads and bridges, our clean environment, museums, libraries and other shared spaces and stopped keeping a floor under poor kids by providing basic food and health care assistance. 

Wisconsin Republicans like to tout the list of states produced annually by the Tax Foundation promoting “business friendly” environments that reduce corporate taxes, including Wyoming, South Dakota, Alaska and Florida. They also like to bring up ALEC’s “Rich States, Poor States” report that gave top billing last year to Utah, Idaho and Arizona for low taxes and deregulation. 

What they don’t track when they lift up those states are pollution, low wages and bankrupt public school systems. 

I’m old enough to remember when it was headline news that whole families in the U.S. were living in their cars, when homelessness was a new term, coined during the administration of Ronald Reagan, the father of bogus trickle-down economics and massive cuts to services for the poor. 

Somehow, we got used to the idea that urban parts of the richest nation on Earth resemble the poorest developing countries, with human misery and massive wealth existing side by side in our live-and-let-die economy.

Wisconsin, thanks to its progressive history, managed to remain a less unequal state, with top public schools and a great university system, as well as a clean, beautiful environment and well-maintained infrastructure. But here, too, we have been getting used to our slide to the bottom of the list of states, thanks in large part to the damage done by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker. 

We now rank 44th in the nation for investment in our once-great universities, and the austerity that’s been imposed on higher education is taking a toll across the state. Our consistently highly rated public schools have suffered from a decade and a half of budget cuts that don’t allow districts to keep pace with inflation, and recent state budgets have not made up the gap. 

Now threats to Medicaid, Head Start, AmeriCorps, our excellent library system, UW-Madison research and environmental protections do not bode well for Wisconsin’s future.

In the face of brutal federal cuts, we need to recommit to our shared interest in investing in a decent society, and figure out how to preserve what’s great about our state.

Tax cuts do not make the top of the list of priorities.

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

Yes.

As of May 21, all Milwaukee County teens who are the responsibility of the county and held in Wisconsin’s youth prisons were Black or Hispanic.

There were 28 teens (96.4% Black) under “non-serious juvenile offender” court orders.

That includes teens age 17 and under sentenced to the state-run Lincoln Hills or Copper Lake schools – where costs approach $500,000 per year per youth – or the Mendota mental health facility.

Milwaukee County official Kelly Pethke said the county pays for non-serious juvenile offenders; the state pays for juveniles who are sentenced for more serious felonies. Pethke said in early May there were 35 Milwaukee County teens under serious orders, but she didn’t have a racial breakdown. 

The Wisconsin Department of Corrections said May 22 it tracks racial data by region. Nine of 66 youths (13.6%) in the southeast region were white.

Researcher Monique Liston cited the racial disparity in a social media post.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Milwaukee County: Youth In Our Care Dashboard May 21, 2025
• Milwaukee County: Youth In Our Care Dashboard
• Wisconsin Watch: One child, $463,000 per year: Ballooning costs of troubled Lincoln Hills youth prison
• LinkedIn: Monique Liston post
• Wisconsin Department of Corrections: Email

In May 2025, were all Milwaukee County teens under county authority in youth prisons Black or Hispanic? 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 rural county in central Wisconsin has filed a lawsuit seeking to remove its county treasurer elected less than a year ago and replace her with the person she defeated in that election.

Adams County filed suit last week asking the court to declare that Treasurer Kara Dolezal “vacated” her position and her former opponent Kim Meinhardt is “entitled to hold that office.”

The suit is essentially seeking a judicial sign-off on a resolution the Adams County Board approved in late April. But state Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican who represents a portion of the county, argued during and after the meeting that the county followed an illegal process to remove an elected official.

Dolezal, a Republican, defeated Meinhardt, an independent, by more than 900 votes in November 2024. In April, Dolezal was reelected to her post as town treasurer for the town of Lincoln in Adams County, a position she held prior to being elected to county-wide office. 

In both the lawsuit and the county board resolution, Adams County has argued Dolezal vacated her county office by accepting a “legally incompatible” position with the town. 

In a statement, Adams County said it is “confident in its legal position.” The county said it’s taking the issue to court to bring “finality” to the situation.

“Understanding that a lot of interest in this issue has found its way into the media and on social media, the County is not going to comment on ongoing litigation or try the case outside of the courtroom,” the statement reads.

But Krug said it’s long been common in Wisconsin for people to hold similar offices for both their town and county.

He said he’s working with colleagues to introduce legislation to clarify it’s possible for the same person to hold positions as county and town treasurer at the same time if both are elected positions.

“We are specifically going to say that there is no contradiction or incompatibility between the role of county treasurer and town treasurer when both are elected by people in their community,” Krug said.

But he also said the lawmakers are trying to do so without interfering with the court’s process.

“We’re trying to be cognizant of the court process while we’re introducing legislation,” Krug said. “But at the same time … we still want legislation coming forward to protect those individuals from having to go through the same type of thing, and, on the flip side of it, trying to protect their communities from having to go through exorbitant legal fees.”

While Dolezal has continued to perform her duties as county treasurer following the county board’s vote, Meinhardt took the oath of office for the position on May 12, according to the suit.

Dolezal has held both offices since January and was never asked to resign from her post with the town, she told WPR earlier this month. In a May 3 statement, Dolezal said she didn’t view the two positions as “incompatible” and she was transparent about being a town treasurer when she ran for county office.

“The voters still elected me as their County Treasurer,” she stated. “I believe it sets a concerning precedent if County Board Supervisors can override the will of the voters.”

Dolezal’s attorney, Catherine La Fleur, was not available for comment Tuesday.

In the lawsuit, attorneys for the county said public officials cannot simultaneously hold incompatible offices, citing a past state attorney general opinion that says the duties of a local treasurer and county treasurer are “wholly inconsistent.” 

“A town treasurer collects property taxes on behalf of, not only the town, but the county, state, and other taxing jurisdictions in which the town is located,” the complaint states. “As a result, the town treasurer is subordinate to the county treasurer.”

After Dolezal took office with the county in January, the complaint states that disputes arose between Dolezal and local treasurers within the county during the property tax settlement process in the spring of 2025.

According to the complaint, the dispute was “regarding the treatment of certain property tax payments, resulting in the County directing an audit of the County Treasurer’s office.”

Mary Lou Poehler, treasurer for the town of Springville in Adams County, spoke in public comment at the county board’s meeting last month. Poehler said “financial issues” had arisen with the county since Dolezal took office.

“Being a town treasurer, I know of a lot of these,” Poehler said at the April 29 meeting. “And our town, for one, was shorted quite a bit of money.”

But Krug, the area lawmaker, said the county did not follow the proper process for removing an elected official, which requires a notice, public hearing and two-thirds vote.

Regardless of whether the county felt both offices were incompatible or had performance concerns, Krug said the board still should have followed the process outlined in state statute.

“You could just follow a simple state statute process to legitimize it,” he said. “When you take time to think and slow down, you could actually accomplish the same goal without looking like you’re trying to do something behind the scenes.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

Adams County asks court to remove and replace elected treasurer 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.

SEIU Wisconsin and UnityPoint Health-Meriter hospital will meet May 29 to resume contract talks covering 950 nurses. But the hospital management and the union have given conflicting accounts about plans for earlier negotiations. (Wisconsin Examiner photo)

SEIU Wisconsin and Meriter hospital management confirmed Wednesday plans to meet on Thursday, May 29 to resume negotiation on a new contract covering about 950 nurses.

Talks ended Monday without an agreement, and the union said it would go forward on Tuesday, May 27, with a five-day strike.

On Wednesday, however, the two parties gave contradictory accounts of the conclusion of their talks and the prospect of further negotiations before the walkout begins.

In Meriter’s initial statement on Tuesday after the strike was announced, the hospital reported that a bargaining session was scheduled for Monday, May 26.

In a statement Wednesday, however, the union bargaining committee said they had never scheduled talks for that day.

UnityPoint Health-Meriter issued an updated statement Wednesday asserting that “SEIU Wisconsin notified Meriter on Tuesday that they are no longer available to meet on May 26 and are now offering May 29 as their first available date to resume negotiations.”

The management statement quoted Meriter’s vice president of human resources Shana Wuebben: “SEIU Wisconsin has declined the bargaining session previously set for Monday, May 26 and has rescheduled bargaining sessions to Thursday, May 29 near the end of the 5-day strike period,” Wuebben said.

The bargaining committee flatly disputed the characterization that the Monday date had been agreed to.

“There was no agreement between the parties to meet on Monday May 26,” the committee’s statement said.

In the hospital’s statement, Wuebben said, “Meriter is listening. We have made great strides in our proposals and tentative agreements to date.  And we are ready to continue bargaining.”  

The union, however, charged that management — not the union — was responsible for ending the talks Monday.

“At our last bargaining session on Monday May 19, the union bargaining committee offered to stay as late as needed to reach an agreement,” the bargaining committee statement said.

“The union was clear that management needed to make movement on our core priorities — priorities we have been crystal clear about since Day 1 — in order to avoid a strike,” the committee said. “Instead of engaging in discussions about our priority issues, management chose to end the bargaining session.”

Wuebben reiterated that Meriter’s management negotiators are “ready to return to the bargaining table at any time.” 

The union statement said bargaining team members are also ready to return to the table, but said they would need to see evidence that management was willing to move on their issues relating to staffing ratios, stronger hospital security and compensation.

“The union bargaining team has consistently made themselves available to meet with Meriter management, and we will continue to do so,” the union statement said. “If Meriter management would commit to make meaningful movement on our priority issues before the strike, we would consider scheduling a meeting with them before Tuesday May 27.”

Wisconsin Watch partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

No.

Transgender people – those who have a gender identity that differs from the sex assigned to them at birth – are not considered by medical authorities to have mental illness simply because they are transgender.

In 2013, the American Psychiatric Association revised its mental disorders manual and no longer listed being transgender as a mental disorder. 

“Gender identity disorder” was eliminated and replaced with “gender dysphoria.”

Gender dysphoria is a diagnosis for the distress experienced by some whose gender identity conflicts with their sex assigned at birth.

Numerous medical groups, including the World Health Organization, have stated that being trans is not a mental disorder.

U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace, R-S.C., suggested May 17 at the Wisconsin Republican Party convention that being trans is a mental illness. She said “women shouldn’t be forced to share” facilities such as bathrooms “with mentally ill men.” 

Her campaign spokesperson did not provide information to support Mace’s reference to mental illness.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

• Mayo Clinic: Transgender facts
• NBC News: Being transgender no longer a 'mental disorder': APA
• American Psychiatric Association: Gender Dysphoria Diagnosis
• Wisconsin Watch: What gender-affirming care means to these Wisconsin families
• World Health Organization: Gender incongruence and transgender health in the ICD
• PolitiFact: Vivek Ramaswamy got it wrong; being trans isn’t a mental health disorder
• WisconsinEye: 2025 Republican Party of Wisconsin State Convention

Is being transgender classified as a mental illness? 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.

This story was originally published by The 19th.

MILWAUKEE — When Yessenia Ruano walks through the door of her home after work, her husband, Miguel, is in the kitchen, shredding chicken with two forks, and her twin daughters are in the living room, playing on an iPad. The sound of “Primer Impacto” fills the background. 

Ruano opens the fridge to keep the dinner prep going. On the top shelf, there are more than 150 corn tortillas lying flat in their plastic bags. On the bar counter, near unopened mail and trinkets, is a pack of zinnia seeds waiting for the last frost to pass before Yessenia and the girls plant them in the patio across the driveway. 

This doesn’t look like the home of a family on the verge of being uprooted, until Ruano and her husband — one rolling chicken into tortillas over hot oil, the other tending to a pile of dishes on the sink — start talking about the questions suddenly pressing on their everyday lives. 

In February, during a check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agent told Ruano that the government would accelerate plans to deport her. Save for a change in her immigration status, the agent said, she should report back to ICE in two months with a plane ticket back to El Salvador set for 50 days out. 

It’s April now; her next appointment with ICE is coming up in just a few weeks. “She said I should buy just one plane ticket,” Ruano, 38, tells her husband, recalling a conversation with a colleague at the local public school where she works. Her colleague reasoned that if Ruano bought a fare for everyone in the family and her deportation was averted, they’d be throwing a lot of money in the trash.

“I’ve always thought we should buy four tickets,” Miguel tells her, hunched over the sink. A few months ago, Ruano went on a ladies’ retreat with her church for two nights and left him and their two children to fend for themselves. The girls cried and cried and barely slept. Their dog — a fluffy, white Bichon Frisé who was named Snowflake before the family adopted him and is now named Copito, short for snowflake in Spanish — barely ate. 

Ruano agrees that the family should stay together, but most days, she’s convinced they’ll never use any of the plane tickets in question. Ruano, for 14 years, has clung onto hope that the immigration powers that be will eventually see that she belongs in the United States. She has checked in with ICE 17 times, worn a GPS monitor. She’s also built the life she shares with her husband and their Milwaukee-born daughters, a job at a local school and volunteer work at her local Catholic parish. 

Through it all, she has searched for ways to create roots in the United States. Recently, she petitioned for a visa created for human trafficking victims, based on her experience of forced labor when she first entered the country. That petition is stuck in the growing backlog at the agency that handles visa applications, one that has accelerated since the start of the Trump administration.

“Of course, practically speaking, they can do whatever they want,” Ruano says. “If they’re a little human, then I can prove I belong here. If they just care about detaining people to meet a certain quota and deport them — if I’m just another number — then I can already hear them saying, ‘Ma’am, I don’t care about your case. We’re so sorry, but we’re going to send you back to your country.’” 

Ruano is among the millions of immigrants living in the United States who are facing deportation as the Trump administration ramps up the removal of people with no permanent immigration status. That includes immigrants who, like Ruano, have been in the country for more than a decade and have no criminal record, and whose ties to the country include young children — some of them U.S. citizens — and also careers and community. 

Ruano’s precarious situation isn’t entirely the product of Trump-era policies. Like millions of immigrants living in the United States, she entered the country at the southern border, lured by the promise of safety and stability. Like thousands of others, she asked for asylum and was allowed to stay as she waited for a resolution on her petition, as long as she followed the law. Even after her petition was unsuccessful, the U.S. government allowed her to remain in the country provided that she checked in regularly with immigration officials. 

Under the United States’ broken immigration system, one in which laws that haven’t been updated in decades no longer align with the reality of immigration patterns, the country’s reliance on the immigrant labor force or even the government’s ability to enforce such laws, immigrants like Ruano have always lived at the discretion — at the whim — of whoever is in power, from the president down to the ICE officer who is looking at their case that day. 

When President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, that dynamic changed again, fueled by an agenda that seems to be taking shape day by day. 

Ruano remains in this limbo, bracing for her life to be upended while fighting for a different outcome. She follows the countless news stories about people who are in ICE detention, or who have been swiftly deported back to their home countries. Hundreds of thousands more are living just like her, navigating the shifting sands of American immigration policy. 

Ruano’s day usually starts early, and by 6:15 a.m., her daughters Paola and Eli, 9, are in the dining room, ready for their mom to brush their hair. Back in El Salvador, Ruano didn’t think she would ever have children. The world seemed dangerous and broken, and life was expensive. “With the cost of living, I always thought, how?” she said one morning while brushing Eli’s hair and finishing it with a braid.

Ruano and her husband went to high school together in El Salvador and reconnected again in Milwaukee at the frozen pizza manufacturing plant where they both worked. Eventually, they started dreaming of growing their family. Soon there were four of them. Juggling two babies was hard, but they both landed steady work and were able to buy the duplex they live in, an older home they’ve improved slowly. Here, they are watching Eli and Paola thrive. 

Eli loves art. She loves to take clay-like dirt from the backyard and shape it. In their living room, Ruano points to a little bowl made of coiled clay, brown and crumbly and beautiful. A bucket holds dozens of small figurines made with air-dry clay, detailed and complex. 

Paola is much more interested in building with Legos, and Ruano says proudly that she is ahead of her peers in math. Barely older than her sister, Paola has also taken on a caretaking role in the family that Ruano says came to her naturally.

Ruano’s daughters have been learning the violin and the viola. They’ve been debating whether to keep going with the string instruments or move on to another extracurricular activity.

“All of those special skills and talents, we can’t really tend to them in my country,” Ruano said. “It’s like they’re trying to rip away my dreams, and also those of my two girls.”

Eli and Paola are U.S. citizens. Their lives would be significantly different in El Salvador, where economic opportunity, gender-based violence and more could alter the course of their lives. Their father, Miguel, has no legal immigration status. The 19th is not publishing his last name to protect his privacy and employment.

Both times Ruano has appeared before ICE this year, agents have alluded to her daughters. During her February appointment, the agent said Ruano should buy plane tickets for her girls as well because she “would hate to see the family separated,” Ruano recalls. During her April appointment, Ruano’s lawyer at the time recalled that the agent scanned Ruano’s plane ticket and asked why she hadn’t bought plane tickets for the girls.

Ruano has spent time talking to each daughter about the different possibilities ahead for their family, including a new life in El Salvador. 

“I tried to focus on the positive things, things I liked as a girl,” Ruano said. Ruano explained that the school day in El Salvador would be shorter — the country has one of the shortest school weeks in the world. There would be more time for play. 

“I told them that they’d see mango trees, orange trees,” Ruano said. “Things we don’t have here.” 

They’d still get to sleep next to each other, as they do in Milwaukee.

Ruano has a trove of files documenting her immigration journey in the United States, but one piece of paper worn thin from years of use tracks every check-in she’s had with ICE since she entered the United States from Mexico in 2011.

At the time, Ruano petitioned for the only form of relief she was told she was eligible for, a form of asylum called “withholding of removal,” which requires immigrants to prove that there is at least a 51% likelihood of suffering persecution in their home country. 

When her case finally came up for review a decade later, a judge told Ruano that her petition would be denied and said Ruano could withdraw it to avoid having the denial on her record. During the hearing, the judge told Ruano through her then-lawyer that the U.S. government wasn’t actively deporting people like her, who had no criminal record. She could explore other avenues for legal status. 

By 2024, she was running out of alternatives and time. ICE placed her in a monitoring program called Alternatives to Detention, or ATD, and told that her deadline to file for a different path to legal status was near. 

ICE advertises the ATD program as having been designed for immigrants who were “thoroughly vetted” and deemed not a risk to public safety. To enroll someone in the program, ICE officers consider their ties to the community and status as a caregiver or provider. Ruano checked all of the boxes. 

Ruano’s participation in the program left a mark: She has a band of pale skin around her wrist, where ICE secured a GPS device. 

The device tracked her location, had facial-recognition software for regular check-ins with ICE, and had messaging capabilities between the agency and Ruano; “Please call your officer” was a regular prompt. Ruano could swap the batteries to make sure the wrist monitor was powered at all times. Sometimes the backup battery wouldn’t work, so she was left to plug the monitor — still attached to her wrist — directly into a wall outlet. When it became loose and couldn’t read her pulse, it would blare loudly. “I would be in the classroom with kids, trying to fix it,” Ruano said. 

At home, Ruano pored over the internet and eventually found a firm in Chicago that helped her file for a T visa as a victim of human trafficking. 

The application was almost complete when Ruano was asked to report to ICE for a check-in on Valentine’s Day. Ruano’s lawyer at the time told her that she feared there was a better-than-90% chance she would be detained. Ruano felt that the time she was promised to finish her application had been suddenly taken away.

She spent most of the week of the appointment working furiously to make sure her T visa application was in the hands of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, that her personal documents were in order, that there was a care plan for the girls beyond Miguel. She did all of that while juggling calls with reporters and advocates from Voces de la Frontera, the local immigrant advocacy group supporting her. She watched herself get to the brink of an emotional breakdown. The voice inside her head begged for surrender: “I’m done. I can’t keep going. I’ll go back to my country and start over, from zero. The fight is over.”

It’s a shift from her default, a hope and belief that things will work out. 

“It’s been 14 years and I’ve suffered a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. Every week before one of my hearings with a judge or a check-in with ICE, those are nights of no sleep,” Ruano said. “I’ll wake up at one in the morning needing to vomit.” She’s had 17 appointments over that time span, and 17 sleepless weeks.

Unlike many immigrants without authorization to permanently live in the country, Ruano has not and does not live in the shadows. The U.S. government knows exactly who she is, where she lives, where she works. Ruano said she was not — and is not — willing to defy a deportation order.

“It wouldn’t be worth it,” she said. “I would rather go back to my country, whatever may happen there. Because when I think about living in the shadows, not being able to use my real name, never being at peace … I don’t want to live in hiding, waiting for the day they knock on my door.” 

At the bilingual public school where she teaches, in Milwaukee’s heavily Hispanic South Side, the chaos of Ruano’s immigration limbo dials down. 

“I feel like I’m in my own world,” Ruano said. “My problems stay back home.” When she walks into a classroom full of kindergarteners, she tells herself, “Vamos a echarle ganas a este dia.” Let’s do this. 

It’s an easy place for her mind to wander to the version of the future she has dreamed for herself. She’s an assistant teacher supporting the youngest learners with the most challenging needs. “I’m always thinking about getting my teaching license,” Ruano said, “so I can have my own classroom.” 

Milwaukee has for years struggled with a shortage of teachers, falling victim to the nationwide teacher shortage. The district’s superintendent announced recently that the next school year would start with 80 vacant teaching positions, and that’s with a recent decision to thin the district’s central office by moving more than a fifth of its administrative staffers with teaching certifications into classroom positions. 

In El Salvador, Ruano graduated from high school and worked her way through college to become an upper-grade teacher. She looked for work in education and wound up cleaning houses instead, joining other teachers with training but no place in the workforce. “You just end up having to do other work,” Ruano said. “I got here and saw that there’s so much opportunity. Here, they need teachers.”

Ruano’s workday begins outside the school, where her job is to welcome kids getting dropped off by their parents. On a frigid April day — she does this same job on frigid January days, too, just with extra gear — most of the interactions are quick hellos and good mornings. One little boy in a Minecraft backpack is refusing to walk in. He’s sad, and he’s asking for his mom. Ruano leans down to chat with him for a minute, a hand on his shoulder, a warm smile beaming. Eventually, he decides to go inside. 

Ruano’s job at this public school has anchored her firmly in this community. As part of Ruano’s public plea to immigration officials, teachers and parents from her school have written letters about the value she brings to her community. One parent wrote that their child had been upset for days, worried about the fate of his favorite teacher. Ruano read one of these letters during a news conference before she walked into her February check-in, surrounded by TV cameras and supporters from Voces de la Frontera. Within 48 hours, they collected 2,800 signatures in an online petition supporting Ruano.

When Ruano walked out of the courthouse that day, she went to the school to drop off her girls. Students filled the hallways and stairwells, erupting in cheers, relieved that she had not been detained. 

“What was really sweet was that she led them in singing our school song. They’re usually quiet and shy when we sing it during our school assemblies. That day they were not,” said Brenda Martinez, who helped found the school and acts as its principal. Martinez has been worried about Ruano’s case and said the school can’t afford to lose her. 

“She has a lot of patience to work with the littlest learners. That’s who she is,” Martinez said. “To lose her is like losing a member of our family.” 

One of the most remarkable aspects of Ruano’s journey, she’ll say herself, is her own outlook in the face of so much upheaval. “La esperanza no se me quita,” Ruano said. For the most part, she can’t shake the hope that someday, things will inevitably work out. 

When she reached a point of desperation earlier in the year, she said the thought that pulled her out was a Bible verse she’d memorized. “I could hear Joshua 1:9 in my head: ‘Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’”

Ruano and her family are devout Catholics and also involved with a local Evangelical church. Faith runs through their lives, though the urgency with which Ruano prays lately is new. 

During a recent Spanish-language Mass at the parish the family attends — the large hall filled quickly to capacity — the Rev. Javier Bustos opened the service with a prayer that asked God for “justice for the nation’s immigrants.” Bustos said in an interview that since the start of the Trump administration, fear has become palpable in his community, and Ruano’s family is just one of the many whom he prays for. 

In many ways, Ruano’s journey to the United States is not unique. She watched violence escalate in El Salvador, and grieved when her brother was kidnapped and later murdered. Her fear for her safety, combined with economic uncertainty, made a future in her home country look grim. 

Her first attempt to enter the United States resulted in her immediate removal. She tried again less than a year later, paying a group of coyotes to guide her way into the country safely. Once in the United States, Ruano said, she became trapped in a filthy home and forced to work for her captors. She was eventually released after they extorted more money from her family back home. This forms the basis for her claim for a T visa, which requires her cooperation with law enforcement. 

Bustos, Ruano’s priest, said in an interview that every immigrant’s story is different, but that losing closely knit members of this church community feels the same: “Like losing an arm, or a limb.” 

Ruano is an active member of the church’s prayer group and volunteers during Mass. This Sunday, she was tasked with a Bible reading in front of the several hundred gathered, including her husband and daughters, who smiled watching her walk up to the lectern. 

Later, she attended a training for members hoping to work with young children, focused on keeping them safe. Ruano is part of a group of members who have committed nearly every Saturday for the next two years to walking a group of children through an intense curriculum in the Catholic faith, up to their First Communion. 

Ruano already started the rigorous curriculum with her group of students. She hopes to be around to watch them reach the rite of passage.

There’s a single Salvadoran restaurant in Milwaukee. Its owner, Concepcion Arias, says business has changed since Trump was elected. Fewer customers are coming through the doors, and even some of the regulars are asking for their meals to go. “People don’t want to be out and about,” she said. 

But Ruano and her family are here on a Sunday after church, one of their regular spots for a meal after Mass. Paola orders a plate of fries with ketchup, while Eli goes for traditional pupusas. 

On the cover of the menu is a picture of a beach in El Salvador. “That’s where my uncle lives,” Ruano says. The girls glance at the small photo of the sunny tropical landscape. When Ruano was a teenager, she moved to this coastal town to work at her uncle’s hotel, a job that helped her pay for school. The girls agree the beach looks beautiful, but then Paola chimes in: “I’m really scared I’m going to die on a plane.” She’s thinking about the prospect of ever traveling to El Salvador, a place she only knows through her parents’ stories. 

Little moments like this one remind all four that the threat of removal hangs heavily over their lives. When lunch is over, the family heads back home, and then Miguel goes out to meet with a contractor. Their home’s roof is overdue for a replacement — one of dozens of to dos that are suddenly urgent. Miguel is worried about leaving their home in less than good shape if Yessenia is removed to El Salvador.

Under the Biden administration, a pending T visa application would typically halt removal proceedings, but that guarantee no longer exists under the Trump administration. At the end of the Biden administration, the wait time for USCIS to confirm it had received a visa application averaged about four weeks. On the day of Ruano’s February check-in with ICE, the Trump administration fired 50 employees from USCIS. Within a few weeks, immigration lawyers were reporting that the wait time for visa application receipts had started to grow. When Ruano called USCIS to check on her case in early April, an agent said the average wait time was 10 weeks. When she checked in with USCIS in early May, they told her the wait had grown to four months.

Her lawyer, Marc Christopher, who has spent years working on immigration cases in the Milwaukee area, said he’s not sure why ICE hasn’t fast-tracked her deportation, but that in a multi-tiered system where so much is up to discretion, it’s not clear who will have the final say on her case.

She is due back for another appointment with ICE at the end of May. In an interview Tuesday, Ruano said she remains hopeful. She’s also started to sell household items they no longer use on Facebook Marketplace, a small step toward resignation. She hasn’t bought flights for her husband or daughters and hopes she won’t have to. The zinnia seeds are now one-inch sprouts.

Ruano’s daughters will turn 10 in early June. This year, they’re most looking forward to celebrating their birthday at school, with cupcakes in class, surrounded by their friends, their mom nearby. 

Ruano’s flight is scheduled to leave the United States the next day.

This story was originally reported by Mel Leonor Barclay of The 19th. Meet Mel and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Fourteen years in Wisconsin. A one-way ticket to El Salvador. 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.

Pat Raes, a Meriter hospital nurse and president of SEIU Wisconsin, addresses union nurses and their supporters at a rally April 8, 2025. On Tuesday the union announced it would strike starting May 27. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

Nurses at Madison’s Meriter hospital plan to walk off the job for five days starting Tuesday, May 27, after negotiations on a new union contract ended Monday night without an agreement.

The hospital management and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Wisconsin, which represents about 950 nurses at the hospital, are divided over pay, security provisions and whether the hospital should commit to specific ratios of how many patients are under a nurse’s care.

If the strike goes forward, it is scheduled to last for five days, with union members returning on Sunday, June 1.

Update: In a statement Tuesday, Meriter said there was a bargaining session scheduled for Monday, May 26, the day before the strike is scheduled to start. An SEIU Wisconsin spokesperson said Wednesday that the union never agreed to that session, and that a bargaining date has been scheduled for Thursday, May 29.

In order to allow hospitals to secure temporary replacement staff or move patients, federal law requires hospital workers to give at least 10 days notice before striking, which SEIU Wisconsin gave May 9. The union also opted for a fixed duration for the walkout.

“We don’t take going on strike lightly, but we truly feel in order to make the changes that are necessary we’re willing to fight to make things safe for our patients,” said Pat Raes, a long-time Meriter nurse and also president of SEIU Wisconsin, in an interview May 14.

“We’ve called a five-day strike because our goal isn’t to walk away from the table — it’s to make UnityPoint Meriter finally hear the voices of nurses,” Raes said Tuesday. “This timeline reflects the urgency of our demands while giving the hospital every opportunity to return to negotiations in good faith.”

She said the five-day window was chosen to match the standard five-day contract used by health care staffing agencies, such as would be called to cover the striking nurses, “to send a strong, clear message without unnecessary disruption to patient care. We hope Meriter uses these five days to come back with real solutions.”

The hospital, UnityPoint Health-Meriter, is one of 17 regional hospitals in the large, Iowa-centered nonprofit health care chain, UnityPoint Health.   

“We’ve been in a union environment for decades and know that a strike could happen. We always work very, very hard to avoid that,” said Sherry Casali, market chief nursing officer for the hospital, in a statement released to the press Tuesday. “I think both parties would prefer not to have a strike.”

The hospital statement said Meriter’s management was disappointed there were not more talks prior to Monday. “Meriter leadership will remain available throughout this week to return to the table and we encourage SEIU to do the same,” the statement said.

In past years, the union and the hospital have worked with federal mediators during contract talks. This year federal mediation wasn’t available after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March gutting the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), nursesan independent federal agency.

Although that order was blocked by a federal judge May 6, the union and hospital turned instead to the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission.

Defined patient-nurse ratios have been a longtime goal for union nurses. California and Massachusetts both have state laws setting certain minimum ratios, according to  NurseJournal.org. A limited number of other states require hospitals to publish their nurse-to-staff ratios.

“The more patients you take care of once you get above that ratio puts every patient that you’re taking care of at higher risk for complications and higher risk for mortality,” Raes said.

The statement the hospital issued Tuesday acknowledged that “both parties agree on the importance of safe and effective staffing,” but said that mandated ratios “limit flexibility” and could make it more difficult “to adjust to patient needs and staff availability in real time.”

The hospital statement said the facility relies on its charge nurses, who “are key to staffing and have clear avenues to discuss any patient care needs throughout each shift.”

There are limits to flexibility, however, according to the members of the nursing staff. Flexibility “sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t,” said Amanda Husk, a postpartum nurse. “We just know there’s always a base need for nurses to make sure patients are safe.”

Husk said ensuring that the ratio of nurses is always sufficient “also prevents burnout and turnover of nurses. That’s a big deal.”

Raes said nurses also wanted stronger security measures — including metal detectors — in light of violent incidents at hospitals across the country that have led to injuries or deaths of health care workers.

The hospital’s statement said its security staff regularly updates security measures and plans additional unspecified changes this summer.

On pay, Raes said that while nurses in their first 12 years have had significant raises, those at the upper end of the scale for pay and longevity don’t see their pay keeping up.

The shift to a 401(k) retirement plan from a standard pension has diminished the incentive for more experienced nurses to stick around, said Raes, while the original pension plan encouraged longevity on the job.

Meriter’s statement said the hospital’s most recent pay offer would keep its nurses “some of the best-paid nurses in Wisconsin” as well as in Madison. 

This report was updated Wednesday with new information about when upcoming bargaining is to take place. 

Protesters gather in Kenosha the second night of protests on August 24th, 2020. This was before the clashes with police later that night. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Imagine you hear about a protest in your community and,  curious, you join your neighbors who are marching in the street. Although the protest is loud and slows down  traffic, it appears peaceful and non-violent. Then suddenly, someone throws a rock or spray-paints a building, and now you find yourself among those apprehended for felony rioting, regardless of whether you committed an act of vandalism or  know who did.

Civil rights advocates fear such a scenario if under a Republican bill that defines a riot as a public disturbance, an act of violence or a “clear and present danger” of property destruction or personal injury involving at least three people. A similar bill was introduced in 2017 by Rep. John Spiros (R-Marshfield). A new version is  (AB-88), authored by Rep. Shae Sortwell (R-Two Rivers) and Sen. Dan Feyen (R- Fond du Lac). 

People who say their property was damaged or vandalized during what the bill defines as a “riot” would also be able to seek civil damages from people or organizations that “provided material support or resources with the intent that such support or resources would be used to perpetrate the offense,” under the bill. It also prohibits government officials with direct authority over law enforcement agencies from limiting or restricting those agencies’ ability to quell vandalism or rioting, as defined by the bill.

Jon McCray Jones, a policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin is concerned that the bill’s definition of a “riot” is too vague. “Using that definition, a riot could be three teenagers driving around in a car knocking off mail boxes,” McCray Jones told Wisconsin Examiner. “Technically, with this definition, a riot could be a food fight.” The bill’s language concerning people who “urge, promote, organize, encourage, or instigate others to commit a riot” is also vague according to McCray Jones, who says this aspect of the bill would open protest leaders and organizers up to criminal and civil liability, regardless of their involvement in rioting.

Sortwell and Feyen did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In written testimony before the Assembly Committee on Judiciary on May 7, both lawmakers said that riots have become more common in recent years. “We saw the destructive riots a few years ago in several metropolitan areas, including right here in Madison and Kenosha,” said Sortwell, referring to George Floyd-inspired protests and unrest in 2020. “Taking a walk down State Street, one would see busted doors and windows of businesses, products stolen, and a smashed statue of a Civil War hero. Several business owners, employees, and citizens had their lives upended.”

Feyen said that “peaceful protests are a cornerstone of our public discourse and will always be protected under the First Amendment, but a line needs to be drawn when those protests go from being peaceful to being destructive and violent.” Although the bill does not  mention specific protests, Feyen wrote, “stricter penalties are needed to deter protesters from crossing that line from protest to property destruction, vandalism, arson, and physical violence.” 

Although scenes of burning buildings and looted stores received a lot of news coverage in 2020, studies suggest that at least 96% of Black Lives Matter protests during the movement’s peak in May and June of 2020 were peaceful. Reports by TMJ4 found that 74.3% of the nearly 200 people who’d been placed on an intelligence list by police in Milwaukee county that year had never been charged with a misdemeanor or felony. Some reports, however, using data derived from insurance claims, estimate that as much as $2 billion in damage nationally occurred due to protests in 2020. 

Some residents of Kenosha – a city referenced by the bill’s authors – recall how months of non-violent protest in Kenosha after Floyd’s death were overshadowed by the unrest that  occurred in August 2020. The shooting of Jacob Blake by Kenosha officer Rusten Sheskey, which paralyzed Blake, led to days of protest and unrest, millions of dollars worth of property destruction, and ended when  then-17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse fatally shot two people and wounded another, in what a jury later ruled was an act of self-defense. 

During committee hearings on May 7, Sortwell said that the bill seeks to punish not only people who commit vandalism but also “those people who put together the riot.”

Several groups have either lobbied or spoken out against the bill. The Wisconsin Civil Justice Council submitted written testimony opposing the bill on the behalf of “16 business associations working together on civil liability matters.” The council said that the bill would allow for civil compensation for emotional distress stemming from property destruction, noting that emotional damages are generally limited. AB-88 would also allow for any civil compensation to include attorneys’ fees, which would be another departure from current law, the council wrote. Others spoke against the bill in person on May 7, pointing to the bill’s broad language and the chilling effect it could have on political movements. 

“This bill is just a blatant attempt to stop people from protesting,” said McCray Jones. “This is a way to silence organizers from fighting for political change and threatening the status quo in power.” Organizers could potentially be sued for anything that happens at a protest, or even just for transporting someone to a protest that later turns into a riot, as defined under the bill. 

What counts as urging or promoting a riot is broad enough to include common protest chants, like “no justice, no peace,” McCray Jones said. “And if you have ambitious or politically motivated district attorneys…politically motivated prosecutors, the vagueness of this bill could be weaponized … free speech now gets criminally turned into inciting a riot.” 

McCray Jones added that he wonders what a police figure like former Milwaukee PD Chief Harold Breier — notorious for targeting and surveilling Black, brown and LGBTQ communities — would have been able to accomplish had such a law been at his disposal. 

As police departments develop their social media surveillance capabilities, it’s possible under the bill that making posts encouraging people to attend a protest could be seen as an attempt to “urge, promote, organize, encourage, or instigate” a riot under the bill. After the protests of 2020, some agencies that monitored protesters enacted new intelligence-gathering policies to help prevent broad, ideology-based surveillance.  

“I think that right now this moment gives us a very opportune chance to highlight the importance of protecting the privacy of protesters here in Wisconsin,” McCray Jones told Wisconsin Examiner. McCray Jones said he hopes debate about the bill  will become “a jumping off point to talk about not just data privacy for protesters, not just privacy from law enforcement for marginalized communities, but what does it look like to re-think our position on surveillance in the midst of this regime in D.C. that is blatantly ignoring due process, the rule of law, and civil rights.” 

ROTHSCHILD — Far from the liberal capital, Republicans gathered over the weekend to assess the state of a party in full control of the federal government, but showing signs of continued collapse in Wisconsin.

There were plenty of middle-aged white guys, one towing “Trump” the service dog and one in a Carhartt polo talking about conspiracist Alex Jones. Among the handful of African American attendees was a man sporting a “Black Guns Matter” T-shirt. An Appleton 25-year-old in a suit and tie talked up the need for more young people in leadership. A Dane County woman shared her thoughts on clamping down on illegal immigration and onshoring manufacturing jobs, as another attendee walked past in an American flag dress.

What many of these rank-and-file Republicans shared, as they gathered for the Wisconsin Republican Party’s annual convention, was applause for the sheer speed of President Donald Trump’s actions in office — and a desire for more moves to the right in the 2026 elections.

In purple Wisconsin, that film has played out before, and it didn’t go so well for Republicans. After Trump’s first election in 2016, the party lost control of the governor’s office and the state Supreme Court. April’s Supreme Court victory for Dane County Judge Susan Crawford means liberals will control the court through at least 2028 and could reshape the state’s congressional maps to help Democrats retake Congress in the midterms.

While there was some talk of blaming GOP state chair Brian Schimming for the poor April showing, none of that materialized in Rothschild. Instead, the party talked up the November victory and how to double down on the same Trumpian rhetoric heading into 2026.

Here’s how several of the 500 convention attendees at the Central Wisconsin Convention & Expo Center near Wausau assessed the first four months of Trump’s second term and what they want to see from GOP leaders going forward.

How state Republicans view Trump 2.0

Delegates were animated in their praise of Trump for keeping his campaign promises.

“It gets better every day,” said Rock County delegate Michael Mattus, accompanied by his Belgian service dog. “I’m happy every day. Wake up and thinking, what’s he gonna do today?” 

Adams County GOP chair Pete Church, who was elected chair of the state party’s county chairs at the convention, said he only wishes the U.S. House and Senate picked up the pace.

“It would be great if we could get Congress to actually put some of these things into law,” he said. “None of us really wants to see a government run by executive order, but that’s where we’re at.”

Delegates lauded Trump’s visit last week to the Middle East and his crackdown on illegal immigration.

“I have uncles, I have aunts that came over here illegally. I don’t associate with them,” said Martin Ruiz Gomez, 39, a one-time Milwaukee-based MMA fighter attending his first state GOP convention. “It’s not nothing against them, but they’re not doing things right.” 

The delegates even backed Trump initiatives that have less public support, such as tariffs. The on-again, off-again measures are viewed by some as making international trade fair and encouraging companies to create manufacturing jobs in the U.S., but recent polling has found more than 60% of Americans oppose them and worry they will raise prices. Rising prices was an issue that fueled Trump’s victory in November.

“Well, I was a little nervous about the tariffs when my (retirement savings account) went (down), but he’s doing what he set out to do,” said Calumet County delegate Linda Hoerth.

Portage County delegate Michael Zaremba agreed, saying the tariffs will eventually return more manufacturing jobs to the U.S.

“Just like with a pregnancy, you have to grow it, and then you have to experience the pain,” said Milwaukee County delegate Cindy Werner, who ran for the GOP nomination for lieutenant governor in 2022. “But then there’s joy that comes after that.”

Delegates happy with Trump’s performance were mild with any criticism.

“Trump hasn’t always been a big supporter of the Second Amendment. I mean, he is, but he also isn’t super firm on that,” said 25-year-old Reive Pullen, a gun-rights supporter from Outagamie County. 

Dane County delegate Tya Lichte could have done without Trump’s talk of taking control of Greenland or making Canada the 51st state.

“I understand he always likes to lead big and then heel back,” she said.

What more they want from GOP leaders

Soon, attention will turn to 2026 and the election for governor. Democratic Gov. Tony Evers hasn’t said whether he’ll seek a third term. His 2018 win over Republican Gov. Scott Walker marked the end of eight years of GOP rule in Wisconsin and came as Democrats flipped 41 seats to take back control of the U.S. House.

Hoerth, a board member of the Calumet County GOP, wants the next governor to “get rid of all this DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion)” and push for a state referendum on at what stage of pregnancy abortion should be legal in Wisconsin.

Hoerth likes the background of military veteran and Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, the only announced Republican candidate for governor, based on Schoemann’s recent visit with her and other Calumet County Republicans.

“He got the entire group wound up looking at their phones, checking some different websites that he was telling us about,” she said. “It was great.” 

Another Republican mentioned as a potential gubernatorial candidate, northern Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, sounded like one. He used much of his convention speech to criticize Evers, but not to make any big announcements. 

Lichte, of Dane County, said she wants the next governor to follow Trump’s lead on reshoring jobs and to try to make Milwaukee a technology hub.

Milwaukee County GOP chair Hilario Deleon said reducing crime, taxes and the size of state government are top priorities.

Rock County’s Mattus, who called abortion “pro-murder,” said he became more active because “this world (is) becoming more communist and I’m not for that.” 

In the name of election integrity, Portage County’s Zaremba wants Republicans to get rid of the state Elections Commission and return to hand-counting paper ballots.

Some delegates expressed hope that their party can mend fences with nonprofits such as Turning Point USA in their efforts to elect Republicans. During the recent Supreme Court race there were disputes about how to campaign that went public and exposed rifts among conservatives.

“It’s all right that we don’t always agree, but when we’re taking those arguments to social media for the whole world to see, that’s where I don’t like it,” said Church, the new head of the county chairs. “The only way it can be fixed is through cooperation.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

How die-hard Wisconsin Republicans rate Trump 2.0 and what they want in a governor for 2026 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 Milwaukee County Courthouse (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Attorneys for Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan filed a motion to dismiss the federal charges against her on Wednesday, arguing the government can’t charge her because she has judicial immunity. 

“This is no ordinary criminal case, and Dugan is no ordinary criminal defendant,” the motion states. “Dugan is a Milwaukee County Circuit Court judge. She was arrested and indicted for actions allegedly taken in and in the immediate vicinity of her courtroom, involving a person appearing before her as a party. The government’s prosecution of Judge Dugan is virtually unprecedented and entirely unconstitutional — it violates the Tenth Amendment and fundamental principles of federalism and comity reflected in that amendment and in the very structure of the United States Constitution.” 

The motion states that the problems with the prosecution “are legion,” and begin with her judicial immunity, which prevents judges from being charged with crimes for their official acts. Immunity is not a defense to be used at trial but “is an absolute bar to the prosecution at the outset,” the motion states, citing the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States that found the president can’t be charged with crimes for official acts. 

Dugan has been accused by federal officials of helping an immigrant without legal status in the U.S. escape from federal agents waiting to arrest him outside her courtroom last month. The criminal complaint alleges she directed the man, Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who came to her court for a routine hearing in a misdemeanor case, out a side door to avoid federal agents waiting to arrest him with an administrative warrant. Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer exited the courtroom into the same hallway where the agents were waiting and a DEA agent rode down the elevator with him before he was arrested on the street. 

Trump administration officials have touted the case as an example of a stern federal response to “deranged” judges across the country working to stymie the president’s efforts to increase immigration enforcement. 

Dugan’s motion states the facts alleged in the indictment and criminal complaint against her would be disproven at trial, but that the case should never get that far. 

“Even if (contrary to what the trial evidence would show) Judge Dugan took the actions the complaint alleges, these plainly were judicial acts for which she has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution,” the motion states. “Judges are empowered to maintain control over their courtrooms specifically and the courthouse generally.” 

Dugan’s attorneys also argue that the prosecution violates the Tenth Amendment, which clarifies the balance of power between states and the federal government. The motion states that federal agents going into a state courthouse to arrest a sitting judge is a violation of the Constitution. 

“The government’s prosecution here reaches directly into a state courthouse, disrupting active proceedings, and interferes with the official duties of an elected judge,” the motion states. “The federal government violated Wisconsin’s sovereignty on April 18 when it disrupted Judge Dugan’s courtroom, and it is violating Wisconsin’s sovereignty now with this prosecution. The Court should end the violation of Wisconsin’s sovereignty and dismiss the indictment.” 

Dugan is scheduled to appear in court for her arraignment Thursday morning.

Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)

Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on charges of concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings. 

Dugan has been accused by federal officials of helping an undocumented immigrant escape from federal agents waiting to arrest him outside of her courtroom last month. 

The case has been cited by officials in the administration of President Donald Trump as an example of “deranged” judges working to stymie the administration’s increased immigration enforcement. Critics, including 150 judges of both political parties who wrote a letter to the Department of Justice objecting to Dugan’s arrest, have said the charges against a sitting state judge mark an escalation by the Trump administration trying to make a political point in a weak case to attack the judiciary.

Tuesday’s indictment is a normal procedural step in a criminal case but attorneys said after Dugan’s arrest late last month that it was strange that federal prosecutors hadn’t gotten a grand jury indictment prior to bringing the charges against her. Instead, U.S. attorneys filed a criminal complaint, which publicized the case immediately and allowed Dugan’s attorneys to learn the allegations against her. 

The charges stem from a routine court appearance in April by Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a 30-year-old Mexican immigrant accused of misdemeanor battery. While he was in the courtroom, agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the FBI and DEA arrived with an administrative warrant to arrest Flores-Ruiz. 

That warrant, which was not signed by a judge, did not give agents the authority to enter the courtroom. The agents waited in the hallway outside. Dugan directed Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a side door of the room that exited into the same hallway. The agents saw him leave the room and one rode down the elevator with him before he was arrested later on the street. 

Dugan has been temporarily removed from her seat on the Milwaukee County Circuit Court by the Wisconsin Supreme Court while the charges are pending, but after the indictment, her attorneys said in a statement she’ll fight the charges. 

“Judge Dugan asserts her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court.” 

Dugan is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday morning.

Wisconsin has just one nuclear power plant. Republican legislation, along with an initiative from Democratic Gov. Tony Evers, could move the state toward more nuclear power.

The GOP-led Senate Bill 125, introduced in March, would require the state Public Service Commission, which regulates electric and gas utilities in Wisconsin, to conduct a nuclear power siting study. 

The study would identify nuclear power generation opportunities on existing power generation sites, as well as on sites not now used for power generation. 

It would help Wisconsin “catch up with other states that have already made important strides in exploring new nuclear energy,” said Paul Wilson, chair of the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

State Sen. Julian Bradley, R-New Berlin, who introduced the bill, did not respond to requests for comment.

Groups registered in favor of the legislation include the Wisconsin Utilities Association and several employee unions. The PSC also supports the bill, noting that an amendment to the bill keeps the current timeline for the commission to review applications for such electricity generation.

Opponents include Sierra Club Wisconsin, which says nuclear power “poses significant risks due to its high costs, long construction timelines, unresolved radioactive waste issues and the potential for catastrophic accidents.”

The environmental group Clean Wisconsin says the nuclear industry, not taxpayers, should fund siting studies.

The effort to explore more nuclear energy is bipartisan in that, separately, Evers proposed in his 2025-27 state budget spending $1 million to do a nuclear power plant feasibility study. 

Evers, calling nuclear energy clean, said in a statement to Wisconsin Watch that “with new advanced nuclear technology and the increasing need for energy across Wisconsin, it is long past time that we invest in new, innovative industries and technologies.”

Wisconsin’s only operating nuclear power plant, Point Beach, is near the Manitowoc County community of Two Rivers.

A nuclear plant in Kewaunee shut down in 2013.

The Senate Committee on Utilities and Tourism approved SB 125 on May 6. No other votes have been scheduled.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Bipartisan support builds for studying nuclear power in Wisconsin 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.

Just six months ago, the Wisconsin Republican Party was flying pretty high. 

Despite an unsuccessful attempt to jettison U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, the GOP held its Wisconsin seats in the U.S. House and its majorities (albeit smaller) in the state Legislature. Donald Trump’s win in the Badger State put him over the top for a second term in the White House. 

Soon after, Brian Schimming was re-elected to a second two-year term as the party’s state chairman.

But, like a sudden drop in cabin pressure, things in politics can change quickly.

There is unrest among some Republicans as they prepare to gather for the state party’s annual convention on Saturday.

The meeting comes some six weeks after a stinging loss in the state Supreme Court election, in which Dane County Judge Susan Crawford defeated GOP-backed Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel by 10 points, cementing a liberal court majority until at least 2028.

A few vocal critics blamed Schimming, who has promised an ”investigation” into what went wrong. Schimming declined an interview request. 

The party will meet in Rothschild, a village south of Wausau in Marathon County. One of the county’s leading Republicans, state Rep. Brent Jacobson of Mosinee, doesn’t blame Schimming for Schimel’s loss.

“That Supreme Court race was a reaction to Trump’s victory in November,” said Jacobson, who was elected to his first term last fall. “Democrats were super energized, and they simply turned out in far greater numbers than Republicans did.”

Jacobson said he is satisfied with Schimming’s performance and wants his fellow Republicans to turn the page. He credited Schimming with encouraging Republicans to embrace early voting during the November election, which Jacobson called “a difference maker,” and getting Trump to visit Dane County during the campaign.

“In politics, you have to have a short memory about losses,” he said. 

Julia Azari, a political science professor at Marquette University, said Schimming has a difficult job because Wisconsin “has a very unclear relationship with Trump and Trumpism.”

On the one hand, she said, Wisconsin helped Trump to victory in 2016 as well as 2024, but policies such as tariffs in his second term have met with pushback.

Azari also pointed to factors other than Schimming’s leadership for the Supreme Court outcome. She cited the involvement of billionaire Elon Musk in pushing Schimel’s candidacy as more important.

“A lot of it is related to resentment about Musk coming in from on high,” Azari said of Schimel’s loss. “I think Wisconsin voters are resistant to nationalization, and that the nationalization of party politics has had a limited impact here.”

For his part, Jacobson is looking ahead to the governor’s race in 2026, hoping for party unity. 

Democrat Tony Evers has not said whether he will seek a third term; so far one Republican, Washington County Executive Josh Schoemann, is in the race.

Jacobson said he expects more Republican candidates, but hopes not to see a repeat of 2022. He said that year’s GOP primary battle between businessman Tim Michels, who defeated former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch for the nomination, left the party hobbled against Evers.

“We can always learn from history and I would hope that we did that from 2022, so that we can not only be united but come out of the primary process with a lot more resources” in 2026, Jacobson said.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

Wisconsin Republicans look for a reset at their upcoming state party convention 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.

Jay O. Rothman, president of the University of Wisconsin System, speaks during the UW Board of Regents meeting hosted at Union South at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on Feb. 9, 2023. (Photo by Althea Dotzour / UW–Madison)

As Congress is considering remaking the federal financial aid program, Wisconsin higher education leaders are warning that changes could significantly affect access to its campuses. 

Universities of Wisconsin President Jay Rothman wrote in a series of posts on social media last week that he is “very disappointed” by the potential cuts that could be made to student aid. 

Congressional Republicans recently introduced a 103-page proposal that would overhaul the federal financial aid system with cuts meant to help support the extension of tax cuts. Changes would include reducing eligibility for Pell Grants by requiring students take more credit hours to qualify, capping the total amount of student loans one can take out annually and ending certain student loan programs. 

The proposed changes come alongside the Trump administration’s work to remake the system by moving the student loan portfolio from the Department of Education to Small Business Administration, even as both agencies have had significant layoffs, and seeking to eliminate loan relief for people working to support immigrants and trans kids. 

Rothman said nearly half of the 164,400 students across University of Wisconsin campuses rely on federal aid to access the schools and noted that many of the students receiving the help are first-generation college students and low- to middle-income. He said federal financial aid has helped better the U.S. economy and allowed millions of people to improve their own lives. 

“It makes no sense for the US to narrow opportunities if our country wants to win the global War for Talent. I’m dumbfounded that cutting educational opportunities would even be considered when our economic vibrancy is at stake,” Rothman wrote. “While the UWs are among the most affordable in the nation, many lower- and middle-class families rely upon federal financial aid to make these life-changing educational opportunities real.”

Rothman urged Congress to reevaluate the potential cuts in the federal budget, continuing his advocacy for keeping the UW accessible for current and future students. 

In a letter to the Wisconsin Congressional delegation last month, Rothman noted that in the 2023-24 school year, 91,000 UW undergraduate students — or 59% — received some form of financial aid. The federal government distributed $130 million in Pell grants to about 23.4%, or 26,060 undergraduate students that year, delivering an average award of $5,000. 

During that year, undergraduate and graduate students across the system received nearly $1.5 billion in financial aid, including $634 million in grants, $666 million in loans and $13 million in work-study funding.

“Programs like the Pell Grant and other federal financial aid are critical to ensuring continued access and success for students who choose to pursue higher education,” Rothman wrote to lawmakers. “Indiscriminate cuts whether to research, financial aid or programs that provide student support are ultimately shortsighted and will negatively impact the next generation of Wisconsin’s workforce.” 

Rothman is not the only leader who has expressed concerns about cuts to programs. During a hearing last month, Wisconsin Association of Independent Colleges and Universities President Eric Fulcomer told state lawmakers that “cutting the Pell Grant or eliminating the Pell Grant would be devastating for our sector.” He said private colleges could be looking at a 27% cut to enrollment.

GREEN BAY, WISCONSIN - MARCH 30: Billionaire businessman Elon Musk arrives for a town hall meeting wearing a cheesehead hat at the KI Convention Center on March 30, 2025 in Green Bay, Wisconsin. The town hall is being held in front of the state’s high-profile Supreme Court election between Circuit Court Judge Brad Schimel, who has been financially backed by Musk and endorsed by President Donald Trump, and Dane County Circuit Court Judge Susan Crawford. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

On April 1 Wisconsin voters decisively voted against unprecedented, massive outside interference in our state Supreme Court election by the nearly $30 million from the richest and second (to Donald Trump) most egotistical person in the world – Elon Musk.  In handing Musk’s endorsed candidate, Brad Schimel, a more than 10 percentage point, 269,000-vote drubbing, Wisconsinites rendered the nation a great service by humiliating Musk here and thereby driving him from the corridors of power and influence in Washington D.C. where he has been  savaging vital U.S. government services and programs that helped the poorest people in our nation and in the world.

Wisconsin also opted to preserve recent democracy reforms in our state by maintaining the current 4-3 progressive majority on the Court.  Fairer and more representative state legislative voting maps and the restoration of the use of secure ballot drop boxes for voters will be preserved and the possibility of new and enhanced political reform is possible in the years immediately ahead either through upholding reforms passed legislatively, through court action, or both.

But what can be done about the obscene amount of political money raised and spent to elect a new Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice in 2025 – as much if not more than $105 million – by far the most amount ever spent in a judicial election in the history of the United States?  Wisconsin faces new state supreme court elections every April for the next four years and a continuation of such frenzied and out of control spending for the foreseeable future seems both unbearable and unsustainable.

Voluntary spending limits for Supreme Court candidates with the incentive of providing them with full public financing if they agree to statutory spending limits is a possibility.  Wisconsin actually had such a law in place for exactly one Supreme Court election in 2011.  The Impartial Justice Act was made possible by passage with overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the Wisconsin Legislature and enactment into law in 2009.  In 2011, both candidates for a seat on the high court agreed to the voluntary spending limits of $400,000 each and received full public financing. That campaign was robust, competitive and the result was close, which is what you would expect in Wisconsin.  And it cost just a tiny fraction of the more than $100 million that was spent in 2025.

Unfortunately, later in 2011, then-Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Wisconsin Legislature defunded the Impartial Justice Act and all other public financing for elections, Four years later, Walker and the GOP completely eviscerated and deformed Wisconsin’s campaign finance laws. They did away with limits on what political parties and outside groups can raise and spend in elections, increased individual campaign contribution limits and, most alarmingly, legalized previously illegal campaign coordination between so-called issue ad spending groups and candidates, which greatly increased opportunities for corruption and undue influence through campaign spending. Disclosure requirements were weakened and, in some instances, dismantled altogether.

In just four short years, Wisconsin was transformed from one of the most transparent, low spending and highly regarded election states in the nation to one of the worst, least regulated special interest-controlled political backwaters in the nation, akin to Texas, Louisiana or Florida.

This current corrupt status quo will remain in place for the upcoming state Supreme Court elections in 2026, 2027, 2028 and 2029 unless the governor, Legislature and the Wisconsin Supreme Court take action and do the following:

• Re-establish an “impartial justice” law for the public financing of state Supreme Court elections modeled after the 2009 law which was in place for only one election before it was repealed. Update and revise it to better fit current times and circumstances including more realistic spending limits and higher public financing grants.
• Establish clear recusal rules for judges at all levels in Wisconsin that clearly decree that if a certain campaign contribution is reached or surpassed beyond a certain threshold amount, then the beneficiary of that contribution (or of the expenditure against her/his opponent) must recuse from any case in which the contributor is a party before the court.
• Restore sensible limitations on the transfer of and acceptance of campaign funds and make illegal again campaign coordination between outside special interest groups engaged in issue advocacy with all candidates for public office — particularly judges.
• Petition the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the disastrous 2010 Citizens United vs F.E.C. decision which ended over 100 years of sensible regulation of unlimited corporate, union and other outside special interest money in federal and by extension state elections, unleashing the torrential flood of campaign cash drowning democracy today.

These are common-sense, achievable reforms that, if enacted into law, would go a long way toward restoring desperately needed public confidence in the fairness, impartiality and trust in Wisconsin’s courts and in particular, our Wisconsin Supreme Court which was regarded as the model for the nation and the best anywhere a quarter century ago. But it will take determined action by all three branches of Wisconsin’s state government working together with the voters to uphold election integrity and curb corruption in a way all of us can embrace.

Ultimately, of course, it’s up to us, the voters, to hold our governmental institutions accountable and ensure that they work for us instead of for their own narrow interests  and those of the donor class. In this critical season of resistance and defiance against tyranny — speak up, make noise and ensure that your voice is heard.  Demand real reform and an end to the corruption of our representative government.

The father of a Wisconsin teenage girl who killed a teacher and fellow student in a school shooting was charged with felonies Thursday in connection with the case, police said.

The shooting occurred at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison last December.

Jeffrey Rupnow, 42, of Madison, was taken into custody around 3:45 a.m. Thursday, police said.

Rupnow was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a child and two counts of providing a dangerous weapon to a person under 18 resulting in death. All three charges are felonies, punishable by up to six years in prison each. He was scheduled to make an initial appearance in court on Friday.

Rupnow’s daughter, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow, opened fire on Dec. 16, 2024, at Abundant Life Christian School, killing a teacher and a 14-year-old student before killing herself. Two other students were critically injured.

Jeffrey Rupnow did not immediately respond to a message The Associated Press left on his Facebook page. No one immediately returned voicemails left at possible telephone listings for him and his ex-wife, Melissa Rupnow. Online court records indicate he represented himself in the couple’s 2022 divorce and do not list an attorney for him in that case.

According to a criminal complaint, Rupnow told investigators that his daughter was traumatized by her parents’ divorce and got into shooting guns after he took her shooting on a friend’s land. He said he bought her two handguns and told her the access code to his gun safe was his Social Security number entered backward.

Investigators discovered writings in her room in which she describes humanity as “filth,” hated people, got her weapons through her father’s “stupidity” and wanted to kill herself in front of everyone. She built a cardboard model of the school and developed a schedule for her attack that ended just after noon with the notation: “ready 4 death.”

Police recovered a 9 mm Glock handgun that her father had bought her from a study hall where she opened fire and another .22-caliber pistol that her father had given to her as a Christmas present in a bag she had been carrying through the school.

Twelve days after the shooting, a Madison police detective received a message from Jeffrey Rupnow saying his biggest mistake was teaching his kid safe gun handling and urging police to warn people to change the codes on their gun safes every two to three months.

“Kids are smart and they will figure it out. Just like someone trying to hack your bank account.’ I just want to protect other families from going through what I’m going through,” he said.

Jeffrey Rupnow is the latest parent of a school shooter to face charges associated with an attack.

Last year, the mother and father of a school shooter in Michigan who killed four students in 2021 were each convicted of involuntary manslaughter. The mother was the first parent in the U.S. to be held responsible for a child carrying out a mass school attack.

The father of a 14-year-old boy accused of fatally shooting four people at a Georgia high school was arrested in September and faces charges including second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter for letting his son possess a weapon.

In 2023, the father of a man charged in a deadly Fourth of July parade shooting in suburban Chicago pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanors related to how his son obtained a gun license.

Killed in the shooting were Abundant Life teacher Erin Michelle West, 42, and student Rubi Patricia Vergara, 14.

Abundant Life is a nondenominational Christian school that offers prekindergarten classes through high school. About 420 students attend the institution.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup. This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.

Police arrest father of shooter at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison 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 couple of years ago, Lorraine Beyersdorff was ready to retire from her job as clerk of the town of Texas, Wisconsin, after 34 years of service.

“I will not run again,” she said in a community Facebook post in late 2022. “Nomination papers can be circulated for signatures beginning December 1st. If interested, call me for more information.”

About a dozen people thanked her for a job well done. But no one filed nomination papers. Nobody called. And because of a quirk in Wisconsin law, no one from outside of the 1,600-person town could take the job. 

State law requires all elected town clerks — and the appointees who replace clerks departing mid-term — to live in the town where they serve. 

Beyersdorff, 73, knew there was another option: The town could switch from electing its clerk to appointing one. That would allow officials to consider candidates from outside the town’s borders.

But in small towns such as Texas — those with fewer than 2,500 residents — making that change is slow and cumbersome. It first requires a vote at a town meeting to put the measure on the ballot, then another vote by residents to approve it.

In Beyersdorff’s case, that months-long process stretched into years. She remained on the job until voters finally approved the switch in November. In April, the town appointed a new clerk, whom Beyersdorff is training. The clerk job is part-time — about 20 hours a week, though that varies depending on elections and other town business. 

“I wanted to get out, but I was OK hanging in,” Beyersdorff said. “After so many years, you’re almost scared to not have it. It’s been part of my life for so long, and because you can do it from home, it’s kind of intermingled with cooking and doing laundry and everything else.”

A proposal to make switching easier

Now, Wisconsin lawmakers want to streamline the process for towns like Texas. A bill introduced April 16 with bipartisan support would allow towns under 2,500 people to switch to appointing a clerk with a simple vote at a town meeting — no referendum required.

The proposal would also eliminate another hurdle: Under current law, even if a town approves the switch, it can’t take effect until the end of the current clerk’s term. The bill would let towns make the change immediately if the clerk position is vacant or becomes vacant.

The legislation passed committees unanimously last year but never received a full floor vote. The proposal authors, state Sen. Romaine Robert Quinn, a Republican who represents a northern Wisconsin district, and state Rep. Alex Dallman, a Republican from central Wisconsin, didn’t respond to requests for comment about the proposal. In a public hearing last year, Dallman said the proposal “will allow towns to operate more efficiently.”

Beyersdorff agrees. “You’d have a much quicker way to replace (clerks) and a bigger pool,” she said. “It can happen that somebody dies in the middle of the term, and then how do you replace them?”

Even in less dire situations, she said, appointing clerks can be advantageous because it allows the town to weigh qualifications heavily. In elections, Beyersdorff said, sometimes small communities vote for the people they know best, without caring “if they have any qualifications or even are capable of doing it.”

The multiple hurdles that small towns face under current law make it challenging for them to recruit and train qualified clerks, said Sam Liebert, a former clerk who is now the Wisconsin state director for All Voting is Local. “Giving local communities the flexibility to appoint their clerks is a common-sense solution.”

About one-third of Wisconsin towns now appoint their town clerks, and more are considering the switch, said Joe Ruth, government affairs director and legal counsel for the Wisconsin Towns Association. The role has become increasingly complex, and the longtime clerks who held the position for decades are aging out, he said.

It can be easier for towns to look for already qualified candidates who might live outside their municipal limits, he said, an option only available if the town appoints its clerk. By forgoing the currently required referendum that small towns need to make that change, towns can save the costs of administering that ballot question.

Ruth said that he often fields calls from towns that are desperate for help.

“We often hear the question, ‘We just lost our clerk. What do we do?'” he said. “Or, ‘We lost our clerk last year, we appointed someone to fill that vacancy, and now that person quit, and we can’t find anybody else.’ Those situations are really what have driven us towards these types of changes.”

The bigger challenge that towns face, Ruth said, is when elected clerks quit early in their tenure and no other town residents seek to replace them. Because state law prohibits towns from switching to appointing clerks until the end of the current term, towns can sometimes go one or two years without a clerk — a problem that this proposal would fix, he said. 

More complications in town of Wausau

While Beyersdorff was OK continuing in her job until the town could find a replacement for her, that wasn’t the case 10 minutes away in the town of Wausau.

Late last year, the longtime clerk retired and moved out of town. The town supervisors thought they had the situation under control: They appointed a town resident. That person quit after two weeks. 

Scrambling to find a clerk before the Wisconsin Supreme Court election in April, town supervisors advertised the opening in the town’s newsletter, during a budget meeting and on its website, said Sharon Hunter, a town supervisor.

People were interested in the job, she said, but they were typically working full time or had part-time jobs. “So the concern was the number of evening meetings, all of the responsibilities of the clerk, and especially running the elections,” she said.

Ultimately, nobody stepped up for the April election, so two town supervisors filled in. Hunter said she had been putting in an extra 20 hours of work per week between processing permits, licenses, keeping meeting minutes and preparing agendas, doing paperwork on the annual budget, and filing reports.

The town was lucky to have a chief election inspector — the official in charge of the town’s only polling place — with detailed knowledge, she said, because it would have been time-consuming for her to learn those duties.

In the April election, the town put forth a referendum to switch to appointing clerks, but voters  rejected it by a narrow margin. Hunter attributes the loss to the failure of supporters to explain why it was necessary. The town will try the referendum again in the future, she said.

For now, at least, the town has a clerk. In the April election, voters elected another clerk, who ran unopposed.

“I’m sure she’ll do a wonderful job,” Hunter said. “My concern is stepping in and not realizing all that is involved. Maybe she finds out that this is something she really doesn’t want to do and then she resigns. Well, then we’re in the same situation again, without a clerk for two years.”

Town clerk takes on extra role after nobody else steps up

If you were to stumble across Sam Augustin at her northern Wisconsin house early on a weekday, you would find her sipping a coffee at her table, surrounded by four laptops. 

One is a personal laptop. One is issued by Forest County, where she’s a board member. Another is from the town of Armstrong Creek, where she’s an elected clerk, and the last one from the town of Caswell, where she’s an appointed clerk.

It’s good to have all those laptops open at once, she said, because if she gets a call for help at any of her three public service jobs, she just has to wake up one of her laptops rather than locate it and start it up. It also helps that they’re four different colors, Augustin said.

Work for her didn’t used to be as complicated — or busy. Originally, she held the clerk position only in Caswell, where she lives. After the Armstrong Creek clerk died in late 2020, though, town officials approached her to become the clerk there, too.

“Nobody will step up in the town,” she said. “My grandparents said, ‘If you can help, you will help.’ Did I want to? Not necessarily, but I could not have, in good conscience, said no when I knew I could do it.”

Serving as a clerk in two communities is sometimes the reality in outstate Wisconsin, where about 30% of clerks leave their positions every year and, in Augustin’s view, younger people “don’t want to serve their community” despite more and more older clerks retiring.

It’s even more challenging because of frequent internet outages in rural Wisconsin. In big cities, Augustin said, clerks are used to the internet operating virtually everywhere.

“We have to go, ‘Oh no, the wind’s blowing the wrong way here. That means it’s going to knock out,’” she said.

Augustin said having Starlink, a satellite internet service, ensures she typically has internet.

“Most people don’t have that option up here because it’s not cheap,” she said.

When residents or town officials seek her help, she said, she can receive calls anytime from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m.

“You never know if they’re going to knock on your front door because everybody knows where you live,” she said. “So heaven forbid you don’t answer your phone. If they see your vehicle at your house, they’re going to stop.”

To be able to manage elections in two towns, she said, “you have to make sure you have good chief inspectors in place.”

“I have one town that’s better at it than the other,” she said, “so I tend to spend more time with one town than I do with the other.”

On Election Day in November, Augustin had to drive to the county seat in Crandon, 30 minutes away, to get more paper ballots for each of her towns, which are 11 miles apart. 

On top of that, she has to adjust to rapidly changing election laws, she said.

“You just have to make sure you’re keeping your poll workers trained,” she said. “You have to keep, make sure you’re keeping everybody abreast of everything. And it changes so fast.”

The demands of her job go far beyond just running elections.

In mid-April, she said, she had an accounting meeting at the county at 1 p.m., an annual meeting in Caswell at 5:30 p.m. and then work in Armstrong Creek at 6:30 p.m.

“Two would be my limit,” she said. 

Because towns of different sizes have to follow varying sets of laws, the best-case scenario is for people to be the clerk of two comparably sized towns, she said.

Augustin told Votebeat that she “definitely” supports the proposal. 

It can cost $1,000 or more to hold an election on a referendum to switch to appointing a town clerk, Augustin said, “and small towns don’t have that kind of extra money laying around.”

“The process would be a heck of a lot simpler,” she said, “because it can be delayed by a great deal of time, the way they make you do it.”

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Wisconsin towns facing clerk shortages seek an easier way to hire election officials 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.

It was a big win for Wisconsin’s small towns.

Soon after the Legislature overhauled local government funding in 2023, reports surfaced of huge increases in state aid for tiny places. 

Shared revenue, the state’s primary local aid program, jumped thousands of percentage points for towns and villages with less than 100 residents, while percentage increases were far more modest for the largest cities.

On Wisconsin’s political map, the biggest cities are also the bluest, and those Democratic strongholds are frequently the targets of scorn from the Legislature’s Republican majority. By contrast, small towns are growing ever more red, particularly in rural areas.

An analysis for Wisconsin Watch finds a statistically significant correlation between how a community votes and how much its shared revenue increased under the legislation known as Act 12. 

On average, each percentage point of GOP vote share corresponds to a 2.1% increase in shared revenue, according to calculations by Phil Rocco, associate professor of political science at Marquette University.

To swing aid payments toward those small red towns, Republicans broke with the first century of shared revenue history and adopted a complex formula that divides Wisconsin communities into five tiers by their 2022 populations. Rocco found that formula resulted in average increases of 202% for communities of less than 5,000 people, but just 25% for cities with 50,000 to 110,000 residents and 35% for cities larger than 110,000.

Dale Knapp, research director for the Wisconsin Counties Association, drafted the formula using parameters set by lawmakers. Knapp said the initial goal was to give “a bigger bump” to communities that were getting less aid per capita under the old shared revenue formula, but as Republicans saw how specific communities would be affected by different versions of the new formula, they asked for more tweaks based on population size.

Only once before had the state used such an approach. In 2012, when the GOP controlled all of state government, Gov. Scott Walker’s budget also split communities into population tiers, slashing shared revenue more deeply for most big cities than for the smallest towns.    

In a state where Republicans notoriously gerrymandered legislative districts by tweaking the lines to lock in their majority, was shared revenue gerrymandered too?

Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, responded with a terse “no” when asked if she and her Act 12 co-author, Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, had any partisan motive. They said they were correcting an imbalance that had shortchanged small communities.

“The new formula is trying to close these gaps between the communities who had done really well under the old formula and those who did poorly,” Kurtz testified at a committee hearing on the legislation. “The old shared revenue formula directed money at larger municipalities, so the new formula aims more funding at smaller municipalities to try to distribute aid a little better.”

But Democratic lawmakers have no doubt the formula was politically biased, said Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison.

“Clearly the way it was developed advantages Republican areas of the state and disadvantages larger urban areas like Milwaukee and Madison,” Roys said. “This Legislature has a history of punishing the biggest cities in the state.”

Democrats introduced several amendments that would have changed the formula to distribute shared revenue increases more evenly among communities of different sizes. All were defeated. That part of the debate received little public attention, overshadowed by clashes over other Act 12 provisions that granted new sales tax power to Milwaukee and Milwaukee County while sharply limiting how they and other local governments could spend taxpayer dollars. 

Yet the debate over state aid to local governments didn’t end with Act 12’s passage. Although the legislation was hailed as a historic turning point in public funding, many municipalities are still struggling with tight budgets more than a year later. Dozens appealed to voters to approve property tax increases over the past year.  

Instead of revisiting the shared revenue formula or the property tax levy limits that force communities to call those referendums, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers is recommending a different approach in his 2025-27 state budget: For any county or municipality that freezes or cuts property taxes, Evers proposes a new state aid payment equaling a 3% levy increase.

How we got here

All that is a long way from how shared revenue started in 1911. Right after adopting the nation’s first state income tax, the Legislature decided to distribute most of its proceeds to local governments, based on how much income tax their residents paid.

Starting in 1972, lawmakers switched to the first of a series of formulas that used factors such as population, equalized value and local property tax levies. The goal of those formulas was to ensure that all local governments could afford “minimum levels of public services, regardless of their ability to finance those services through their property tax base,” according to a Legislative Fiscal Bureau paper. Because the formulas directed more money to larger cities and to communities with lower property values, the Legislature added an extra boost for municipalities with populations under 5,000, starting in 1994. Similar formulas were used to cut shared revenue in 2004 and 2010, with payments frozen in between.

Back then, the size of a community’s population wasn’t strongly related to its partisan preferences, according to data compiled by John D. Johnson, research fellow at the Marquette Law School’s Lubar Center for Public Policy Research and Civic Education. Democrats like President Barack Obama, Gov. Jim Doyle and Sens. Herb Kohl and Russ Feingold regularly carried many smaller communities.

But in the “red wave” election of 2010, an overwhelming majority of communities with populations under 50,000 swung Republican to elect Walker as governor. That pattern has held for every gubernatorial election since then, and for most presidential and senatorial elections as well, Johnson’s data show.

Walker’s first budget, for the 2011-13 biennium, again cut shared revenue, but used population tiers that favored the smaller places that had fueled his victory. At the time, he linked the move to his controversial Act 10, which all but eliminated the power of most public employee unions to bargain for wages and benefits. Walker and his aides argued that Act 10 gave larger cities the “tools” to absorb the cuts through such tactics as shifting more health care costs to employees, while smaller communities with fewer workers couldn’t save as much that way. 

However, the formula for the 2012 cut still retained some of the old formula’s factors. That allowed Milwaukee to escape with only a 4% trim to its shared revenue. By contrast, Madison’s shared revenue was chopped 25%, and reductions averaged 10% for the next 10 largest cities.

After that, shared revenue was frozen at 2012 levels. Without adjustments for changes in population and property values since 2003, disparities grew, while inflation ate away at the buying power of the stagnant allocations, said Knapp and Jerry Deschane, executive director of the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. 

Walker’s 2011-13 budget also tightened the state’s limits on property taxes, blocking local governing bodies from approving tax hikes in most communities without new construction. That forced local officials to seek voter approval for any increases beyond the state limits.

Caught between limited taxing authority, frozen shared revenue and rising costs, Milwaukee and Milwaukee County found themselves careening toward a “fiscal cliff” that would force deep cuts in services. At the same time, Felzkowski said, town officials in her district were warning her that they and their counterparts across Wisconsin were having trouble paying for emergency medical service for rural residents.

Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson and Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley forged a coalition with other local governments to seek changes to the funding system. Evers responded by proposing a $576 million increase to the $753 million shared revenue program in his 2023-25 budget. Republicans shot down that plan, but started work on the legislation that became Act 12.

In discussions with local government leaders, GOP lawmakers made it clear they didn’t want to change the existing shared revenue formula, Deschane and Knapp said. Felzkowski said other Republican legislators with experience in local government told her the existing formula was “broken,” and they didn’t want to create the kind of “tweaked mess” that resulted from years of incremental changes to the state’s school aid formula.

Instead, Act 12 created a new formula to distribute increases, called “supplemental aid,” in addition to the shared revenue base payments that had been frozen since 2012. 

A thumb on the scale?

To analyze the legislation, Rocco developed a database of how much revenue each community would receive, compared with the Evers plan. Separately, Marquette’s Johnson had compiled a database of how every community in Wisconsin has voted in major statewide elections since 2000.

Wisconsin Watch asked the two scholars to merge their databases to determine whether Act 12 was politically neutral in distributing shared revenue increases of $206.9 million to municipalities and $68 million to counties.

Using Johnson’s data for gubernatorial races from 2010 through 2022, Rocco found a consistent and statistically significant bias toward Republican-voting communities in the percentage increases authorized by Act 12. The formula for counties — which didn’t include population tiers — showed no such bias, he said.

The largest proportional boost in municipal shared revenue was 5,748% for Rusk County’s town of Cedar Rapids, which at 36 residents is Wisconsin’s smallest community. The state’s second-smallest community, the town of Popple River in Forest County, scored a 5,070% increase for its 43 inhabitants.

By contrast, the smallest percentage increase, 10%, went to Milwaukee, although the legislation also authorized Wisconsin’s largest city to levy a new 2% sales tax. Shared revenue rose 56% for Madison, with no new sales tax power. Those two cities are the state’s biggest sources of Democratic votes.

Shared revenue increased around 20% for 10 predominantly blue cities with 2022 populations between 50,000 and 110,000, but a 67% boost went to Waukesha, the only red city of that size. Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, said he didn’t think the formula was engineered to favor Waukesha, although he expressed frustration that similarly sized cities like Janesville didn’t get more.

Drafting notes show the original version of the legislation would have given even lower increases to most cities between 50,000 and 110,000, before negotiations with the governor’s office and others. However, the increases of 22% for Janesville and 67% for Waukesha remained the same in the original and final versions.

Spreitzer said Assembly Republicans, led by Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, “drew that line” between cities above and below 50,000 in population, directing the smallest increases to the bluest cities. A Vos spokesperson did not respond to emails requesting an interview.

Deschane, Knapp, Felzkowski and Spreitzer said percentage increases could be misleading because many smaller towns and villages were receiving such tiny sums to begin with that a gigantic percentage increase still would result in relatively modest dollar amounts. They said per capita figures and total allocations could be more telling.

However, Rocco’s findings for pro-Republican bias in Act 12 are almost identical when looking at the shared revenue increase per capita instead of the percentage increase. 

A separate analysis by the nonpartisan Wisconsin Policy Forum highlighted striking variations in per capita allocations among communities of different sizes, based on 2023 populations.

Before Act 12, per capita payments averaged $87 both for communities with less than 1,000 residents and for those with more than 20,000, except for Milwaukee, the Policy Forum found. But with the Act 12 increases, the smallest communities shot up to an average of $157, compared with $114 for the largest, again excluding Milwaukee, the Policy Forum calculated.

While Milwaukee’s per capita payment was $416, Madison’s $28 was the state’s third-lowest, compared with $34 for Waukesha, $76 for Janesville and more than $100 for each of Wisconsin’s seven other largest cities, the Policy Forum said. By contrast, the state’s smallest incorporated municipality, the village of Big Falls in Waupaca County, ended up with the largest total per capita aid: $1,040 for each of its 58 residents.

Rocco’s analysis cites research by other scholars who found that federal aid formulas “offer lawmakers a means of concealing bias” by using “ostensibly neutral” factors to “move aid toward communities they represent,” benefiting similar communities as well.

While Felzkowski denied trying to help red areas, she said her goal was to send more money to rural areas that can’t generate much property tax revenue, yet still must provide services to more remote locations than cities do.

“I’m a rural legislator,” Felzkowski said. “My largest community at the time was 9,000 people, and I represented my district.”

Overall, Act 12 boosted total shared revenue dollars for communities under 5,000 by 64%, compared with a 14% increase for cities of more than 50,000. Shared revenue payments to Wisconsin’s 13 largest cities dropped from 53% of the municipal total to 45%, while the slice for communities under 5,000 rose from 21% to 27%. One-third of the state’s population lives in those small communities, compared with 28% in the largest cities.

Rocco also found evidence of bias toward Democratic-voting cities in the per capita increases in shared revenue that Evers proposed in his 2023-25 budget. Unlike Act 12, the same bias wasn’t consistently statistically significant in percentage increases.

The Evers plan didn’t use population tiers. Instead, it revised the original shared revenue formula, with its per capita and equalized valuation factors, and added a boost based on local public safety spending. That would have benefited larger cities with bigger police and fire departments — the same kinds of cities that typically vote Democratic. 

“The partisan affiliation of Wisconsinites impacted or benefited is not a factor the governor or our office consider in making policy decisions,” Evers’ spokesperson said in an email. “The governor proposed more funds be distributed to local communities and consistently pushed for a fairer distribution to mid-major communities while continuing to invest in all towns, cities, and counties across the state.”

Unfinished business

Cities large and small applauded the financial lift they received from Act 12. Milwaukee pulled back from its fiscal cliff, keeping its services and workforce intact. Monona was able to cover inflationary cost increases and hand out 3% raises to its employees, said the Madison suburb’s former Mayor Mary O’Connor.

But it didn’t take long before those cities and others were again facing tough choices. Milwaukee officials said the city had to raise property taxes, fees, fines and borrowing for 2025 to avoid service cuts and layoffs while meeting the public safety spending requirements of Act 12. Monona found itself short of what it needed to keep up with inflation and to pay employees enough to keep other cities from luring them away, O’Connor said. 

And even though the Act 12 increases were earmarked for public safety and transportation, multiple communities still needed more to pay for emergency medical, fire and police services. Yet their leaders lacked authority to raise property taxes enough to cover those costs.

“Wisconsin has the strictest property tax limits in the country, and that is an ongoing challenge,” Deschane said.

Because property tax increases are tied to new construction, Monona officials estimate the city would need to attract a $20 million project every year to justify levy hikes sufficient to keep up with its costs, O’Connor said. That’s not realistic for a community with less than 9,000 residents and no vacant land, she added. The city along Lake Monona is hemmed in on all sides by Madison.

Monona, Madison and 40 other municipalities decided to ask permission for higher tax increases. Wisconsin voters last year approved 21 municipal tax referendums, including those in Madison and Monona, and rejected 15. That includes two communities that went to a second referendum after losing on their first try. Another nine such questions were on the April ballot, including a second bid for one community that lost on its first attempt in 2024. Voters approved four and rejected five.

“Were it not for (Act 12), the number of municipal and county referenda in 2024 might have been even greater — and it is notable that even with Act 12, these referenda still reached near-record levels,” the Policy Forum observed.

Act 12 provides for shared revenue to grow as state sales tax collections grow, Deschane noted. Evers is seeking some additional sweeteners in his 2025-27 budget, including a 90% increase in a fund that compensates local governments for providing municipal services to tax-exempt state buildings.

But the governor didn’t propose changing the Act 12 formula to address the inequities that larger cities cited. And the Legislature rejected his 2023-25 budget recommendation to ease the levy limits as many local officials are pleading. Instead, his latest budget calls for $339.8 million over two years in new incentive payments for frozen or reduced levies. Still, many local referendums are seeking larger increases than the 3% boosts that communities could receive from that incentive program.

Evers’ office called Act 12 “a bipartisan compromise” that “delivered a generational increase for shared revenue,” but acknowledged “more is needed to continue to support the sustainability and strength of our communities across the state.” The budget plan represents an attempt to address local concerns about levy limits “while holding the line on property taxes,” the statement said.

Felzkowski and Deschane said they don’t know if the Legislature would support revisiting these issues in the next budget. Both see Act 12 as a major accomplishment, but they agree local government finance reform will continue to be an issue in the future.

“It’s not done,” Felzkowski said. “It’s never going to be done.”

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

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As local governments across Wisconsin continue to wrestle with tight budgets, $300 million in state aid remains unspent.

That money could have provided a major boost to the $275 million in shared revenue increases that the Legislature approved in a historic overhaul of local government funding.

Instead, lawmakers deposited the $300 million in an “innovation fund” to reward cities, villages, towns and counties that cut expenses by consolidating or privatizing services.

It’s an approach championed by Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, R-Rochester, who at one point wanted to reserve $1 billion for the incentive payments, legislative records show. Senate President Mary Felzkowski, R-Tomahawk, says she expects the state’s smallest communities will benefit most from the plan.

But Democrats say the money could have been better used as part of the main shared revenue distribution than in what Sen. Kelda Roys, D-Madison, calls “a set-aside slush fund.”

Act 12, the landmark 2023 local government legislation, increased shared revenue allocations to counties and municipalities throughout the state. Yet even though that cash infusion helped many communities, dozens are still calling referendums to seek voter approval to raise property taxes beyond state levy limits.

Under Act 12, the innovation fund will pay financial incentives to cities, villages, towns, counties and Native American tribes that successfully present proposals to contract with each other to share services or to hand them off to a business or nonprofit organization. Each agreement needs to cut costs by at least 10%, and the state Department of Revenue will give top priority to plans that save money on law enforcement, firefighting and emergency medical response, without jeopardizing service.

The Revenue Department expects applications for those grants will be available in July.

A related $3 million program provides planning grants to communities of less than 5,000 residents to prepare their proposals for the main innovation grants. To date, $1.7 million has been distributed in three rounds to 58 local governments, many of which received more than one of the 98 grants. With nearly half the allocation unspent, the application deadline was extended to April 30, adding two more rounds.

Proposals to combine fire departments and emergency medical services dominate the planning grants awarded so far. Others focus on sharing police, public works and administrative services. 

A Vos spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for an interview. But legislative drafting notes indicate he championed the innovation fund — and even wanted it to be more than triple its final size.

“I just talked to the Speaker. He wants to put the whole billion in the first year” of the state’s fiscal biennium, says an email from an aide to Rep. Tony Kurtz, R-Wonewoc, who co-authored Act 12, to legislative staff working on the bill.

During the discussions that led to Act 12 — and for years beforehand — Vos repeatedly questioned whether the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County were spending taxpayer money wisely. He urged them to do more to share and privatize services.

Mayor Cavalier Johnson and County Executive David Crowley responded with lengthy lists of how much their governments already had done to cut expenses and share services. The city’s list included establishing a joint recycling center with Waukesha County; reaching mutual aid agreements with suburban fire departments; contracting to take over fire and emergency medical protection for West Milwaukee; and privatizing snow removal at bus stops.

But none of that qualifies for an innovation grant. Act 12 specifies the grants are only for deals taking effect after Nov. 13, 2024, not for any previous moves by local governments.

Felzkowski said she thought the innovation fund would help small rural towns and villages consolidate services. In addition to merging fire departments, she suggested they might find efficiencies by sharing human resources and information technology staff. Sen. Mark Spreitzer, D-Beloit, said larger communities might benefit as well.

But Spreitzer questioned the fund’s emphasis on reducing overall costs instead of improving services. For example, if two or more communities wanted to share a fire chief and use the money saved to hire more firefighters, the state should encourage them to do that, he said.

Gov. Tony Evers’ office did not respond directly when asked what the governor thought of the fund.

While Roys said she is a “big believer in efficiency,” she also believes local governments should consolidate services only if it’s the right thing to do, not because they’re coerced into doing it.

The innovation fund is “kind of holding them over a barrel and forcing them to compete,” Roys said.

Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.

The $300 million competition for making local Wisconsin government more efficient starts soon 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 Wisconsin Supreme Court chambers. (Henry Redman/Wisconsin Examiner)

An outside investigation found that last year’s leak of the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order accepting a case challenging the state’s 1849 abortion law was “likely deliberate,” but was unable to determine its source. 

Last June, Wisconsin Watch published a story detailing the contents of the Court’s draft order agreeing to hear Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin v. Urmanski, the lawsuit challenging the validity of the abortion law. After the leak, all seven members of the Court condemned the order’s release, and the investigation began in August. 

According to a report released Wednesday, investigators interviewed 62 people and reviewed computer records in an effort to find the leak’s source. Despite the inconclusive findings, the report includes a number of recommendations for improving the Supreme Court’s security. 

The draft order was written on June 13 and Wisconsin Watch published its report on June 26. Investigators interviewed the 28 people who had “immediate access” to the draft. They included the seven justices, judicial assistants, law clerks and Supreme Court commissioners, as well as 18 people whose key card data shows they entered the justices’ chambers during that time period, interns and other office staff. 

Investigators requested computer usage data to determine what websites office staff visited during that time frame. The report states, however, that computer usage data from June 13 to 25 is missing. 

“The lack of complete website visitation logs for the period between June 13, 2024 and June 26, 2024 significantly hampered the ability to thoroughly examine the circumstances surrounding the leak,” the report states. “The issue underscores the importance of proper data management, retention, and verification procedures especially when such information is crucial for ongoing investigations.”

No evidence was found during the investigation that would show the leak was caused by an external breach of the Court’s network, according to the report. 

But the report also states that justices and Court staff often send confidential information to the justices’ personal email accounts and leave confidential documents unattended in printer trays. Unauthorized individuals have at times been able to access restricted floors in the Court’s Madison offices, the investigators also found. 

To improve the Supreme Court’s security, the report recommends a number of policy changes. Those include establishing better protocols for the handling of paper copies of confidential documents; stopping the justices’ use of personal email accounts; improving retention of computer history data; and using digital watermarks on confidential documents to ensure “the document remains traceable throughout its lifecycle.”

Audrey Skwierawski, the director of state courts, said in a statement that the Supreme Court would use the report’s recommendations to improve its processes.

“Integrity is the lifeblood of our court system, and we take threats to that integrity very seriously,” Skwierawski said. “Our responsibility now is to respond to and learn from the challenges identified through the investigation. This report gives us an important opportunity to strengthen the systems that support our courts and the public we serve.”

She added that her office is establishing a “Judicial Operations Integrity Task Force” to review the recommendations and proposing ways to prevent similar incidents in the future.