Protests are expected across the state on Friday in reaction to this week's fatal shooting in Minneapolis by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent.
The post Wisconsin communities protest fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis appeared first on WPR.
A section of the U.S.-Mexico border wall near El Paso, Texas, on June 6, 2024. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Senate Majority Leader John Thune, joined at the U.S.-Mexico border Friday by a handful of other Republican senators, highlighted the president’s signature tax cuts and spending package passed last year that provided billions for immigration enforcement.
The press conference in McAllen, Texas, came after a federal immigration officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis on Wednesday, and two people were shot by Border Patrol agents late Thursday in Portland, Oregon.
Thune, a South Dakota Republican, touted how the tax cuts and spending package signed into law last summer also provided “for additional reinforcements,” such as the hiring of more Border Patrol and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.
On Jan. 3, ICE announced it hired 12,000 new officers, more than doubling its force from 10,000 agents to 22,000. Thousands more are set to be hired.
The GOP-passed bill also included $4.1 billion for Customs and Border Protection to hire 5,000 customs officers and 3,000 Border Patrol agents over the next four years.
Thune said because migration at the southern border has slowed, the time has come for President Donald Trump to shift his focus to immigration reform. CBP data from November, the most recent available, shows total apprehensions at the southwest border slowed to 7,350 that month.
“I think President Trump is probably the president best equipped to lead the effort to reform immigration law in his country in a way that it creates, again, those better paying jobs, opportunities for people who come to the country legally,” Thune said. “We are a nation of immigrants, but we’re also a nation of laws, and we have to make sure we’re enforcing our laws, and that’s where it starts.”
The Trump administration has continued with its aggressive mass deportation efforts throughout the interior of the country and has moved to revoke the legal status of more than 1.5 million immigrants since taking office last January.
Thune added that the GOP bill, known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, also provided billions for border security.
“As a result of the passage of the One Big, Beautiful bill … we got more resources down here, not only for physical infrastructure, for the wall, but for also that virtual infrastructure, for technology and counter drone technology, all those sorts of things that make it possible for the Border Patrol to do their job,” he said.
Thune was joined by Whip John Barrasso of Wyoming and Sens. John Cornyn of Texas, Ashley Moody of Florida, Jon Husted of Ohio, Mike Rounds of South Dakota and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska.
Rounds said that under the Trump administration the southern border has undergone “a remarkable transformation.”
“There is no such thing as a country that can be a superpower, or, for that matter, be free if they can’t defend their own borders,” Rounds said.
Cornyn also highlighted how the bill will reimburse, up to $13.5 billion, those border states who have spent money on immigration enforcement. He said of that money, Texas will get $11 billion.
Zabi Sahibzada’s team of refugee resettlement caseworkers has shrunk. The Trump administration’s pause on refugee admissions in January 2025 dealt a blow to Sahibzada’s employer, Jewish Social Services of Madison, which previously counted on federal funding tied to each new refugee arrival to support its resettlement program.
A few new arrivals trickled in over the following months, entering the U.S. with special immigrant visas available to Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked with the U.S. government or its international partners. The same visa enabled Sahibzada, a former USAID employee from Afghanistan, to reach the U.S. in 2022.
But even those admissions have now halted. The State Department in November stopped issuing any visas to Afghan nationals after authorities identified the man who shot two West Virginia National Guard members near the White House as an Afghan special immigrant visa holder.
Though the Trump administration says it will permit up to 7,500 refugees to resettle in the U.S. this fiscal year, it plans to prioritize South Africans – primarily Afrikaners, a white minority descended largely from Dutch, French and German settlers.
Eleven South African refugees arrived in Wisconsin in September, followed by another 32 in late 2025. They were the only refugees resettled in the state since last January, U.S. State Department records show.
The dramatic slowdown leaves agencies searching for ways to maintain Wisconsin’s resettlement infrastructure until the refugee pipeline widens again. For some agencies, that includes resettling South African refugees, even if some remain skeptical of the Trump administration’s motives for privileging them in admissions. Jewish Social Services lacks that option: Federal officials did not include the nonprofit in the South African refugee program.
Providers warn that if Wisconsin’s resettlement infrastructure – trained caseworkers, volunteers and employer partnerships — withers, the state won’t be prepared for any future surge of refugees.
The near-total shutdown of refugee admissions followed the most active period for resettlement in decades.
More than 5,000 refugees reached Wisconsin between October 2020 and September 2024 – a span in which refugee resettlement in the U.S. reached the highest annual peak since the early 1990s.
Most recent refugee arrivals came from Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Those figures do not include special immigrant visa holders, asylees or immigrants with humanitarian parole, many of whom come from the same countries as those admitted as refugees. Roughly 370 Afghans with special immigrant visas settled in Wisconsin between October 2020 and October 2025.
Refugees reach Wisconsin through a network of international, federal and state agencies, national nonprofits and state-level partners. In the process, they pass through a series of screening interviews, background checks and medical examinations.
Six organizations currently contract with Wisconsin’s Department of Children and Families to provide resettlement services, connecting new arrivals to housing, employment and English language courses. Relying on a mix of federal and state funding, they provide some services for up to five years after an arrival. The federal government ties much of its funding to the number of refugees resettled.
Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan planned to resettle more than 400 people in fiscal year 2025. Instead, it resettled 163 people between October 2024 and January 2025, after which it received only a half-dozen new arrivals, resettlement director Omar Mohamed said. All were Afghans with special immigrant visas who arrived in Wisconsin without ties to a resettlement agency and reached out for help.
“At least 27 people were scheduled to arrive in January when the stop work order happened,” he added. President Donald Trump’s inauguration day order to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program rendered their plane tickets useless.
The sudden shift prompted Lutheran Social Services to cut nearly a third of its resettlement program staff, Mohamed said.
Most Wisconsin refugee resettlement agencies face similar predicaments. Jewish Social Services in Madison laid off two case workers and a housing specialist. Hanan Refugee Relief Group, a relatively new nonprofit operating out of an office above a South Side Milwaukee pizzeria, cut 10 members of an already small team. World Relief Wisconsin, which resettles refugees in the Fox Valley, also laid off staff.
Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Green Bay, which has resettled hundreds of refugees in northeast Wisconsin in recent years, ended its resettlement program after its national affiliate, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, severed its partnerships with the federal government in April.
But Sean Gilligan, the diocese’s refugee services director, says Catholic Charities is still providing housing referrals, English classes and other basic services to refugees who already settled in greater Green Bay.
Resettlement agencies are still receiving some federal funds to support refugees who arrived within the past five years, along with state grants for educational and health programs.
That funding may temporarily help the agencies stay afloat.
Hanan Refugee Relief Group is ramping up its focus on employment training, Executive Director Sheila Badwan said. That includes offering on-the-job English language training for refugees employed at a Milwaukee Cargill meat processing plant.
But the loss of funding from new arrivals leaves Hanan and other agencies scrambling to find donors to support their work.
“We are hoping just to keep our doors open to serve not just the ones we welcomed (recently),” said Uma Abdi, the nonprofit’s refugee program director, “but all of those refugees and immigrants that still need support.”
The International Institute of Wisconsin, an older and well-established resettlement agency, is an outlier. It’s growing as others scale back. Revenue from contracts with medical clinics and other businesses to provide translation services has allowed it to grow as others scale back.
“We can operate without any government contracts,” President and CEO Paul Trebian said.
With the doors closed to refugees from most of the world’s conflict zones, some Wisconsin resettlement agencies are now turning their attention to South Africans.
The Trump administration launched the South African refugee admissions program through a February executive order, filling in the details after the fact. Alleging a “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights,” the order pointed to a 2024 South African law that allows the state to seize land without compensation in limited circumstances.
The law’s supporters call it necessary to redistribute land from the country’s white minority, who own much of South Africa’s farmland, to a Black majority still recovering from decades of racial apartheid that ended in the 1990s. Trump decried the law as “racially discriminatory” and accused the South African government of “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.”
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has not set a date for the law’s implementation, and police statistics do not bear out claims that white farmers are more likely to be targets for violence than Black farmers.
Trump’s order specifically offered refugee status to Afrikaners, but his administration has since said the resettlement program is open to members of any racial minority in South Africa, including those of English or South Asian descent, so long as they can “articulate a past personal experience of persecution or fear of future persecution.” Unlike most refugees, South Africans may apply for refugee status only while living in South Africa.
Refugee advocacy groups and the South African government have criticized the program for legitimizing false claims of “white genocide” and bypassing some steps through which refugees from other countries must pass.
But the Wisconsin resettlement agencies participating in the program say their responsibility is to welcome refugees, not to determine who deserves refugee status.
“We’re here to serve everybody,” said Lutheran Social Services President and CEO Héctor Colón, whose nonprofit expects next year to resettle up to 75 new arrivals, mostly or all South Africans in the Milwaukee area.
Colón adds that working with South Africans keeps his organization’s resettlement infrastructure in working order during the pause in other admissions.
“We’ve been through ebbs and flows, we understand how this works,” he said, “but our organization has made a commitment that we want to keep this program up and running. There are many programs all across the country that cannot absorb the hit.”
But World Relief Wisconsin Regional Director Gail Cornelius, whose nonprofit helped resettle South Africans this year, noted that some of the South Africans who arrived in Wisconsin last year have already moved on to other states.
A wave of federal rules changes following the November attack of National Guard members further complicates the work of resettlement agencies.
Among the changes: halting green card and citizenship applications for immigrants and refugees from 39 countries, including Afghanistan and Myanmar.
“People that were going in for their citizenship oath were actually pulled out of line,” Cornelius said.
The Trump administration also vowed to revet and reinterview all refugees who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration, regardless of their current legal status. Such a review could affect thousands of Wisconsin refugees, but resettlement agencies are still awaiting clarity about how the administration will follow through.
“How are they going to review all of these cases?” Badwan asked. “Do we even have the resources to do that?”
Sahibzada wonders whether he, too, will face revetting. Meanwhile, the White House’s bar on immigrant visas for Afghan nationals placed his plans to reunite with his wife and children on hold. They remain in Kabul, his daughters confined to their home after the Taliban forbade girls from attending school.
“I was waiting for things to be calm,” he said, referring to the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan that previously stalled his efforts to secure visas for his family. “I talk to my kids every morning, and they’re asking me that question, like, what’s gonna happen? I have no answer to them. I’m just saying, maybe things will get better.”
Working with Afghan families who made it to Wisconsin before the door closed is bittersweet, Sahibzada added. “Even if my kids are not here, at least they are here.”
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Wisconsin politicians had a lot to say about the shooting death of a Minnesota woman by federal immigration agents, with one Republican accusing the woman of "domestic terrorism" and multiple Democrats calling for the defunding of ICE.
The post Wisconsin politicians sound off on fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis appeared first on WPR.
Portland police officers stand behind police tape in front of an apartment building in east Portland. (Photo by Alex Baumhardt/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
Federal agents reportedly shot and injured two people near a medical clinic in east Portland on Thursday afternoon, according to the Portland Police Bureau.
The Department of Homeland Security acknowledged the shooting on social media, though it referred to a U.S. Border Protection agent firing “a defensive shot.” Police had few immediate details to share about the incident, which occurred the day after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis.
Like Minneapolis, Oregon’s largest city has been the subject of an intense immigration crackdown by federal agents in recent months. While a federal judge stymied President Donald Trump’s efforts to mobilize the Oregon National Guard and deploy guardsmen from other states to Portland, federal officials revealed in court in December that they’ve brought ICE agents from around the country to the metro as part of a major operation.
The Homeland Security Department claimed that agents were conducting a targeted stop against a Venezuelan national affiliated with the transnational Tren de Aragua criminal group, and that the driver attempted to run over agents when they identified themselves. The agency made similar claims about the Minneapolis shooting, though bystander videos from multiple angles showed that the officer fired into Renee Nicole Good’s car after he was clear of the car’s path.
No such videos were immediately available of the Portland incident, which occurred near a medical campus on Southeast Main Street.
“We are still in the early stages of this incident,” Portland Police Chief Bob Day said in a statement. “We understand the heightened emotion and tension many are feeling in the wake of the shooting in Minneapolis, but I am asking the community to remain calm as we work to learn more.”
Multnomah County Sheriff Nicole Morrisey O’Donnell said in a statement that the FBI is handling an investigation into the shooting. Attorney General Dan Rayfield announced Thursday evening that his office will investigate whether any federal officers acted outside the scope of their authority, in keeping with a November warning he and district attorneys of the state’s three largest counties gave the federal government that the state will investigate and prosecute federal agents who engage in excessive force.
“We have been clear about our concerns with the excessive use of force by federal agents in Portland, and today’s incident only heightens the need for transparency and accountability,” Rayfield said. “Oregonians deserve clear answers when people are injured in their neighborhoods.”
Police received reports of a shooting on the 10200 block of Southeast Main Street at 2:18 p.m. Six minutes later, they received a call for help from a man at Northeast 146th Avenue and East Burnside, a 10-minute drive away.
The shooting occurred near an Adventist Health building with several offices and medical clinics, the health organization confirmed in an email. The clinics closed for the rest of the day, and Portland Police were seen escorting people out in the evening.
Police found a man and woman with apparent gunshot wounds. Emergency responders transported both people to the hospital and their condition is unknown, according to police.
State Rep. Ricki Ruiz, D-Gresham, represents a neighboring state House district and spoke to the Capital Chronicle near an apartment complex where the shooting victims called for help. He said the two were hospitalized at Oregon Health & Science University and he was unsure of their condition.
A woman he spoke to said she spotted U.S. Border Patrol agents roaming the area earlier this morning, Ruiz said.
Lilian Rubi Herrera, who spoke to the Capital Chronicle in Spanish outside the apartment building, receives donations from her followers on social media to buy groceries for immigrants who are fearful of leaving their homes. She was in the neighborhood distributing food when she heard about the shooting and went to the scene.
Herrera said her social media followers are extremely sad because of the shooting in Minneapolis.
“Out of all the years I’ve lived here, I never thought I would witness this type of treatment from the federal government.” she said. “They treat us worse than dogs, and that’s not fair. We must use our voices and seek help for our community.”
A Capital Chronicle reporter saw men wearing FBI gear walking around the apartment complex behind police tape.
Within hours of the shooting, about 150 people had gathered outside Portland City Hall, chanting “abolish ICE.” Some held candles and anti-ICE signs as they waited to hear from city councilors.
Portland City Councilor Angelita Morillo, speaking to the crowd, called upon Congress and local officials to resist ICE operations and strip funding from the agency.
“The reality is that anyone who chooses to stand in solidarity with our community is putting themselves directly in harm’s way, because that’s what it means to sacrifice and to love your neighbor,” she said. “And what I see here is we have a group of people that is prepared to do anything and everything to take care of our immigrant community.”
Councilor Candace Avalos said the recent shooting victims were her constituents in her city councils’s district, arguing that “this is what the Trump administration’s deportation agenda looks like.” She called for the audience to keep organizing until ICE agents leave the city.
“We keep each other safe when ICE shows up in our neighborhoods, it’s not politicians who stop them,” she said. “It’s neighborhood whistles, with their phones out, standing shoulder and shoulder, forcing them out of our communities.”
Portland Mayor Keith Wilson called on ICE to immediately pause its operations in Portland and urged residents to remain calm.
“We cannot sit by while constitutional protections erode and bloodshed mounts. Portland is not a ‘training ground’ for militarized agents, and the ‘full force’ threatened by the administration has deadly consequences,” Wilson said. “As mayor, I call on ICE to end all operations in Portland until a full investigation can be completed.”
U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, a Democrat who represents Portland, also urged her constituents to stay calm and said local law enforcement must be able to conduct a full investigation.
“ICE has done nothing but inject terror, chaos, and cruelty into our communities,” Dexter said. “Trump’s immigration machine is using violence to control our communities—straight out of the authoritarian playbook. ICE must immediately end all active operations in Portland.”
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, added that he was monitoring reports, and that “Trump’s deployment of federal agents in my hometown is clearly inflaming violence — and must end.”
Reporter Mia Maldonado contributed to this report.
This story was originally produced by Oregon Capital Chronicle, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
A federal agent grabs a demonstrator as they attempt to drive a truck through the area while protesters gather after ICE officers shot and killed a woman through her car window Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026 near Portland Avenue and 34th Street. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
Minneapolis Public Schools canceled school on Thursday and Friday, citing safety concerns related to incidents involving immigration agents Wednesday.
Federal agents deployed tear gas at Roosevelt High School in Minneapolis Wednesday afternoon as students were being dismissed, hours after an ICE agent shot and killed a woman a few miles away, according to the teachers’ union.
The incident occurred hours after an ICE agent shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in the Powderhorn neighborhood of Minneapolis, sparking protests and a vigil that attracted thousands.
Roosevelt High School is home to the Spanish immersion program for Minneapolis Public Schools. The student population is around one-third African American and one-third Hispanic American, according to the district.
The Minneapolis Federation of Educators Local 59 said in a statement a union member was detained by ICE at the school but later released.
“We will not tolerate ICE inhibiting our city’s youth from their constitutional right to attend school safely or inhibiting educators from doing their job,” the union’s executive board said in the statement.
El Colegio High School, a nearby bilingual charter school, announced Wednesday that classes would be held online until further notice.
This story was originally produced by Minnesota Reformer, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
ICE Police at Immigration Detention Center. Oneida tribal leaders in Wisconsin announced they would end a contract to build ICE facilities with a the Oneida Engineering Science Construction Group and apologized saying they were previously unaware of the agreement. | Getty Images
Oneida Engineering Science Construction Group (OESC), a Limited Liability Company (LLC) of the Oneida Nation, is taking action to terminate two contracts it has with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to provide engineering services to at least 34 ICE facilities.
The action comes after tribal leaders only recently became aware of the contracts that OESC has through a subsidiary company: Oneida Environmental (OE) that is working in a joint venture with Stantec JV, called Oneida-Stantec JV, LLC.
In a Jan. 2 Oneida Live online meeting, Tribal Chairman Tehassi Hill said he had just learned of the ICE contracts on Monday morning, Dec. 29 through social media posts.
“I want to make sure that I clearly state that the Oneida Business Committee (OBC, the agency that runs the tribe when the tribal governing board is not in session) was not aware of this joint venture or the signing of the contract,” said Hill. “I also stand strong in my words and conviction that the business venture does not align with the nation’s values, our culture and who we are as Haudenosaunee People, and it is something the committee would have never entertained had it been made aware of this.”
Jeff House, chief executive officer (CEO) of OESC, took full responsibility for the contracts, adding that his motives were to provide a service to ensure the ICE facilities were habitable for residents and also as a business venture to sustain the operation of the LLC’s 500 employees.
“I deeply apologize,” House said. “The decision did come to me and I green-lighted the proposals to go forward, and I know it was a huge mistake.”
House said when he made the decision he wanted to ensure the facilities would be “up to code, making sure they meet human standards, making sure that it’s properly engineered.” And, he added, “while I don’t approve and am appalled by the ICE activities, these people are being detained and put in a facility somewhere, and what had gone through my mind was, ‘Who’s taking care of them? Who’s looking out for their best interest?’ As much as I have disdain for the ICE activities going on, that’s where my mind went, and I was flabbergasted that I didn’t reach out further and get more information.”
House said he was aware of the recent controversy involving the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation in Kansas to terminate a subsidiary contract with ICE for designing large-scale migrant detention centers, and he applauded the Potawatomi Chairman for noting how Indian people had been treated by the federal government by being placed on reservations and drew parallels to ICE activities.
House said he hadn’t considered the history of tribes and detention when he pursued the ICE contracts, but was more focused on ensuring the ICE facilities would be humane facilities.
According to the Federal Procurement Data System for Oneida-Stantec JV LLC, the recent ICE contract signed on Dec. 26 is for $3.777 million, and another contract signed on Sept. 19 is for $2.601 million.
House said the immediate goal is to begin the process of terminating the Dec. 26 contract, but he noted that the Sept. 19 contract, initiated under the administration of former President Joe Biden, would be more complicated to terminate because work had already begun under that contract.
House emphasized the LLC would sustain any loss or liability as it pursued the terminations.
To avoid potential liability to the tribe, Chairman Hill noted that the tribe doesn’t directly operate OESC or participate in day-to-day operations to maintain a “corporate veil.”
In a press release, the tribe explained the “corporate veil” is “a legal concept that recognizes a company as a separate legal entity distinct from its shareholders, and it protects shareholders from personal liability for the company’s debts and obligations (meaning the company itself is responsible for its own liabilities).”
However, the OBC does appoint members to the corporate board of OESC, and there are regular reports from the LLC to the OBC.
“It is important to reiterate that the Oneida Business Committee does not approve, negotiate or manage individual contracts of its subsidiaries,” said Hill, “and only provides high-level oversight.”
Hill read a recently passed OBC resolution that directs business decisions to reflect the Oneida Nation values and specifically states that “any employee or representative of Oneida Nation and its tribal corporations to disengage with all grant agreements and contracts that involve Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”
In the future, House said, he will keep the OBC informed of any gray areas of concern.
In 2025, House said, OESC processed $177 million in revenue and made $12 million in profit, most of which was reinvested in the LLC, with a small amount given to the tribe’s general fund. He estimated the valuation of the LLC as somewhere between $80-100 million.
House said one of his primary concerns in securing contracts, most of which are for engineering services, is keeping the LLC’s 500 employees on the job.
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Eau Claire County Government Center, which was visited by ICE agents Monday, Jan. 5. | Photo by Frank Zufall/Wisconsin Examiner
Eau Claire County Sheriff Dave Riewestahl confirmed that on Monday, Jan. 5, federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were sighted within the city of Eau Claire at the Eau Claire County Courthouse, but he noted the sheriff’s office had no contact or coordination with the federal agents and he was not aware of other activity by ICE agents in the county.
Riewestahl said the ICE agents were identified when they arrived at the courthouse and parked a vehicle in the parking lot.
The federal agents “entered on the ground floor and stood in the vestibule,” Riewestahl said. “Some were making phone calls, others were just on their phones and/or talking amongst themselves.”
He added that a “few went further into the courthouse,” probably to use the restrooms.
Concerning whether the ICE agents had contacted his office requesting help to detain people, Riewestahl said, “They have not, nor have we assisted with anything related to ICE.”
Riewestahl shared that the office’s policy manual for field services (patrol) and security services (jail) regarding immigration status directs patrol officers not to detain anyone accused of a “civil violation of federal immigration laws or a related civil warrant,” and the jail is only allowed to hold individuals who have “been charged with a federal crime,” or has been issued “a warrant, affidavit of probable cause or removal order.”
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The crashed SUV after an ICE agent shot the driver at point-blank range through the window on Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2026. The driver died, according to the Department of Homeland Security. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
An ICE officer fatally shot a 37-year-old woman driving an SUV through her car window in south Minneapolis on Wednesday morning.
The deadly confrontation immediately ratcheted up the intensity of what was already a brutal crackdown on Minnesota and its immigrants by the Trump administration — and in a community with raw memories of the police murder of George Floyd.
Video of the incident shared with the Reformer shows masked ICE officers approach a Honda Pilot stopped in the middle of Portland Avenue near 34th Street. One officer tells the driver to “get out of the f*cking car” and tries to open the door. The driver then slowly backs up and then pulls forward, appearing to try to leave. An officer at the front of the vehicle fires three shots and the SUV travels a short distance before crashing into a parked car.
The woman was transported to Hennepin County Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead, the Minneapolis chief of police said.
A group of Minneapolis City Council members identified her in a statement as Renee Nicole Good, a Minneapolis resident. They said she was a “member of our community” and demanded justice for her killing.
The witness who took the video, Caitlin Callenson, said she was on a walk when she saw an ICE vehicle stuck in the snow. As more ICE vehicles arrived, bystanders blew whistles in protest, and the driver of the SUV tried to block the ICE vehicles.
Callenson said she did not see ICE agents attempting to detain anyone leading up to or after the shooting.
Tricia McLaughlin, assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, quickly confirmed the death on X but gave a contradictory version of what happened. She accused the driver of attempting to run over and kill a law enforcement officer in an “act of domestic terrorism.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, at a news conference in Minnesota for the second day in a row, accused Good of “stalking and impeding” ICE operations and that the officer acted appropriately in killing her.
“He used his training to save his own life and that of his colleagues,” she said Wednesday.
Noem said ICE will continue its operations as usual after the killing in what the agency said is its largest operation ever, with more than 2,000 agents and officers in Minnesota.
U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, who represents Minneapolis, accused ICE officers of “terrorizing neighborhoods.”
“I am beyond outraged that their reckless, callous actions led to the killing of a legal observer in Minneapolis,” Omar said in a statement. “This administration has shown, yet again, that it does not care about the safety of Minnesotans.”
MAGA supporters showed video from different angles that purported to show the officer acting in self-defense, while former senior Obama administration official Tommy Vietor reshared the Reformer video on X and called the incident, “an execution by this ICE officer.” Americans can expect a debate over the shooting for years to come, regardless of the outcome of any investigations.
Law enforcement sprays demonstrators with chemical irritants at the scene where an ICE office shot and killed a 37-year-old woman in her car in Minneapolis on Jan. 7, 2026. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
After the shots were fired, the driver “then was completely slumped over in the vehicle,” said Emily Heller, another witness.
Federal agents wouldn’t allow a man who said he is a physician to examine the driver, Heller said. Emergency medical technicians arrived 15 minutes later, she said. First responders were unable to get close to the scene because ICE agents did not move their cars to let them through.
“There was chaos and ambulance and fire trucks couldn’t get through,” Callenson said. “They had to walk through all of the ICE vehicles on foot to try to administer first aid.”
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he had been dreading this moment since the Department of Homeland Security began ramping up immigration enforcement in the Twin Cities.
Frey called ICE’s statement saying the shooting was in self-defense was “bullsh*t” and blasted the agency’s presence in the city saying they’re only “causing chaos and distrust.”
“To ICE, get the f*ck out of Minneapolis,” Frey said.
He urged residents to remain peaceful and not “take the bait” from the federal government.
“They want us to respond in a way that creates a military occupation in our city,” Frey said. “Let’s not let them.”
Dozens of federal agents from ICE and the FBI, as well as Minneapolis police officers and Hennepin County sheriff deputies responded to the scene.
While ICE agents left the scene, the standoff between law enforcement and protesters is ongoing.
As some federal officers attempted to leave, protestors blocked their vehicle. The officers fired a noxious gas at close range, causing distress and vomiting for many demonstrators and journalists.
Protesters hurled insults at Minneapolis Police officers, who are not supposed to assist with immigration enforcement, but were on the scene Wednesday morning.
After law enforcement cleared the scene, demonstrators placed white roses where blood stained the snow.
City Council members including Robin Wonsley and Jamal Osman addressed the crowd, saying the area was an active crime scene, and that MPD was present to investigate.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said at a Wednesday press conference that they have yet to see information indicating that the shooting was justified and there was nothing to indicate the woman was a target of immigration enforcement activity, O’Hara said.
Minneapolis police officers secured the crime scene to preserve evidence, O’Hara said. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now jointly conducting an investigation into the use of deadly force with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
Hennepin County Sheriff Dawanna Witt emphasized the need for local involvement in the investigation for transparency: “With all due respect to the federal level, we do need to make sure that our local agencies are involved.”
Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty issued a statement soon after the shooting saying “pushing hard for a local investigation which is the only way to ensure full transparency and review by our office.”
U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, a St. Paul Democrat, called on Noem, who filmed herself observing ICE actions in Minneapolis on Tuesday, to immediately stop the ICE operation “to restore order and prevent further injuries.”
This story was originally produced by Minnesota Reformer, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
ICE agents stage outside of Hibachi Buffet in South Minneapolis Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2026 as an estimated 2,000 more federal agents are deployed in the metropolitan area. (Photo by Nicole Neri/Minnesota Reformer)
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was in the Twin Cities Tuesday as the Trump administration launches what it’s calling “the largest DHS operation ever.”
CBS News reported over the weekend that around 2,000 Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents are being deployed in Minnesota, in addition to the 700 already present in the state as part of “Operation Metro Surge,” which began in December.
In a video posted to the Department of Homeland Security’s official X account, Noem and several heavily armed and masked agents arrested a man in St. Paul. In another video, Noem appeared to greet and thank local ICE staff.
One photo showed Noem meeting with Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson, who is leading the prosecutions of people accused of defrauding Minnesota’s social services programs.
The Trump administration’s focus on Minnesota was sparked by unsubstantiated allegations shared by right-wing media figures that Somali Americans who committed fraud were using the proceeds to fund terrorist organizations abroad.
“@POTUS Trump and @Sec_Noem have rallied DHS law enforcement personnel to keep Americans safe and ERADICATE fraud,” DHS posted on X.
ICE did not respond to the Reformer’s requests for comment.
Immigrant rights organizations have been fielding many reports of ICE arrests around the metro, but an exact number of arrests is difficult to confirm. Unlike a few high-profile raids in Minneapolis and St. Paul in 2025, which involved dozens of agents and attracted large crowds, ICE appears to be focused on conducting smaller and faster operations.
Walz blasted the deployment as a waste of government resources on social media, sharing a video from a little over a week ago showing dozens of agents leading a single person out of a Hennepin County government building. He said the Trump administration did not give his office advance notice or any additional information on the operation.
“We have a ridiculous surge of apparently 2,000 people not coordinating with us that are for a show of the cameras,” Walz said at a news conference on Tuesday. “We don’t even know they are, they’ll be wearing masks.”
Noem fired back at the governor for accusing them of misusing taxpayer dollars given the widening scandal of fraud in state-run social service programs that led him to end his campaign for a third term on Monday.
Around the country and in Minnesota, immigration agents have been accused of violating constitutional rights: detaining U.S. citizens for days, targeting individuals based on their speech; and arresting and holding people without probable cause.
In late December, ICE agents entered a private area of the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis without a judicial warrant, according to immigrant rights activists and Democratic elected officials, who urged Hennepin Healthcare to adopt a clear policy and train employees on how to interact with immigration agents.
Janna Gewirtz O’Brien, a pediatrician and president-elect of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said fear of ICE is keeping immigrant families from seeking health care.
“There is a sense of fear that has been perpetuated by our administration, and we need hospitals to step up,” Gewirtz O’Brien said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota and three Minnesota-based law firms recently sued federal immigration authorities, alleging that ICE agents and their leaders are also routinely violating the constitutional rights of the people protesting their actions.
Minnesota Reformer is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.
Enrique Casiano addresses a rally at the Wisconsin State Capitol on Sept. 4, 2025, during a strike by UAW-represented employees against Mercyhealth East Clinic in Janesville. (Photo courtesy of Enrique Casiano)
Among the Democrats running for the chance to challenge the Republican incumbent in Wisconsin’s 1st Congressional District are a nurse, a union leader, a working class activist and a Hispanic professional.
A fifth candidate, Enrique Casiano of Janesville, happens to check all four of those boxes. A 47-year-old registered nurse, Casiano said his decision to join the Democratic field of hopefuls for the 1st District seat arose during a four-month strike at the Mercyhealth East Clinic in Janesville, where he is a leader in United Auto Workers Local 95.
The walkout of UAW-represented nurses, physical therapists, medical assistants and maintenance employees at the clinic started July 2, centered on health care costs, wages and security for employees.
“When September came around we were still on strike,” Casiano recalled. “I was thinking to myself, What in the world is going on? Why would a company do this to their employees? Why would this even be allowed?”
He and fellow union members blamed federal labor laws. Casiano said they have “no teeth” and don’t hold employers accountable.
“That has to be changed at a national level,” Casiano said. “That’s what motivated me to get out there and run for Congress.”
The strike ended Nov. 3, when the clinic management and the union ratified a new contract. The agreement led to raises that were higher than nonunion employees received elsewhere in the Mercyhealth system, Casiano said, although still less than what the union had originally sought. Health care costs for employees will be “basically three times” what they were previously, he added.
“This was a big concession,” Casiano said. “Something I told the membership, this should be a wake-up call for everybody to vote for someone who’s going to do something about the health care crisis in our nation.”
Casiano argues that health care is a human right and government should do more to prevent health care costs from leaving people in debt or sending them into bankruptcy.
“If you have the money, you’ll get care,” he said. “If you don’t have the money, I’ve seen how many people end up being homeless or go into great debt because of their health.”
He supports Medicare for All, but also favors giving states greater freedom to regulate the health care systems. He opposes consolidation among health care groups and favors breaking up large hospital and health care systems, as well as keeping for-profit businesses, including private equity and venture capital firms, out of health care.
“The current system rewards profiting from people’s health care crisis,” Casiano said. “It is not a system of prevention and rewarding the best health care outcomes and practices.”
Casiano said that updating the 1930s-era National Labor Relations Act with laws that would strengthen the rights of workers to union representation is a top priority of his. If elected he would also seek to enact stronger federal laws against wage theft and against misclassifying workers as independent contractors with fewer protections. He said that he also wants “real tax relief to the working class” instead of the wealthy.
Casiano is one of five Democrats vying for the chance to challenge U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil, the Republican incumbent in the 1st District now in his fourth term.
“I’m part of the working class. I’m not a lawyer. I’m not a politician,” Casiano said — although he readily acknowledged that every other Democrat competing for the nomination could make the same claim.
“Pretty much everybody running this time around, we’re all just working class people who want to see a change in the 1st District,” he said.
The rest of the Democratic field includes ironworker Randy Bryce, emergency room nurse Mitchell Berman, Racine community activist Gage Stills and university administrator Miguel Aranda.
As he shapes his campaign, Casiano is leaning into his background as a health care professional, a union activist and also a member of the Hispanic community.
He said the Trump administration’s round-ups of immigrants — which has caught up U.S. citizens in addition to people without legal immigration status — has a personal dimension.
“It’s sad that I, when I go to Milwaukee, can be stopped [by police] just because of the way I look and the way I talk,” he said. “At the national level, we’re attacking specific [ethnic groups of] people, which we’ve never done before.”
The 1st Congressional District has been solidly Republican since the mid-1990s. Steil succeeded Paul Ryan in the office when Ryan stepped aside in 2018 after a 20-year tenure. A corporate lawyer and former Ryan aide, Steil won with margins of 9 to 10 points in 2022 and 2024.
The Cook Political Report has rated the district as likely Republican in 2026, and gives the GOP a 2-point advantage based on past presidential elections.
Casiano contends political apathy accounts for Steil’s success. “In the last election, many of my coworkers, they just did not go out to vote,” he said. “It’s not winnable, somebody told me [because] it’s all about the money.”
He contends that 2026 can be different.
“What’s changed now is the Trump administration and how messed up everything is going,” Casiano said. “Only people that have blinders on will say everything is OK, because it’s not.”
Casiano said he knows he’s a long-shot candidate, but he believes Steil is vulnerable and that people can be motivated to vote if candidates reach out to them.
“I know he has let down a lot of his constituents,” Casiano said. “We know he’s not out there for the farmers, or some of the small businesses” in the district, he added. “That’s the big message we’ve got to bring forward.”
He believes enough people have stayed away from the polls in the past to make a difference in the outcome for 2026.
“We have to go and start talking to Black and brown people in our community and get them out to vote,” Casiano said. “This is what I’m going to be fighting for.”
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Neighbors confront Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Special Response Team officers following an immigration raid at the Italian restaurant Buono Forchetta in San Diego on May 30, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Pedro Rios)
This story was originally published by CalMatters.
A series of immigration raids across California in 2025 had one thing in common: Most of the federal agents detaining people wore masks over their faces.
This month, the state of California and its largest county will ban law enforcement officers from covering their faces, with a few exceptions, putting local and state police at odds with masked immigration agents.
The state law gives law enforcement officers a choice: If they cover their faces, they lose the ability to assert “qualified immunity,” the doctrine that protects officers from individual liability for their actions. That means they can be sued for assault, battery, false imprisonment, false arrest or malicious prosecution, and the law adds a clause that says the minimum penalty for committing those offenses while wearing a mask is $10,000.
Assemblymember Mark Gonzalez, a Los Angeles Democrat who co-authored the law, said it was necessary to rein in anonymous federal agents.
“We initially were under the understanding that, oh, they’re only targeting folks who were not citizens,” Gonzalez said, “And then actually over time you learn they don’t give a [crap] who you are, they’re attacking you no matter what, with no due process.”
The Trump administration has sued to block the bill, and more than a century of federal court precedent is on its side. An 1890 Supreme Court case provides that a state cannot prosecute a federal law enforcement officer acting in the course of their duties.
The Trump administration said in its brief to the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California that forcing agents to reveal their identities would put the agents at risk.
During Immigration and Customs Enforcement “actions, individuals can be heard threatening to doxx and find out who officers and their family members are and where they live,” the administration’s lawyers said in the Nov. 17 brief. “There are even public websites that seek and publish personal information about ICE and other federal officers to harass and threaten them and their families.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said the issue may not be as cut-and-dried as one or two Supreme Court cases. He pointed to a 2001 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that allowed the case of a federal sniper who killed a woman during the 1992 Ruby Ridge, Idaho, standoff to go to trial.
“It basically says that a federal officer can be criminally prosecuted for unreasonable actions,” Chemerinsky said. “Federal officers, by virtue of being federal officers, do not get immunity from all state civil and criminal laws.”
Brian Marvel, president of an organization that represents California police unions, said the law will make life harder for local cops and county sheriffs’ deputies. The organizations that represent police chiefs, sheriffs, agents in the attorney general’s office and California Highway Patrol officers opposed the law, too.
“I think that the state has put us in a tenuous position with this battle they’re having with the Trump administration,” said Marvel of the Peace Officers Research Association of California. “We don’t want to be in the middle of this fight. But unfortunately, [with] the desire for higher name recognition and elections in 2026, they decided to create things that are much more political and not geared toward legitimate public safety issues.”
Marvel said another drawback of the law is giving “a false sense of hope to the immigrant community in California” that the law will force federal agents to leave the state.
Los Angeles County supervisors have also approved a local mask ban on law enforcement for unincorporated areas of the county, a measure that will go into effect in mid-January, unless a court decision comes sooner.
Gonzalez noted that masks have played a significant role in recent California history. First, California temporarily made masks mandatory in public and at work during the pandemic. Then, a couple of years later, a rush of smash-and-grab robberies were harder to solve because the suspects all wore masks. Now, California finds itself in its third back-and-forth over face coverings.
The law provides exemptions for N-95 or medical-grade masks to prevent infection transmission, and permits undercover operatives to wear a mask.
“This is specifically aimed to federal agents because we gotta combat these kidnappings somehow,” Gonzalez said, “and this was our way in.”
This story was originally produced by Stateline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
California National Guard members stand guard at an entrance to the Wilshire Federal Building on June 13, 2025, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that he will back off his plans to use National Guard troops in the Democratic-led cities of Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.
The move follows the Supreme Court’s decision last week that found Trump could not deploy guard members to Chicago, ruling that the president did not meet the requirements to send guard members to the Windy City for the purpose of assisting with federal immigration enforcement.
Several federal judges have either blocked the deployments or found them unlawful. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, generally prevents the military from participating in civilian law enforcement.
“We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again – Only a question of time!” Trump wrote on his social media site, TruthSocial.
The president first deployed National Guard troops earlier this summer to Los Angeles, following massive protests against immigration raids.
He has continued to send service members to cities with Democratic leaders, a decision that has tested the legal bounds of presidential authority on military law all the way up to the Supreme Court.
An appeals court in early December ruled that the Trump administration must remove troops from Los Angeles, which upheld a lower court ruling that found it illegal to keep an extended military presence long after protests quelled.
In November, a federal judge permanently blocked the Trump administration from deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to Portland, Oregon.
The judge, Karin Immergut, found the move to use service members for the purpose of protecting a federal immigration facility exceeded presidential authority. Trump nominated Immergut in his first term.
Guard members are still deployed in the District of Columbia; Memphis, Tennessee; and New Orleans, Louisiana.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia stands outside U.S. District Court in Greenbelt with his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, left, and Lydia Walther-Rodriguez with CASA, after a federal judge ruled earlier this month he was allowed to remain free. (File photo by William J. Ford/Maryland Matters)
A federal judge in Tennessee is ordering federal prosecutors to turn over some documents to lawyers for Kilmar Abrego Garcia as they try to show his indictment on human smuggling charges was the product of vindictive prosecution.
U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw’s nine-page ruling — issued under seal Dec. 3, but unsealed at noon Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Nashville — said a “subset” of more than 3,000 government documents he reviewed appear to undercut the government’s defense against vindictive prosecution.
“Specifically, the government’s documents may contradict its prior representations that the decision to prosecute was made locally and that there were no outside influences,” Crenshaw wrote.
The order is a partial victory for Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran native who lives in Maryland, where he was stopped by immigration agents in March and deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador. His removal came without due process and despite an earlier court order that prohibited immigration officials from deporting Abrego Garcia to his home country, for fear of violence.
A series of court battles ended with the U.S. Supreme Court in April ordering Abrego Garcia be returned to the United States. He was finally brought back to the U.S. in June, where he faced new charges of human smuggling, stemming from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee where he was let go without a citation.
Abrego Garcia argues that the smuggling charge was concocted years after the fact to punish him for embarrassing the administration in court, and should be thrown out.
The charges of “conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain” and “unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain” are tied to a 2022 traffic stop in Putnam County, Tennessee, where he was pulled over for speeding. There were nine passengers in the back of his car.
Abrego Garcia was not arrested. No ticket was issued.
But three years later, as he was winning his case to be returned to the U.S., federal prosecutors were revisiting that traffic stop. A Homeland Security agent told a federal judge earlier this year that he was told on April 28 of this year to investigate the traffic stop.
Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty to the charges, that his attorneys have claimed were filed as retaliation against their client. They claim senior officials in the Justice Department pushed for the indictment, citing television interviews where Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said the investigation began after “a judge in Maryland … questioned” the government and accused it of “doing something wrong,” according to Crenshaw’s order.
The government denies involvement by higher-ups, saying the decision to prosecute Abrego Garcia was made solely by Robert McGuire, the U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee.
Crenshaw’s order includes a timeline of events. In it are several communications between McGuire and D.C.-based U.S. Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh that began on April 27, one day before a federal agent was assigned to investigate the 2022 traffic stop.
In an April 30 exchange, Singh writes that Abrego’s case is “a top priority.” McGuire writes “we want the high command looped in.”
In a May 15 email, McGuire writes about the pending indictment.
“Ultimately, I would hope to have ODAG [Office of the Deputy Attorney General] eyes on it as we move towards a decision about whether this matter is going to ultimately be charged,” he wrote, according to Crenshaw’s order.
McGuire adds: “While ultimately, the office’s decision to charge will land on me. I think it makes sense to get the benefit of all of your brains and talent in this process and as we consider this case. I have not received specific direction from ODAG other than I have heard anecdotally that the DAG and PDAG would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.”
Singh is updated about the indictment over the next week, according to Crenshaw’s timeline.
“These documents show that McGuire did not act alone and to the extent McGuire had input on the decision to prosecute, he shared it with Singh and others,” Crenshaw wrote.
Abrego’s attorneys successfully made a case before Crenshaw that prosecutors had acted vindictively. They sought the release of documents through discovery. Federal prosecutors balked and withheld those documents, citing privilege.
Crenshaw, in his now-unsealed order, said allowing the privilege assertion to trump due process protections would undermine rulings by other federal courts.
“The Court recognizes the government’s assertion of privileges, but Abrego’s due process right to a non-vindictive prosecution outweighs the blanket evidentiary privileges asserted by the government,” Crenshaw wrote. “If the work product, attorney-client, and deliberative process privileges asserted by the government precluded all discovery in the context of a vindictiveness motion, defendants would never be able to answer the question ‘what motivated the government’s prosecution?'”
This story was originally produced by Maryland Matters, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Wisconsin Examiner, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Democratic and Republican candidates for governor appeared for a joint forum in early November. Shown are, from left, Matt Smith of WISN-12, Francesca Hong, Sara Rodriguez, Kelda Roys, David Crowley and Missy Hughes, all Democrats, and Josh Schoemann, a Republican. Republican Tom Tiffany did not participate. Since that event two more Democrats have entered the contest, former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and former cabinent member Joel Brennan. (Photo by Baylor Spears/Wisconsin Examiner)
A popular two-term governor decides to retire, and triggers a flood of prospective replacements. Democrats vow to flip the Republican-majority Legislature. A state Supreme Court race blows the doors off spending records, and another one is waiting in the wings.
Each of those could be considered a big story by itself in Wisconsin, but they’re all part of this year’s single biggest story in government and politics. And that story — that it was a really big year for Wisconsin politics — wasn’t just about 2025: It set the stage for 2026.
The three-stories-in-one about Wisconsin politics are just the beginning of the news that flooded our pages in 2025. Wisconsin Examiner’s five-person staff published 550 stories in 2025, a total that includes opinion columns by Editor Ruth Conniff, but doesn’t include briefs that also appeared under the bylines of Conniff, Erik Gunn, Isiah Holmes, Henry Redman, Baylor Spears and Criminal Justice Fellows Andrew Kennard and Frank Zufall.
Herewith, then, our list of 10 big stories that the Wisconsin Examiner covered over the course of the last year.
Democratic Gov. Tony Evers put an end to the last Wisconsin governor’s quest for a third term when he defeated Republican Scott Walker in 2018. Midway through his own second term, Evers surprised many by deciding to call it quits when his current term ends rather than run again.
The decision created the first open race for governor in more than a decade and opened the floodgates, with a bevy of Democrats entering the fray. By contrast, the Republican field was down to two at year’s end, with one early contender dropping out after the entry of Congressman Tom Tiffany.
In the Wisconsin Legislature, Democrats, having narrowed the Republicans’ majority in 2024 thanks to new maps that undid the state’s 15 years of GOP gerrymandering, launched twin efforts to flip both the Assembly and the Senate in 2026. Republicans vowed to maintain their majority in both houses.
The new Senate and Assembly maps were made possible after the 2023 state Supreme Court election flipped the seven-member Court’s ideological majority from conservative to liberal. With the balance of the Court at stake again after liberal Justice Ann Walsh Bradley retired in 2025, Democrats went all out, electing Dane County Judge Susan Crawford to the nominally nonpartisan Court and handily overcoming the efforts of billionaire Elon Musk who spent millions supporting Crawford’s opponent, former state Attorney General Brad Schimel. The contest set both state and national records for campaign spending in a U.S. judicial election, and maintained the one-vote liberal majority. Now supporters of the current Court majority have their eyes on extending that ideological advantage in 2026.
Chris Taylor, currently a District IV appeals court judge and a former Democratic state representative, is running to succeed sharply conservative Rebecca Bradley. Bradley opted not to seek a new term on the Court, and conservative Appeals Court Judge Maria Lazar has announced plans to seek the post.
Evers went into the 2025-27 state budget process with an ambitious list of goals. Lengthy negotiations between the Democratic governor and Republican lawmakers produced a deal. While the final result fell well short of his original vision, Evers claimed victory nevertheless, with gains on paper for child care funding and for public school special education funding.
Both, however, left their strongest advocates disappointed, and by the end of the year, the special education funding did not live up to the promises made when the budget was signed.
The budget’s lack of additional school aid for regular classes was especially upsetting to public school advocates, and was exacerbated by the state’s expanding school choice systems that use tax dollars to pay for private schools and charter schools outside the common public schools. It also underscored the extent to which local communities have been voting to raise their own property taxes to support their school systems.
The defeat of some school referendum requests further accentuated the sense of crisis, while Republican lawmakers called for new restrictions on the referendum process. And in the state’s largest system, Milwaukee Public Schools, an audit called for sweeping changes in response to a range of challenges, from declining enrollments and staff turnover to the continuing pressure of having to fund the parallel voucher and charter systems.
Throughout the year, the state Department of Public Instruction came under intense scrutiny from Republican lawmakers over policies ranging from school performance evaluations to the handling of sexual abuse complaints against school employees.
With the inauguration of President Donald Trump to a second term in the White House, the fallout from new federal actions reached Wisconsin in a myriad of ways. The giant legislation to cut taxes (mostly for the wealthy) and spending (much of it for health care) that Trump signed in July was one cause, setting the stage for future cuts to Medicaid and to health care under the Affordable Care Act, while also imposing new restrictions on programs aimed at reducing hunger.
But there were other reductions as well, some coming from the actions of the “Department of Government Efficiency” or DOGE that Trump authorized, and others from unilateral — and often legally challenged — actions by the administration itself. Clean energy and climate change projects, scientific research, education assistance, help with removing lead from public schools, community service, child care, economic policies, numerous federal agencies and the federal workforce itself along with countless other federal initiatives were swept up in the administration’s first year.
The record-long federal shutdown — when Congress failed to agree on a temporary spending plan and the GOP majority refused to extend extra tax breaks for Affordable Care Act health plans into 2026 — added to the chaos, with a temporary halt to the federal SNAP food assistance program.
Wisconsinites joined people from across the country in the recurring protests that started just weeks into the Trump presidency, culminating in the Oct. 18 “No Kings” rallies from coast to coast that some analysts identified as the largest mass protest ever in the United States.
The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown reverberated in Wisconsin from Inauguration Day. At the start of this term, Editor Ruth Conniff traveled to Mexico, documenting the longstanding relationships Wisconsin farmers have had with migrants who provide 70% of the labor that the state’s dairy industry has relied on.
Republican lawmakers called for cementing the state’s relationship with the newly unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — agency , while the Evers administration resisted those calls. Individual counties signed on to assist ICE, sometimes facing opposition, but while Wisconsin was less in the national spotlight than other states, it wasn’t immune to periodic episodes of immigration enforcement.
Visa cancellations caught up students from overseas, and migrant arrests rose across the state. Immigration enforcement officers focused on the Milwaukee County Courthouse in their search for immigrants to take into custody, prompting criticism from advocates who warned the result would drive migrants underground rather than encouraging them to show up for court dates as witnesses, plaintiffs or defendants.
After a four-day trial in December, Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan was convicted on a felony charge of obstruction but acquitted of a misdemeanor charge of concealing a man who had appeared in her courtroom in April and was targeted by immigration officials. The case had national repercussions as the Trump administration targets judges it sees as opponents to its policies.
In Wisconsin a statewide — indeed, nationwide — the rush to embrace massive data centers to serve emerging artificial intelligence-based technology sparked widespread debate over water use, electricity demands and power generation.
Meanwhile, a longstanding and widely popular land preservation program — the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship fund — hovered on the verge of collapse as Republican lawmakers demanded the power to veto stewardship decisions after a state Supreme Court ruling in 2024 removed the Legislature from the process.
After a running battle against rerouting an Enbridge oil pipeline, the Army Corps of Engineers approved permits for the project over the strenuous objections of opponents, only to be sued by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
A standoff between the Evers administration and the Legislature’s Republican leaders over how to address PFAS “forever chemicals” was eased by a state Supreme Court ruling allowing the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources to apply Wisconsin’s spills law to PFAS contamination, along with a bipartisan bill that would require the DNR to notify local and tribal officials about groundwater PFAS contamination.
A lengthy investigation by Isiah Holmes of the Wisconsin Examiner in partnership with Type Investigations documented how the Milwaukee Area Investigative Team, assigned to probe death investigations for people killed by metro Milwaukee police officers, use protocols that grant officers privileges not afforded to the general public.
Among many other issues involving policing and law enforcement in Wisconsin, police surveillance was a recurring matter, with debates arising over facial recognition technology, department interest in expanding phone-tracking resources and increasing attention to how police agencies make use of widespread surveillance cameras.
Evers’ budget proposal included a sweeping plan for prison reform, but the result was more limited, leaving advocates dissatisfied. One concrete element is the start of a project to close the Green Bay Correctional Institution, a longtime objective, but divisions remain between the governor and GOP lawmakers about the details.
With the return of President Donald Trump to the White House, the conspiracy theories that were amplified after his reelection loss in November 2020 got a new burst of energy. The Wisconsin Elections Commission twice rejected an administration demand for the personal identifying information of Wisconsin voters.
Trump issued a largely symbolic pardon of the Republicans who signed certificates falsely stating he won the 2020 presidential election in Wisconsin, while a Dane County judge kept alive a criminal case against three men charged with orchestrating the fake elector scheme.
Although bipartisan lawmakers in the Assembly sought common ground over absentee ballot drop boxes and a measure to allow election clerks to begin counting absentee ballots on the Monday before Election Day, their efforts stalled.
August flooding in Southeast Wisconsin that followed torrential storms and was centered on the metro Milwaukee area left behind devastation, damaging nearly 2,000 homes and some $34 million worth of public infrastructure.
The Trump administration’s Federal Emergency Management Agency approved $30 million in initial relief to support the victims of flood damage, but the administration denied a subsequent request for aid to mitigate future disasters.
GET THE MORNING HEADLINES.
Johann Teran, photographed in Minneapolis on Jan. 31, 2025, is among the Venezuelans living in the United States with temporary protected status who is likely to see his legal status expire. The Trump administration has canceled TPS for more than 1 million people from 11 countries. (Photo by Madison McVan/Minnesota Reformer)
WASHINGTON — Since Inauguration Day, more than 1.5 million immigrants have either lost or will lose their temporary legal status, including their work authorizations and deportation protections, due to President Donald Trump’s aggressive revocation of legal immigration.
It’s the most rapid loss in legal status for immigrants in recent United States history, experts in immigration policy told States Newsroom. The Trump administration curtailed legal immigration by terminating Temporary Protected Status for more than 1 million immigrants and ending Humanitarian Parole protections for half a million more individuals.
“I don’t think we’ve ever, as a country, seen such a huge number of people losing their immigration status all at once,” said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.
The move to strip so many immigrants of their work authorization is likely to not only affect communities, but also batter the economy, both immigration and economic experts told States Newsroom.
“Seeing well over 1 million people lose their work authorization in a single year is a really huge event that has ripple effects for employers and communities and families and our economy as well,” Gelatt said.
Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by immigrant rights groups and TPS recipients themselves challenging the terminations as unlawful.
“This is the continuation of the Trump administration attack against the immigrant community, and specifically about the TPS program, a program that, for many of us has been a good program, a life-saving program,” said Jose Palma, a TPS recipient from El Salvador and coordinator of the National TPS Alliance, which is part of several TPS lawsuits.
A TPS designation is given because a national’s home country is deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, war, natural disasters or some other unstable condition.
When Congress created the program in 1990, it was initially meant to be temporary, which is why authorizations can be as short as six months and as long as 18 months.
Immigrants who are granted TPS must go through background checks and be vetted each time their status is renewed, but the program does not provide a path to citizenship.
Under the Biden administration, the number of TPS recipients grew, as did the category of humanitarian parole.
That policy decision was heavily criticized by Republicans, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to reevaluate TPS country designations for terminations during her Senate confirmation hearing this year.
“This program has been abused and manipulated by the Biden administration, and that will no longer be allowed,” Noem said during her hearing.
Before the Trump administration came into office in late January, there were more than 1.3 million immigrants in the TPS program, hailing from 17 countries. Under the first Trump administration, there were roughly 400,000 TPS recipients.
“Almost a million new people got onto TPS protections under President Biden, so we saw a really rapid expansion, and now we’re seeing a very rapid contraction, which is all to say that in the first Trump administration, there weren’t so many people who had TPS,” Gelatt said.
Noem has terminated TPS for immigrants from 11 countries, and the more than 1 million immigrants affected will lose their protections by February.
Noem extended six months’ protection for South Sudan earlier this year, but decided in November to terminate protections by January. She most recently terminated a TPS designation for Ethiopia on Dec. 12.
The other countries with TPS termination are Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela.
“We’ve never seen this many people lose their legal status in the history of the United States,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said. “This is totally unprecedented.”
People losing their status are also concentrated in certain areas. Florida has more than 400,000 TPS recipients, and Texas has nearly 150,000. Bier said he expects certain industries with high TPS workers to feel the impact, such as construction and health care.
Immigrants from two countries — Haiti and Venezuela – make up a majority of recipients set to lose their TPS protections, at nearly 935,000 people.
Venezuelans, who make up 605,000 of those 935,000 TPS recipients, were first granted protections during Trump’s first term.
On his final day in office in 2021, his administration issued 18-month deportation protections for Venezuelans — known as Deferred Enforcement Departure, or DED — citing the country’s unstable government under President Nicolás Maduro.
“Through force and fraud, the Maduro regime is responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere in recent memory,” according to the Jan. 19, 2021 memo. “A catastrophic economic crisis and shortages of basic goods and medicine have forced about five million Venezuelans to flee the country, often under dangerous conditions.”
After the Trump administration’s 18-month DED designation, the Biden administration issued the TPS designation for Venezuelans who came to the U.S. in 2021 and again in 2023. The move created two separate TPS groups for Venezuelans.
“The bottom line is that removing the 935,000 Venezuelans and Haitians would cause the entire economy to contract by more than $14 billion,” said Michael Clemens, a professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University.
He added that not all the TPS recipients are in the labor market. Some are children or elderly dependents who cannot work. Clemens said the TPS workforce population of Haitians and Venezuelans is about 400,000.
Separately, under the Biden administration, nearly 750,000 immigrants had some form of humanitarian parole, granting them work and temporary legal status due to either Russia’s war in Ukraine or efforts by the administration to manage mass migration from Central American countries.
DHS has moved to end humanitarian parole for 532,000 immigrants hailing from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, opening them up for deportation proceedings.
“The onslaught of attacks that we’ve been seeing on temporary forms of immigration status, specifically with a humanitarian focus, is truly saddening and concerning,” said Alice Barrett, a supervising immigration attorney at the immigrant rights group CASA.
Not every recipient has been affected. The agency has kept humanitarian parole for 140,000 Ukrainians who came to the United States after Russia’s invasion in 2022, and 76,000 Afghans who were brought in after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from their country.
But since the National Guard shooting last month in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national granted asylum, the program is under increased scrutiny and all immigration-related paperwork from Afghans has been halted.
This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to end TPS.
During the president’s first term, he tried to end TPS for Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.
This time is different, said Palma of the National TPS alliance.
“The only thing different right now is that the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to continue with termination of TPS, even though lower courts are saying, ‘No, we should stop the cancellation of TPS for now, until it’s clear whether the decision was illegal or not,’” he said.
So far, in emergency appeals, the high court has allowed the Trump administration to move forward in stripping legal status for the two groups of Venezuelan TPS recipients and individuals in the humanitarian parole program.
Barrett at CASA, which is leading the legal challenge of TPS termination for Cameroon and Afghanistan, said when it comes to TPS termination, “what we are seeing in the second Trump administration is a supercharged version of what we saw in the first Trump administration.”
“We are essentially seeing during this administration more actual terminations happening early on even while litigation is pending, which has certainly been disappointing for members of the community, because they’re still left in this limbo,” she said.
Barrett added that even when TPS recipients try to apply for longer-term legal status they face multiple hurdles.
“For example, we are seeing them questioned or denied relief at asylum interviews because they did not apply for asylum within one year of entering the United States, even though the Code of Federal Regulations clearly creates an exception to this one-year filing deadline for people who have been in other valid status before applying for asylum,” Barrett said.
“These members of our community who have been in lawful status therefore now risk being placed in removal proceedings and even (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention, where conditions are increasingly inhumane and dangerous,” she continued.
TPS recipients are still continuing to fight in the courts and share their stories, Barrett said.
“These cases are still in progress, and we remain hopeful that despite preliminary rulings leaving so many hardworking individuals and their families in a state of uncertainty, upon thorough review and litigation of these cases the courts will recognize the improper nature of recent TPS terminations and restore status for those seeking safety here in the United States,” she said.
Protesters gather outside of the Federal Building in Milwaukee to denounce the arrest of Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
Attorneys at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Wisconsin are pushing for the release of Jaciel Cirrus Rojas, who has been held in immigration detention since June. Rojas, a Mexican-born man who has lived in the U.S. since 2018, has no criminal record, Urban Milwaukee reported, and was arrested by immigration officers despite not being the target of their operation.
An immigration judge ordered Cirrus Rojas released on bond in July. But the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) appealed his release and Cirrus Rojas remains in the Dodge County Jail.
The judge’s order was vacated by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), followed by the denial of a federal court petition challenging the legality of Cirrus Rojas’ detention. Cirrus Rojas has had no contact with his wife and infant daughter for the 200 days during which he has been detained.
ACLU attorneys working for his release, say Cirrus Rojas has a pending asylum claim and is at risk of being tortured if deported to his home country. The hearing for Cirrus Rojas’ asylum claim has been rescheduled. Earlier this month, ACLU attorney Jennifer Bizzotto filed an emergency motion in the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals pushing to overturn previous denials to release Rojas.
“We have seen hundreds of cases nationwide in which federal judges have ruled that [immigration enforcement] cannot hold people in Cirrus Rojas’ position without bond hearings, and that has not deterred [immigration enforcement] from continuing to lock up people while flagrantly violating the law,” ACLU staff attorney Hannah Schwarz said in a statement.
An ever larger portion of ICE arrests involve people like Cirrus Rojas who have no criminal record
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Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, speaks following a hearing in federal court in Greenbelt, Maryland, on Dec. 22, 2025. (Photo by Ashley Murray/States Newsroom)
GREENBELT, Md. — U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis will retain an order keeping the wrongly deported El Salvador national Kilmar Abrego Garcia out of federal custody for the rest of the year, the judge said at a Monday hearing.
In the first hearing that Abrego Garcia was present for after his release last week, Xinis pressed U.S. Department of Justice attorneys to say by Friday how they planned to proceed, including whether they would seek a new warrant to arrest Abrego Garcia. Attorneys for Abrego Garcia would then be able to respond to the government next week, with a decision coming in the new year.
Xinis expressed frustration with the Trump administration Monday, as she has throughout the monthslong case that has highlighted the nationwide crackdown on immigration.
She said she would “happily” consider a lawful request from the administration to detain Abrego Garcia under a different section of law than the one she has already rejected. But the government has not given her the assurance that they would pursue a different authority to detain him again.
“But the problem is, you want me to lift the (temporary restraining order) so that we don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “Why should I give the respondents the benefit of the doubt in this case? Why should I do that here? Show your work. That’s all.”
DOJ lawyer Ernesto Molina objected to a restriction on the government’s ability to detain Abrego Garcia.
“There’s no period during which an alien cannot be detained under the appropriate circumstances,” he said.
Abrego Garcia’s lawyer, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, told reporters following the hearing that Abrego Garcia, who is married to and the father of U.S. citizens, would be with his family for the holidays.
“As of right now, Mr. Abrego Garcia is going to return to his home with his wife and his children and his family members in Maryland,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said. “And he will be at home through Christmas and New Year.”
Sandoval-Moshenberg also blamed the federal government for keeping Abrego Garcia in the country, rather than allowing him to self-deport to Costa Rica.
Costa Rica has agreed to accept Abrego Garcia, who entered the United States without legal authorization in 2011. The Trump administration has rejected deportation to the Central American country, instead proposing he be removed to several African nations to which he has no relationship.
Abrego Garcia “remains willing” to move to Costa Rica, Sandoval-Moshenberg told Xinis. If not for the government’s actions to pursue criminal charges in Tennessee and to reserve the right for future immigration enforcement in Maryland, Abrego Garcia would now be out of the country, Sandoval-Moshenberg said.
“It’s the government that’s preventing him from doing so,” he said. “He’s literally in a double bind. …. He’s got two ankle bracelets.”
Abrego Garcia after his deportation was imprisoned in a brutal prison in El Salvador and returned to the United States to face criminal charges in Tennessee stemming from a 2022 traffic stop. After he was ordered released from U.S. marshals’ custody by a federal judge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him again at an appointment at the Baltimore, Maryland, ICE field office.
In mid-December, he was released from the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania. He had remained there since September.
Chequamegon Family Restaurant, also known as the Ashland Family Restaurant, where two workers were arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on Monday, Dec. 15. (Photo by Frank Zufall/Wisconsin Examiner)
Federal U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested two individuals at the Chequamegon Family Restaurant (also known as the Ashland Family Restaurant) Monday, Dec. 15 in the city of Ashland in far northern Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Superior.
This is the second arrest ICE agents have made in the Ashland/Bayfield area since July when an individual was arrested at Washburn Iron Works in the city of Washburn.
The Ashland City Police Department issued a statement Friday, Dec. 19 saying that ICE and U.S. Border Patrol officers had informed the police department that federal officers had a federal warrant for two individuals at the “Ashland Family Restaurant.”
The police department noted the federal officers had “picked up” one employee in the morning, and then returned after requesting that a city police officer be present because “the restaurant staff was very upset with them the first time they were there.”
A Dec. 15 police dispatch report notes that Officer Mark Campry was requested at 12:04 p.m. to the restaurant.
According to the police statement, when the federal officers returned with the local police officer there was a request to open the doors and a second person was taken into custody.
The police did not say what type of warrant ICE had to make the arrest. ICE has not yet responded to a request for that information.
Alexandra Guevara of Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant workers’ rights organization, says there is an important difference between judicial warrants, signed by judges in cases where individuals are wanted for a crime, and ICE administrative warrants, which lack the same force.
“Nobody should open their doors for an ICE warrant. It’s an illegal instrument,” Guevara said. “When we do our Know Your Rights trainings, it’s the first thing we tell people — you have to be able to get a warrant that is actually signed by a judge, that includes your address, that includes your name, your official name, and you have the ability to get that warrant, send it to a lawyer, send a picture to a lawyer, and ask, ‘Should I open the door or not?’”
Reporters for the Ashland Daily Press said they also were told by an employee of Deltco, a plastics manufacturer, that an employee at the plant was taken in custody by the federal officers Monday. Deltco management did not return calls from the Wisconsin Examiner attempting to verify whether an employee had been arrested.
Voces de la Frontera has identified one of the restaurant employees, a cook, as Luis Davids Coatzeozon Gomes, but has not been able to find out where he is being held.
“One of the things that happens with some of these detentions is that they’re detained and immediately sent somewhere else,” said Guevara, “so they don’t need to report them. And I mean, that creates a lot of confusion, that makes it impossible for their families to find them. It also makes it very difficult for lawyers to represent them, because they need to be in one place to be represented by a lawyer who can have access to them.”
She added, “We know that the ACLU has been dealing with that, talking all over the nation about how difficult it is now to trace where people are being taken because they’re being moved every two to three days, sometimes crossing state borders, like even being sent to places as far as Florida from here. And that makes it very, very difficult to know exactly how many people have been detained because they’re not being reported here.”
Guevara said most ICE detainees in Wisconsin are held, at least temporarily, in the Dodge County Jail. However, nearby Douglas County also has an agreement to hold ICE detainees. The ACLU reported in September that the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office had billed ICE for detaining 111 persons since the beginning of 2025.
State Rep. Angela Stroud, (D-Ashland) questioned why a city police officer accompanied the federal officers making an immigration arrest.
“My view on this is, if there’s probable cause that someone committed a crime, then you know, that’s a reasonable thing for the police to be involved in, because clearly, fighting crime is part of what we want to happen in our communities,” she said.
In answer to a question about the police involvement in the arrest, Ashland City Police Chief Bill Hagstrom sent the Ashland Daily Press a citation from the city’s police manual, 416.6 “Federal Request for Assistance” that states: “requests by federal immigration officials for assistance from this department should be directed to a supervisor. The Department may provide available support services, such as traffic control or peacekeeping efforts.”
Rep. Stroud also expressed concern about taking workers from employers struggling to maintain adequate staffing during a labor shortage in a city of fewer than 8,000 people.
“We have problems finding people to work generally around here,” she said, “and you know, we have an aging population. We have a lot of workforce shortages. What is the big picture goal here, and how does it help our community? How does this help our community? I would like someone to explain that. And I recognize people need to, you know, follow immigration laws, but we’re seeing more and more that even people who do follow the law are being deported. And it’s just irrational. I don’t understand the big picture goal, except maybe to terrorize communities, and that’s, needless to say, is completely unethical.”
She added, “Unfortunately, we’re seeing these large raids and sweeps of people who are working and, you know, sometimes we’re even finding people who are American citizens getting caught up in that. So I recognize that people have a lot of strong feelings on this topic.”
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Judge Hannah Dugan leaves court in her federal trial, where she was convicted of a felony for obstructing immigration officers. (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
According to the Eastern District of Wisconsin’s Interim U.S. Attorney Brad Schimel, freshly appointed to his position by President Donald Trump, the federal trial of Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan had nothing to do with politics. “There’s not a political aspect to it,” Schimel told reporters after Dugan’s felony conviction on charges she obstructed U.S. immigration agents as they tried to make an arrest inside the Milwaukee courthouse. “We weren’t trying to make an example out of anyone,” Schimel said. “This was necessary to hold Judge Dugan accountable because of the actions she took.”
Schimel didn’t say whether Dugan’s very public arrest and perp walk through the courthouse was also necessary, along with the social media posts by Trump’s FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, crowing about the arrest and sharing photos of Dugan in handcuffs.
There is no doubt that the Dugan case was highly political from the start.
As a coalition of democracy and civic organizations in Wisconsin declared in a statement after the verdict, Dugan’s prosecution threatens the integrity of our justice system and “sends a troubling message about the consequences faced by judges who act to protect due process in their courtrooms.”
But Schimel is right about one thing: Dugan’s trial this week was mainly about “a single day — a single bad day — in a public courthouse.”
That narrow focus helped the prosecution win a conviction in a confusing mixed verdict. The jury found Dugan not guilty of a misdemeanor offense for concealing Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, the defendant she led out a side door while immigration agents waited near the main door of her courtroom to arrest him. At the same time, the jury found Dugan guilty of the more serious charge of obstructing the agents in their effort to make the arrest. The two charges are based on some of the same elements, and Dugan’s defense attorneys are now asking that her conviction be overturned on that basis.
An observer watching the trial from afar with no inside knowledge of the defense strategy might wonder why Dugan’s defense team didn’t enter a guilty plea on the misdemeanor charge and then strongly contest the felony obstruction charge as an outrageous overreach in a heavily politicized prosecution. That might have led to a more favorable mixed verdict, in which the jury found that Dugan was probably guilty of something, but that it did not rise to the level of a felony with a potential penalty of five years in prison.
I’m no expert, but daily reports from the trial this week gave me the strong impression that things weren’t going well for Dugan as long as witnesses and lawyers focused on a blow-by-blow account of the events of April 18. Witness testimony described an agitated Dugan, whose colleague, Judge Kristela Cervera, testified — damagingly — that she was uncomfortable with how Dugan managed the federal agents she was outraged to find hanging around outside her courtroom.
It’s not surprising that the jury agreed with the prosecution that Dugan was not cooperative and that she wanted to get Flores-Ruiz out of her courtroom in a way that made an end-run around the unprecedented meddling of federal immigration enforcement inside the courthouse. Like other judges and courthouse staff, she was upset about the disruption caused by ICE agents stalking people who showed up to court.
But, as Dean Strang, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law and a long-time Wisconsin criminal defense lawyer, told me in April just before he joined the defense team and stopped talking about the case to the press, “Whatever you think of the actual conduct the complaint alleges, there is a real question about whether there’s even arguably any federal crime here.”
The government’s behavior was “extraordinarily atypical” for a nonviolent, non-drug charge involving someone who is not a flight risk, Strang added.
The handcuffs, the public arrest at Dugan’s workplace, the media circus — none of it was normal, or justified. When Bondi and Patel began posting pictures of Dugan in handcuffs on social media to brag about it, “what is it they are trying to do?” Strang asked. His conclusion: “Humiliate and terrify, not just her but every other judge in the country.”
The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, Voces de la Frontera, and Common Cause-Wisconsin agree with that assessment, writing in their statement reacting to the conviction that Dugan’s felony conviction threatens the integrity of our justice system as a whole, and undermines the functioning of the courts by scaring away defendants, witnesses and plaintiffs who are afraid they might be arrested if they show up to participate in legal proceedings.
But that big picture perspective was not a major feature of the defense’s closing arguments, which relied heavily on raising reasonable doubt about Dugan’s intentions and her actions during a stressful and chaotic day.
That’s frustrating because, contrary to Schimel’s assertions, the big picture, not the events of “a single bad day” is what was actually at stake in this case.
One of the most distressing aspects of the Dugan trial was the prosecution’s through-the-looking-glass invocation of the rule of law and the integrity of the courts.
The federal agents called to the stand, the prosecutors in the courtroom, and Schimel, in his summary of the case, made a big point about the “safety” of law enforcement officers.
Repeatedly, we heard that immigration agents prefer to make arrests inside courthouses because they provide a “safe” environment in which to operate.
In his comments on the verdict, Schimel emphasized that Dugan jeopardized the safety of federal officers by causing them to arrest Flores-Ruiz on the street instead of inside the courthouse: “The defendant’s actions provided an opportunity for a wanted subject to flee outside of that secure courthouse environment,” Schimel said.
This upside-down view of safety has become a regular MAGA talking point, with Republicans claiming that when citizens demand that masked agents identify themselves or make videos of ICE dragging people out of their cars, they are jeopardizing the safety of law enforcement officers — as opposed to trying to protect their neighbors’ safety in the face of violent attacks by anonymous thugs.
Churches, day care centers and peaceful suburban neighborhoods are also “safe” environments for armed, masked federal agents. But their activities there are making our communities less safe.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Brown Watzka, delivering the prosecution’s closing argument, told the jury it must draw a line against judges interfering with law enforcement, or else “there is only chaos,” and that “chaos is what the rule of law is intended to prevent.”
But chaos is what we have now, with federal agents terrorizing communities, dragging people out of courthouses and private residences, deporting them without due process and punishing those who stand in their way in an attempt to defend civil society.
The real questions raised by Dugan’s case are whether we believe the “safety” of the agents making those dubious arrests matters more than the safety of our communities, and whether we want the courts to be able to regulate the conduct in their own courthouses as a check on the government’s exercise of raw power.
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