WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans fended off an attempt Thursday to block the Department of Justice from using an “anti-weaponization” fund to pay people who feel they were wrongly prosecuted, as well as another proposal that sought to require congressional authorization for a new White House ballroom. 

Debate on amendments and motions, by Democrats and Republicans, is a required part of the special process GOP leaders are using to approve nearly $70 billion for immigration enforcement and deportation activities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol, through the end of President Donald Trump’s term.

Votes were expected to last into the evening and possibly overnight as Democrats look to challenge their Republican counterparts on policy while also making their case for control of Congress ahead of this year’s November midterm elections. The U.S. House adjourned for the week Thursday, meaning the measure will not head to the president’s desk until next week at the earliest.

Senators voted 49-50 to reject an amendment from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., that would have prevented the Department of Justice from carrying out the “anti-weaponization” proposal by Trump to use $1.776 billion to pay people who feel they were wrongly prosecuted. 

Several Republicans facing tough reelection campaigns joined Democrats in voting for the amendment, including Alaska’s Dan Sullivan, Maine’s Susan Collins and Ohio’s Jon Husted.  

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified earlier this week the administration had scrapped plans for the “anti-weaponization” fund, following intense criticism from both Republicans and Democrats, but Trump later said he wasn’t sure and would have to check with his attorneys. 

“Trump won’t give Americans a penny to help offset the skyrocketing costs he brought on our country,” Schumer said. “But he’s more than happy to charge them nearly $2 billion to line the pockets of his families, his billionaire friends, and the criminals who mauled police officers on January 6. If Republicans truly oppose this corruption, then prove it.”

North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis then offered an amendment of his own that would have transferred the funding the administration had proposed for its so-called “anti-weaponization” fund to the Justice Department’s fraud division. 

“We heard over the last 48 hours that the acting attorney general said that this fund’s not moving forward,” Tillis said. “All this amendment does is codify what I believe the policy of the DOJ is.”

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham raised a procedural objection to Tillis’ amendment, arguing it didn’t comply with the strict rules of the process. 

Tillis tried to waive that maneuver, but a 15-84 vote didn’t achieve those goals and the amendment failed. 

White House ballroom construction

Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley offered an amendment that would have required congressional authorization to proceed with Trump’s  White House ballroom renovations. 

“All of us here have a responsibility to follow the power of the purse responsibility in the Constitution. Let’s all support the idea that it must proceed, if it’s to proceed, with a congressional authorization,” the Democrat said. 

Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul called the amendment a “poison pill” and raised a procedural issue on the grounds that Merkley’s measure is not under the jurisdiction of the Judiciary Committee.

“There is no money in this bill for a ballroom,” Paul said. 

Merkley tried to waive the procedural objection, but it failed in a 53-46 vote, which required at least 60 to agree in order to move forward. 

WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin appeared before the U.S. Senate Appropriations Homeland Security panel Tuesday and defended his threats to cripple international air travel into some cities led by Democrats.

Democratic senators on the panel also pressed Mullin about aggressive immigration tactics from federal officers; whether the department would follow court orders from federal judges; and his recent televised comments floating plans to pull customs employees from airports in cities that don’t cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

Republicans also probed Mullin about visa issues affecting rural hospitals and employers in the hospitality industry.

It was the first time Mullin, who was advocating for President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2027 budget request, has appeared before Congress since the Senate confirmed his nomination to lead the Department of Homeland Security in March. 

The top Democrat on the panel, Chris Murphy of Connecticut, asked Mullin if DHS would implement court orders from federal judges. 

Mullin did not answer the question, but said he would “never break the Constitution.” 

Murphy pressed him several more times, but Mullin only argued that some judges make a “political opinion from the bench.”

“If we didn’t think the courts were politicized then I’d be able to answer that,” he said.

Airspace in ‘chaos’?

Murphy criticized Mullin’s first few months in his role, citing repeated statements he would suspend arrivals of international flights to cities and states that are governed by Democrats. 

“Not only would that throw our airspace into chaos, it’s illegal,” Murphy said. “Do not ask us to fund an agency that makes up its own laws.”

Mullin pushed back on Murphy’s characterizations, calling them “outlandish claims” that “are flat wrong.”

“What’s unconstitutional that we’re doing?” Mullin said. “We’re doing the job that Congress gave us.”

Mullin said in interviews on Fox News and Newsmax last week that he was considering a plan to remove customs officers from airports in cities that do not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement.

“Listen, these sanctuary cities where the local radical left Democrats aren’t allowing us to do our job and enforce federal laws, then we shouldn’t be processing international flights into their cities, either,” he told Fox’s Sean Hannity May 26.

The move would severely harm customs processing. 

The top Democrat on the full Appropriations Committee, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, said it would be “insane.”

“It is not only dangerous but would spell economic crisis for blue and red states,” Murray said.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia

Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen brought up the high-profile case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran immigrant who was wrongly deported to a brutal mega-prison in El Salvador last year. Abrego Garcia fought to be returned to the United States, where the Trump administration continues to try to deport him.

Van Hollen asked Mullin if he was aware that Abrego Garcia has agreed to be removed to Costa Rica, and that Costa Rica will accept him.

Mullin said he was not aware of that. 

In a federal court in Maryland, Abrego Garcia is challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to remove him to several African countries, rejecting his offer of moving to Costa Rica. 

Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation cast a national spotlight on the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign. Several courts ruled his deportation illegal and the Supreme Court ruled Abrego Garcia should be returned to the U.S., but stopped short of requiring it. 

The Justice Department indicted Abrego Garcia on human-smuggling charges stemming from a 2022 traffic stop, but a federal judge in Tennessee last month found the move to be vindictive and dismissed the charges. 

Prior to the charges being dismissed, the Justice Department offered for Abrego Garcia to be removed to Costa Rica if he were to plead guilty to those initial charges. He refused. Since then, the Trump administration has tried to remove him to Eswatini, Liberia and Uganda.

Van Hollen told Mullin that Abrego Garcia had agreed to be deported to Costa Rica. 

“Great. If he’s willing to do that, we’ll send him,” Mullin said.

Visa restrictions

Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins of Maine asked Mullin about two visa programs, H-1B for high-skill workers and H-2B for seasonal workers. She said the newly imposed visa fee for highly skilled workers the Trump administration placed – $100,000 – is impacting rural hospitals in her state. 

She asked Mullin if the Trump administration would consider making a carveout for healthcare workers on a H-1B visa. 

Mullin said DHS has looked into that issue, but said his ability to address it was limited.

“To have a carveout would be difficult,” he said. “We still have to do our due diligence.” 

Collins asked Mullin if DHS would consider reinstating a visa policy that allowed repeat seasonal workers to not be included in the annual cap for H-2B visas. 

Mullin said his hands were tied and said Congress would have to give him a higher cap.  

New Hampshire Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen asked Mullin for a followup on visa processing for international students on F-1 visas, citing her state’s New England College as an example. 

“Without approval by July 1 they will lose 2,000 graduate students,” she said.

Mullin said he had looked into the issue and alerted U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes legal immigration paperwork. DHS is “working on it,” he added.

“There’s some real urgency,” Shaheen said. 

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Elvira Benitez Suarez stepped out of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office in downtown Milwaukee on Monday to cheers from a crowd of supporters — her first time leaving the building without handcuffs.

The 51-year-old Sheboygan Falls woman left U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody last week on bond; her daughter picked her up outside the northern Kentucky detention facility where she had spent the previous two months. 

“I didn’t see daylight for 17 days, so I was very, very heartened and excited that I saw my family,” she said. 

The Monday morning check-in in Milwaukee was her first interaction with immigration authorities since returning to Wisconsin. She arrived with her family, attorney and two members of the Milwaukee Common Council in tow. 

Nearly a dozen other immigrants wove through the crowd to line up behind Benitez for their own check-ins; some picked up contact information from her attorney while they waited to enter the building. 

Benitez’s time in Kentucky was her second stint in ICE custody in the past year. Benitez, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager and lived without legal status for over three decades, first landed in detention after a wrong turn on a family road trip took her across the Canadian border in July 2025. U.S. immigration authorities arrested her when she reentered the country. Benitez had no prior interactions with law enforcement or the federal immigration court system. 

In her absence, Benitez’s two adult daughters, both U.S.-born, took in their school-age siblings and helped manage their parents’ painting and cleaning business. 

A federal district court judge in Ohio ruled last fall that Benitez is eligible for a green card, citing — among other factors — the hardships her children experienced in her absence. After waiting a month for immigration authorities to complete her background check, Benitez returned to Wisconsin in December, only to be arrested again during a check-in at the Milwaukee DHS office in March while the agency appealed the judge’s ruling. 

“We checked in, everything went fine, and we were actually walking out the door when they stopped us,” recalled her attorney, Marc Christopher. 

After stops in Chicago and Indianapolis, Benitez landed in a cell at the Campbell County Detention Center, a northern Kentucky jail that contracts with ICE to hold immigrants facing deportation proceedings. Benitez recounted finding fellow Wisconsinites in her unit; nearly two dozen other immigrants detained in Wisconsin have passed through Campbell County within the last year.

But a recent decision by an Ohio-based federal appeals court opened a door for Benitez to again return to Wisconsin. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that a year-old Trump administration policy requiring detention for most immigrants in deportation proceedings amounts to a violation of due process rights, joining federal appellate courts in New York and Georgia. Appellate courts in Louisiana and Missouri have sided with the Trump administration, and the appellate court based in Chicago remains divided on the issue.

The 6th Circuit holds jurisdiction over Kentucky, and its ruling allowed Benitez to file a bond motion in immigration court — an option once available to most immigrant detainees that largely vanished after the Trump administration introduced its mandatory detention policy last year. An immigration court judge in Memphis granted her bond motion on May 21, setting her bond amount at the minimum allowed under court rules: $1,500.

As a condition of her bond, Benitez will continue checking in at the Milwaukee DHS office.

Benitez’s Monday morning check-in was brief and straightforward. Like other immigrants granted bond, she was directed by immigration officers to download a tracking app that will prompt her to take a photograph of her face once a week to compare against booking photos.

DHS is still appealing last year’s ruling that set Benitez on track to secure legal permanent residency. That appeal, currently in the hands of the federal Board of Immigration Appeals, is still pending. 

“I would never put anything past the Board of Immigration Appeals,” Christopher said during a press conference on Monday, alluding to the board’s recent tendency to side with the Trump administration on immigration court rule changes. Nevertheless, Christopher added that he believes Benitez’s case is strong enough to defy the odds.

Benitez herself is still recovering. “I can’t sleep,” she said, recounting the grim details of her latest stint in custody — fellow detainees whose pregnancies ended in miscarriages, late-night bus trips with erratic drivers and no seat belts, and harassment from nonimmigrant inmates with whom she shared a cell in Kentucky. Benitez noted that she is in contact with the families of several fellow detainees who remain in Kentucky.

Her eldest daughter, Crystal Aguilar, also needs time to bounce back. In her mother’s absence, “my life was on hold,” she said. A return to normality still seems far away, she added.

Freed on bond, Sheboygan Falls woman returns to Milwaukee immigration office amid legal limbo is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Los Angeles International Airport customs officers took Everlee Wihongi aside for questioning in April. Her family hasn’t seen her since.

Wihongi, a longtime resident of Hortonville, Wisconsin, was passing through Los Angeles during a return trip from her native New Zealand. The 37-year-old green card holder had made the same trip at least a half-dozen times, even after pleading no contest to a felony marijuana possession charge in Fond du Lac County in her mid-20s. 

But with the White House’s nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown in full swing, customs officers took a new approach to the felony on her record. After a few uneasy hours in a secluded screening room, Wihongi left the airport in shackles en route to an immigration detention center in a desert valley northeast of Los Angeles.

Wihongi is one of hundreds of legal permanent residents federal immigration authorities have detained since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, often while they passed through airports and other ports of entry. Most — like Wihongi — had prior criminal convictions.

Those convictions generally make immigrants “inadmissible,” meaning they cannot freely re-enter the U.S.

Customs officers have “a lot of discretion at the port of entry” when deciding whether to allow green card holders with convictions like Wihongi’s to re-enter the country, Madison-based immigration attorney Aissa Olivarez said. “They have given none lately.”

“Possessing a green card is a privilege, not a right,” a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch. “Our government has the authority to revoke a green card if our laws are broken and abused,” the spokesperson added, and to detain legal permanent residents while they await a decision in their removal case. 

The sharp increase in arrests of green card holders doesn’t stem from a policy change, but immigration attorneys say cases like Wihongi’s are yet another sign that federal immigration authorities are reshuffling their priorities.

Old conviction is grounds for detention

Wihongi has held a green card since childhood, when her father’s career as a locomotive engineer brought the family to northeast Wisconsin. “As the years went by, it was just cheaper to renew (her) green card,” her mother, Betty Wihongi, recalled.

Her 2014 conviction was not grounds for deportation, said Marc Christopher, a Milwaukee immigration attorney representing Wihongi. “She can remain here and become a U.S. citizen,” he said, “but once she crosses the border, she’s governed by the rules of admissibility.”

But family vacations to New Zealand passed without incident over the decade following Wihongi’s conviction. “Normally, they will just look at, look at your passport, look at your green card, you know, ask you, where you’ve been?” her mother said. “And usually it’s like two, three minutes, not even that.” 

“I just don’t think they made an issue of it” in the past, Christopher added. “They weren’t going to detain her for two to three months,” he said, in part because detaining and prosecuting a green card holder is an expensive undertaking. As of May 2025, DHS reported that the average cost to arrest, detain and deport an immigrant was roughly $17,000, though costs vary widely from case to case.

DHS detention records point to a sudden shift in practice after the Trump administration resumed control of immigration enforcement operations last year. Immigration authorities detained an average of at least 100 legal permanent residents each month between January 2025 and February 2026 — five times the monthly average in the final two years of the Biden administration, the only portion of his term for which data is available. 

At least 75% of legal permanent residents detained during the latter half of the Biden administration had prior criminal convictions, compared with at least 66% of those detained since Trump returned to office. 

Only a tiny fraction of detainees’ records from either period list marijuana possession as their most serious criminal charge, though immigration enforcement officers arrested more legal permanent residents with prior marijuana possession convictions in the first year of the Trump administration than in the previous two years combined. 

Wihongi is the second Wisconsin green card holder in ICE custody to join Christopher’s caseload since January 2025. His previous client, also blocked from re-entering the country because of a prior marijuana possession conviction, spent five months in detention before Christopher secured his release. 

Olivarez, the Madison-based immigration attorney, offered another recent example from her own caseload: a legal permanent resident and longtime Milwaukeean detained while returning from his wife’s funeral in Egypt because of a prior felony. That client eventually accepted a deportation order to avoid a lengthy stint in custody.

A stricter standard

The growing cohort of green card holders in ICE custody is still vastly outnumbered by the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants detained alongside them. 

Federal immigration authorities have arrested more than 400,000 people since January 2025, including roughly 1,700 in Wisconsin. 

Just over half of all immigrants arrested by ICE in Wisconsin during the second Trump administration had prior criminal convictions, as was the case in the latter years of the Biden administration. But the criminal histories of more recent arrestees suggest that the stricter standards that landed Wihongi in custody are reshaping other corners of the immigration enforcement apparatus.

ICE officers in Wisconsin arrested 82 immigrants with prior traffic offense convictions in the first full year after Trump returned to office, up from 19 in the last full year of the Biden administration.

In years past, Christopher said, federal immigration authorities were less inclined to begin removal proceedings solely based on traffic offenses like driving without a license, instead prioritizing immigrants convicted of more serious offenses. 

Immigrants who come into contact with Wisconsin courts after a traffic offense now face a far higher risk of landing in federal custody, Christopher added. 

He attributes the shift in part to dramatic additions to DHS’ budget in the past year and a half. Those funding boosts, including a $170 billion increase last year, lowered the financial barriers that previously made federal immigration prosecutors wary of spending resources on immigrants with lower-priority criminal histories, Christopher argued. 

The U.S. Senate is currently considering an additional $72 billion in new funding for DHS.

Transferred without warning 

Wihongi was the only legal permanent resident in the 46-person cell in Adelanto, California, where she spent her first month in detention, her mother told Wisconsin Watch.

Her visa doesn’t spare her from the unpredictability of the federal immigration detention system. When money disappeared without notice from her commissary account on a Friday in early May, Wihongi called her mother in a panic. “Inmates all know that if that happens to your commissary,” her mother explained, “that means they’re getting ready to transfer you.” 

She resurfaced that Sunday in a detention camp outside El Paso, Texas, reaching her family by phone that evening to recount two mostly sleepless days of travel, including hours spent in shackles. 

Wihongi has since transferred again to a federal contract facility in Eloy, Arizona. An internet outage Thursday pushed her first scheduled court appearance back a week. Meanwhile, Christopher has filed a motion in Fond du Lac County to vacate her 2014 conviction.

Decade-old marijuana conviction prompts ICE detention of Wisconsin green card holder after family trip is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson on Wednesday pressed for increased funding for the Secret Service, arguing most of the money Senate Republicans included for the agency in their immigration enforcement bill is for security needs, not building a new ballroom at the White House. 

But the Louisiana Republican added during a morning press conference he didn’t want to “prejudge” the $72 billion package before the Senate approves a final version this month and sends it to the House. 

“I don’t have the pen in the Senate. They’re writing the bill,” he said. “We’ll see what we get.”

Johnson noted there are several more steps the legislation must go through in the Senate, including a review by the parliamentarian to make sure all of the provisions fit within the strict rules of the reconciliation process, committee debate and a marathon amendment voting session on the floor. 

Johnson said that President Donald Trump “is excited about building a ballroom with private funding,” though that project comes with some additional needs that will likely require taxpayer dollars.  

“The Secret Service says that as we enhance the White House grounds and the modernization there that obviously we have to think differently about security,” he said. “We live in a very dangerous time and there are new and increasing threats that we have never faced before. And so Congress has a role in funding that and we’ll have to see how it all works out.”

‘Urgent request’

Johnson asserted the bill Senate Republicans released last week “very specifically defined” how the Secret Service could use the additional funding.  

The legislation would provide $1 billion that would be available until Sept. 30, 2029 for “security adjustments and upgrades … to support enhancements by the United States Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project.”

The bill would limit the Secret Service from using any of the funding “for non-security elements.” 

Johnson said GOP lawmakers added the funding to the immigration enforcement spending bill after the Secret Service “put in an urgent request for additional security measures.”

“We’ve needed some of these security measures for a long time,” he said. “And that’s what this is all about.”

Congress provided the Secret Service with $3.25 billion in the annual funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that lawmakers passed in late April.  

Republicans approved an additional $1.17 billion for the Secret Service in their “big, beautiful” law that the agency can use through September 2029 for personnel, training, technology as well as performance, retention and signing bonuses. 

Normally, the White House budget office would publicly send Congress a supplemental spending request, asking lawmakers to approve the additional money. That would then be vetted by the Appropriations Committees, though that didn’t happen in this case. 

The Trump administration also could have included a boost in funding to the budget request officials sent Congress in early April that asked members to approve $3.5 billion for the Secret Service in the annual funding bill for the agency that’s due by the end of September.  

Funding breakdown

Secret Service Director Sean Curran gave Republican senators more details about how the agency plans to use the additional funding during a closed-door lunch this week, though the bill wouldn’t actually require the agency to spend the money as outlined. 

A breakdown obtained by States Newsroom showed: 

• $220 million would go to “hardening” the East Wing Modernization Project with additional bulletproof glass, drone detection technologies and filtration systems designed to detect chemical or other contaminants. 
• $180 million would go toward construction of a “long overdue” White House visitor screening facility. 
• $175 million would bolster Secret Service training as well as its training facilities. 
• $175 million would help the agency “secure frequently visited venues facing heightened risk due to their public visibility and static nature.”
• $150 million would go to the branch of the Secret Service that focuses on drones, aircraft incursions, biological threats and “other emerging threats through investments in state-of-the-art technologies.”
• $100 million for “high-profile national events that require significant planning.”

Republican senators said after that meeting they wanted more information from the Secret Service on exactly how the agency would spend the additional funding before they vote on the package. 

Thune predicts passage next week

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said Wednesday morning most GOP senators will ultimately support the additional funding for the Secret Service “that’s needed to enable them to do their jobs.” 

“Obviously there are security implications related to the modernization of the East Wing. And that represents, I think, of the total request that Secret Service made, about 20%,” he said. “The balance of it, I think, are things that they’ve been putting off for a long time, but need to be done, especially in a modern threat environment where you’ve had, you know, now, three assassination attempts in the last two years.”

Thune said his “aspirational timeline” is to have committees debate their bills early next week, followed by floor action on the full package later in the week.  

“It can always be affected by other factors,” he said. “But I think at least right now, that’s the goal.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said during a floor speech that Trump’s focus on building a “gilded ballroom” shows the president “is living in the theater of the absurd.”

Schumer said Americans don’t want to see government leaders focused on the ballroom project when inflation, food costs and gasoline prices have all increased. 

“I would say Trump has completely lost touch with the American people, but that would assume that Trump was ever in touch with the American people to begin with,” he said. “And on this issue he sure as heck isn’t.”

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Update, May 21, 2026:

An immigration court judge in Tennessee granted a $1,500 bond for Elvira Benitez Suarez on Thursday morning. Benitez will remain in custody at the Campbell County Detention Center during the 30-day window in which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorneys can file an appeal.

Thursday’s bond hearing came just over a week after the Ohio-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Trump administration’s year-old policy requiring mandatory detention for most immigrants facing removal. Benitez’s attorney, Milwaukee-based Marc Christopher, told Wisconsin Watch that the short turnaround reflected agreement among Benitez’s legal team, a federal district court judge and DHS itself that her case merited speedy consideration.

Original story, May 12, 2026:

A Sheboygan Falls woman is poised to test a new federal ruling reopening the door for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees to seek release on bond. 

An Ohio-based federal appeals court ruled Monday against the Trump administration policy requiring mandatory detention for most ICE detainees, the latest blow to a rule adopted last summer amid an escalating nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown.  

Detainees “should have a forum to explain that their backgrounds and connections to their communities justify release on bond while they undergo their removal proceedings,” 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Eric Clay wrote in the panel’s majority decision. Denying bond hearings, he added, amounts to a violation of their due process rights. 

The court’s ruling sent Wisconsin immigration attorneys scrambling to file bond motions for their clients detained in Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky — all under the 6th Circuit. Among those now able to seek bond: Elvira Benitez Suarez, currently detained at the Campbell County Detention Center in northern Kentucky.

Benitez, 51, has now spent two stints in ICE detention, as Wisconsin Watch has reported. 

She fled an abusive household in Mexico at 15, crossing the border with a younger sibling and settling in the Midwest. Though she remained undocumented for decades, she had no run-ins with law enforcement or immigration authorities until a GPS error on a family road trip through Michigan in July 2025 led her across the Canadian border.

The incident landed her in an Ohio immigration detention facility for six months. In her absence, her two adult daughters — both U.S. citizens — took in their school-age siblings.

A major shift in federal immigration court policy last year left Benitez unable to post bond.

Since 1996, federal law has required immigration authorities to detain — without bond — anyone found crossing the U.S. border without authorization. Prior administrations applied that rule relatively narrowly, meaning immigrants arrested in the interior of the U.S. could often seek a bond hearing in immigration court.

The Trump administration cast that precedent aside in July 2025, when ICE Director Todd Lyons issued a new interpretation subjecting anyone in deportation proceedings to mandatory detention without the possibility of bond. The Board of Immigration Appeals, a panel of judges who set the rules for the federal immigration court system, signed off on the interpretation in September. 

The board has more frequently sided with the Department of Homeland Security than immigrants facing deportation for at least a decade, but the distribution of decisions is more lopsided than ever: The body has favored DHS’s position in more than 90% of decisions issued since President Trump returned to office last year, a recent NPR analysis found.

The rule change triggered an ongoing legal battle over the validity of the Trump administration’s interpretation; more than 400 federal district court judges have ruled against the White House’s position, while roughly 50 have backed the new policy. Judges in Wisconsin’s Western District Court have uniformly ruled against the mandatory detention rule, while those in Wisconsin’s Eastern District are divided.

Federal appellate courts are also split: Aside from the 6th Circuit’s Monday decision, the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and the Georgia-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled against the mandatory detention policy, whereas the Louisiana-based 5th Circuit and the Missouri-based 8th Circuit have sided with the Trump administration. 

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Illinois and with jurisdiction over Wisconsin, remains divided.

With bond off the table, thousands of immigrants in ICE custody have turned to a backup option: habeas corpus petitions, filed in federal district courts — administered separately from the federal immigration court system — to challenge their detention.

Federal district courts have received tens of thousands of habeas petitions in the past year, including more than 70 in Wisconsin’s Western and Eastern District Courts combined. 

When a federal district court approves a habeas petition, the court generally orders an immigration court judge to hold a bond hearing.

Benitez’s first habeas petition produced a more unusual victory: Judge Richard Drucker of the Cleveland immigration court, citing the emotional toll on her younger children, canceled her deportation and set her on the path to legal residency, though a delayed background check added more than a month to Benitez’s initial stay in a detention facility.

Released in late December, Benitez reunited with her family in Wisconsin while DHS appealed Drucker’s order. She continued attending mandatory check-ins at the agency’s field office in downtown Milwaukee, where ICE agents re-arrested her on March 10. After a stop at an ICE detention facility outside Chicago, the agency transferred Benitez to Campbell County, where nearly two dozen immigrants detained in Wisconsin have spent time within the last year.

Marc Christopher, a Milwaukee immigration attorney who represented Benitez during her first detention, told Wisconsin Watch in March that no statute required DHS to detain her while awaiting the outcome of its appeal. Her arrest, Christopher wrote, served “no legitimate public safety purpose.”

“It separates a mother from her vulnerable U.S. citizen children despite a federal immigration judge already recognizing the extreme hardship her removal would cause them,” he added.

Following the March arrest, an ICE spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that “being in detention is a choice,” arguing that Benitez could leave custody by agreeing to self-deport.

Benitez’s new Ohio-based attorney filed a habeas petition on her behalf with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky in March. Judge Chad Meredith, a Trump appointee, joined the court’s bench last fall. He has received more than 80 habeas cases involving immigrants in ICE custody since his confirmation, most of which are still active; he has yet to side with an immigrant detainee, but he has denied a half-dozen habeas petitions outright. 

The 6th Circuit’s latest ruling could give Benitez a shorter route out of custody. Christopher filed a bond motion for Benitez “the minute (the ruling) came out,” he told Wisconsin Watch. “Given the unusual circumstances of her case,” Christopher added, he plans to ask Meredith to order a bond hearing on a short turnaround, rather than waiting more than a week. DHS can appeal bond decisions.

Christopher isn’t alone in his haste. Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Madison-based Community Immigration Law Center, filed a bond motion for another client held at the Campbell County Detention Center just after the news broke — a first since the Board of Immigration Appeals approved the mandatory detention rule last September. 

“We are now working to identify other people who have reached out in the past,” she added, “to see who might be eligible for bond now.”

Olivarez and other immigration attorneys are still awaiting a decision from the 7th Circuit; the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion requesting expedited oral argument  on Monday. 

The issue may reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It’s up to the justices whether they want to take the case,” Christopher said, “but traditionally on cases involving immigration, cases where there’s been a clear circuit split, and where it affects literally tens of thousands of people, I think it’s going to be near the top of the issues they want to resolve.”

Sheboygan Falls mother granted bond in challenge to ICE detention rule is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Republicans released a roughly $70 billion spending package Monday night that will keep Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol operating for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term without any of the new constraints Democrats have demanded.

The legislation also includes $1 billion “to support enhancements by the United States Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.”

Trump, who had the East Wing of the White House bulldozed to make way for his $300 or $400 million ballroom project, had said it would be funded by private donors and not taxpayers. White House officials have said the ballroom is critical for national security when top officials are gathered, following an April 25 incident in which a gunman opened fire at a dinner at the Washington Hilton attended by Trump.

Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement the panel “is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families.” 

“We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay,” he added. 

Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said in a statement the package shows “Republicans are ignoring the needs of middle-class America and instead funneling money into Trump’s ballroom and throwing billions at two lawless agencies.”

He noted the Department of Homeland Security has more than $100 billion from Republicans’ signature tax and spending cuts package it hasn’t spent. 

“Throughout this process, Democrats will continue to show the American people that we are for bringing down costs, making it easier to get ahead, and building an economy where families thrive and billionaires pay their fair share,” Merkley said. “It is clear that the country has had enough of the Republican ‘families lose, billionaires win’ agenda.”

Billions for immigration enforcement

The package’s release follows a record-setting shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security that began after the two parties were unable to reach a compromise on new guardrails for immigration operations after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis in January.  

The Judiciary Committee’s bill includes $30.725 billion for ICE, $3.47 billion for Customs and Border Protection and $1.457 billion for the Department of Justice.

The bill from the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs allocates $19.1 billion for CBP to hire Border Patrol staff and $7.45 billion for ICE to hire Homeland Security Investigations agents.

CPB will receive an additional $3.45 billion to purchase new technology “to combat the entry or exit of illicit narcotics at ports of entry,” to upgrade border surveillance technology and to conduct initial screenings of unaccompanied children. 

Another $2.5 billion would go to the Homeland Security secretary for any additional border security needs. 

All of the funding would last through Sept. 30, 2029.

Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in a statement the panel plans to vote later this month to advance the bill. 

“Senate Democrats refuse to vote for a single dollar to secure our borders or enforce our immigration laws, even against the most violent illegal aliens,” Paul said. 

60 votes not needed in Senate

Republicans plan to pass the bill using the same complex budget reconciliation process they used last year to enact their “big, beautiful” law that provided DHS with $170 billion. 

GOP lawmakers voted last month to approve the budget resolution that unlocks the process that comes with many rules and restrictions but avoids the need to get 60 votes in the Senate to end debate. 

Senate Republican leaders chose to separate funding for ICE and Border Patrol from the annual Homeland Security appropriations bill after the two political parties made little progress toward restrictions on immigration agents. 

The stalemate led to a 76-day shutdown for the Department of Homeland Security, which ended in late April after the House sent Trump the annual funding bill the Senate had approved a month earlier.

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans adopted their budget resolution Wednesday night, clearing the way for the party to pass a bill in the coming weeks that will provide tens of billions in additional funding for immigration enforcement. 

The 215-211 party-line vote unlocks the complicated budget reconciliation process that will allow the GOP to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol for the rest of President Donald Trump’s term in office. California independent Rep. Kevin Kiley, formerly a Republican, voted “present.”

The budget resolution was approved by the Senate earlier this month and does not need Trump’s signature.

When combined with a separate Senate-passed bill, which Speaker Mike Johnson has so far refused to put on the House floor for a vote, the two measures are expected to eventually end the shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security that began in mid-February. 

House Budget Committee ranking member Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., said during floor debate that lawmakers should place constraints on immigration agents after they shot and killed two U.S. citizens earlier this year in Minneapolis. 

“I think the vast majority of the American people agree with me that we need to have a secure border, but that we cannot have any agency of our government carrying out killings on our streets,” he said. 

Republicans removed ICE and Border Patrol funding from the annual DHS appropriations bill after negotiators were unable to broker agreement with Democrats to place new guardrails on immigration activities.

Placing funding for those two agencies in a reconciliation bill allows Republicans to move the measure through the Senate without securing 60 votes to end debate, which would require bipartisanship. 

Immigration enforcement debated

House Budget Committee Chairman Jodey Arrington, R-Texas, said the shutdown isn’t “just about the inconvenience of long lines at airports.” 

“This is an unprecedented national security and public safety crisis. And this is the moment we take the keys from the kids and we say no more of this nonsense,” he added.  

DHS includes the Coast Guard, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration. 

Arrington used his debate time to criticize Democrats for demanding constraints on immigration agents, arguing federal officers shouldn’t have to secure a judicial warrant to enter someone’s home to detain a person in the country without proper documentation.

“There is not a Democrat or Republican former commander-in-chief that would ever find that acceptable,” he said. 

Democrats also called for federal immigration agents to: 

• Wear body cameras.
• Only wear masks to conceal their identities in “extraordinary and unusual circumstances.”
• Not undertake roving patrols.
• Not detain people in certain locations, like houses of worship, schools, or polling places.
• Not engage in racial profiling.
• Not detain or deport American citizens. 

Up to $140 billion

The GOP used the reconciliation process last year to enact its “big, beautiful” law, which included an additional $170 billion for immigration and deportation enforcement. 

The reconciliation bill Republicans hope to approve in the next month can cost up to $140 billion, according to the instructions in the budget resolution. But GOP lawmakers expect the price tag to come in around $70 billion.

The additional funding is significantly higher than the $10 billion allocation for ICE and the $18.3 billion for Customs and Border Protection that Congress was on track to approve earlier this year. About $550 million of the CBP total was for the Border Patrol. 

White House officials have repeatedly urged lawmakers to quickly approve the reconciliation bill that has yet to be released and for House Republicans to clear the Senate-passed DHS appropriations bill for Trump’s signature. 

The Office of Management and Budget sent a memo to lawmakers this week notifying them the administration is running out of money to pay DHS employees during the shutdown. 

“If this funding is exhausted, the Administration will be unable to pay all DHS personnel beginning in May, which will once again unleash havoc on air travel, leave critical law enforcement officers—including our brave Secret Service agents—and the Coast Guard without paychecks, and jeopardize national security,” it says. 

WASHINGTON — U.S. Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday he plans to use the complex reconciliation process to fund immigration enforcement for the next three years, though it wasn’t immediately clear if House Republicans were on the exact same page.

The plan to fund Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol with only Republican votes could end the two-month shutdown at the Department of Homeland Security when combined with the regular funding bill for that department, which the Senate already approved but is stalled in the House. 

Thune, R-S.D., said during an afternoon press conference that House GOP leaders “could” add additional provisions to the reconciliation bill, but said he would like it to remain narrow. 

“My hope would be that if we can execute on getting that done here in the Senate, the House would be able to follow through,” he said. 

Thune said the Senate could vote as soon as next week on a budget resolution with reconciliation instructions. That is the first step of the complicated process. But the House must vote to adopt that budget resolution before Republicans can pass the funding bill for ICE and the Border Patrol.  

Speaker Mike Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

Homeland Security shuttered

The Department of Homeland Security has been shut down since Feb. 14, after Democrats insisted on new guardrails for immigration enforcement following the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers.

Without any bipartisan consensus on how to do that, Republicans have instead decided to use the same reconciliation process they used last year to enact their “big, beautiful” law to approve funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol. 

The House would then likely pass DHS’ spending bill without those two line items, which the Senate has already approved. That would provide funding for the other agencies within the department, including the Coast Guard, Federal Emergency Management Agency, Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration.

Safeguards demanded

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said during a separate press conference that Democrats have repeatedly asked for “common sense” safeguards that would require immigration agents to show identification, prevent them from wearing masks and require judicial warrants to enter someone’s home. 

“The bottom line is these are simple. These are common sense,” he said. “They’re what every police department uses and when you ask the American people, they’re on our side. It’s the intransigence, particularly of the hard right, who seem to like what ICE is doing.”

Schumer said Democrats would use the marathon amendment voting session on both the budget resolution and the later reconciliation bill to hold Republicans’ “feet to the fire on DHS, on the war, on so many other issues.”

Thune said he has been “trying to figure out exactly” what Democrats have gotten out of the DHS shutdown, especially considering that immigration enforcement operations haven’t been affected since there was funding for that in last year’s reconciliation bill, exempting those programs from the funding lapse. 

“All of the things that the Democrats made this about, which was supposed to be reforms to the way that ICE and CBP operate. They got none of that. Zero,” he said, referring to Customs and Border Protection, the larger agency that includes the Border Patrol. “And now we’re going to fund those agencies for three years into the future.”

Dodge County Sheriff Dale Schmidt called a press conference Friday to push back against reports about a U.S. citizen who claimed last month that she was detained by federal immigration agents and held at the Dodge County Jail. Schmidt announced he is filing a civil lawsuit against the woman who made the allegations, saying, “it is important that we correct the facts, so today we’re here to talk about the fact vs. the fiction in the Sundas Naqvi allegations that were made.” 

In early March, Naqvi, 28, of Skokie, Illinois, claimed that she and her co-workers had been detained by federal immigration authorities at the O’Hare airport in Chicago after returning from a work trip abroad. Naqvi’s family and Kevin Morrison, a Cook County commissioner, said that Naqvi had been taken to the Broadview Detention Facility and was then transferred across state lines to the Dodge County Jail, then released without aid or transportation in the pre-dawn hours. 

Schmidt said during his press conference Friday that these allegations are false. “They gained significant attention, but they have not been supported by any — any — verified evidence at all,” he said. Schmidt noted that Morrison, a candidate in the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat, held a press conference to air the Naqvi allegations in the leadup to a the election, which he  lost. 

Naqvi’s alleged detention took place against a backdrop of news reports and widespread public outrage over the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, which targeted Chicago and Minneapolis. 

Research conducted by the Deportation Data Project found that 1,300 arrests made by federal immigration agents were listed as “collateral,” meaning they were not the intended targets of the enforcement, the Minnesota Reformer reported. The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office has also been criticized for assisting in detaining and transporting people arrested by federal immigration agents. 

Schmidt said that the initial claims about Naqvi’s arrest were “coordinated messaging designed to generate outrage and media attention.” He showed a picture posted to social media showing Naqvi being reunited with her family after her alleged detention.

Schmidt said that there “is no record of booking, there is no record of detention, there is no record of release, no contact with the individual, no transfer to any federal agency.” He also blasted media outlets that covered Naqvi’s allegations as factual, repeatedly saying those kinds of stories hurt the reputation of law enforcement. 

“Media coverage has impacts,” said Schmidt. “What you publish has impacts on more than just those readers and viewers. It has impacts on real human beings.” Schmidt showed hate mail the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office received after the Naqvi allegations surfaced, and revealed the names of the people who sent the messages. “These are the types of things that we as elected officials, that public officials get when media put out information that is not verified. And many times, it’s false information that goes out and we get these regularly. And I don’t think that the media understand the impact that these kinds of stories have on real people every single day.”

Schmidt stated that Naqvi had been briefly detained by Customs and Border Protection until 11:42 a.m. at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, after which she left and checked in at a Hampton Inn and Suites hotel in Illinois at 1:17 p.m, just minutes from the airport. While investigating the allegations, Schmidt made contact with a man he calls both a witness and a victim, who provided corroborating evidence refuting Naqvi’s story.

The witness — who Schmidt refused to identify citing Marsy’s Law — allegedly received texts from Naqvi telling him that she’d arrived to her hotel room, and asking to use his credit card to buy some food. Records from the hotel confirm when Naqvi checked in, and that she was not at the Dodge County Jail when she claimed. Naqvi also asked to use the witness’s card to pay for a spa treatment during this time. “Now I don’t know about you, and my staff have never recorded one, there is no spa at Broadview in Chicago Illinois,” said Schmidt. “I can also tell you there is no spa lady in our jail here in Dodge County.”

Schmidt said that on the morning Naqvi claimed she was released from custody, she’d actually asked the witness to drive her to Wisconsin to help her sister with car trouble. The witness allegedly told Schmidt in a recorded interview that he thought she was  going to the Kenosha area, but it turned out Naqvi wanted to go to another hotel in Beaver Dam. Schmidt showed images and played video of Naqvi at a gas station with the witness, wearing the same striped black and white shirt she wore in a social media post that purportedly showed her being reunited with her family. Schmidt called the witness “a true gentleman” for holding the door open for Naqvi as they left the gas station. 

It was around this time, Schmidt said, well-past 5:00 in the morning, that Naqvi claimed she was being released from the Dodge County Jail. The witness’s vehicle was also captured by several Flock cameras along the journey, Schmidt said. The sheriff wanted to check whether the timeline of events he believed occurred tallied with what the witness was saying. “So I put those times into A.I. and I said ‘what time would he have left?’” The software’s results lined up with what the witness described, Schmidt said.

Later, Schmidt played video of Naqvi at another location taking selfies. At 6:50 a.m. on the morning she was allegedly released, Naqvi’s sister and others arrived in a silver SUV to pick her up. The unnamed witness told Schmidt that he was then asked by Naqvi to pose for media as one of the coworkers who allegedly went with her on the overseas work trip, and who were allegedly detained with her upon returning to the country. Schmidt said that none of this happened, and that the witness refused to make those claims to the media, but did claim to be one of the coworkers to Naqvi’s attorney. 

Schmidt said that the witness paid for Naqvi’s trip to Turkey, and that the trip was not related to or paid for by an employer. In fact, later media coverage reported that the company where Naqvi claimed to work denied that she worked there. Schmidt said that while Naqvi was overseas, she wanted to get a medical procedure for which the witness took out a $3,000 loan. Schmidt said that Naqvi spent about $25,000 of the witness’ money, maxing out his credit card. The witness did all of this, Schmidt said, because he believed he might be able to have  a long term relationship with Naqvi.

The sheriff also discounted the images of Naqvi’s phone location showing her at Broadview and Dodge County. “I’m here to tell you that in the world of A.I., in the world of technology that they live in, things like this can be spoofed very easy,” he said. “I could do it on my phone in only a matter of minutes.” Schmidt noted that one of the screenshot images actually had two different time stamps. Schmidt also highlighted Naqvi’s past disputed allegations, including an accusation of sexual misconduct against a professor that the professor denied.  

In 2019, Schmidt said, Naqvi made a report to the Skokie police that she was violently sexually assaulted. Although officers observed injuries, took forensic evidence and arrested an ex-boyfriend of Naqvi’s, they later determined the report was false, Schmidt said. Another 2020 report with the Skokie police made by Naqvi accused a driver of being impaired in a Walmart parking lot. The driver showed no signs of impairment, and claimed he met Naqvi on a dating app and was waiting for her to come out of the Walmart. The report was classified as disorderly conduct and categorized as not made in good faith, Schmidt said. 

Schmidt said he has not had any success getting other law enforcement agencies interested in following up on what he regards as Naqvi’s bad acts, none of which are likely to be charged as crimes in the state of Wisconsin. He added that he does not know the status of any investigation the FBI may be doing, and the state police he reached out to in Illinois never got back to him. Schmidt said that he was told by local law enforcement officers that while they would like to act, that they can’t because Cook County prosecutors don’t take on cases of this nature. Later, Schmidt claimed that upon hearing this the witness allegedly said “it sucks to live in a blue state.” 

Schmidt is filing a lawsuit in an attempt to hold Naqvi and anyone else involved in her allegations accountable, he  said. “This is not a misunderstanding or a minor discrepancy,” said Schmidt. “This is not a violation of the constitutional or civil rights of Sundas Naqvi or those allegedly with her. The timeline claimed is not physically possible based on the evidence that we have, and that matters.” He also condemned the media and politicians for spreading false reports, saying they damaged respect and trust in law enforcement. 

“Let me be clear,” said Schmidt, “ICE is not the enemy. Law enforcement is not the enemy.” Schmidt said that he won’t stand by “while false narratives are used to portray law enforcement as something it is not.” He added, “I take it personally when my staff are called liars. These are men and women who do the job the right way every day and those accusations are simply not supported by facts.”

Schmidt said that a criminal investigation is ongoing, in addition to the federal civil lawsuit he’s filed, which seeks $1 million in damages. He wouldn’t comment on whether any phones were forensically downloaded as part of this investigation, which Schmidt said he used a lot of his own time to pursue. 

In a statement provided over email, Morrison said that he understands that a lawsuit has been filed, and that while he has not seen it, he cannot comment on pending litigation.  Morrison did not comment on whether he has been in contact with Naqvi or her family. The Examiner reached out to the office of attorney Robert Held, who represented Naqvi and her family when the allegations were first made, but no comment has been forthcoming.

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A loosely formed coalition of about 60 federal litigators is working with immigration attorneys in Wisconsin who represent clients being detained and facing deportation.

Gabriela Parra, an immigration attorney and partner at Layde & Parra S.C. in Milwaukee, said immigration policies are constantly changing, which adds new challenges. 

Many cases now involve both immigration proceedings and federal civil rights issues, she said.

“If you haven’t done this, it’s a learning curve,” Parra said. 

Federal litigators and immigration attorneys are working together to help meet this demand in Wisconsin.

Surge in overall need

The need for legal representation has grown as immigration enforcement has expanded.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement held an average of 69,600 people per day in detention in December 2025 – a 78% increase compared with the year before, according to an analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a national nonprofit working on issues related to mass incarceration and immigration. 

But more than half the people in the immigration court system are fighting the government alone, according to immigration court data analyzed by Vera. 

“There is a due process crisis right now happening in our immigration system,” said Elizabeth Kenney, associate director of Vera’s Advancing Universal Representation Initiative. 

While people have the right to obtain an immigration attorney, the government does not have to provide one, said Timothy Muth, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin.

Kenney said not having legal representation has major consequences. 

People who have attorneys are up to 10 and a half times more likely to get successful outcomes, Kenney said.

More complex cases

Parra said policy changes have added a federal civil rights dimension to many cases – changes that include how the Board of Immigration Appeals has interpreted immigration law.

The board sets binding rules for immigration judges and has authority over appeals in immigration cases.

Parra said there have been more than 80 decisions by the board since January 2025 that have affected immigration policy.  

One Board of Immigration Appeals decision, known as Yajure Hurtado, requires immigration judges to treat many as subject to mandatory detention. The decision has significantly limited people’s access to bonds.

“Now you have individuals in detention unless you can file a habeas petition in federal court,” Parra said. 

A habeas petition is used to argue that a person’s detention is unlawful. 

Habeas petitions vary widely depending on a person’s situation, said Elisabeth Lambert, a federal civil rights attorney working with the network.

Some involve people who have lived in the United States for years and seek release on bond while their cases proceed. Others involve people who entered through legal processes but are later detained and denied bond.

There also are other barriers that make it harder for people to defend themselves, requiring different support in federal court.

For example, Lambert said, immigrants facing deportation don’t have a right to discovery. This means that the only way to get the records is through a specific type of federal records request. 

A right of discovery allows defendants to access information that could be used against them from a prosecutor ahead of trial. 

Lambert said records can face various delays and other barriers and may arrive after the deportation proceeding has already happened.

Why federal court is different

Lambert said the two court systems – immigration court and federal court – operate very differently.

Each of these legal spaces has its own sets of rules, norms and procedures, she said. 

“It’s just a lot to learn very quickly in a very high-stakes situation,” Lambert said. 

It works the other way, too.

“I couldn’t go into immigration court,” she said. “I don’t have the knowledge or the experience.” 

In one case Lambert and Parra worked on together, a judge issued a restraining order barring ICE from moving ahead with a client’s removal proceeding until a Freedom of Information Act issue was resolved, she said.

Lambert anticipates similar litigation in the future.  

“We think that this is going to be a pretty common issue – of the government withholding people’s immigration records as part of this effort to stack the deportation process against people who are seeking immigration relief.”

---

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

Wisconsin attorneys team up with federal litigators as deportation cases grow more complex is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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The president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque was detained by federal immigration agents, drawing accusations Thursday from local officials and religious leaders that the arrest was motivated by his criticism of Israel.

Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian-born legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody by nearly a dozen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who surrounded his car on Monday in Milwaukee after he left his home, according to the Islamic Society of Milwaukee.

Supporters called Thursday for his immediate release. His attorneys said he was detained on the grounds that he is a foreign policy threat, a claim they say has no merit.

Instead, they believe Sarsour, 53, was targeted for speaking out against Israel and for a conviction as a minor by Israeli military courts, which have faced scrutiny over allegations of limited due process and high conviction rates of Palestinians. Israel rejects those claims. The offenses included allegedly throwing rocks at Israeli officers, according to attorney Munjed Ahmad.

“Our government should not be doing the bidding of a foreign government,” Ahmad said of Israel. “There’s no question in my mind is that this is to stifle the discourse on the Palestinian narrative.”

Attorneys said Sarsour, born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has no criminal record in the U.S., where he has lived for more than 30 years. They said the U.S. government has known about Sarsour’s conviction in Israel since he came to the U.S. in 1993.

An email message left Thursday for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned.

Sarsour’s attorneys have likened the case to that of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student activist who faces deportation because the federal government said he was a foreign policy threat.

Sarsour has been the board president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, the largest Islamic organization in the state, for five years. His attorneys say he holds a green card and lives just outside Milwaukee. His wife and four adult children are U.S. citizens.

At a crowded news conference, boisterous supporters chanted to free Sarsour, recounting his advocacy for those in need. Several recalled Sarsour’s stories about his childhood, including allegations of inhumane treatment while being detained by Israelis.

“He was targeted because of one thing, because he dared stand up to the Israeli army,” Othman Atta, one of Sarsour’s attorneys, told the crowd. “And he was not a U.S. citizen.”

A diverse group of religious leaders in a attendance called Sarsour a valuable community member.

“This appears to be just the latest example of how this administration seeks to silence opposition and intimidate those who speak and act differently,” said the Rev. Paul D. Erickson, bishop of the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Sarsour’s arrest also prompted outcry from elected officials, including Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who called it “an outrage.”

“He is a legal permanent resident. There is no substantive evidence he has done anything wrong,” Johnson said Thursday in a post on X. “This is another example of overreach and harm from the U.S. immigration authorities.”

Sarsour is being held at a county jail in Indiana. His attorneys have filed a petition seeking his release.

“He is ready to fight tooth and nail to make sure that he’s not drug through the mud,” Ahmad said. “He wants to stay in this country.”

Elected leaders and clergy seek release of Wisconsin mosque president detained by immigration agents is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Editor’s note: This story was updated March 13 to include a comment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested a Sheboygan Falls woman during a routine check-in this week, taking her back into custody just months after an immigration court judge canceled her deportation order and began the process of securing her a green card.

Elvira Benitez, 51, spent six months in ICE custody last year after accidentally crossing the Canadian border during a family road trip in Michigan. Benitez fled an abusive home in Michoacán, Mexico, as a teenager and lived without legal status for 35 years, her family said. She first entered the immigration court system after last year’s arrest. 

She was among more than 25,000 people arrested by ICE in July 2025 alone. Roughly a third of immigrants arrested by the agency nationally between January and mid-October 2025 had neither a prior criminal history nor pending criminal charges, including Benitez. 

In her absence, her two adult daughters — both U.S. citizens — took in their school-age siblings. Judge Richard Drucker of the Cleveland immigration court cited her younger children’s struggles during Benitez’s initial detention as a reason to cancel her deportation and set her on the path to legal residency. 

Drucker initially signaled a willingness to grant Benitez relief in early November, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) delayed her background check — necessary for her path to a green card — for over a month, eventually releasing her in mid-December. 

The agency soon appealed Drucker’s order, stalling Benitez’s green card process. She continued attending mandatory check-ins at the Milwaukee DHS office, where ICE agents arrested her Tuesday morning before transferring her to a holding facility outside Chicago.

ICE arrested at least 107 people at the DHS office in downtown Milwaukee between January and mid-October 2025 — more than at any other Wisconsin site named in ICE arrest records. Three-quarters of those immigrants  had no pending criminal charges or past convictions, compared with just 17% of all immigrants arrested by ICE in Wisconsin during the same period.

Benitez had no other run-ins with law enforcement that could have triggered her recent arrest, said Crystal Aguilar, her eldest daughter. In Aguilar’s view, the arrest calls into question “whether families who follow the rules can rely on the decisions made in immigration court,” she added.

She complied with all requirements following her initial release, including attending every ICE supervision appointment, according to her attorney, Marc Christopher. DHS was not legally required to arrest her while its appeal is pending, he added. 

Benitez’s detention serves “no legitimate public safety purpose,” Christopher wrote in a Tuesday press release. “It separates a mother from her vulnerable U.S. citizen children despite a federal immigration judge already recognizing the extreme hardship her removal would cause them.”

An ICE spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that Benitez will remain in custody “pending further immigration proceedings.”

“Being in detention is a choice,” they added, suggesting that undocumented immigrants should self-deport or face arrest and a permanent ban on re-entering the U.S.

ICE re-arrests Sheboygan Falls mother after judge halted deportation and cleared green card path is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

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Rep. Derrick Van Orden stands out among vulnerable House Republicans: He has not softened his rhetoric on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics, despite public outcry over the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.

The Wisconsin Republican, whose seat is one of Democrats’ targets in the 2026 midterms, supported an investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing, but said his “support for federal law enforcement” would remain “unwavering.”

Van Orden told NOTUS he is holding firm in his support for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts because of the crime committed by unauthorized immigrants.

He cited a video posted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week alongside the caption, “American citizens raped and murdered by those who have no right to be in our country.”

“That’s why I back ICE,” Van Orden said. “Watch that video, and then you would never ask me that question again.”

“If you can look at that thing and see all these people that have been brutally murdered and the families that have been destroyed because of these criminal, illegal aliens, and you’re willing to turn your back to it, that means you have an alternative purpose or an alternative objective,” Van Orden said.

Van Orden’s hard-line position in support of the president’s mass deportation agenda in one of this year’s most competitive races will test the Trump agenda in the very part of the country that helped secure the president a second term in the White House.

His district includes the farmland and exurbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, spanning Wisconsin’s border with Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. Van Orden won by a margin of 2.8 percentage points in 2024. Trump won the district by more than 7 percentage points. In a midterm cycle that favors Democrats, and at a time voters are losing trust in Republicans’ immigration agenda, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss up.”

“We’re not a border state. It’s not something that was on the agenda prior to Trump. And obviously, people like Derrick Van Orden have taken the most extreme possible positions on an issue that I’m not sure was top of mind for most Wisconsin voters,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator and Wisconsin resident.

Van Orden has shown his MAGA bona fides through issues like immigration and trade, where he has defended the president’s actions.

He followed the administration’s lead, expressing support for body cameras on immigration officers, a reform that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she would implement after Pretti was killed. Democrats want to standardize that policy in a DHS funding bill.

“It allows good cops to be good cops, and it holds police officers that may not be doing what they should do accountable publicly,” Van Orden said. “And that makes the force better, that makes the American population trust law enforcement more.”

He said he will await the results of a full investigation into Pretti’s death, but has laid the blame for the rise of political violence squarely with Democrats, as many in the administration and Trump’s circle have done.

“This is unfortunately true for many Democrats. They’re willing to put those American lives, throw them into the garbage can for political power, which means they have no business being in power,” Van Orden said.

There are issues where Van Orden has broken with the conservative mainstream. In January, he voted to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to prevent coverage loss, though he is opposed to the program. He has advocated for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he used as a child, though he voted for cuts to the program in the budget reconciliation bill.

Faced with a frustrated agricultural industry, Van Orden introduced a bill to create a path to temporary worker status for immigrant agricultural workers who self-deport and pay a fine. Wisconsin farms employ a large immigrant labor force.

“He has this interesting dichotomy of picking some of those softer issues that might appeal to independents and some others, versus his very strong pro-Trump issues where, obviously that’s going to settle well with the MAGA voters and the pro-Trump Republicans,” said independent political strategist Brandon Scholz, who formerly ran the Wisconsin Republican Party.

In contrast, other House Republicans facing heated reelection bids this year have moderated their positions on immigration enforcement, calling for a reassessment of the country’s immigration policy.

“Congress and the president need to embrace a new comprehensive national immigration policy that acknowledges Americans’ many legitimate concerns about how the government has conducted immigration policy,” Rep. Mike Lawler wrote for The New York Times.

Van Orden declined to comment on other Democratic demands for DHS reforms, which include a ban on masks and identification requirements for immigration agents, until the party funds the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the U.S. Coast Guard.

It is these nonimmigration agencies within DHS that Van Orden’s constituents are affected by during the partial government shutdown, which has left some without paychecks and blocked others from receiving their boating licenses to go out on the district’s many lakes, he said.

That message may work with his constituents, Scholz said. While Republican voters in Wisconsin may be concerned about immigration, the issue has not historically been top of mind for them.

“There are other issues for them that may be more critical to making a decision on what they’re going to do, i.e. economic issues,” Scholz said.

This story was produced and originally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.

Vulnerable House Republicans have softened on immigration. Derrick Van Orden hasn’t. is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

Reading Time: 4 minutes

Editor’s note: This is a static version of the interactive story found at this link.

Part 1: A struggling regional carrier

The legacy network

Air Wisconsin Airlines has not been spared by the nationwide decline of regional air service. The 60-year-old carrier laid off hundreds of employees in Appleton and Milwaukee last year after terminating a contract to provide aircraft, crews and services to American Airlines in January 2025. The airline’s planned pivot to charter service and federally subsidized connections to underserved airports didn’t pan out, prompting another round of layoffs by the spring.

But the company’s troubles didn’t entirely ground its fleet. Flight tracking data indicate that Air Wisconsin continued to provide regional air service through the end of 2025, primarily connecting its Wisconsin hubs to mid-sized Midwestern airports as it had for decades.

The sale

In January, Harbor Diversified Inc., the Appleton-based parent company of Air Wisconsin, sold the company’s operations and 13 of its jets to CSI Aviation, a New Mexico-based air charter company and longtime federal contractor owned by former New Mexico Republican Party chair Allen Weh.

Air Wisconsin sent recall notices to the company’s furloughed flight attendants after the sale to CSI Aviation, and the Association of Flight Attendants — the union representing the furloughed workers — negotiated an immediate raise for returning members. In a January press release announcing the recall notices, the union noted that only a third of the furloughed flight attendants opted to return.

Neither CSI nor Harbor Diversified responded to requests for comment.

CSI is central to the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown.

It has provided charter services for ICE since 2024, transporting detainees and deportees both directly and through subcontractors.

The company entered its current $1.5 billion contract with the Department of Homeland Security in November of last year.

Demand for private charters surged after 2010, when the Obama administration moved away from relying solely on the U.S. Marshals Service.

Air Wisconsin isn’t alone. Avelo Airlines began deportation flights last spring, but backed out last month following intense public backlash.

A transformed network

CSI’s acquisition of Air Wisconsin transformed the airline’s flight patterns within a matter of weeks. The airline’s website no longer lists passenger routes, but flight data collected between Jan. 9 and mid-February indicates that the airline has largely ceded its role as a Midwestern regional carrier.

Instead, the airline increasingly looks south: Destinations in Louisiana and Texas replaced the mid-sized Midwestern airports that were, until recently, the airline’s most frequent destinations.

Flight data indicates Air Wisconsin planes made at least 125 trips in January 2026, up from roughly 60 in December 2025. Thicker lines on the map indicate more frequent routes.

Part 2: Air ICE

Many of Air Wisconsin’s new destinations are within easy reach of ICE detention facilities in Texas and Louisiana, including some of the agency’s largest.

The Minnesota operation

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is among the busiest in the country, but Air Wisconsin rarely provided service to the Twin Cities in the final months of 2025.

That changed in January, just weeks after the Trump administration dispatched thousands of federal agents to Minnesota for an immigration enforcement offensive dubbed Operation Metro Surge.

Hundreds of immigrants detained in the operation have since departed the airport in shackles, loaded onto charter flights bound for ICE detention facilities farther south.

Alexandria

The modest airport in Alexandria, Louisiana, is now the epicenter of ICE’s deportation flight operations. Air Wisconsin has flown to or from Alexandria at least 30 times since the airline’s acquisition by CSI, on par with the airline’s service to Madison and outpacing service to Appleton, home to the airline’s corporate headquarters.

The GEO Group, an international private prison operator, runs an ICE detention facility on the airport’s tarmac. A dozen other ICE facilities sit within easy reach. Among them is the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Mississippi, where Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, a 39-year-old Nicaraguan national, died in custody on Dec. 14, 2025. ICE acknowledged the incident in a press release four days later, though the agency did not specify the cause of Rodriguez’s death.

El Paso

Camp East Montana, ICE’s largest detention facility, sits just east of El Paso International Airport. Air Wisconsin flights took off from or landed in El Paso at least 32 times in January and early February, second only to Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport.

The camp drew national attention in early January after Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban national, died by asphyxiation after guards pinned him to the floor of a cell. The El Paso County Medical Examiner’s Office later ruled the death a homicide.

Lunas Campos’ death came a month after Francisco Gaspar-Andres, a 48-year-old from Guatemala and detained at Camp East Montana, died in an El Paso hospital; ICE attributed Gaspar-Andres’ death to liver and kidney failure.

Another detainee, 36-year-old Victor Manuel Diaz of Nicaragua, died at the camp on Jan. 14 in what ICE described as a “presumed suicide” — an explanation his family questions. ICE agents detained Diaz in Minneapolis only days before his death.

Back at home

Air Wisconsin hasn’t entirely withdrawn from its home state hubs. Many of the airline’s remaining pilots, flight attendants and ground crew are still Wisconsin-based, and Milwaukee remains the airline’s primary hub.

The airline is now hiring for more than a dozen Wisconsin-based positions — including legal counsel.

About the data

Wisconsin Watch used FlightAware AeroAPI data (Sept 2025 – Feb 2026) to reconstruct patterns before and after the Jan. 9 sale to CSI Aviation.

Hubs on these maps represent the 10 airports most frequently used. While the routes align with ICE operations, the data does not confirm if specific flights carried detainees.

Air Wisconsin turns to ICE (static version) is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.