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Hundreds Rally in Milwaukee Against Trump Admin's 'Unprecedented' Arrest of Judge
"We reject this lawless escalation against an immigration judge who appears to be showing a commonsense and humane approach to immigrants, and stands for due process for all," said one campaigner.
Apr 26, 2025
Hundreds of people rallied in Wisconsin's largest city on Saturday to protest the Trump administration's arrest of Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan on what critics called "baseless" charges of felony obstruction after she allegedly helped an undocumented immigrant evade arrest during an appearance in her courtroom.
FBI agents arrested Dugan, 65, on Friday following an investigation, accusing her of escorting an undocumented man and his attorney through her courtroom's jury door after learning that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents showed up to arrest him.
Protesters chanted slogans including, "No ICE, No KKK, No Fascist USA!" and "No Hate, No Fear, Immigrants Are Welcome Here!" They held signs with messages like "Liberty and Justice for All" and "Resist Fascism!"
HAPPENING NOW: A HUGE crowd of protesters march through the streets outside an FBI office in Milwaukee in support of Judge Hannah Dugan (Video: @unraveledpress.com)
[image or embed]
— Marco Foster ( @marcofoster.bsky.social) April 26, 2025 at 3:05 PM
"I have never heard of a state court judge being arrested by the federal government because she chose to control her own courtroom. This is unprecedented," Sara Dady, an immigration attorney who traveled more than 90 miles from Rockford, Illinois to attend the demonstration outside the FBI field office in Milwaukee, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-19) told the crowd: "The judiciary acts as a check to unchecked executive power. And functioning democracies do not lock up judges."
"I hope that we can all be as brave as Judge Dugan was," Clancy added.
Janan Najeeb, one of the leaders of the Wisconsin Coalition for Justice in Palestine, told rallygoers: "The courtroom is not a hunting ground for ICE. It is a sanctuary. When our government turns our courtrooms into traps, they are betraying the very laws that they claim to defend."
Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights director Angelica Salas said in a statement that "in an unprecedented move against members of the judicial branch, the Trump administration is exercising authoritarianism to degrees that should alarm us all."
"We reject this lawless escalation against an immigration judge who appears to be showing a commonsense and humane approach to immigrants, and stands for due process for all, and against wanton disregard for our Constitution," Salas added.
Critics have called Dugan's arrest part and parcel of President Donald Trump's attacks on immigrants, the nation's system of checks and balances, and the rule of law.
"The Trump administration deserves zero benefit of the doubt here. It has evinced utter contempt for due process and the rule of law since inauguration day," Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect, wrote on Friday. "It has deported numerous legal residents, most notably Kilmar Abrego García, to an El Salvador torture dungeon, and is openly disobeying a 9-0 Supreme Court decision to bring García back."
"The ongoing mass layoffs of federal workers and outright dismantling of legislatively mandated agencies being carried out by Elon Musk and DOGE is blatantly unconstitutional," Cooper added, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency.
Among those pushing back against Dugan's arrest are Wisconsin Circuit Judge Monica Isham, who wrote in an email to other judges: "Enough is enough. I no longer feel protected or respected as a judge in this administration. If there is no guidance for us and no support for us, I will refuse to hold court."
"I have no intention of allowing anyone to be taken out of my courtroom by ICE and sent to a concentration camp, especially without due process as BOTH of the constitutions we swore to support require," Isham added. "If this costs me my job or gets me arrested, then at least I know I did the right thing."
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Peace Group Faces Death Threats After 'False Accusations' by Lawmaker at RNC
"This is a deliberate attempt to scapegoat and incite hate and retaliatory violence against our organization and views."
Jul 17, 2024
CodePink on Wednesday published a recording of a vicious death threat it received after a GOP congressman's dubious assault allegation against one of the peace group's members resulted in her arrest outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
According to CodePink, Rep. Derrick Van Orden (R-Wis.)—a former Navy SEAL—"falsely accused" Nour Jaghama, the group's Palestine campaign coordinator, of assault after he ran into her from behind. Jaghama was arrested and held for 15 hours in a Milwaukee jail before being released. She was charged with battery against a sitting member of Congress.
"CodePink unequivocally states that no one from our organization assaulted anyone," the group said in a statement. "We attended the RNC to deliver a message of peace and disarmament, adhering strictly to nonviolent protest methods."
Van Orden took to social media Tuesday evening to claim he was "assaulted by what appeared to be a member of the pro-Hamas group CodePink" in "an incident of political violence."
"Republicans have been intimidated and targeted for years including the attempted assassination of [former President Donald] Trump and we will no longer stand by and allow lawlessness," the congressman added.
Van Orden has a history of aggressive behavior toward others, including profanity-laced tirades against a fellow congressman and a group of teenage Senate pages, and threatening a librarian over a book about gay rabbits.
Hours after Van Orden's post, CodePink received the following message:
The next Palestinian protest in the street, I'm going to get my semi-truck and run over you fucking faggots and make road pancake out of you, you fucking cunt. I hope you all die, bitch.
"Mere days after a high-profile assassination attempt, [Van Orden] used the same words to describe our peace organization that the nation is using to describe the person who attempted to kill Donald Trump," CodePink said in a statement. "This is a deliberate attempt to scapegoat and incite hate and retaliatory violence against our organization and views. In a heated political moment where people all over the United States are called to unite, Van Orden used the moment to incite hate against nonviolent activists."
CodePink called Van Orden's "pro-Hamas" slur "an obvious example of the racial profiling and anti-Palestinian hatred that has been stoked in this country since October 7."
"Hateful messaging and false accusations against Palestinians led to the killing of Wadea Al Fayoume, a 6-year-old boy in Illinois, the shooting of three Palestinian young men in Vermont, and the attempted drowning of a Palestinian child in Texas," the group added. "This incident is another incitement of violence against Palestinians. The very same rhetoric that leads our elected officials to disregard Palestinian life in Gaza is the rhetoric they use to disregard Palestinian life at home."
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'Huge Win for Abortion Rights': Planned Parenthood to Resume Care in Wisconsin
While welcoming the shift, Gov. Tony Evers also stressed that the broader battle is far from over and "I will keep fighting like hell every day until Wisconsinites have the right to make their own healthcare decisions."
Sep 14, 2023
Wisconsin residents, reproductive rights advocates, and Democratic political leaders on Thursday celebrated after Planned Parenthood announced that it will resume abortion care at Madison and Milwaukee clinics next week following a recent court ruling.
"With patients and community as our central priority and driving force, we are eager to resume abortion services and provide this essential care to people in our state," said Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin (PPWI) president and CEO Tanya Atkinson in a statement.
"With the recent confirmation from the court that there is not an enforceable abortion ban in Wisconsin, our staff can now provide the full scope of sexual and reproductive healthcare to anyone in Wisconsin who needs it, no matter what," added Atkinson.
After the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing majority reversed Roe v. Wade last year, PPWI stopped providing abortion care due to uncertainty over an 1849 Wisconsin law—which is still being challenged and expected to eventually reach the state Supreme Court.
As Atkinson explained in a two-minute video posted on social media Thursday, PPWI decided to resume care after Dane County Judge Diane Schlipper ruled in July that "there is no such thing as an '1849 abortion ban' in Wisconsin."
Schlipper determined that the law only applies to feticide, or the act of killing a fetus, and wrote that "a physician who performs a consensual medical abortion commits a crime only 'after the fetus or unborn child reaches viability.'"
The Guttmacher Institute—which tracks state-level policy changes on abortion rights across the country—declared Thursday on X, formerly Twitter, that "this is a win for people in Wisconsin seeking care, advocates, and providers!"
The pause on abortion care in Wisconsin forced patients to continue dangerous or unwanted pregnancies, self-manage abortions, or seek care elsewhere—such as in Democrat-controlled Illinois, which is surrounded by states with strict anti-choice laws, including Wisconsin, and has been flooded with "abortion refugees" since the Roe reversal.
"The ability to provide abortion services in Wisconsin again is crucial to being able to address the full scope of care for our patients," PPWI associate medical director Dr. Allie Linton said Thursday. "Patients who walk through our doors can again know they will receive the comprehensive, high quality, nonjudgmental, and confidential reproductive care they deserve."
In a statement welcoming PPWI's decision, Democratic Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers noted that Schlipper's ruling in July stemmed from an attempt to dismiss a lawsuit that he and state Attorney General Josh Kaul filed to clarify that the 1849 law could not be used to prevent abortion care.
"I've been clear from the beginning that I would fight to restore reproductive freedom in our state with every power and every tool we have, and I've spent every day over the last year doing just that," said Evers. "This is critically important news for Wisconsin women and patients across our state who, for a year now, have been unable to access the healthcare they need when and where they need it."
"But I also want to be clear today: I will never let up. And we must not let up. Our fight to restore the same reproductive rights and freedoms Wisconsinites had up until the day the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe must continue," he added. "I will keep fighting like hell every day until Wisconsinites have the right to make their own healthcare decisions without interference from politicians who don't know anything about their lives, their family, or their circumstances."
Other Democratic political leaders in Wisconsin who applauded the development included former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, Secretary of State Sarah Godlewski, U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, and Congresswoman Gwen Moore, who has previously spoken about her decision, as a low-income 19-year-old mother, to end her second pregnancy before Roe.
Praising PPWI's announcement as "an important step toward restoring reproductive freedom for everyone in our state," Opportunity Wisconsin said that "no Wisconsinite should face a massive financial burden just to access the basic healthcare services they need."
The coalition also called out Wisconsin Republicans in Congress who have joined their GOP colleagues in blocking federal legislation that would affirm abortion rights nationwide.
Abortion—and specifically, fights over the 1849 law—was a key issue in the April election in which voters elected Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which now has a liberal majority for the first time in 15 years. Republicans in the state Legislature are threatening to impeach her before she even hears a case.
"Wisconsin Republicans are threatening to impeach Justice Protasiewicz for one reason: to stay in power," Moore said Sunday. "They know they're outnumbered on issues like abortion, so the only way to keep their extreme policies in place is to subvert the will of the voters."
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Resignation Demanded After Wisconsin GOP Official Boasts of Suppressing Black, Hispanic Vote
"It is incredibly racist to brag about lowering Black and Brown turnout, it is also unacceptable to have these comments and views held by an election official," said one advocacy group.
Jan 12, 2023
Voting rights advocates in Wisconsin on Thursday called on a far-right conspiracy theorist and member of the state's election authority to resign following revelations that he boasted about suppressing Black and Brown Milwaukee voters during last year's midterms.
Urban Milwaukee first reported that Bob Spindell, chairman of the 4th Congressional District GOP and a member of the Wisconsin Elections Committee (WEC), gloated in an email to thousands of Republicans that "we can be especially proud of the city of Milwaukee (80.2% Dem Vote) casting 37,000 less votes than cast in the 2018 election, with the major reduction happening in the overwhelming (sic) Black and Hispanic areas."
"From participating in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results, to now boasting about the suppression of votes from people of color, Spindell clearly cannot be trusted to fairly and adequately carry out a position directly related to the integrity of the Wisconsin election system."
Spindell explained that "this great and important decrease in Democrat votes in the city" was due to a "well thought out multifaceted plan," which included negative ads targeting Black voters, Republican lawsuits that increased voting restrictions, and an effort to convince Democratic voters to stay home on Election Day.
"While this is incredibly disturbing, we are not surprised by this recent revelation of additional Republican tactics used for voter suppression," the political action group Black Leaders Organizing for Communities (BLOC) said in response to Spindell's email. "Many of us have been sounding the alarm about how sinister voter suppression tactics have become, and Spindell's comments reinforce what we already knew."
"It is incredibly racist to brag about lowering Black and Brown turnout, it is also unacceptable to have these comments and views held by an election official," BLOC added. "We join calls from various grassroots partners... to rescind Spindell's appointment to the Wisconsin Election Commission."
Chris Walloch, executive director of A Better Wisconsin Together, a progressive research hub, tied Spindell's email to the official's support for former President Donald Trump's "Big Lie" about the last presidential election.
"There's no easier way to put it—Spindell is a Trump faction conspiracy theorist who has actively tried to sabotage and influence the outcome of Wisconsin elections based upon his own partisan bias," Walloch said in a statement.
"From participating in a criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results, to now boasting about the suppression of votes from people of color, Spindell clearly cannot be trusted to fairly and adequately carry out a position directly related to the integrity of the Wisconsin election system," Walloch added. "Wisconsinites deserve better, and we are demanding better."
Spindell was already a controversial figure. A prominent purveyor of Trump's "Big Lie," he was one of 10 fake Republican electors who plotted to fraudulently hand Trump a second White House term.
"The comments Commissioner Spindell made are not only egregious, they are the antithesis to what a true democracy is all about," Samuel Liebert, the Wisconsin state director for the advocacy group All Voting Is Local, said in a statement. "Nobody should be celebrating the disenfranchisement of Wisconsin voters, least of all an election official serving on the Wisconsin Elections Commission."
"The targeting of Black and Brown voters and the rejoicing over tens of thousands of us casting fewer ballots than in previous elections is alarming and leaves little doubt that barriers to the ballot and the spreading of disinformation regarding voting and elections have specifically been implemented and utilized to prevent us from voting," he continued.
"No matter our color, background, or zip code, most Wisconsinites believe that voters pick our leaders, our leaders do not pick their voters," Liebert added. "Elections officials, such as those serving on the WEC, should deliver the promise of American democracy to all, regardless of party affiliation."
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Lessons from Flint and the Price of Water Privatization
U.S. communities are shifting toward keeping their water infrastructure public, and that’s a good thing. But stopping water privatization is only the first step.
Feb 18, 2016
As new information comes out every day about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, the state of our country's water feels dire. Flint children will suffer the lifelong consequences of lead poisoning after the state took over the city's water system and switched the city's water source from the safe Detroit water system to the polluted Flint River all in the name of cutting costs.
Flint's situation is appalling, outrageous and frightening. It is a warning about what is at stake when communities lose local control of their water and outside officials come in and run water systems like businesses, putting money before public health and human lives.
Although we still have a long way to go to get justice for Flint, the good news is that more and more communities recognize the need to protect our water and run water systems like public services - not profit centers. Cities are moving in the right direction: toward local, public, democratic control of our water.
Food & Water Watch has worked for ten years to help communities keep their water in local public hands, and today we're releasing our report, "The State of Public Water in the United States," which shows that public water is slowly but surely winning over privatized water systems. We reviewed eight years of data from the U.S. EPA and found that more people than ever have public water. That's a very good sign for the future of safe water.
We conducted a comprehensive survey of the 500 largest U.S. water systems - the largest survey of its kind - and found that private systems charge 58 percent more than public systems on average. That's an extra $185 a year for a typical household.
Locally controlled public water systems tend to be better all around for residents than privately owned systems. We've seen that when communities privatize their water systems, they frequently experience problems. Privatized systems have:
- Worse service: private companies may cut corners, respond slowly to service requests, and let existing infrastructure deteriorate in order to improve their short-term profits.
- Increased costs: when companies have state-sanctioned monopolies on water service, there is little incentive to keep costs down.
- Profit-motivated decision-making: companies can expand and improve service where it benefits their bottom line, not where people need it most.
- Less accountability: Because private companies aren't accountable to voters the way public systems are, when problems occur, people have few options.
Local governments often try to auction off their water or sewer systems to raise money during a budget crunch. But water is one of a community's most essential assets, and one that ought to be protected. Once leaders make the decision to privatize, the damage can be difficult to reverse.
Communities often don't know what problems privatized water could bring until it happens to them. Fortunately, more and more communities are learning about the importance of public water, and they are fighting to keep their water in public hands, or take back public control of privatized systems. Since our founding, Food & Water Watch has always supported communities' efforts to fight privatization, and we continue to offer education, expertise, training, and other resources to communities that are fighting for their water.
And together, we've won again and again. We beat a major water company in Florida. We protected multiple communities in New Jersey. We won in Milwaukee and Akron. In Food & Water Watch's ten-year history, we've helped stop over three dozen privatization efforts.
The data shows that more and more communities are opting - and fighting when necessary - for public water, and Food & Water Watch will keep fighting with them. It's a critical step, but local efforts aren't enough to protect our water for the long term. We need to invest in keeping our water service clean, safe and affordable for everyone.
Cities across the country have aging pipes and need expensive updates to their water systems. Much of our water infrastructure was built around the same time that Henry Ford developed the Model T.
We need to fix and replace our pipes, upgrade our treatment plants and make sure that no more cities suffer the way Flint is. That's why we're calling on Congress and President Obama to fund our clean water infrastructure. You can help: take action to protect our public water.
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