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    Federal grand jury indicts Wisconsin judge over alleged Ice obstruction

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    A federal grand jury has indicted a Wisconsin judge who was arrested by the FBI last month on allegations that she helped an undocumented immigrant avoid federal authorities.Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge in Milwaukee, was charged on Tuesday with concealing a person from arrest and obstruction of proceedings, the New York Times reported on Tuesday.Dugan was apprehended in the courthouse where she works in April, sparking public protests and rebukes from lawmakers. Her arrest has escalated a clash between Donald Trump’s administration and local authorities over the Republicans’ sweeping immigration crackdown. Democrats have accused the Trump administration of trying to make a national example of Dugan to chill judicial opposition to the crackdown.“Let’s be clear. Trump’s arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee has nothing to do with immigration,” said US senator Bernie Sanders at the time. “It has everything to do with [Trump] moving this country towards authoritarianism.”Prosecutors charged Dugan in April with concealing an individual to prevent arrest and obstruction. In the federal criminal justice system, prosecutors can initiate charges against a defendant directly by filing a complaint or present evidence to a grand jury and let that body decide whether to issue charges.A grand jury still reviews charges brought by complaint to determine whether enough probable cause exists to continue the case as a check on prosecutors’ power. If the grand jury determines there’s probable cause, it issues a written statement of the charges known as an indictment. That’s what happened in Dugan’s case.Dugan faces up to six years in prison if she’s convicted on both counts. Her team of defense attorneys responded to the indictment with a one-sentence statement saying that she maintains her innocence and looks forward to being vindicated in court.Prosecutors say Dugan escorted Eduardo Flores-Ruiz and his lawyer out of her courtroom through a back jury door on 18 April after learning that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents were in the courthouse seeking his arrest.According to court documents, Flores-Ruiz illegally re-entered the US after being deported in 2013. Online state court records show he was charged with three counts of misdemeanor domestic abuse in Milwaukee county in March. He was in Dugan’s courtroom the morning of 18 April for a hearing.Court documents suggest Dugan was alerted to the agents’ presence by her clerk, who was informed by an attorney that the agents appeared to be in the hallway. An affidavit says Dugan was visibly angry over the agents’ arrival and called the situation “absurd” before leaving the bench and retreating to her chambers. She and another judge later approached members of the arrest team in the courthouse with what witnesses described as a “confrontational, angry demeanor”.After a back-and-forth with the agents over the warrant for Flores-Ruiz, Dugan demanded they speak with the chief judge and led them away from the courtroom, according to the affidavit.She then returned to the courtroom and was heard saying words to the effect of “wait, come with me” and ushered Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out through a back jury door typically used only by deputies, jurors, court staff and in-custody defendants, according to the affidavit. Flores-Ruiz was free on a signature bond in the abuse case at the time, according to online state court records.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFederal agents ultimately captured him outside the courthouse after a foot chase.The state supreme court suspended Dugan from the bench in late April, saying the move was necessary to preserve public confidence in the judiciary. A reserve judge is filling in for her.Dugan’s case is similar to one brought during the first Trump administration against a Massachusetts judge, who was accused of helping a man sneak out of a courthouse back door to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent. That case was eventually dismissed.She was scheduled to enter a plea on Thursday.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Wisconsin woman missing for more than 60 years found ‘alive and well’

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      A Wisconsin woman missing for more than 60 years has been found “alive and well”, according to authorities.In a press statement, Wisconsin’s Sauk county sheriff’s office said that 82-year old Audrey Backeberg, who initially disappeared in July 1962 at the age of 20, had been found living out of the state. The sheriff’s office did not disclose which state Backeberg was found in.“Further investigation has revealed that Ms Backeberg’s disappearance was by her own choice and not the result of any criminal activity or foul play,” the sheriff’s office said.According to the Wisconsin justice department, Backeberg left her family home on 7 July in 1962. Backeberg’s babysitter claimed that she and Backeberg hitchhiked to Madison, Wisconsin, and then took a Greyhound bus to Indianapolis, Indiana. The babysitter last saw Backeberg – a mother of two – walking around the corner away from the bus stop.The Charley Project, which profiles missing persons, said in a since updated post that Backeberg married her husband, Ronald Backeberg, when she was “about fifteen years old” and that that their “marriage was troubled and there were allegations of abuse”.Around the time of her disappearance, Backeberg had filed a criminal complaint against her husband, alleging that he had beat her and threatened to kill her, the BBC reports, citing the Wisconsin Missing Persons Advocacy nonprofit group.It added that on the day Backeberg disappeared, she left home to collect her pay cheque from a woollen mill where she had worked.Backeberg was ultimately found 60 years later after her case was assigned to a detective for a “comprehensive review as part of an ongoing examination of cold case files”, the Sauk county sheriff’s office said. It added that part of the review involved “a thorough re-evaluation of all case files and evidence, combined with re-interviewing witnesses and uncovering new insights.”Speaking to WISN, detective Isaac Hanson who found Backeberg said he was able to locate her through her sister’s Ancestry.com account.“That was pretty key in locating death records, census reports, all kinds of data,” Hanson told the news station, adding, “Ultimately, we came up with an address … so I called the local sheriff’s department, said ‘Hey, there’s this lady living at this address. Do you guys have somebody, you can just go pop in?’ … Ten minutes later, she called me, and we talked for 45 minutes.”“I think she just was removed and, you know, moved on from things and kind of did her own thing and lead her life … She sounded happy. Confident in her decision, no regrets,” Hanson added. More

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      Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers Is Not Afraid of Trump Administration Immigration Warning

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      Thomas Homan, the border czar, had said, “Wait to see what’s coming,” when asked about guidance sent to state workers about interacting with ICE agents.A dispute over a memo about how Wisconsin state workers should interact with federal immigration agents escalated this week into sharply worded warnings from the president’s border czar, Thomas Homan, and the state’s Democratic governor, Tony Evers.Mr. Evers and others interpreted comments by Mr. Homan to suggest that he and other elected officials could face arrest over local immigration policies, leading the Wisconsin governor to say he was “not afraid” of what he described as “chilling threats.”The Wisconsin dispute was the latest chapter in a long-running fight between President Trump’s administration and Democratic-led cities and states over whether local officials must cooperate with federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.In Wisconsin, Republicans had for days pushed for Mr. Evers to rescind a message to state employees, issued on April 18 by the state’s Department of Administration. The single-page memo instructed workers to call a state lawyer if an ICE agent or other federal official visited their workplace. The memo told state workers to stay calm and notify their supervisors, to not immediately answer an agent’s questions and to not give them access to nonpublic areas. Chicago officials issued similar guidance to city workers earlier this year.Read the Memo to Wisconsin State WorkersRead Document 1 pageThe disagreement over the memo intensified outside the White House on Thursday when a person who identified himself as being from The Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website, asked Mr. Homan why the government was not simply arresting “the leaders who are harboring and shielding” people who should be deported.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The FBI’s arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan is a bid to silence dissent | Moira Donegan

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      On Friday, the Trump administration dramatically escalated its assault on the courts when the FBI arrested Hannah Dugan, a county circuit court judge handling misdemeanors in Milwaukee – allegedly for helping an undocumented man avoid abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents outside her courtroom. The arrest, a highly publicized and dramatic move from the Trump administration, seemed designed to elicit fear among judges, government bureaucrats and ordinary Americans that any effort to slow, impede or merely not facilitate the administration’s mass kidnapping and deportation efforts will lead to swift, forceful and disproportionate punishment by Donald Trump allies. Her arrest may be the opening salvo of a broader Trump assault on judges.Even if you believe the FBI’s allegations, their account of Dugan’s alleged misconduct is trivial and flimsy, wholly undeserving of the administration’s sadistically disproportionate response. The FBI claims that earlier this month, on 17 April, when an undocumented man was in Dugan’s Milwaukee courtroom charged with misdemeanor battery, she learned that Ice agents were waiting in a public hallway to arrest him. Later, in her courtroom, when she saw the defendant moving toward a main exit, she told the man, “Wait, come with me,” and directed him towards a side door instead. (He was captured by Ice shortly thereafter.) The FBI arrested her in her courtroom and has indicted her on two federal felony charges: obstruction and “concealing an individual”.The presence of Ice agents looking to abduct, detain and deport various undocumented people has long been a problem in local courthouses, keeping municipalities from interacting officially with their residents and slowing the pace of court business as undocumented people have become reluctant to show up at courthouse buildings, be it to face criminal charges, as the man in Dugan’s case was doing; to tend to civil matters; or to report crimes or pursue restraining orders against abusers. As a result, many local judges and administrators have criticized Ice’s operation policies, alleging that the agency’s aggressive tactics to enforce federal immigration law have obstructed their own ability to enforce local law. This is a distinct issue from the legality of Trump administration’s immigration crackdown tactics, which have also been challenged by a number of judges at the state and local level. The justice department has reportedly encouraged federal prosecutors to press charges against state and local officials who oppose the administration’s immigration policies.At the Milwaukee courthouse where Dugan works, Ice agents had already made two high-profile arrests of undocumented persons there to conduct official business, actions that sent a chilling effect through the local community. (The defendant in question in Dugan’s court that day was there on a domestic violence charge; because Ice decided to appear there to arrest him on civil immigration charges instead, the proceedings had to be abruptly halted. The victims, who were present in the courtroom, did not get their chance to see justice served.) When she learned of the presence of Ice agents outside her courtroom door, the FBI alleges, Judge Dugan asked the Ice agents to leave, and pointed out that they did not have the correct warrants. She also allegedly called the situation “absurd”.The absurdity was only beginning. After capturing Dugan’s defendant, the Trump administration evidently sought to make an example of Dugan, and concocted the trumped-up felony charges in order to criminalize her objection to their presence in her courthouse. After orchestrating her arrest, the FBI’s embattled chief, Kash Patel, tweeted gloatingly about Dugan’s capture; then, he quickly deleted the post, only to put it up again later. The FBI seems to have procedurally expedited the charges against her, having her indictment issued by a magistrate judge rather than a grand jury, and arresting Dugan rather than giving her the opportunity to turn herself in. They seem to have been going for maximum drama. For her part, Dugan – a well-known progressive in Milwaukee legal circles who spent much of her career working as a public-interest legal aid attorney – said nothing at her arraignment on Friday. Her attorney told the press, “Judge Dugan wholeheartedly rejects and protests her arrest,” adding: “It was not made in the interest of public safety.”Indeed it was not. Instead, Dugan’s arrest was made in the interest of shoring up the Trump administration’s depictions of itself as lawless, fearsome and impervious to constitutional checks on its own power. It was made in the interest of intimidating the administration’s critics and opponents. And it was made in the interest of silencing dissent.The Trump administration has been rapidly accumulating political prisoners. It began with immigrants who voiced opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza: Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, the graduate students who had their legal status revoked in retaliation for their pro-Palestinian opinions and who were kidnapped by the Ice secret police and shipped off to faraway prisons without process, are political prisoners. Dugan’s, too, is a political prosecution: what is at stake is not so much the law that that meager little comment – “Wait, come with me” – supposedly broke. Instead, it is that Dugan opposes the Trump mass deportation project, and she voiced that opposition in public. Her arrest is an expansion of the Trump regime’s determination into who can be made a political prisoner: with Dugan, that designation extends, in public fashion, to citizens, and even to judges. You should expect that it can expand to you.Dugan’s example is meant to frighten Americans into submission. But I think it might be more likely that she inspires us to subversion. Legality and morality are different things, and what Dugan allegedly did, whether or not it was technically legal, was supremely moral, and not a little bit brave: she refused to cooperate with a secret police force that was there to violate her courtroom, disappear her defendant, and interfere with her own distribution of justice. Doing the morally right thing – opposing Ice and mass deportations with our actions, in practical terms – will require courage from more and more of us, and a greater and greater willingness to face consequences for it.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Democrats decry Wisconsin judge’s arrest as Republicans call to remove her

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      The FBI’s arrest of Wisconsin judge Hannah Dugan has triggered strong reactions from Republican and Democratic politicians, as the Trump administration veered closer to direct confrontation with the judiciary over its crackdown on immigration.Following the Milwaukee county circuit judge’s arrest on Friday, over allegations that she helped a man evade US immigration officers at her courthouse, Republicans have called for her removal while Democrats regard her arrest as a reflection of the administration’s increasing disregard of judicial independence amid its push to deport immigrants on an enormous scale.In a clear signal that the administration welcomed a political fight over the judge’s arrest, the FBI director, Kash Patel, posted a photograph of Dugan in handcuffs on Twitter/X on Friday night, captioned: “No one is above the law.”According to the criminal complaint against the judge filed in federal court, a six-person arrest team, which included an immigration officer and two FBI agents, arrived at the courthouse to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican immigrant facing three misdemeanor battery counts they intended to deport.Flores-Ruiz was in Dugan’s courtroom on 18 April for a scheduling hearing. The complaint alleges that when the arrest team identified themselves to courthouse security, and waited in the public hallway outside Dugan’s courtroom, she confronted them and ordered them to report to the chief judge’s office. Then, according to a court officer cited in the complaint, Dugan directed the defendant and his lawyer to a side exit from the courtroom, which led to a private hallway.In response to Dugan’s arrest, Representative Glenn Grothman, a Wisonsin Republican, accused Dugan of being a “liberal judge [who] would go so far as to obstruct federal law enforcement in order to protect a violent illegal immigrant from arrest”.Tony Wied, another Republican representative of Wisconsin in Congress, demanded Dugan’s resignation. “Absolutely unacceptable,” Wied wrote, adding: “Not only are activist judges trying to thwart the president’s agenda, now they are actively breaking the law to protect illegal aliens. Judge Dugan should resign immediately.”Democrats, including Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, condemned the FBI’s arrest of Dugan as an overreach of executive power by Donald Trump.Evers said: “In this country, people who are suspected of criminal wrongdoing are innocent until their guilt is proven beyond reasonable doubt.” He went to add: “Unfortunately, we have seen in recent months the president and the Trump administration repeatedly use dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine the judiciary at every level, including flat-out disobeying the highest court in the land and threatening to impeach and remove judges who do not rule in their favor.”Referencing the US president and the White House’s own messaging of likening Trump to a king, the state’s Democratic senator, Tammy Baldwin, said: “Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country … By relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders, and arresting a sitting judge, this president is putting those basic Democratic values that Wisconsinites hold dear on the line.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, the state’s former Republican governor Scott Walker called on, the Wisconsin state legislature “to remove disgraced Milwaukee county circuit court judge Hannah Dugan from office”.Republicans from outside of Wisconsin echoed those calls, with Tennessee’s representative Tim Burchett saying: “If she broke the law, she needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent. No double standards.”But Wisconsin’s Democratic representative Gwen Moore countered that what she called the administration’s “willingness to weaponize federal law enforcement is shocking and this arrest has all the hallmarks of overreach. Federal law enforcement coming into a community and arresting a judge is a serious matter and would require a high legal bar.”Milwaukee’s city council members also released a statement, saying: “Perhaps the most chilling part of judge Dugan’s arrest is the continued aggression by which the current administration in Washington DC has weaponized federal law enforcement, such as ICE, against immigrant communities.”Similarly, Milwaukee county board supervisor, Miguel Martinez, said: “The people will not stand for an administration that continues to weaponize our justice system as a means to intimidate immigrant communities, made clear by the cumulative actions over recent weeks.”Becca Balint, a Vermont Democrat who sits on the House judiciary committee, told Axios that there should “absolutely” be a probe into Dugan’s arrest. “On the face of it, this is dangerous and outrageous and it is designed to intimidate our judiciary,” she said.Her fellow House judiciary committee member, Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, said: “This is a drastic escalation and dangerous new front in Trump’s authoritarian campaign of trying to bully, intimidate and impeach judges who won’t follow his dictates.”“We must do whatever we can to defend the independent judiciary in America … This is an unmistakable descent further into authoritarian chaos,” he added. More

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      FBI arrests Wisconsin judge and accuses her of obstructing immigration officials

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      The FBI on Friday arrested a judge whom the agency accused of obstruction after it said she helped a man evade US immigration authorities as they were seeking to arrest him at her courthouse.The county circuit judge, Hannah Dugan, was apprehended in the courthouse where she works in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at 8.30am local time on Friday on charges of obstruction, a spokesperson for the US Marshals Service confirmed to the Guardian.Kash Patel, the Trump-appointed FBI director, wrote mid-morning on X: “We believe Judge Dugan intentionally misdirected federal agents away from the subject to be arrested in her courthouse, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, allowing the subject – an illegal alien – to evade arrest.”He said that agents were still able to arrest the target after he was “chased down” and that he was in custody. Patel added that “the judge’s obstruction created increased danger to the public”. The FBI director deleted the post minutes later for unknown reasons, but the US marshals confirmed to multiple outlets that the arrest had occurred.Dugan appeared briefly in federal court in Milwaukee later on Friday morning before being released from custody. Her next court appearance is 15 May.“Judge Dugan wholeheartedly regrets and protests her arrest. It was not made in the interest of public safety,” her attorney, Craig Mastantuono, said during the hearing. He declined to comment to an Associated Press reporter, following her court appearance.A crowd formed outside the courthouse, chanting: “Free the judge now.”In a statement shared with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, an attorney for Dugan said: “Hannah C Dugan has committed herself to the rule of law and the principles of due process for her entire career as a lawyer and a judge.”It continued: “Judge Dugan will defend herself vigorously, and looks forward to being exonerated.”Trump weighed in on his Truth Social platform by sharing an image of the judge taken from her campaign’s Facebook page in which she was seen on the bench wearing a KN95 face mask and displaying the Ukrainian national symbol of a trident. The image was first posted on X by the rightwing blogger Libs of TikTok.The Milwaukee city council released a statement following the arrest: “This morning’s news that Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested by federal authorities is shocking and upsetting. Judge Dugan should be afforded the same respect and due process that she has diligently provided others throughout her career.“Perhaps the most chilling part of Judge Dugan’s arrest is the continued aggression by which the current administration in Washington, DC has weaponized federal law enforcement, such as ICE, against immigrant communities,” the statement reads. “As local elected officials, we are working daily to support our constituents who grow increasingly concerned and worried with each passing incident.”Senator Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat representing Wisconsin, called the arrest of a sitting judge a “gravely serious and drastic move” that “threatens to breach” the separation of power between the executive and judicial branches.“Make no mistake, we do not have kings in this country and we are a democracy governed by laws that everyone must abide by,” Baldwin said in an emailed statement after Dugan’s arrest.The leftwing senator Bernie Sanders said the move was about “unchecked power”.“Let’s be clear. Trump’s arrest of Judge Dugan in Milwaukee has nothing to do with immigration. It has everything to do with [Trump] moving this country towards authoritarianism,” he said in a statement.The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren said in a social media post: “This administration is threatening our country’s judicial system. This rings serious alarm bells.”The judge’s arrest dramatically escalates tensions between federal authorities and state and local officials amid Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown. It also comes amid a growing battle between the Trump administration and the federal judiciary over the president’s executive actions over deportations and other matters.In a statement Wisconsin’s governor, Democrat Tony Evers, accused the Trump administration of repeatedly using “dangerous rhetoric to attack and attempt to undermine our judiciary at every level”.“I have deep respect for the rule of law, our nation’s judiciary, the importance of judges making decisions impartially without fear or favor, and the efforts of law enforcement to hold people accountable if they commit a crime,” Evers said. “I will continue to put my faith in our justice system as this situation plays out in the court of law.”It was reported on Tuesday that the FBI was investigating whether Dugan “tried to help an undocumented immigrant avoid arrest when that person was scheduled to appear in her courtroom last week”, per an email obtained by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.Dugan told the Journal Sentinel: “Nearly every fact regarding the ‘tips’ in your email is inaccurate.”The arrest of Dugan is the first publicly known instance of the Trump administration charging a local official for allegedly interfering with immigration enforcement.Emil Bove, the justice department’s principal associate deputy attorney general, issued a memo in January calling on prosecutors to pursue criminal cases against local government officials who obstructed the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts.Bove stated in the three-page memo: “Federal law prohibits state and local actors from resisting, obstructing, and otherwise failing to comply with lawful immigration-related commands or requests.”Dugan has been charged with the federal offenses of obstructing a proceeding and concealing an individual to prevent arrest, according to documents filed with the court.The administration alleged that in the original encounter, the judge ordered immigration officials to leave the courthouse, saying they did not have a warrant signed by a judge to apprehend the suspect they were seeking, who was in court for other reasons.Prosecutors said that Dugan became “visibly angry” when she learned that immigration agents were planning an arrest in her courtroom, according to court filings.Dugan ordered the immigration officials to speak with the chief judge and then escorted Flores Ruiz and his attorney through a door that led to a non-public area of the courthouse, the prosecution complaint said.The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, citing sources it did not identify, said Dugan steered Flores Ruiz and his attorney to a private hallway and into a public area but did not hide the pair in a jury deliberation room as some have accused her of doing.Dugan was first elected as a county judge in 2016 and before that was head of the local branch of Catholic Charities, which provides refugee resettlement programs. She was previously a lawyer at the Legal Aid Society of Milwaukee, which serves low-income people.The case is similar to one brought during the first Trump administration against a Massachusetts judge, who was accused of helping a man sneak out a backdoor of a courthouse to evade a waiting immigration enforcement agent.That prosecution sparked outrage from many in the legal community, who slammed the case as politically motivated. Prosecutors under the Biden administration dropped the case against Newton district judge Shelley Joseph in 2022 after she agreed to refer herself to a state agency that investigates allegations of misconduct by members of the bench.However, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, gave a media interview in which she said the administration would target any judges it believed were breaking the law.Bondi said on a Fox News segment that she believes “some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today … if you are harboring a fugitive, we will come after you and we will prosecute you.”The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Wisconsin Supreme Court Says Governor’s 400-Year Edit Was Within Veto Authority

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      Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, used his veto power to increase school funding limits for four centuries longer than Republican lawmakers in the state had intended.The sentence, dull but clear, was buried 158 pages into Wisconsin’s budget.“For the limit for the 2023-24 school year and the 2024-25 school year,” the sentence read when it was passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature, “add $325” to the amount school districts could generate through property taxes for each student.But by the time Gov. Tony Evers, a Democrat, and his veto pen were finished, it said something else entirely: “For the limit for 2023-2425, add $325.”It was clever. Creative. Perhaps even a bit subversive, extending the increase four centuries longer than lawmakers intended. But was it legal?On Friday, the Wisconsin Supreme Court said yes. In a 4-to-3 ruling in a lawsuit challenging Mr. Evers’s use of his partial veto authority, the court’s liberal majority said the governor had acted legally. The three conservative justices on the court dissented.“We uphold the 2023 partial vetoes, and in doing so we are acutely aware that a 400-year modification is both significant and attention-grabbing,” Justice Jill J. Karofsky wrote in the majority opinion. “However, our Constitution does not limit the governor’s partial veto power based on how much or how little the partial vetoes change policy, even when that change is considerable.”The proposed state budget had outlined two years of revenue limit increases, for the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years. By editing out the text in red, Mr. Evers allowed increases until 2425.State of WisconsinWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      She’s a waitress raised on a farm – can Rebecca Cooke win a key Wisconsin seat?

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      Wisconsin’s third congressional district has voted for Donald Trump every time he’s been on the ballot, but the moderate Democrat Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who grew up on a dairy farm, thinks she can flip the state’s most competitive seat next year.Last year, Cooke outperformed other Democrats when she tried to unseat incumbent Derrick Van Orden, a retired US Navy Seal who attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally at the Capitol and shouted “lies” during Joe Biden’s 2024 state of the union address. She lost the race by less than three points.She’s trying again. She launched her 2026 campaign in March, amid constituent anger at Van Orden for refusing to face questions at in-person town halls. She is doubling down on the campaigning that worked for in November, hitting the pavement across the western Wisconsin district.In the soul-searching among Democrats over the future of their party, Cooke aligns with the moderate Blue Dog coalition led by Washington state representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, who told Mother Jones that after she endorsed Cooke, Van Orden “shoulder-checked me on the floor”.But Cooke rejects a label within the party, calling them “somewhat harmful” and polarizing in her district. She tells voters that she thinks lawmakers in DC are either too far left or too far right, and that there need to be more regular folks willing to work across the aisle to get things done. The idea resonates with people, who tell her they’re over the polarization and chaos. She needs votes from people across the political spectrum to win in the moderately right-leaning district.Cooke’s resumé is the kind often cobbled together in small towns across the US: she works as a waitress, she ran a retail business and an Airbnb business, she worked on Democratic campaigns, and she started a non-profit to support female entrepreneurs. She first ran for the congressional seat in 2022, losing in the Democratic primary, then again in 2024, beating out two other Democrats to take on Van Orden.She has been waitressing since she was a teenager, she said. “I love that work. I love the hospitality industry. I think there’s so much dignity in hospitality work, and it’s something that allows me being able to work at night, to be able to campaign all day.”She said her “more working-class” background aligns with the district but upsets her opponents, who have brought up her work on Democratic campaigns. The National Republican Congressional Committee has repeatedly called her a “sleazy political activist” and said she is lying about her background.“I’d love them to see the car that I drive around, and the place that I live,” she said. “Anybody that knows me knows that I’m not rolling in dough by any means.”Cooke grew up on a dairy farm, but her family had to sell their cows because of how competition affected the price of milk. Losing the farm wasn’t just losing a business, she said. “It’s just very much a part of our way of life, and we’ve lost thousands of dairy farms in Wisconsin.”In June, farmers around the state will host breakfasts to promote dairy farming. She said she’ll be at every dairy breakfast she can get to in the district, shaking hands and introducing herself.“I don’t know what people’s political background is, but when I’m shaking their hand, I’ll say: ‘I’m Rebecca Cooke, I grew up on a dairy farm,’ and I tell them a little bit about my background,” she said. “By the end of the conversation, they go: ‘So, what party are you from?’ And I would rather that question if they’re agreeing with me on similar values.”Cooke said she thinks Democrats need to bring people back into a big tent through pragmatism and detailing how their agenda would help Americans afford their housing and groceries.The party needs to create its own “prosperity gospel instead of just demonizing the right”, she said. “What are we going to do better? And how are we going to help people find their path to the middle class?” Democrats need to be bold, fresh and and willing to be “more uninhibited”.“I really think the change that we want to see has to come from the inside out and not from the outside in,” she said. “We need to look to our communities to solve these gaps and this vacuum and work to recruit people to be those strong voices and to run for office.“It shouldn’t be like, this is coming from the national party, and this is what you should think or do. It should be, this is what’s coming from our communities, and this is what we want the party to do.” More

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      Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ and Musk’s bad week – podcast

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      This week Donald Trump announced a blanket 10% tariff on all goods imported into the US from Saturday, and higher ‘reciprocal’ tariffs on countries taxing US exports from next Wednesday.Meanwhile, the Trump administration was forced to deny that Elon Musk would be leaving his role as a special government employee soon. The reports came a day after a Democrat defeated a Musk-backed Republican for a seat on the Wisconsin supreme court.Archive: ABC News, NBC News, CBS News, WFRC Local, WHAS11, 6abc PhiladelphiaBuy a ticket to The Guardian’s special event, looking at 100 days of Trump’s presidency, with Jonathan Freedland More