The two weeks Congress negotiated to spend working on changes to immigration enforcement runs out Feb. 13, at which point funding lapses for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — all six of Wisconsin’s Republican U.S. House members voted for the stopgap funding measure and its two Democratic U.S. House members voted against it, including U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore of Milwaukee. Two candidates are vying for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court in the spring 2026 election — Here & Now is interviewing each, starting with state appeals court Judge Maria Lazar.

U.S. Rep. Gwen Moore
D-4th Congressional District

• Moore and other Democrats want new accountability measures for federal officers conducting immigration enforcement after Homeland Security agents shot and killed two U.S. citizen protesters in Minneapolis in January. Moore specified the changes she and other lawmakers seek in order to vote to fund the agency.
• Moore: “Really commonsense things — anything that any American would expect and how they would want to be treated as a citizen or not. First of all, targeted enforcement. Have probable cause to stop someone, not stop someone because they are speaking Spanish, or because they look like a Somali, or they look brown, or God forbid, that they be a protester that’s exerting their First Amendment rights and they get arrested for that. Have a probable cause. We want them to have no masks. I mean, this is horrifying. You know, Frederica, would any of us tolerate people not in uniforms, but just dark hoodies to come up and kidnap us. Require some identification. What’s wrong with a badge and a badge number? We want state and local oversight and coordination in these arrests. Police in Wisconsin have the right to prosecute ICE officers if they are using unreasonable force. We want body cameras being used to record what’s happening — not to track people, but to record what’s happening. And certainly no paramilitary police. We want people trained, as in regular law enforcement duties and standards, and we want them to have a judicial warrant to be able to arrest them — not an administrative warrant, not something that, you know, Pam Bondi has drawn up, but a warrant signed by a judge.”

Maria Lazar
Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate

• The 2026 race for a Wisconsin Supreme Court seat is shaping up to be a lower key affair than the previous two years, both of which set spending records for judicial elections and with ideological control of the state’s high court at stake in each. At the same time, the race follows a longstanding pattern for these spring elections, with ideologically distinct candidates that reflect the state’s political division. Here & Now senior political reporter Zac Schultz interviewed both candidates, starting with the conservative candidate, state Court of Appeals District II Judge Maria Lazar. She spoke about her judicial philosophy.
• Lazar: I describe my philosophy as originalism with a slice of textualism, which means for those who are not law nerds like me, means that I look at the documents and the laws as they’re written, and I interpret them from that point of view. And if you have to go a little bit outside, I do, but I don’t go all the way outside to intent of legislators and things like that.

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