Wisconsin
Suspected Venezuelan gang member arrest may give Trump fodder in Wisconsin
The recent arrest of a suspected Venezuelan gang member in Wisconsin may give former President Donald Trump, who has long stoked fears of migrant crime, fodder at his upcoming rally in the state on Saturday.
Trump, the GOP presidential nominee in November’s election, is set to hold a rally Saturday afternoon in Mosinee, Wisconsin, which is about a three-and-a-half-hour drive northeast of Prairie du Chien where Alejandro Jose Coronel Zarate, a 26-year-old Venezuelan, was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Thursday, following allegations of physical and sexual violence.
The Prairie du Chien Police Department wrote in a Facebook post on Friday that Zarate had allegedly been “physically and sexually violent” toward a woman in an altercation that also left a girl injured. Zarate was arrested and taken to the Crawford County Jail. ICE was notified and placed a detainer on Zarate.
Zarate is suspected of being affiliated with the transnational gang, Tren de Aragua, who are known for criminal activities including murder, kidnapping, extortion, as well as drug, weapons, and human trafficking.
He was booked into jail for domestic disorderly conduct, two counts of domestic battery, strangulation/suffocation, physical abuse to a child, disorderly conduct and two counts of second-degree sexual assault. Zarate also had warrants through Dane County, Wisconsin, for strangulation/suffocation, false imprisonment, battery and disorderly conduct.
Trump—who has amplified anti-migrant rhetoric since his first run for president during the 2016 election cycle when he called Mexican migrants “rapists” who are bringing in drugs and crime—may use Zarate’s arrest to back up his continued claims that migrants are dangerous criminals that the U.S. needs to keep out as his campaign has done before.
Meanwhile, the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy institute, said in a May 2024 article: “Numerous studies show that immigration is not linked to higher levels of crime, but rather the opposite…When looking specifically at the relationship between undocumented immigrants and crime, researchers come to similar conclusions.”
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign via email for comment on Saturday afternoon.
Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
On July 24—three days after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the Democratic presidential nominee—Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez blamed Harris for the massive influx of illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border seen in recent years.
“Border Czar Harris owns the bloodbath at the southern border, including the rape, murder, and brutal assault of women like Rachel Morin and Laken Riley. Try as they might, Kamala and her allies can’t change reality: she is responsible for the flood of migrant crime and deadly fentanyl into our country, and Americans will hold her accountable when they vote for President Trump in November,” Alvarez said in a statement.
Laken Riley was a 22-year-old nursing student who was killed in Athens, Georgia, while on a run last February. The suspect in her murder, José Antonio Ibarra, is a Venezuelan illegal immigrant. Meanwhile, Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five from Maryland, was allegedly raped and murdered by 23-year-old undocumented migrant Victor Martinez Hernandez while out for a run in August of 2023.
In 2021, Biden tasked Harris with leading the administration’s diplomacy with Central American countries—El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras—to address the “root causes” of migration. However, she never was in charge of border security. While illegal immigration has gone up significantly under Biden, it also increased in Trump’s last months in office after hitting a low from the COVID-19 pandemic.
(WLUK) — Wisconsin State Patrol troopers are teaming up with truckers to better spot dangerous driving behaviors.
The annual Trooper in a Truck initiative kicks off next week in Wisconsin.
Troopers will ride along with with semitruck and bus drivers to use the higher vantage point to spot dangerous driving behaviors, especially near commercial motor vehicles.
Troopers will be looking for risky driving behaviors, including distracted driving, speeding, following too closely and seatbelt violations. When an officer identifies a violation from the truck or bus, they will radio to patrol cars in the area for appropriate enforcement action.
Drivers can expect to see Trooper in a Truck enforcement in the following areas:
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New Wisconsin athletic director Shawn Eichorst, who spent the last eight years at Texas, believes his new and old schools have much in common.
Both are well-regarded research universities in state capitals that belong to major conferences and have relatively similar enrollments.
He also pointed out one difference.
“There’s swag at Texas, right?” Eichorst said Tuesday during his introductory news conference. “There’s 30 million people in Texas. We’ve got swag, too, but we have a little humility with that deal. We need to get our shoulders up. We need to feel good about what it is that we’re doing.”
Wisconsin could gain more of that Texas swagger if its football program gets back to winning the way it did the last time Eichorst was employed in Madison. Eichorst, who most recently worked as a deputy athletic director at Texas, received a five-year deal worth $1.6 million annually, with provisions for increases and incentives. He was hired 2½ months after Chris McIntosh left to become the Big Ten’s deputy commissioner for strategy.
Eichorst worked at Wisconsin from 2006-11 when Barry Alvarez was AD and Bret Bielema was leading the football program. He followed that up with stints as an athletic director at Miami (2011-12) and Nebraska (2012-17) before Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte hired him in 2018.
He returns to Wisconsin with the Badgers coming off back-to-back losing seasons in football, a notable fall for a program that had 22 straight winning seasons from 2002-23. Wisconsin coach Luke Fickell has gone 17-21 after posting a 53-10 record with one College Football Playoff appearance in his last five years at Cincinnati.
Eichorst hasn’t worked with Fickell before but said he’s encouraged by their initial conversations.
“Obviously he’s won every place he’s been,” Eichorst said. “My expectation is more of me than him, meaning I need to pour into him, learn more about his program, how he has things set up, how his athletes are taken care of, how we’re supporting that endeavor. And then we can figure out, as we move along, what that might look like.”
Football struggles led to Eichorst’s downfall the last time he was an athletic director.
He fired Nebraska coach Bo Pelini in 2014 and hired Mike Riley, who had gone 93-80 in 14 seasons at Oregon State. Eichorst was dismissed shortly after Nebraska suffered an early-season loss to Northern Illinois in 2017. Riley was fired at the end of that season after going 19-19 in three years.
When Eichorst’s hiring was announced last week, he spoke about how much he had grown from that Nebraska stint. Wisconsin interim chancellor Eric Wilcots led the search and has emphasized Eichorst’s accomplishments at Texas, which has won the Learfield Directors’ Cup all-sports standings five times in the last six years.
Texas ranked anywhere from fifth to ninth in the Directors’ Cup standings in the five years before Wilcots’ arrival. Texas’ football team went a combined 23-27 from 2014-17 but has made two College Football Playoff appearances in the last three years.
“Everybody looks at the end result of what we did at Texas,” Eichorst said. “When we got there in 2018, we weren’t very good in a lot of areas. And that didn’t change overnight.”
Eichorst said one thing that has caught his attention about Wisconsin is the overall quality of its head coaches.
“You’re going to be as good as your coaches,” Eichorst said. “That’s it. If you have an elite group of coaches who are working together and uniting and galvanizing and learning from one another and taking it out to their individual programs, I think you can start to build something special. I go back to Texas. We built a room of really elite head coaches and put them at the top of everything we did to help guide us.”
Eichorst said this job is particularly important to him because of his Wisconsin roots. He was born in Lone Rock, about 45 miles northwest of the Madison campus.
He treasured his previous stint at Wisconsin and says he believes this school “represents everything that is great about higher education and college athletics.”
“Nobody will work harder for Wisconsin athletics,” Eichorst said. “I love this state, and I love everything that it represents. The passion is there. You can see it. I don’t have to make it up. I’ve lived it. It’s in my heart.”
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AP college sports: https://apnews.com/hub/college-sports
Wisconsin
South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, officials in standoff with homeowner over year-round skeleton display
The city of South Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has ordered a homeowner to take down his year-round giant skeleton display or face fines, but the homeowner is standing firm and refusing, even as the deadline to remove the display has passed.
Now there’s a skeleton standoff.
The city cited ordinance violations in their order for Sean Oster to dismantle the lawn decorations. The notice specifically references “large Halloween decorations being displayed not during the appropriate time of year.”
Oster was also ordered to make other improvements to his property.
But Oster has refused to take down the display, which is re-dressed as the year goes on and is currently sporting a Fourth of July theme. The Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, has come to his aid, saying the city’s actions violate Oster’s First Amendment rights.
City administrators declined to comment, citing a pending investigation. Neighbors have been divided by the display; some say they’re fine with it, and think it brings fun and positivity to the neighborhood, but some others want to see it removed and say the lawn should be kept up better and more consistently.
Oster said he’s hoping to reach an agreement with the city, and said he’s corrected all other violations outside of the display.
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