Josh Kaul looks back on a long year of litigation against Trump administration

Democratic Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul announced Monday that Wisconsin has joined a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s sharp fee increase for employers seeking to bring skilled workers into the U.S. It’s the latest in a flurry of litigation Kaul’s Wisconsin Department of Justice has brought against the president’s agenda this year.

As of Monday, Wisconsin has joined a total of 40 multistate lawsuits against Trump in 2025. The cases have challenged freezes on federal funding, restrictions on health care access for transgender youth and an attempt to end birthright citizenship in the U.S.

“Unfortunately, what we’ve seen from this administration time and again is actions that harm Wisconsinites and do so in a way that just flouts the law that’s in place,” Kaul told WPR in a year-end interview. 

The first lawsuit Wisconsin got involved with came a day after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2025. With an executive order, the president declared the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t automatically grant citizenship to people born in America. That spurred several lawsuits from states around the nation. Lower courts have already ruled against the Trump Administration. The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in one of those cases in early 2016.

Some of the lawsuits brought by states against the administration have already made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. Kaul said the court’s conservative majority has been “very deferential” to the Trump administration’s use of executive power “in a way that’s inconsistent with long standing precedent that’s been in place.”

But when it comes to birthright citizenship, Kaul said the Constitution is clear. 

“We have over 100 years of Supreme Court precedent in place, so that case is really ultimately a test of whether the rule of law is in place with the Trump administration and whether this Court will hold the administration accountable,” said Kaul.  

In the latest lawsuit filed Monday. Kaul is joining 19 states suing the Trump administration over a new policy charging American companies $100,000 if they want to hire skilled workers through the H-1B work visa program.

The administration claims employers are abusing the program to keep wages low, thereby hurting American workers. 

In a statement, Kaul said the fee goes well beyond the bounds of what Congress authorized for the H-1B program and violates the law because it bypasses the federal rulemaking process. He said the fee threatens colleges, hospitals and research operations, which have struggled to fill skilled jobs.

Kaul is running for a third term as attorney general. He announced his campaign in October following speculation he’d run for the state’s highest elected office after Gov. Tony Evers announced he’s stepping away from politics. Kaul’s announcement said his decision was, in part, to continue challenging the Trump administration in court.