Anti-data center protesters arrested during Port Washington meeting
Multiple people were arrested at a City of Port Washington meeting Dec. 2 where protesters spoke out against the proposed $15 billion data center.
Claudia LevensJessie OpoienFrancesca Pica
Three people were arrested at a City of Port Washington meeting Dec. 2 where protesters spoke out against a $15 billion artificial intelligence data center campus for tech giants OpenAI and Oracle.
The arrests came during public comment after a woman speaking against the project led a brief chant of “Recall, recall, recall.” Her three-minute time slot to speak had ended, and city officials had already warned attendees to remain respectful and not speak outside of their turn multiple times throughout the meeting.
The woman, Christine Le Jeune, had mentioned that advocacy groups, namely the citizen group Great Lakes Neighbors United, are already planning recall elections to challenge members of the council. Multiple other speakers had also mentioned this effort during public comment.
She appeared surprised as police officers approached her to escort her out of the building.
Immediately, the council chambers erupted into commotion, as other protesters stood to defend her. They called out, “She didn’t do anything” and “What is the arrest for?”
Le Jeune did not comply with police officers who asked her to leave, and she went limp as police officers dragged her out of the room. Two other women who moved to defend her were handcuffed and escorted out of the building.
Before they were out the door, members of the city council had left the room. For the next 30 minutes, the remaining attendees and protesters stood in consternation, chattering nervously.
After the meeting, a Port Washington police officer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Le Jeune was given a municipal ticket for disorderly conduct. She had refused to leave after officers told her to do so and resisted arrest by going limp, he said. She was not taken to jail.
The other protesters who were handcuffed and escorted out were also ticketed, he said.
After the meeting, Port Washington Mayor Ted Neitzke told the Journal Sentinel he hadn’t yet been briefed on the situation to answer questions about whether officers’ actions were appropriate. He said he was listening intently to the speaker at the time and didn’t realize it had escalated until he saw multiple officers approaching the public gallery.
“I’m saddened that we can’t maintain decorum,” he noted, saying the city has done the most it can to handle the increased attendance at meetings by holding them at a nearby hotel and to address criticism and feedback from attendees.
Neitzke said he trusts law enforcement’s judgment.
He noted elected city officials have received threats to their safety that have needed to be investigated.
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“I think our law enforcement has a heightened awareness,” he said. “They have had to investigate across the state of Wisconsin and work with other municipal departments to look into threats to us.”
In recent months, as interest in the data center project has ballooned, the city has placed around a dozen police officers at common council meetings.
No one had been arrested before at a city meeting in relation to data center dismay, but people have been escorted out of recent meetings for being disruptive.
“Why are we the epicenter of this conversation?” he wondered aloud.
In recent months, civic interest around the data center has vastly increased, with city meetings regularly seeing over 100 attendees from across the region. The swell of pushback comes as several new hyperscale data centers have been proposed across Wisconsin within the last year.
Residents opposed to the Port Washington project have repeatedly raised concerns about the project’s potential impact on the environment, energy prices, water use and purpose of advancing AI.
During public comment at the end of the meeting, Port Washington resident Dawn Stacey said, “For democracy to thrive, we need to have respect between public servants and the people who they serve.”
“We have so many people who have these concerns about this data center. But are we being heard by the common council? No,” Stacey said.
On Dec. 2, the data center was not on the agenda.
But around 30 demonstrators showed up to participate in a string of protests against data centers across the state Dec. 1 and 2. Dozens of residents and climate advocates in seven Wisconsin cities demanded officials halt approval of data center projects built by Microsoft, OpenAI and other tech companies.
More than 50 people demonstrated outside Milwaukee’s Discovery World Dec. 2, while another 40 gathered at the state Capitol in Madison. Protesters also held smaller rallies in Kenosha, Beaver Dam, Menomonie and Janesville, cities on or near the sites of potential data center projects.
The protests were organized by climate advocacy groups Healthy Climate Wisconsin and 350 Wisconsin as well as political groups like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, said Healthy Climate Wisconsin health equity coordinator Julia Alberth.
A spokesperson for Vantage who attended the Port Washington meeting declined to comment on the situation. Vantage, a Denver-based data center operations company is fronting infrastructure improvements, along with interest, consulting fees and other costs associated with the project that total $458 million.
Woman arrested said police action felt outsized: ‘It’s really unfortunate to see how this project has come in and created these divisions’
After the meeting, the Journal Sentinel spoke with Le Jeune about the incident.
“I never expected something like that to happen in a meeting. It was very strange. I’m still processing everything,” she said.
After she finished speaking, she made her way back to her seat and was listening to the next speaker, a representative of the Ozaukee County Economic Development, commenting in support of the project.
“Suddenly this police chief showed up in front of me, and all I was thinking was, ‘Wait, what is going on. Why is he interrupting her speech?'” she said. She knew it was the chief because she had previously had conversations with him in asking why the city had banned signage at prior meetings.
Le Jeune said she didn’t feel as though her comments before the council were especially disorderly, but she acknowledged that attendees throughout the meeting had repeatedly been speaking out of turn during other speakers’ comment periods.
“It felt like [police] were kind of primed tonight to pounce with everything going on,” Le Jeune said.
She said she was not aware of threats to council members and understood why those threats would cause heightened awareness amongst law enforcement. But she felt the response was outsized in comparison with her actions.
“It’s really unfortunate to see how this project has come in and created these divisions,” she said.
Le Jeune said she is to appear in municipal court on Feb. 18.
In a statement sent after the meeting, a spokesperson for the city said, “Throughout this process, Port Washington has taken significant steps to ensure that members of the public can attend and speak at meetings, including moving several recent meetings to a larger venue.”
“Our goal is to create a secure environment with respectful public discourse where speakers are not disrupted or shouted down, regardless of their viewpoint,” the statement read. “These expectations were made clear at the beginning of tonight’s meeting, as we have done before previous meetings.”
“An attendee at tonight’s meeting was unwilling to meet these expectations, was asked several times to leave, and then was eventually removed after refusing to leave. Two other attendees were removed for additional actions that disrupted the meeting. After a brief break, public comments resumed and the meeting was completed as scheduled.”
Protest by US military veterans misrepresented amid Gaza war
- Published on October 6, 2025 at 09:31
- 3 min read
- By Anne CHAN, AFP Hong Kong
Days after US President Donald Trump announced plans to sell billions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel, social media users falsely claimed a clip showed military pilots arrested for “refusing to transport arms to Israel”. However, the video in fact shows the detention of two US veterans who were protesting Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Two US army pilots were arrested for refusing to transport arms to Israel,” reads the simplified Chinese caption of a video shared on Facebook on September 22, 2025.
The clip, which has been viewed more than 19,000 times, shows a man and woman in uniform escorted out of a room before being handcuffed against a wall.
“The Israeli terrorists are committing genocide, and the US Congress and the Senate are complicit in funding the bombs that are forcing children to be slaughtered and massacred,” the woman can be heard shouting.
Chinese sticker text on the video repeats the claim, adding the pair were detained after being summoned to the Pentagon.
Image
Screenshot of the false Facebook post captured on October 1, 2025, with a red X added by AFP
The video was shared elsewhere on Facebook and on TikTok, Weibo, YouTube and X.
The false posts gained traction after the Trump administration announced on September 20 that it plans to sell nearly US$6 billion in weapons to Israel, amid its ground offensive in Gaza triggered by Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack (archived link).
The attack on Israel killed 1,219 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures. Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 67,074 Palestinians, according to health ministry figures in the Hamas-run territory, which the United Nations considers reliable.
Palestinian militants seized 251 hostages during their October 7 attack, 47 of whom are still in Gaza. Of those, the Israeli military says 25 are dead.
Trump released a roadmap on September 30 to end the fighting and release captives in Gaza in exchange for Palestinians held in Israeli jails, though the details still need to be ironed out (archived link). Delegations from Hamas, Israel and the United States are due to convene in Egypt for talks on October 6.
But the circulating video does not depict two pilots being arrested for protesting against the delivery of arms to Israel.
Not army pilots
A reverse image search led to a YouTube video posted on September 9, 2025 titled: “Ret. military officers arrested on Capitol Hill accused lawmakers of complicity in the Gaza genocide.”
The video caption claims the two individuals are a former Army intelligence officer and a retired Green Beret lieutenant colonel arrested for disrupting a Senate hearing.
A subsequent Google keyword search led to reports by Manhattan-based Democracy Now!, Turkish public broadcaster TRT World and Qatar’s Al Jazeera that two US veterans — Josephine Guilbeau and Anthony Aguilar — were escorted from the Senate hearing on September 3 after interrupting the proceedings (archived here, here and here).
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Screenshot comparison of the false post (left) and the video posted by Al Jazeera
Aguilar, who used to work as a security subcontractor for the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) has spoken up about alleged “war crimes” he witnessed (archived link). Guilbeau, meanwhile, has posted multiple videos of her speaking at pro-Palestine rallies on her Instagram account (archived here and here).
Upon closer inspection, a sign in the video reads: “Committee on Foreign Relations Hearing Room 419.”
The Committee on Foreign Relations is a standing committee of the US Senate — not the Pentagon as claimed in the false post — and is responsible for leading foreign policy legislation and debates (archived link).
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Screenshot of the false Facebook video captured on October 2, 2025, with the door sign highlighted in red by AFP
AFP has previously debunked other misinformation related to Israel-Palestinian conflict.
