This week, Wisconsin’s Office of Lawyer Regulation suspended Kenosha County District Attorney Xavier Solis’s law license for missing a deadline in a confidential misconduct inquiry, then reinstated it the next morning. The pause lasted less than 24 hours. Critics treated it as a political funeral for the DA while Solis treated it as another day in a job that was never going to be comfortable.
Solis has received ongoing attacks from the left since January 2025 after taking office as Kenosha County’s first Republican District Attorney since 1924 and its first Mexican-American to win countywide office. He is the son of migrant farm workers. He came from private defense practice, not the typical courthouse machine of Southeastern Wisconsin. He won narrowly on a law-and-order platform after voters had lived through the 2020 riots—the looting, the arson, the businesses that burned while the same political class now calling him a “disaster” held power.
The targeting was predictable. A century of one-party control of the DA’s office was not going to surrender quietly. Mainstream media coverage has emphasized turnover, an AI-citation sanction in February, missed deadlines, and the latest license episode. Former prosecutors have talked to reporters while the Office of Lawyer Regulation file remains open.
But the real reason critics attack Solis incessantly is due to his uncompromising stance on upholding the rule of law. Solis ended a two-track justice system on day one, cooperates with ICE, and has used the office to demand prison time for violent and repeat offenders instead of the old revolving door.
One courtroom, not two
Under the prior Democratic administration, Kenosha ran what Solis and local reporting have called an “illegal alien secret court”—deferred-prosecution deals for Spanish-speaking illegal immigrants charged with driving without a license, handled in locked courtrooms off the public docket so the cases would not trigger deportations the way a regular conviction would. Veterans and U.S. citizens went through the ordinary system. Solis shut the program down immediately. He has said one justice system, equal treatment, no sanctuary, no special track.
Solis is a staunch supporter of 287(g) cooperation and ICE detainers. Sheriff David Zoerner signed a jail-enforcement 287(g) Memorandum of Agreement December 2025. Solis’s office has publicly announced charges, convictions, and ICE custody in cases involving illegal alien defendants accused of domestic violence, child pornography, cartel-tied theft, and other crimes. His standing line is that Kenosha will not be a sanctuary county. Lawful immigrants who follow the rules are welcome, but criminal illegal aliens who hurt people are not.
On Solis’ Facebook post this week, he highlights the contrast:
“DISASTER?” Kenosha remembers what a real disaster looked like.
The old Democrat machine can throw that word around all it wants and call me “disaster.”
The people of Kenosha remember the Kenosha riots, the looting, the arson, the destruction and businesses burning while the same people who call me a disaster were in power.
Before I became District Attorney, the courthouse operated an “illegal alien secret court” a criminal program that gave illegal aliens special treatment by allowing criminal charges to be dismissed through a separate process so they won’t get deported, while our veterans and U.S. citizens went through the regular court system and faced criminal convictions.
I ended that program on DAY ONE.
Why? Because there should be one justice system in Kenosha County. Everyone is treated equally under the law. No secret courtroom. No special treatment. No sanctuary.
That is the rule-of-law argument in a single paragraph. It is also why the institutional fight has been so bitter against Solis. He continues:
“My office has faced major changes from the court system, including requiring prosecutors to appear in traffic court after roughly 20 years of a different practice and courtroom-video redactions that create safety concerns for prosecutors, court staff, defense attorneys, sheriff deputies and victims in intake court.
We will keep working. We will keep fighting for equal treatment under the law, public safety, accountability and transparency.” Full Facebook post: https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1MW3cMaCdx/
Maximum accountability for criminals
Solis’ public posture on violent and repeat offenders has been consistent. His office prosecutes to the full extent of the law for violent criminals and offenses against children, seeks prison sentences, honors 287(g) agreements and ICE detainers, does not treat retail theft rings or “non-violent” precursor crimes as harmless, and takes down organized crime and illegal alien networks operating in Wisconsin.
His office has announced multi-year prison sentences in retail-theft cases, sex-offender registration prosecutions, child-sexual-abuse-material cases, and a life-without-parole homicide sentence he personally tried. In one release he said fleeing police and endangering the public “create extreme and unacceptable risks,” and that out-of-county offenders who think they can outrun Kenosha law enforcement are wrong: “We will prosecute aggressively. We will seek prison. And we will protect this community.”
Critics pretend the prior office was a model of transparency after it ran a closed-door immigrant docket and fought open records requests until a new DA took over and produced the files.
Spanish-speaking illegal aliens got deferred prosecution deals in locked courtrooms off the public calendar so a criminal conviction would not trigger deportation, while veterans and U.S. citizens took the regular hit. Former DA Michael Graveley’s office even issued one of those deals to a woman who already had a first-offense OWI at a 0.186 BAC and later faced possible felony drug charges. That is not “compassion.” It is a “two-track courthouse.”
The same office was soft where Solis is a hardliner. Repeat violent offenders often got bargains. Andres Casas—later accused of firing a gun at Kenosha police in May 2026 —had an armed-robbery and school-zone violence case in which Graveley, then an assistant DA, dismissed multiple violent felonies; Casas drew two years of prison time concurrent, not the consecutive stretch the conduct justified.
Child cases also dragged under Graveley’s office. Shane Johnson, already a registered sex offender, was not charged for 3½ years after two young girls reported repeated sexual assaults.
And when a KTEC West science teacher, Christian Enwright, spent months grooming a 14-year-old student—thousands of late-night Snapchats, shirtless photos, body compliments—Graveley’s office filed 22 counts of misdemeanor disorderly conduct in May 2024 because Wisconsin then had no felony grooming statute. Enwright later pleaded to 15 counts and received 15 months in jail and three years of probation. He walked out of the Kenosha County Jail three months early. Under the felony grooming law that followed, the same course of conduct by a teacher in a position of trust could have meant more than a decade in prison. That is the gap Solis inherited, and it is why he has said his office takes crimes against children seriously and will use the new tools.
It is also why his office has since sought real prison time in school-predator and child-sexual-abuse-material cases and placed ICE detainers on illegal alien defendants charged with child pornography instead of treating immigration status as someone else’s problem.
What the ORL license episode actually showed
The OLR action was procedural—failure to meet a document deadline in confidential investigations that include the earlier AI filing and a dispute involving former Deputy DA Andrew Burgoyne. Solis’ office was buried in information and document requests in a short amount of time and missing the deadline to meet these requests. Reinstatement was automatic a day later once it was completed. Solis thanked supporters, said he remains committed to Kenosha County. That is less dramatic than the mainstream media headlines made it out to be, as expected.
In 2024, Kenosha voters asked for a DA who would stop treating illegal alien defendants as a protected class, work with federal immigration enforcement, and seek real sentences for people who hurt this community.
Media and Democratic institutions have treated Solis as an interloper from the moment he won. That is what happens when the first Republican in a hundred years, who happens to be Hispanic and unapologetic about 287(g) and equal justice, walks into a courthouse that had grown used to another set of rules. Kenosha voted for a different standard. Solis delivered.
