Marchers organized by Voces de la Frontera demanded immigration reform from the federal government. (Photo | Joe Brusky)
A family friend who lives in Mexico flew into Chicago last week to visit his college-aged son. We exchanged messages about getting together. Could the two of them come up to Madison, I asked. “The truth is with everything that’s been happening in Chicago, and the arbitrary arrests, we almost haven’t gone out at all these last three days,” my friend wrote back. “This stuff with ICE, it’s unbelievable,” he added. “But there it is. It’s happening.”
Sadly, he felt safer staying in his son’s apartment and then dashing to the airport Saturday to fly back to Mexico than driving across the border to visit us in Wisconsin.
The same day we exchanged messages, an ICE raid on the northeast side of Madison, not far from my home, swept up seven people. Madison police didn’t even know about the ICE raid until it was over, according to chief John Patterson.
So far, Wisconsin has not been targeted for the massive escalation in immigration raids taking place in neighboring states. But the Thursday morning arrests in Madison and a Sept. 25 sweep of dairy farm workers in Manitowoc mark a sudden shift.
Darryl Morin of the nonprofit Forward Latino addressed the Madison and Manitowoc raids at a Friday press conference in Milwaukee. “While other states such as California and Illinois have borne the brunt of these new immigration enforcement actions,” he said, “I fear we are turning the page and entering a new chapter, a new sad chapter, in immigration enforcement right here in our great state.”
“What we’re seeing in Chicago is now starting to hit closer to home,” agreed Jennifer Maldonado, an immigrants’ rights advocate in Manitowoc, who joined the press conference by video link. She described fielding calls from terrified family members after the crackdown in her area. “Many are people asking, ‘Should I send my children to school? Should I go to work?’” she said.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security claims it disrupted an international sex and drug trafficking ring when it grabbed the 24 Manitowoc farm workers at a Walmart parking lot and in a door-to-door operation targeting workers’ homes.
But this is the same Department of Homeland Security that insisted a Mexican-born Milwaukee resident wrote a letter threatening to assassinate President Donald Trump — even after the person who actually wrote the letter, Demetric Scott, admitted that he was the real author and that he was trying to frame the other man to keep him from testifying against Scott at trial. Long after that confession a statement from DHS Secretary Kristi Noem celebrating the detention of “this illegal alien who threatened to assassinate President Trump” remained on the DHS website, uncorrected, connecting the wrong person to an image of the letter written by Scott.
Dubious hype about immigrant workers, portraying them as dangerous, violent criminals, is the now-familiar backdrop to a crackdown that does not, in fact, have anything to do with fighting crime. Fewer than half of the people ICE has arrested under Trump are convicted criminals. Of those, only 7% have been convicted of violent crimes and only 5% of drug-related crimes, Tim Henderson of Stateline reports.
In Manitowoc, “This [criminal network] narrative was pushed without any basis to try to paint a negative image of an entire community,” Christine Neumann-Ortiz of Voces de la Frontera said during the Friday press conference. Of the 24 people arrested, ICE identified one person who faced serious criminal charges. But, as Henry Redman reported, that person was not among those rounded up and was already sitting in custody during the Sept. 25 raid.
Neumann-Ortiz described seeing disturbing videos documenting ICE actions — agents barging into a home “as if this were some kind of cartel, when it’s a working class family” and of a father who was grabbed by ICE while taking out the garbage. “It’s disturbing. It’s very, very disturbing,” she said.
One bright spot, she said, has been the community response to “the tragedy that we’re witnessing around the U.S. and here in Wisconsin as well.” She praised Wisconsinites’ sense of “urgency to build community — to support each other.”
Voces and other groups have been training community members across the state, with Know Your Rights seminars and instruction on how to effectively document ICE activity without escalating a dangerous situation. They’ve been lobbying local communities to reject 287(g) ICE cooperation agreements along with the cash incentives the federal government is offering local law enforcement in exchange for rounding up immigrants — a system Neumann Ortiz described as allowing local police to “essentially function like bounty hunters.” And they’ve been trying to help immigrants prepare for the worst, connecting them with immigration attorneys and helping them make contingency plans by naming caretakers for their property and guardians for their children in case they are deported. Forward Latino is sharing helpful information in a “family separation toolkit.”
Advocates, Neumann-Ortiz said, are getting good at “combatting lies,” connecting immigrants with legal support, and moving fast.
Several Manitowoc workers have already been deported, she said, and another was moved to detention outside of Wisconsin, where it’s hard for his family members and his lawyers to be in touch with him.
Morin said he was on the phone with a Wisconsin resident who had been detained by ICE and he could hear an agent yelling in the background that the man had to sign a self-deportation order. Morin was also yelling, telling the man not to sign, and that they had to let him see a lawyer. “That’s happening on a daily basis,” Morin said. “The violation of constitutional rights is happening right now on a daily basis.”
Against a gale of misinformation, immigrants’ advocates are fighting to get out the truth.
“You can fight your deportation. But people need to know that and not be tricked or conned into signing deportation orders,” Neumann Ortiz said.
“It’s not a crime to be undocumented in the US. It’s a civil violation,” Morino added.
Farmers, alarmed at the prospect of losing the immigrant workers who perform 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms, have been communicating with each other and with immigrants rights groups, Neumann-Ortiz said, trying to help their employees protect themselves.
“We need to scale it up even more, so that people are not tricked into giving up their rights,” she said.
The federal immigration crackdown, and the way it has seeped into local communities, does nothing to improve public safety. We are all safer if immigrants are confident enough to call 911 to report crime and abuse “or if their neighbor’s house is on fire,” as Morin put it.
Despite the dire news, advocates see progress in community engagement and responsiveness.
“In the early days we were getting flooded with false reports,” Morin said. “People wanted to spread fear.” Now, through training and preparation, advocacy groups have created a reliable channel for information about ICE raids and are able to screen out unsubstantiated rumors.
And some communities that have been tempted to accept federal dollars and cooperate with ICE have begun to think twice.
In Palmyra, where the local police department signed an agreement with ICE, community pushback has slowed down implementation of the agreement. In Walworth County, Neumann-Ortiz said, public pressure helped persuade the sheriff to reject a 287(g) agreement and Ozaukee County rolled back an agreement to accept federal money in exchange for detaining immigrants arrested by ICE.
The massive increase in funding for ICE — and the incentives it offers local law enforcement agencies to pursue immigrants in their communities — is funded through the same “Big Beautiful Bill Act” that slashes health care, food assistance and education funding. “We’re taking away food from hungry kids, medical care, money from schools, to do what?” Neumann-Ortiz said, referring to the push to terrorize immigrants. “That does not promote public safety.”
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