In February, the Trump administration announced the end of its immigration crackdown in the Twin Cities. But some ICE operations there continue, and the surge of ICE agents also spilled over into western Wisconsin, where they’ve detained community members regularly, including children.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter Sophie Carson spent time in the area talking with people and reporting about what’s happening. She talked with WUWM’s Jimmy Gutierrez about what to know from the Minnesota border.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity,
Jimmy Gutierrez: You visited a bunch of spots on your trip, but one town in particular, called Baldwin. It has a population of just over 4,000 people and dubs itself “the biggest little town in Wisconsin.” But when you visited, it sounded like it was almost a ghost town.
Sophie Carson: The streets were quite empty, but the thing that was notable was just how many apartment buildings and homes had been vacated. We followed this woman, Denise Flaherty, around and she's a volunteer who knows a lot about the community. And she was really able to point out just how many places were empty now that immigrants had fled because of immigration enforcement [in the area].
[You wrote] a profile on Denise, who’s like a rapid response team herself when it comes to immigrants. A bit about her background is that she's a retiree from corporate America, she doesn't speak any Spanish, in the past it doesn't sound like she'd advocated for immigrant rights before. So can you tell me about Denise?
She told me before a year or two ago, she never even thought about the issue of immigration. She lived in the Twin Cities. Now she lives on a farm about 40 miles east of the Twin Cities, outside Baldwin. But she really got connected to a couple families through a food donation program.
And [then she] started seeing the effects of immigration enforcement and the fear around that on so many families; people too scared to leave their homes, kids not going to school, people needing rides to work, and the challenges that come with not being okay with driving places in a small town that obviously doesn't have any public transportation, doesn't have very many social services, doesn't have an immigration advocacy organization.
So she's taking it on herself. And when I asked her about why she was doing this, she said basically, how could she not help?
Hudson is one of the biggest towns in the Saint Croix area, in this area in western Wisconsin. The police chief, Geoff Willems, said that the department would continue to work with ICE even after what's been happening within the area. And Hudson's mayor, Rich O'Connor, recently shut down public comments on concerns about sharing information with ICE. What do we know about what's happening with ICE operations in Wisconsin currently?
There are not [ICE operations] beyond western Wisconsin, sort of citywide, roving operations picking up anyone on the street. That's not necessarily the case in Milwaukee or Madison, although we do [have] every day reports of people getting picked up by ICE agents.
But in general, western Wisconsin is sort of this unique case because it is next to the Twin Cities. And in the advocates' view, one of the reasons Hudson and Baldwin are so targeted by ICE is that the agents are staying in hotels in those two towns. They're sort of just in the area already. They can sort of drive around and easily arrest individuals. Although, of course, this is what the advocates say. ICE did not say it would comment on any operations.
