Elvira Benitez Suarez stepped out of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office in downtown Milwaukee on Monday to cheers from a crowd of supporters — her first time leaving the building without handcuffs.

The 51-year-old Sheboygan Falls woman left U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody last week on bond; her daughter picked her up outside the northern Kentucky detention facility where she had spent the previous two months. 

“I didn’t see daylight for 17 days, so I was very, very heartened and excited that I saw my family,” she said. 

The Monday morning check-in in Milwaukee was her first interaction with immigration authorities since returning to Wisconsin. She arrived with her family, attorney and two members of the Milwaukee Common Council in tow. 

Nearly a dozen other immigrants wove through the crowd to line up behind Benitez for their own check-ins; some picked up contact information from her attorney while they waited to enter the building. 

Benitez’s time in Kentucky was her second stint in ICE custody in the past year. Benitez, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager and lived without legal status for over three decades, first landed in detention after a wrong turn on a family road trip took her across the Canadian border in July 2025. U.S. immigration authorities arrested her when she reentered the country. Benitez had no prior interactions with law enforcement or the federal immigration court system. 

In her absence, Benitez’s two adult daughters, both U.S.-born, took in their school-age siblings and helped manage their parents’ painting and cleaning business. 

A federal district court judge in Ohio ruled last fall that Benitez is eligible for a green card, citing — among other factors — the hardships her children experienced in her absence. After waiting a month for immigration authorities to complete her background check, Benitez returned to Wisconsin in December, only to be arrested again during a check-in at the Milwaukee DHS office in March while the agency appealed the judge’s ruling. 

“We checked in, everything went fine, and we were actually walking out the door when they stopped us,” recalled her attorney, Marc Christopher. 

After stops in Chicago and Indianapolis, Benitez landed in a cell at the Campbell County Detention Center, a northern Kentucky jail that contracts with ICE to hold immigrants facing deportation proceedings. Benitez recounted finding fellow Wisconsinites in her unit; nearly two dozen other immigrants detained in Wisconsin have passed through Campbell County within the last year.

But a recent decision by an Ohio-based federal appeals court opened a door for Benitez to again return to Wisconsin. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that a year-old Trump administration policy requiring detention for most immigrants in deportation proceedings amounts to a violation of due process rights, joining federal appellate courts in New York and Georgia. Appellate courts in Louisiana and Missouri have sided with the Trump administration, and the appellate court based in Chicago remains divided on the issue.

The 6th Circuit holds jurisdiction over Kentucky, and its ruling allowed Benitez to file a bond motion in immigration court — an option once available to most immigrant detainees that largely vanished after the Trump administration introduced its mandatory detention policy last year. An immigration court judge in Memphis granted her bond motion on May 21, setting her bond amount at the minimum allowed under court rules: $1,500.

As a condition of her bond, Benitez will continue checking in at the Milwaukee DHS office.

Benitez’s Monday morning check-in was brief and straightforward. Like other immigrants granted bond, she was directed by immigration officers to download a tracking app that will prompt her to take a photograph of her face once a week to compare against booking photos.

DHS is still appealing last year’s ruling that set Benitez on track to secure legal permanent residency. That appeal, currently in the hands of the federal Board of Immigration Appeals, is still pending. 

“I would never put anything past the Board of Immigration Appeals,” Christopher said during a press conference on Monday, alluding to the board’s recent tendency to side with the Trump administration on immigration court rule changes. Nevertheless, Christopher added that he believes Benitez’s case is strong enough to defy the odds.

Benitez herself is still recovering. “I can’t sleep,” she said, recounting the grim details of her latest stint in custody — fellow detainees whose pregnancies ended in miscarriages, late-night bus trips with erratic drivers and no seat belts, and harassment from nonimmigrant inmates with whom she shared a cell in Kentucky. Benitez noted that she is in contact with the families of several fellow detainees who remain in Kentucky.

Her eldest daughter, Crystal Aguilar, also needs time to bounce back. In her mother’s absence, “my life was on hold,” she said. A return to normality still seems far away, she added.

The post Freed on bond, Sheboygan Falls woman returns to Milwaukee immigration office amid legal limbo appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Los Angeles International Airport customs officers took Everlee Wihongi aside for questioning in April. Her family hasn’t seen her since.

Wihongi, a longtime resident of Hortonville, Wisconsin, was passing through Los Angeles during a return trip from her native New Zealand. The 37-year-old green card holder had made the same trip at least a half-dozen times, even after pleading no contest to a felony marijuana possession charge in Fond du Lac County in her mid-20s. 

But with the White House’s nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown in full swing, customs officers took a new approach to the felony on her record. After a few uneasy hours in a secluded screening room, Wihongi left the airport in shackles en route to an immigration detention center in a desert valley northeast of Los Angeles.

Wihongi is one of hundreds of legal permanent residents federal immigration authorities have detained since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, often while they passed through airports and other ports of entry. Most — like Wihongi — had prior criminal convictions.

Those convictions generally make immigrants “inadmissible,” meaning they cannot freely re-enter the U.S.

Customs officers have “a lot of discretion at the port of entry” when deciding whether to allow green card holders with convictions like Wihongi’s to re-enter the country, Madison-based immigration attorney Aissa Olivarez said. “They have given none lately.”

“Possessing a green card is a privilege, not a right,” a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch. “Our government has the authority to revoke a green card if our laws are broken and abused,” the spokesperson added, and to detain legal permanent residents while they await a decision in their removal case. 

The sharp increase in arrests of green card holders doesn’t stem from a policy change, but immigration attorneys say cases like Wihongi’s are yet another sign that federal immigration authorities are reshuffling their priorities.

Old conviction is grounds for detention

Wihongi has held a green card since childhood, when her father’s career as a locomotive engineer brought the family to northeast Wisconsin. “As the years went by, it was just cheaper to renew (her) green card,” her mother, Betty Wihongi, recalled.

Her 2014 conviction was not grounds for deportation, said Marc Christopher, a Milwaukee immigration attorney representing Wihongi. “She can remain here and become a U.S. citizen,” he said, “but once she crosses the border, she’s governed by the rules of admissibility.”

But family vacations to New Zealand passed without incident over the decade following Wihongi’s conviction. “Normally, they will just look at, look at your passport, look at your green card, you know, ask you, where you’ve been?” her mother said. “And usually it’s like two, three minutes, not even that.” 

“I just don’t think they made an issue of it” in the past, Christopher added. “They weren’t going to detain her for two to three months,” he said, in part because detaining and prosecuting a green card holder is an expensive undertaking. As of May 2025, DHS reported that the average cost to arrest, detain and deport an immigrant was roughly $17,000, though costs vary widely from case to case.

DHS detention records point to a sudden shift in practice after the Trump administration resumed control of immigration enforcement operations last year. Immigration authorities detained an average of at least 100 legal permanent residents each month between January 2025 and February 2026 — five times the monthly average in the final two years of the Biden administration, the only portion of his term for which data is available. 

At least 75% of legal permanent residents detained during the latter half of the Biden administration had prior criminal convictions, compared with at least 66% of those detained since Trump returned to office. 

Only a tiny fraction of detainees’ records from either period list marijuana possession as their most serious criminal charge, though immigration enforcement officers arrested more legal permanent residents with prior marijuana possession convictions in the first year of the Trump administration than in the previous two years combined. 

Wihongi is the second Wisconsin green card holder in ICE custody to join Christopher’s caseload since January 2025. His previous client, also blocked from re-entering the country because of a prior marijuana possession conviction, spent five months in detention before Christopher secured his release. 

Olivarez, the Madison-based immigration attorney, offered another recent example from her own caseload: a legal permanent resident and longtime Milwaukeean detained while returning from his wife’s funeral in Egypt because of a prior felony. That client eventually accepted a deportation order to avoid a lengthy stint in custody.

A stricter standard

The growing cohort of green card holders in ICE custody is still vastly outnumbered by the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants detained alongside them. 

Federal immigration authorities have arrested more than 400,000 people since January 2025, including roughly 1,700 in Wisconsin. 

Just over half of all immigrants arrested by ICE in Wisconsin during the second Trump administration had prior criminal convictions, as was the case in the latter years of the Biden administration. But the criminal histories of more recent arrestees suggest that the stricter standards that landed Wihongi in custody are reshaping other corners of the immigration enforcement apparatus.

ICE officers in Wisconsin arrested 82 immigrants with prior traffic offense convictions in the first full year after Trump returned to office, up from 19 in the last full year of the Biden administration.

In years past, Christopher said, federal immigration authorities were less inclined to begin removal proceedings solely based on traffic offenses like driving without a license, instead prioritizing immigrants convicted of more serious offenses. 

Immigrants who come into contact with Wisconsin courts after a traffic offense now face a far higher risk of landing in federal custody, Christopher added. 

He attributes the shift in part to dramatic additions to DHS’ budget in the past year and a half. Those funding boosts, including a $170 billion increase last year, lowered the financial barriers that previously made federal immigration prosecutors wary of spending resources on immigrants with lower-priority criminal histories, Christopher argued. 

The U.S. Senate is currently considering an additional $72 billion in new funding for DHS.

Transferred without warning 

Wihongi was the only legal permanent resident in the 46-person cell in Adelanto, California, where she spent her first month in detention, her mother told Wisconsin Watch.

Her visa doesn’t spare her from the unpredictability of the federal immigration detention system. When money disappeared without notice from her commissary account on a Friday in early May, Wihongi called her mother in a panic. “Inmates all know that if that happens to your commissary,” her mother explained, “that means they’re getting ready to transfer you.” 

She resurfaced that Sunday in a detention camp outside El Paso, Texas, reaching her family by phone that evening to recount two mostly sleepless days of travel, including hours spent in shackles. 

Wihongi has since transferred again to a federal contract facility in Eloy, Arizona. An internet outage Thursday pushed her first scheduled court appearance back a week. Meanwhile, Christopher has filed a motion in Fond du Lac County to vacate her 2014 conviction.

The post Decade-old marijuana conviction prompts ICE detention of Wisconsin green card holder after family trip appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Update, May 21, 2026:

An immigration court judge in Tennessee granted a $1,500 bond for Elvira Benitez Suarez on Thursday morning. Benitez will remain in custody at the Campbell County Detention Center during the 30-day window in which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorneys can file an appeal.

Thursday’s bond hearing came just over a week after the Ohio-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Trump administration’s year-old policy requiring mandatory detention for most immigrants facing removal. Benitez’s attorney, Milwaukee-based Marc Christopher, told Wisconsin Watch that the short turnaround reflected agreement among Benitez’s legal team, a federal district court judge and DHS itself that her case merited speedy consideration.

Original story, May 12, 2026:

A Sheboygan Falls woman is poised to test a new federal ruling reopening the door for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees to seek release on bond. 

An Ohio-based federal appeals court ruled May 11 against the Trump administration policy requiring mandatory detention for most ICE detainees, the latest blow to a rule adopted last summer amid an escalating nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown.  

Detainees “should have a forum to explain that their backgrounds and connections to their communities justify release on bond while they undergo their removal proceedings,” 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Eric Clay wrote in the panel’s majority decision. Denying bond hearings, he added, amounts to a violation of their due process rights. 

The court’s ruling sent Wisconsin immigration attorneys scrambling to file bond motions for their clients detained in Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky — all under the 6th Circuit. Among those now able to seek bond: Elvira Benitez Suarez, currently detained at the Campbell County Detention Center in northern Kentucky.

Benitez, 51, has now spent two stints in ICE detention, as Wisconsin Watch has reported. 

She fled an abusive household in Mexico at 15, crossing the border with a younger sibling and settling in the Midwest. Though she remained undocumented for decades, she had no run-ins with law enforcement or immigration authorities until a GPS error on a family road trip through Michigan in July 2025 led her across the Canadian border.

The incident landed her in an Ohio immigration detention facility for six months. In her absence, her two adult daughters — both U.S. citizens — took in their school-age siblings.

A major shift in federal immigration court policy last year left Benitez unable to post bond.

Since 1996, federal law has required immigration authorities to detain — without bond — anyone found crossing the U.S. border without authorization. Prior administrations applied that rule relatively narrowly, meaning immigrants arrested in the interior of the U.S. could often seek a bond hearing in immigration court.

The Trump administration cast that precedent aside in July 2025, when ICE Director Todd Lyons issued a new interpretation subjecting anyone in deportation proceedings to mandatory detention without the possibility of bond. The Board of Immigration Appeals, a panel of judges who set the rules for the federal immigration court system, signed off on the interpretation in September. 

The board has more frequently sided with the Department of Homeland Security than immigrants facing deportation for at least a decade, but the distribution of decisions is more lopsided than ever: The body has favored DHS’s position in more than 90% of decisions issued since President Trump returned to office last year, a recent NPR analysis found.

The rule change triggered an ongoing legal battle over the validity of the Trump administration’s interpretation; more than 400 federal district court judges have ruled against the White House’s position, while roughly 50 have backed the new policy. Judges in Wisconsin’s Western District Court have uniformly ruled against the mandatory detention rule, while those in Wisconsin’s Eastern District are divided.

Federal appellate courts are also split: Aside from the 6th Circuit’s May 11 decision, the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and the Georgia-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled against the mandatory detention policy, whereas the Louisiana-based 5th Circuit and the Missouri-based 8th Circuit have sided with the Trump administration. 

The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Illinois and with jurisdiction over Wisconsin, remains divided.

With bond off the table, thousands of immigrants in ICE custody have turned to a backup option: habeas corpus petitions, filed in federal district courts — administered separately from the federal immigration court system — to challenge their detention.

Federal district courts have received tens of thousands of habeas petitions in the past year, including more than 70 in Wisconsin’s Western and Eastern District Courts combined. 

When a federal district court approves a habeas petition, the court generally orders an immigration court judge to hold a bond hearing.

Benitez’s first habeas petition produced a more unusual victory: Judge Richard Drucker of the Cleveland immigration court, citing the emotional toll on her younger children, canceled her deportation and set her on the path to legal residency, though a delayed background check added more than a month to Benitez’s initial stay in a detention facility.

Released in late December, Benitez reunited with her family in Wisconsin while DHS appealed Drucker’s order. She continued attending mandatory check-ins at the agency’s field office in downtown Milwaukee, where ICE agents re-arrested her on March 10. After a stop at an ICE detention facility outside Chicago, the agency transferred Benitez to Campbell County, where nearly two dozen immigrants detained in Wisconsin have spent time within the last year.

Marc Christopher, a Milwaukee immigration attorney who represented Benitez during her first detention, told Wisconsin Watch in March that no statute required DHS to detain her while awaiting the outcome of its appeal. Her arrest, Christopher wrote, served “no legitimate public safety purpose.”

“It separates a mother from her vulnerable U.S. citizen children despite a federal immigration judge already recognizing the extreme hardship her removal would cause them,” he added.

Following the March arrest, an ICE spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that “being in detention is a choice,” arguing that Benitez could leave custody by agreeing to self-deport.

Benitez’s new Ohio-based attorney filed a habeas petition on her behalf with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky in March. Judge Chad Meredith, a Trump appointee, joined the court’s bench last fall. He has received more than 80 habeas cases involving immigrants in ICE custody since his confirmation, most of which are still active; he has yet to side with an immigrant detainee, but he has denied a half-dozen habeas petitions outright. 

The 6th Circuit’s latest ruling could give Benitez a shorter route out of custody. Christopher filed a bond motion for Benitez “the minute (the ruling) came out,” he told Wisconsin Watch. “Given the unusual circumstances of her case,” Christopher added, he plans to ask Meredith to order a bond hearing on a short turnaround, rather than waiting more than a week. DHS can appeal bond decisions.

Christopher isn’t alone in his haste. Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Madison-based Community Immigration Law Center, filed a bond motion for another client held at the Campbell County Detention Center just after the news broke — a first since the Board of Immigration Appeals approved the mandatory detention rule last September. 

“We are now working to identify other people who have reached out in the past,” she added, “to see who might be eligible for bond now.”

Olivarez and other immigration attorneys are still awaiting a decision from the 7th Circuit; the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion requesting expedited oral argument  on Monday. 

The issue may reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

“It’s up to the justices whether they want to take the case,” Christopher said, “but traditionally on cases involving immigration, cases where there’s been a clear circuit split, and where it affects literally tens of thousands of people, I think it’s going to be near the top of the issues they want to resolve.”

The post Wisconsin mother granted bond in challenge to ICE detention rule appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Wisconsin Watch is testing a new approach to data storytelling: news applications. As a first step, we’re launching a tool to track activities in federal immigration courts nationwide, designed with local and state-level interests in mind. 

Nearly 5 million people entered the federal immigration court system between 2020 and 2025. 

Many were new arrivals handed notices to appear in court shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Others spent years in the U.S. before landing in deportation proceedings. Nearly 40,000 listed addresses in Wisconsin.

Federal immigration courts are a function of the U.S. Department of Justice, not the federal judiciary. The roughly 550 immigration judges in courts scattered across the U.S. are appointees; since President Trump returned to office in January 2025, their numbers have fallen by about a quarter, including nearly 100 judges whom the administration fired over the past year.

The courts primarily hear deportation cases, though immigrants can also seek asylum and other forms of relief through the court system, albeit only as a defense against deportation.

Wisconsin Watch frequently relies on federal immigration court data to shape our reporting, but navigating the data is no small task. The DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review updates a vast public dataset of immigration court records monthly — the result of repeated public records requests from the nonprofit data analytics organization Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

While other tools to explore that data exist, we have learned through trial and error that extracting local- or state-level insights is easiest when we do it ourselves.

We want to make those insights accessible to you.

Our immigration court tracker provides national, state, county and court-level summary details about the millions of immigrants placed in deportation proceedings over the past five years. It tracks the nationalities of immigrants with cases before the courts, the volume of new and active cases and the share of immigrants with legal representation, among other metrics, all summarized in brief “explainers” available through the dashboard.

The underlying data is an important counterpart to our recent reporting on the past year’s worth of ICE activity in Wisconsin. Wisconsin-level data often parallels our past coverage, and it will continue to inform our approach to covering immigration.

This is a living project, and we welcome your suggestions. If you find a way to use the dashboard — as a reporter, student or otherwise — please tell us how. The records offer far more detail than this dashboard currently provides, but we can update and upgrade our offerings in response to feedback.

It won’t be our last news application. We want to make public data as accessible as we can, so we will roll out more tools for you to explore.

The post Wisconsin Watch launches immigration court data tracker appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

The post Steady arrests, shifting targets: Explore latest data on ICE activity across Wisconsin appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

International migration to Wisconsin has dropped sharply since President Donald Trump’s return to office, mirroring a national slowdown as visa issuances and border crossings decline.

New U.S. Census Bureau data shows Wisconsin gained just over 7,200 residents through international migration between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, down from more than 22,000 over the previous year — a 67% decline. 

Overall, Wisconsin added about 16,000 new residents in that period, increasing the state’s overall population by roughly 0.2%. 

Nearly every Wisconsin county saw net international migration fall by double-digit percentages. Several counties lost more residents to international migration than they gained.

The few Wisconsin counties that saw net increases added only small numbers of new arrivals from outside the U.S. Shawano County, for instance, received 29 international migrants in fiscal year 2025, up from 24 the year before. 

Not all international migration is immigration. The Census Bureau counts movements in and out of the country by citizens and noncitizens as international migration. That includes members of the armed forces and people moving between Puerto Rico and the rest of the U.S.

But a sharp drop in legal and unauthorized immigration is driving the decline. The U.S. State Department issued roughly a quarter million fewer visas in the first eight months of 2025 than during the same period of 2024 and admitted about 60,000 fewer refugees in fiscal year 2025 than the previous year. Meanwhile, Border Patrol encounters with migrants along the U.S.-Mexico border fell to 50-year lows. 

Federal immigration court records show a similar pattern. Only 198 immigrants with Wisconsin addresses made their first appearance in immigration court in February, down from a monthly peak of about 2,400 in March 2024. 

Federal immigration courts, run by the U.S. Department of Justice, handle deportation cases and immigrants’ requests for asylum and other forms of relief. 

More than 43,000 immigrants who entered the court system over the past decade listed addresses in Wisconsin. Three-quarters still await final rulings. New arrivals and removal cases slowed to a trickle after President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Many immigrants detained in Wisconsin over the past year first entered the court system before Trump returned to office.

Even so, international migration accounted for nearly half of Wisconsin’s overall population growth between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and a similar share over the past decade.

Nearly two dozen counties lost population last year, and another seven would have lost population without international migration.

In Milwaukee County, a scenario with no international migration in 2025 would have meant a net loss of more than 2,000 residents. Instead, the county shrunk by just over 100 residents. Natural growth outpaced international migration, but the county lost nearly 5,000 residents to domestic migration.

Even as international migration sharply declines, Republican voters in the state continue to express strong concern about immigration. In a Marquette University Law School poll conducted this month, 77% of Republicans said they were very concerned about illegal immigration and border security, compared with 54% who said the same about inflation and the cost of living — the top issue for Democrats and independents.

The post Immigration to Wisconsin plunges, yet still fuels nearly half of population growth appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Over the past six months, dozens of immigrants held in Wisconsin jails awaiting deportation have challenged their detention in federal court. Judges ruled in their favor in more than half the cases, pushing back on new federal immigration enforcement practices.

Wisconsin’s federal courts have not seen comparable volumes of immigration-related habeas corpus petitions, which challenge the legality of a person’s detention, in at least a decade. More than a third of the petitions heard in Wisconsin since 2016 were filed in the past six months.

Two forces are driving the influx: the Trump administration’s effort to halt bond for virtually all detainees and its enforcement surge in neighboring Minnesota. 

The U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals ruled last September that all unauthorized immigrants in ICE custody are ineligible for bond, meaning they must remain in custody while their case plays out.

The ruling reversed a long-standing practice that previously enabled many immigrants to continue their cases while out on bond. In its wake, habeas petitions became one of few remaining paths to an exit.

Wisconsin’s growing tally of habeas petitions pales in comparison to national figures. Federal district courts nationwide have received more than 24,000 habeas petitions from detained immigrants since January 2025, with numbers surging after the Board of Immigration Appeals decision, overwhelming federal prosecutors tasked with defending the legality of ICE detentions.

Soon after the board’s ruling, the Trump administration targeted Minnesota in its immigration crackdown, deploying thousands of federal agents to patrol the Twin Cities and nearby rural communities. The White House claimed in early February that the campaign resulted in the arrests of more than 4,000 immigrants.

Since January 2025, ICE has transferred at least 108 immigrants from Minnesota to the Douglas County jail in Superior, Wisconsin. The sheriff’s office contracts with ICE for detainee housing, as do three other Wisconsin counties.

At least 15 immigrants held in Douglas County have filed habeas petitions in Wisconsin’s Western District Court since September 2025. Judges have thus far sided with immigrants four times, including two Ecuadorian men arrested in a raid on a construction site in a Minneapolis suburb. Five of the cases remain pending.

Those detained in the Douglas County jail made up two-thirds of the Western District’s immigration-related habeas petitions between September 2025 and February 2026. 

While arrest locations were not available for every case, available data indicates that 60% of immigrants who passed through the Douglas County jail between January and October 2025 were arrested in Minnesota.

The Madison-based court had not previously handled an immigration-related habeas case in over a decade. 

Habeas petitions in the recent past were a “hodgepodge,” said Milwaukee immigration attorney Benjamin Crouse, and were often dismissed or denied by judges in Wisconsin’s Eastern District.

Prior to last September, many habeas petitions challenged the legality of detaining immigrants for months at a time without a clear end date. A Colombian man transferred into ICE custody after a drug arrest in 2014 filed a habeas petition after spending more than 20 months at the Dodge County Detention Facility in Juneau, arguing his detention had stretched beyond reasonable time limits. 

Judge William Griesbach denied the man’s petition in 2016. Griesbach has ruled on 17 habeas petitions in the past decade, granting only one: a 2018 petition filed by a Mexican asylum seeker who spent more than two and a half years in the Kenosha County Detention Center without a bond hearing.

In some cases, Griesbach and other federal judges had no choice but to deny or dismiss habeas petitions: In at least 10 cases filed in Wisconsin’s Eastern District Court since 2016, federal immigration officials deported immigrants before the court could fully consider their petitions. 

Nearly as many immigrants left ICE custody through other routes, including community supervision and asylum, before a judge could rule on their habeas petitions.

Despite the influx of new cases in the Western District, the Eastern District has still heard roughly two-thirds of the immigration-related habeas petitions filed since September. 

Most federal district court judges who have considered habeas petitions since September have ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision prohibiting bond hearings for detained immigrants. 

Wisconsin’s Eastern District judges are split. Griesbach called the board’s position “persuasive” in December, rejecting a habeas petition filed by a Venezuelan man arrested alongside his wife during a routine check-in at the Department of Homeland Security’s downtown Milwaukee office earlier that year. That man, Diego Ugarte-Arenas, left ICE custody after receiving asylum in January.

Judge Brett Ludwig also sided with the Trump administration’s position on detaining immigrants without bond. Trump appointed Ludwig to the Eastern District bench in 2020; then-President George W. Bush appointed Griesbach to the court in 2002. 

Eastern District judges Byron Conway, a Biden appointee, and Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee, have both criticized the board’s ruling. “Courts have nearly universally rejected the conclusion of the Board,” Conway wrote in an October order granting the habeas petition of a Nicaraguan man arrested during an incidental run-in with ICE agents.

Western District judges have uniformly ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ bond decisions.

Keeping cases in courts like Wisconsin’s Western District is a high priority for attorneys representing detained immigrants.

“It’s less about jurisdictions where you’re successful and more about avoiding jurisdictions where it’s more problematic,” said St. Paul immigration attorney Solomon Steen, who has represented two clients detained in the Douglas County jail.

Many of ICE’s largest detention facilities are in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — states within the jurisdiction of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which last month backed the Board of Immigration Appeals’ bond eligibility decision.

When a client arrested in Minnesota lands in a Wisconsin jail, Steen said, attorneys can find them within “hours or days.” Tracking clients’ locations becomes tougher once they are transferred to larger detention facilities elsewhere, he added.

With thousands of immigrants now bouncing between distant detention centers, Steen said many face pressure to give up on their legal cases. “You won’t know if you’ll be able to contact a lawyer if you get detained,” he said. “So wouldn’t it be easier to just take a voluntary departure or take a removal order in immigration court just so that you will know where you are and what’s happening?” 

Steen and other attorneys are now working to keep clients’ cases in Midwestern courts — and out of the 5th Circuit’s jurisdiction — even when their whereabouts are unclear, preserving their chances of a successful habeas petition.

Even before the Board of Immigration Appeals blocked most detainees from seeking bond, voluntary departures — wherein an immigrant leaves the U.S. to avoid a deportation on their record — increased 21-fold between January and September of last year. 

Meanwhile, an order from a federal district court judge in California has opened the door for many of Wisconsin’s current ICE detainees to request bond for the first time in months. 

Judge Sunshine Sykes of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California initially ruled in November that the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of denying bond hearings to most immigrant detainees ran afoul of federal law. 

DHS didn’t budge, maintaining that the Board of Immigration Appeals’ rulemaking authority takes precedence over a ruling in federal district court. Chief Immigration Court Judge Teresa Riley, a Department of Justice employee, later directed judges in immigration courts nationwide to continue denying detained immigrants’ requests for bond hearings. 

Sykes doubled down last week, rebuking DHS for ignoring her earlier order. 

“It is not the executive department’s province and duty to say what the law is,” she wrote. 

Sykes vacated Board of Immigration Appeals bond rules in all states outside of the 5th Circuit, which still leaves most immigrants in ICE’s largest detention centers unable to request bond hearings. 

Crouse recently observed one Chicago immigration court judge notify immigrants about Sykes’ latest order.

 “They’re taking this a little more seriously now, but we still don’t know exactly what this looks like,” he said. 
He and other Milwaukee-area immigration attorneys are again filing bond motions for their clients. “We’re getting hearings,” he added.

Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison, confirmed that immigrants detained in Dodge County are receiving notice that they are eligible for bond. So far, she said, there is no indication federal immigration authorities are rushing to move Wisconsin detainees to holding facilities farther south.

The post Immigrants fight ICE detention in federal court — and increasingly win appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Can federal immigration officials access personal data on every Wisconsinite enrolled in Medicaid? 

Not for now, but the question is winding its way through federal courts.  

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last summer signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to give immigration enforcement officers broad access to Medicaid data, which includes names, addresses, claim information and banking details. Trump administration officials claim the agreement is needed “to ensure that Medicaid benefits are reserved for individuals who are lawfully entitled to receive them.”

Wisconsin joined 21 other states in a lawsuit challenging the agreement last year. 

“Millions of individuals’ health information was transferred without their consent,” the lawsuit argues. “In doing so, the Trump administration silently destroyed longstanding guardrails that protected the public’s sensitive health data.” 

In December, a federal judge in California ordered that, in states involved in the lawsuit, DHS can only access the names and contact information of undocumented immigrants in states involved in the lawsuit. 

But patient advocates say it’s unclear how the agency could separate the records of undocumented immigrants from those of immigrants with legal status.

“The sharing of data is dangerous for all of us at the end of the day,” said Esther Reyes, movement-building director with the national advocacy group Protecting Immigrant Families. 

How does immigration status affect eligibility for Medicaid and other health programs? 

Federal law bars undocumented immigrants and many other recent immigrants from receiving full-benefits Medicaid coverage. Most legal permanent residents and new arrivals with legal status become eligible for full Medicaid coverage only after five years in the U.S. A list of exceptions to that rule shrank last year when President Trump signed his trademark “big beautiful bill” into law. 

But the White House claims many undocumented immigrants still access Medicaid benefits, largely citing state-funded health care programs — including a now-shuttered program in Illinois — that provided coverage for undocumented adults. While those programs must operate without federal dollars to avoid running afoul of federal law, the Trump administration argues a tax “loophole”, which it moved to close last week, made them possible.

Medicaid rules make one exception for immigrants ineligible for full coverage: Under federal law, hospitals must provide emergency care for any uninsured patient. Emergency Medicaid coverage can reimburse hospitals for those costs, meaning people of any legal status can receive temporary coverage in dire circumstances — though receiving that emergency coverage is not guaranteed.

“Emergency Medicaid is exclusively available when you go to the emergency room if you don’t qualify for Medicaid because of your immigration status, and it covers services that states by law are required to cover — life or death situations,” Reyes said.

Absent that reimbursement, hospitals may distribute the costs of emergency care for people without insurance across other patients. 

Some states also rely on the federal Children’s Health Insurance Program, which is separate from Medicaid, to cover prenatal care for pregnant patients regardless of immigration status. 

How do those programs work in Wisconsin, and how much do they cost?

In Wisconsin, those two options are called Medicaid Emergency Services and BadgerCare Plus Prenatal, respectively. The prenatal program is open both to immigrants ineligible for other coverage and to pregnant inmates in Wisconsin’s prisons and jails.

Immigrant patients can receive emergency services coverage until their “condition is no longer considered an emergency,” according to state guidelines. Patients enrolled in the prenatal plan remain covered through their pregnancy, though many then become eligible for two months of emergency care coverage.

Roughly 3,200 people were enrolled in the two programs combined in October 2025, according to Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services’ data. That marked the programs’ lowest monthly enrollment since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state paused reviews of Medicaid recipients’ eligibility during the pandemic, allowing some enrollees in the emergency services and prenatal programs to remain insured beyond the standard cutoff, but enrollment plummeted after Wisconsin DHS resumed reviews in June 2023 in a process often called the “unwinding.”

Not all patients enrolled in the programs are undocumented, and Wisconsin DHS records do not break down enrollment by legal status.

Spending on the two programs dipped from about $60 million in fiscal year 2024 to about $57 million in 2025 — less than 0.4% of the state’s overall medical assistance spending that year.

Why did Wisconsin Republicans try to block state-funded health care for undocumented immigrants last year?

The Republican-controlled Legislature voted last year to bar Wisconsin agencies and local governments from funding any form of health services for undocumented immigrants. 

Rep. Alex Dallman, R-Markesan, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, pointed to Illinois’ expansion of health coverage to some undocumented adults as reason for Wisconsin to preemptively block any similar expansion; the Illinois program’s costs consistently exceeded projections, prompting the state to end the program last year.

“We’re in such a deficit on Medicaid already that it’s hard to keep up as it is,” he told Wisconsin Watch. Wisconsin is on track to overspend its Medicaid budget by $213 million by the end of the current budget cycle, state DHS Secretary-designee Kirsten Johnson wrote in a letter to state lawmakers at the end of December.

Dallman noted that the bill made an exception for health care spending required under federal law. “If they go to the emergency room, they are still going to get emergency care,” he said. As he understood it, Dallman said, that language in the bill would have shielded emergency Medicaid.

But opponents say it isn’t clear that Wisconsin’s emergency services program would have been left untouched. Some also argue that the proposal could also require immigration status checks to access any form of subsidized health care, spanning far beyond hospitals alone.

“If a child is at school and they’re sick… does the school nurse need to figure out how to verify their status before they provide health care?” asked William Parke-Sutherland, government affairs director of Kids Forward, which advocates for low-income and minority families.  

“It would have affected health care services for people if they are in need of emergency services like EMTs,” he added. “We have a primarily county-based crisis mental health system — I think that this would have applied to those as well.”

Gov. Tony Evers vetoed the bill in December, arguing that it sought to solve problems that “do not exist.” 

Could sharing Medicaid data deter patients from seeking health care?

Health outreach workers warn that giving federal immigration officials access to even some Medicaid patient data could discourage people from enrolling in programs for which they are eligible — including U.S. citizens.

The database shared with immigration authorities, called the Transformed Medicaid Statistical Information System, doesn’t clearly distinguish between undocumented immigrants and immigrants with legal status who are ineligible for full-coverage Medicaid for various reasons.

In December, U.S. District Court Judge Vince Chhabria of northern California ruled that immigration authorities may access data only on undocumented immigrants — and only if it can be separated from data on citizens and eligible immigrants. 

It’s still unclear whether officials can do that.

Regardless, the data-sharing agreement alone is enough to make many immigrants — and some citizens with immigrant family members — “think twice about whether they actually access programs like Medicaid,” Reyes said.

But health care navigators say skipping coverage can be far riskier than the potential for their address to land in the hands of immigration enforcement officers.

“You’re protecting the life of your child — and yours” by enrolling in the prenatal program, said Francisco Guerrero, a health coverage navigator with the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service.

For now, advocates are urging people to be cautious when deciding whether to drop their coverage. If people are already enrolled in the emergency or prenatal programs and haven’t changed their address, leaving the program won’t wipe their information from the database, Reyes said. U.S. citizens don’t have to disclose the immigration status of anyone in their household, she added, and immigrant parents enrolling U.S.-born children do not need to share their own legal status.

“We want people to make informed decisions and understand the risks,” Reyes said. “We understand, though, that it’s really critical to get the care that you need for yourself and for your children.”

The post Can immigration officials access your Medicaid data? What it means for Wisconsin patients appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Editor’s note: This story, published in September, has been updated.

As fears grow over immigration enforcement, some community members want to better document the activities of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. 

Comité Sin Fronteras, an arm of Voces de la Frontera, is training people to serve as “community verifiers” – who confirm or deny reports of ICE actions and document incidents when they do happen. 

A key element of the project, dubbed, “La Migra Watch,” is to raise awareness about the hotline anyone can use to report possible ICE activity, said Raul Rios, an organizer with Comité. 

“That is how, statewide, we can get involved and get on the ground to help each other,” Rios said. 

Rumors of ICE sightings in Milwaukee in Milwaukee over the past few weeks prompted Voces De La Frontera issued a statement on Sunday.

“We’re asking for your help in stopping the spread of unverified claims, particularly about ICE being spotted in hotels and other locations. Spreading unverified rumors only causes unnecessary anxiety for our community, especially for undocumented immigrants,” it read.

They are asking residents to call 1-800-427-0213 to report ICE sightings.

In this video, Rios explains how the verification process works, and we follow a verifier after a call to the hotline is made. 

The post Video: ‘Community verifiers’ work to inform residents about ICE as advocates urge caution appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Ricardo Manriquez starts his shift at the Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry headquarters in Manitowoc long before the sun rises. More than 100 miles away, on a dairy farm near Madison, a herdsman named Alex is heading out to the barn with his crew to milk a few hundred cows.

Both are middle-aged fathers with neat haircuts and sensible work boots. Both studied at technical schools and have years of hands-on experience in their fields. Both are immigrants from Latin America who settled in Wisconsin over the past two decades. The Trump administration’s efforts to ramp up immigration enforcement and overhaul visa rules leave both men and their employers in difficult positions.

The recruitment pathway that brought Manriquez, an engineer from Mexico with a temporary work visa, to Wisconsin remains mostly untouched by the Trump administration’s overhaul of federal immigration policy, but his prospects of securing permanent residency in the foreseeable future have faded. Alex, an undocumented immigrant from Nicaragua, is in a more precarious position. His small team is poised to shrink, and finding new hires is more difficult than ever.

At least one in 20 Wisconsin workers is a noncitizen, and many Wisconsin employers have watched recent federal immigration policy changes sever, clog or redirect their hiring pipelines. Those employers — in manufacturing, dairy and innumerable other segments of Wisconsin’s economy — are finding their bearings in the new policy landscape, and more shake-ups or reversals may lie ahead.

The Tijuana engineer pipeline

Manriquez’s office sits near a door to the Manitowoc plant’s labyrinthine production floor, where the motion alarms on forklifts periodically cut through the hum of heavy machinery and a Nirvana album blasting from a worker’s portable speaker. 

“All my life I was involved with grease and cars and steel,” Manriquez said. His father was a mechanic, he said, and his hometown, Tijuana, is a manufacturing powerhouse. Relatively low labor costs have drawn hundreds of manufacturers to cities near Mexico’s northern border, which now serve as a hub for the North American electronics, automotive parts, aerospace and medical device industries. 

With an electro-mechanical engineering degree from a local technical university in hand, Manriquez found work at Prime Wheel, an American automotive parts company with a corporate office and fabrication facilities in one of Tijuana’s factory districts. He spent nearly a decade there, working long shifts with tedious commutes while attempting to raise a family. “In Mexico, we work 48 to 60 or even 80 hours a week without extra pay,” he said. “You get paid $50 to $60 a day … If you have a family, it really doesn’t help. You need to do a side job.”

Though his supervisor promoted him from designer to project engineer, Manriquez saw few opportunities to climb higher at Prime Wheel’s Tijuana plant. Prime Wheel did not respond to a request for comment.

The TN visa program was Manriquez’s ticket to cross the border. A product of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the TN visa provides a three-year work authorization to Mexican and Canadian nationals with job offers for a limited number of high-skilled professions. 

Compared with other types of employment-based visas, like the H-1B favored in the tech and health care industries, the TN visa offers a straighter path to the U.S. for skilled Mexican workers. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved nearly 16,000 TN visas for Mexican nationals in 2024, compared to just under 2,000 H-1B visas for Mexican nationals. Only 42 Canadians received TN visas that year.

Manriquez learned about an opening in Manitowoc through word of mouth, and Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry was already primed to use the TN visa program to recruit skilled engineers.

When Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry purchased a metal castings manufacturer in New Hampton, Iowa, in 2024, the company absorbed the plant’s team, including four TN visa holders. It has retained those workers and hired three more since the acquisition, including Manriquez, who joined the company last February. Most came from Tijuana’s metals industry.

The company is trying to build a domestic pipeline. It has a relationship with Wisconsin’s technical college system, which trains engineers for a range of manufacturing roles, including on quality control teams like Manriquez’s. “It’s really hard to say if (those) skill needs are growing or shrinking,” said Ian Cameron, dean of Northcentral Technical College’s School of Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing, noting that day-to-day responsibilities and compensation for engineers with similar titles vary between companies.

But attracting and retaining talent for plants in small Midwestern towns is a constant challenge, said Michelle Szymik, the company’s human resources director. New Hampton, population 3,500, sits in a quiet stretch of northeast Iowa, and skilled engineers with U.S. citizenship tend to favor less-isolated workplaces.

Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry’s product line compounds its recruiting challenges. The foundry produces intricately detailed castings for Dodge sports cars and SpaceX satellites, among other clients, and few students of U.S. technical colleges have mastered the skills needed to design those castings by graduation. “It takes a long time to come up to speed on that kind of stuff,” Szymik added. “So we do internships, but at the end of the day, it’s really nice when you can find somebody who’s already got the skill set.” 

Mexico’s advanced manufacturing industry provides a straightforward solution. Engineers like Manriquez come with years of experience and, Szymik said, are more willing to settle in small towns to “take care of their family and build a career.” Manriquez can earn more in two hours than he did in a day in Tijuana, and he no longer spends hours of his day trapped in gridlock.

The visa comes with trade-offs. Manriquez’s wife and children remain in Mexico, and while they are eligible to join him in Manitowoc as dependents, his wife would not receive work authorization.

The TN visa is not a path to permanent residency, and Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry would eventually need to sponsor Manriquez for another employment-based visa before helping him secure a green card and a long-term career with the company.

One of the more common paths would involve securing Manriquez an H-1B visa, which would allow him to simultaneously hold a “nonimmigrant” visa and apply for a green card. But the company would first need to prove it can’t find an equally qualified U.S. citizen for the job. If it finds a qualified candidate, Manriquez would be out of a job and on his way back to Tijuana. 

The company spent nearly $12,000 to transition another employee from a TN to an H-1B visa, most of which went to legal fees. The Trump administration raised that hurdle even higher last year, introducing a $100,000 fee for new H-1B visa applications — a price tag few employers can afford, including Wisconsin Aluminum Foundry. 

Wisconsin’s manufacturing sector could bear the brunt of the new H-1B fees. Of the more than 1,600 workers employed in Wisconsin who received H-1B visas or renewed their visas last year, roughly a quarter worked in manufacturing. No other sector in the state sponsored more H-1B visas in 2025.

Manriquez can still renew his TN visa, but the breakneck pace of the Trump administration’s policy changes gives him reason to wonder whether that will remain true. “Suddenly, one day to another, (things) probably can change,” he said. 

Wanted: ‘a good future for our children’

On a chilly morning in early December, Alex wore only a long-sleeve thermal shirt and a vest as he checked on the herd.

“We deal with the cold and the heat. We’re out there in all of that,” Alex told Wisconsin Watch in Spanish. “And it doesn’t matter to us because what we want is to work. What we want is to build a good future for our children.”

Alex is at ease around the animals. He studied agricultural sciences at a technical high school, and he was partway through a veterinary degree at a university in Managua 15 years ago when he headed north from Nicaragua to the U.S. He feared that the country’s security apparatus would some day come for him — a vocal opponent of authoritarian President Daniel Ortega.

He eventually approached an attorney about obtaining legal status, only to learn he had missed the eligibility window, which ended a year after his arrival. Because he lacks legal status, Wisconsin Watch has agreed to use only his first name.

“After 15 years in this country that respects your rights as a person, as a worker,” he said, going back to Nicaragua feels unthinkable. His brother, who spent four years working in Wisconsin, recently returned to care for his son, reporting back that allegiance to the ruling party is now required to access government services.

Alex has worked in dairies and manufacturing since arriving in Wisconsin, settling down at his current workplace in south-central Wisconsin to join his partner, with whom he has U.S.-born children. To minimize their risk of crossing paths with immigration enforcement, Alex’s family has cut back on all but the most basic errands. “We no longer think, ‘Oh, it’s a summer weekend. Let’s go to the mall. Let’s take the kids to an amusement park,’” he said. “We’ve reduced it to the minimum: if we need to go to a clinic or a hospital for a medical appointment, to school, to buy food.”

Alongside his daily duties leading a crew of fellow immigrant workers — all from Nicaragua — Alex serves as the farm’s recruiter. He’s held the role for the past five years, giving him a front-row view of the federal immigration crackdown’s impact on hiring.

“It’s been eight months since the last person came (to ask for work),” he said. “Before, people came here constantly.”

With two members of his small crew preparing to leave the U.S., Alex now relies on his extensive network of former colleagues and acquaintances across Wisconsin to drum up replacement candidates. He’s competing with manufacturers who can offer overtime, but the farm’s isolation is now a selling point.

“Right now, security is a consideration. A farm is more separate, less involved, fewer moving people and cars,” he said. “The working conditions will be a little harder, but there’s more security.”

The farm’s owner, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid drawing the attention of immigration enforcement officials, added that skilled dairy workers can now be more selective when searching for new jobs. “The (labor) pool is clearly getting smaller,” he said. “If you don’t have a number of things — a nice, comfortable, attractive facility, one that people want to work in, if you don’t have a good company culture, and if you can’t provide housing, you’ll have a hard time hiring and retaining people.”

Wisconsin Farmers Union President Darin Van Ruden expects the labor drought to inflate farm wages. “You’re going to have to pay more to keep help,” he said, “which means paying someone $25 an hour versus $15.” Not all farms will be able to afford the new labor market, he added.

Alex’s employer says he has looked into the H-2A program, which provides temporary visas for hundreds of thousands of seasonal farmworkers each year, as a backup if his current crew shrinks. At least 16% of the agricultural employers that hired through the H-2A program last year own dairy herds, up from just 6% in 2020, but most sought agricultural equipment operators in seasonal job listings submitted to the U.S. Department of Labor. But the H-2A program does not provide visas for year-round roles like milking cows — a core responsibility of Alex and his crew. With that source of labor off the table, the farm’s recruitment options are slim. 

While some farmers are exploring reducing labor needs through automation and rotary milking parlors, akin to a lazy Susan for cows, those options don’t eliminate the need for workers entirely.

While automation may reduce the need for some types of labor on dairy farms, some workers may simply shift to other tasks, said Hernando Duarte, a farm labor management outreach specialist with UW-Madison.

 “Maybe you can need less people in the parlor,” he said, “but who is going to feed the calves? All the calves have to be fed two or three times a day. I’ve also seen more people moving more into tractors and feed work.” Rotary milking parlors, he added, also require trained staff to operate and clean. 

Many workers who will learn to operate the automated milking equipment, Duarte added, will likely come from the same labor pool that currently keeps many Wisconsin dairies afloat: immigrants. But Wisconsin’s technical colleges are also preparing dairy science students for the industry’s technological frontier. Greg Cisewski, dean of Northcentral Technical College’s School of Agricultural Sciences, Utilities and Transportation, said several graduates have gone on to manage automated milking operations.

Meanwhile, Alex is preparing for the worst. He and his partner have arranged to temporarily transfer custody of their children to a U.S. citizen if they are arrested or deported, and he has been sending money back to Nicaragua for years to build a backup nest egg. 

When Alex came to the U.S., he left behind a 1-year-old son. He has kept in touch, and his now-teenage son recently shared his plans to study veterinary medicine. “The degree I couldn’t finish is the degree he’s going to study,” he said.

The post Skilled but uncertain: Immigrant workers and employers navigate hiring hurdles under Trump appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Two of the Trump administration’s largest immigration enforcement operations have unfolded just across Wisconsin’s border. 

In September, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security dispatched hundreds of federal agents to Illinois, citing state “sanctuary policies” that bar local law enforcement from participating in immigration enforcement. In a press release announcing the operation, DHS Assistant Secretary Trisha McLaughlin called Illinois “a safe haven for criminal illegal aliens.” 

Dubbed “Midway Blitz,” the operation dramatically increased the pace of immigration arrests in greater Chicago within its first month-and-a-half. The surge coincided with frequent clashes between federal agents and protesters, who documented incidents in which agents drew firearms while conducting immigration arrests or facing demonstrators. Within a month, the operation resulted in two shootings by federal agents.

DHS withdrew from the operation’s command center at Naval Station Great Lakes by mid-November, as did Texas National Guard members deployed to support immigration enforcement officers. The agency in December shifted its attention to Minnesota, where it launched “Operation Metro Surge.” That operation has already resulted in thousands of arrests, DHS announced Monday. As in Chicago, it has also sparked daily confrontations between activists and immigration officers and led to two shootings, including the Jan. 7 incident in which an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good, a U.S. citizen.

News of the immigration crackdowns in neighboring states has prompted some in Wisconsin to wonder: Might our communities be next?

While the Illinois and Minnesota operations have undoubtedly touched Wisconsin — some immigrants detained in Chicago last fall passed through Milwaukee while in ICE detention, for instance — DHS has yet to devote the same attention to Wisconsin.

Still, Wisconsin Watch has tracked agency arrest and detention records for months, noting a sharp increase in apprehensions beginning shortly after President Trump’s inauguration last January. 

Here are some other storylines we’ve followed: 

• A vast majority of the roughly 1,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in Wisconsin between January and October of last year had prior criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. But arrests in Wisconsin of immigrants with no criminal history were ticking upward. Roughly 17% had no prior criminal convictions or pending charges. Roughly half of those without criminal histories were arrested at DHS’ downtown Milwaukee office, often while checking in on the status of their immigration cases. 
• Immigrants picked up by ICE while awaiting a decision in a criminal case often forfeit their bail. In many cases, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne said, prosecutors are left in the dark when ICE detains a defendant in their jurisdiction. 
• DHS’s claims about arrestees’ criminal histories do not always match court records. Among the two dozen immigrants arrested in Manitowoc last October — the largest ICE raid in Wisconsin since Trump took office — was Abraham Maldonado Almanza, a dairy worker from Mexico. DHS claimed he had a prior conviction for identity theft, but court records in Wisconsin and Iowa, where Maldonado Almanza lived before moving to Manitowoc, show nothing to corroborate the claim. DHS also claimed that the Manitowoc operation netted a Honduran national charged with sexual assault of a child, but that man, Hilario Moreno Portillo, had been in ICE custody for months at the time of the Manitowoc arrests, court records showed.

Even without enforcement surges like those in Illinois and Minnesota, the Trump administration’s immigration policy overhauls are reshaping Wisconsin. We recently documented the consequences for two immigrant workers in key sectors of the state’s economy: a Mexican engineer at an aluminum foundry in Manitowoc and a Nicaraguan herdsman who lacks legal status while working on a dairy farm near Madison. Their employers, who rely on immigrant labor to expand or maintain their operations, are also feeling the pinch, as will consumers if farmers’ and manufacturers’ hiring woes drive up prices.

You can find more of our immigration coverage here. 

As we continue reporting on the White House’s immigration crackdown, we want to hear from you. What questions would you like us to answer? What are we missing? Where should we look next? 

Email me at pkiefer@wisconsinwatch.org.

The post As ICE surges next door, share your questions about immigration enforcement in Wisconsin appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Zabi Sahibzada’s team of refugee resettlement caseworkers has shrunk. The Trump administration’s pause on refugee admissions in January 2025 dealt a blow to Sahibzada’s employer, Jewish Social Services of Madison, which previously counted on federal funding tied to each new refugee arrival to support its resettlement program.

A few new arrivals trickled in over the following months, entering the U.S. with special immigrant visas available to Afghan and Iraqi nationals who worked with the U.S. government or its international partners. The same visa enabled Sahibzada, a former USAID employee from Afghanistan, to reach the U.S. in 2022. 

But even those admissions have now halted. The State Department in November stopped issuing any visas to Afghan nationals after authorities identified the man who shot two West Virginia National Guard members near the White House as an Afghan special immigrant visa holder.  

Though the Trump administration says it will permit up to 7,500 refugees to resettle in the U.S. this fiscal year, it plans to prioritize South Africans – primarily Afrikaners, a white minority descended largely from Dutch, French and German settlers. 

Eleven South African refugees arrived in Wisconsin in September, followed by another 32 in late 2025. They were the only refugees resettled in the state since last January, U.S. State Department records show. 

The dramatic slowdown leaves agencies searching for ways to maintain Wisconsin’s resettlement infrastructure until the refugee pipeline widens again. For some agencies, that includes resettling South African refugees, even if some remain skeptical of the Trump administration’s motives for privileging them in admissions. Jewish Social Services lacks that option: Federal officials did not include the nonprofit in the South African refugee program. 

Providers warn that if Wisconsin’s resettlement infrastructure – trained caseworkers, volunteers and employer partnerships — withers, the state won’t be prepared for any future surge of refugees. 

Trends in refugee resettlement 

The near-total shutdown of refugee admissions followed the most active period for resettlement in decades.

More than 5,000 refugees reached Wisconsin between October 2020 and September 2024 – a span in which refugee resettlement in the U.S. reached the highest annual peak since the early 1990s.

Most recent refugee arrivals came from Myanmar and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

Those figures do not include special immigrant visa holders, asylees or immigrants with humanitarian parole, many of whom come from the same countries as those admitted as refugees. Roughly 370 Afghans with special immigrant visas settled in Wisconsin between October 2020 and October 2025.

Refugees reach Wisconsin through a network of international, federal and state agencies, national nonprofits and state-level partners. In the process, they pass through a series of screening interviews, background checks and medical examinations. 

Six organizations currently contract with Wisconsin’s Department of Children and Families to provide resettlement services, connecting new arrivals to housing, employment and English language courses. Relying on a mix of federal and state funding, they provide some services for up to five years after an arrival. The federal government ties much of its funding to the number of refugees resettled. 

Resettlement agencies cut staff

Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan planned to resettle more than 400 people in fiscal year 2025. Instead, it resettled 163 people between October 2024 and January 2025, after which it received only a half-dozen new arrivals, resettlement director Omar Mohamed said. All were Afghans with special immigrant visas who arrived in Wisconsin without ties to a resettlement agency and reached out for help.

“At least 27 people were scheduled to arrive in January when the stop work order happened,” he added. President Donald Trump’s inauguration day order to suspend the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program rendered their plane tickets useless. 

The sudden shift prompted Lutheran Social Services to cut nearly a third of its resettlement program staff, Mohamed said. 

Most Wisconsin refugee resettlement agencies face similar predicaments. Jewish Social Services in Madison laid off two case workers and a housing specialist. Hanan Refugee Relief Group, a relatively new nonprofit operating out of an office above a South Side Milwaukee pizzeria, cut 10 members of an already small team. World Relief Wisconsin, which resettles refugees in the Fox Valley, also laid off staff.

Catholic Charities of the Diocese of Green Bay, which has resettled hundreds of refugees in northeast Wisconsin in recent years, ended its resettlement program after its national affiliate, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, severed its partnerships with the federal government in April.

But Sean Gilligan, the diocese’s refugee services director, says Catholic Charities is still providing housing referrals, English classes and other basic services to refugees who already  settled in greater Green Bay.

Resettlement agencies are still receiving some federal funds to support refugees who arrived within the past five years, along with state grants for educational and health programs.

That funding may temporarily help the agencies stay afloat. 

Hanan Refugee Relief Group is ramping up its focus on employment training, Executive Director Sheila Badwan said. That includes offering on-the-job English language training for refugees employed at a Milwaukee Cargill meat processing plant.

But the loss of funding from new arrivals leaves Hanan and other agencies scrambling to find donors to support their work. 

“We are hoping just to keep our doors open to serve not just the ones we welcomed (recently),” said Uma Abdi, the nonprofit’s refugee program director, “but all of those refugees and immigrants that still need support.” 

The International Institute of Wisconsin, an older and well-established resettlement agency, is an outlier. It’s growing as others scale back. Revenue from contracts with medical clinics and other businesses to provide translation services has allowed it to grow as others scale back.  

“We can operate without any government contracts,” President and CEO Paul Trebian said.

Trump opens doors to South Africans 

With the doors closed to refugees from most of the world’s conflict zones, some Wisconsin resettlement agencies are now turning their attention to South Africans.

The Trump administration launched the South African refugee admissions program through a February executive order, filling in the details after the fact. Alleging a “shocking disregard of its citizens’ rights,” the order pointed to a 2024 South African law that allows the state to seize land without compensation in limited circumstances. 

The law’s supporters call it necessary to redistribute land from the country’s white minority, who own much of South Africa’s farmland, to a Black majority still recovering from decades of racial apartheid that ended in the 1990s. Trump decried the law as “racially discriminatory” and accused the South African government of “fueling disproportionate violence against racially disfavored landowners.” 

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has not set a date for the law’s implementation, and police statistics do not bear out claims that white farmers are more likely to be targets for violence than Black farmers. 

Trump’s order specifically offered refugee status to Afrikaners, but his administration has since said the resettlement program is open to members of any racial minority in South Africa, including those of English or South Asian descent, so long as they can “articulate a past personal experience of persecution or fear of future persecution.” Unlike most refugees, South Africans may apply for refugee status only while living in South Africa. 

Refugee advocacy groups and the South African government have criticized the program for legitimizing false claims of “white genocide” and bypassing some steps through which refugees from other countries must pass. 

But the Wisconsin resettlement agencies participating in the program say their responsibility is to welcome refugees, not to determine who deserves refugee status. 

“We’re here to serve everybody,” said Lutheran Social Services President and CEO Héctor Colón, whose nonprofit expects next year to resettle up to 75 new arrivals, mostly or all South Africans in the Milwaukee area. 

Colón adds that working with South Africans keeps his organization’s resettlement infrastructure in working order during the pause in other admissions.

 “We’ve been through ebbs and flows, we understand how this works,” he said, “but our organization has made a commitment that we want to keep this program up and running. There are many programs all across the country that cannot absorb the hit.”

But World Relief Wisconsin Regional Director Gail Cornelius, whose nonprofit helped resettle South Africans this year, noted that some of the South Africans who arrived in Wisconsin last year have already moved on to other states. 

Revetting of refugees promised 

A wave of federal rules changes following the November attack of National Guard members further complicates the work of resettlement agencies. 

Among the changes: halting green card and citizenship applications for immigrants and refugees from 39 countries, including Afghanistan and Myanmar. 

“People that were going in for their citizenship oath were actually pulled out of line,” Cornelius said.

The Trump administration also vowed to revet and reinterview all refugees who entered the U.S. during the Biden administration, regardless of their current legal status. Such a review could affect thousands of Wisconsin refugees, but resettlement agencies are still awaiting clarity about how the administration will follow through. 

“How are they going to review all of these cases?” Badwan asked. “Do we even have the resources to do that?”

Sahibzada wonders whether he, too, will face revetting. Meanwhile, the White House’s bar on immigrant visas for Afghan nationals placed his plans to reunite with his wife and children on hold. They remain in Kabul, his daughters confined to their home after the Taliban forbade girls from attending school. 

“I was waiting for things to be calm,” he said, referring to the conflict between Afghanistan and Pakistan that previously stalled his efforts to secure visas for his family. “I talk to my kids every morning, and they’re asking me that question, like, what’s gonna happen? I have no answer to them. I’m just saying, maybe things will get better.”

Working with Afghan families who made it to Wisconsin before the door closed is bittersweet, Sahibzada added. “Even if my kids are not here, at least they are here.”

The post Refugee resettlement agencies try to keep doors open as White House shuts out new arrivals appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Elvira Benitez of Sheboygan Falls is just one step away from receiving her green card. 

But more than a month after an immigration judge agreed to grant her permanent residence pending a biometric background check, she’s still sitting in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Ohio, where she spent half of 2025. 

On Friday, Dec. 19, Cleveland immigration court Judge Richard Drucker cancelled Elvira Benitez’s removal from the country, her attorney Marc Christopher told Wisconsin Watch. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reserved the right to appeal his ruling within the next 30 days, but Christopher expects she will be able to return to Wisconsin before the end of the year.

The reason she hasn’t returned yet? The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, told an immigration court judge that a staffing shortage delayed the background check, which requires running her fingerprints through a national registry.

The ongoing immigration crackdown has strained some of the immigration system’s most basic infrastructure, and Benitez is one of many stuck as a result. Many immigration attorneys, including Benitez’s, say increased pressure on the system from mounting arrest numbers and rapidly shifting policies has “exponentially inflamed” many of its long-standing flaws, even as the Trump administration spends billions trying to keep up with its own demands.  

Those flaws have appeared in many forms: defendants in felony cases deported before a judge can issue a verdict, inconsistent application of ever-changing asylum rules and inefficiencies that cost the administration little while dramatically affecting the lives of people like Benitez. 

How has that played out in Wisconsin? Wisconsin Watch has documented the shifting landscape in a range of stories during a chaotic year for immigration policy. 

Accidental Canadian trip triggers arrest

Benitez, 50, fled an abusive home in Michoacán, Mexico, as a teenager, crossing the border with her 8-year-old sister and making her way to the Midwest, said Crystal Aguilar, Benitez’s eldest daughter. She lived without legal status for more than three decades, entering the immigration court system only after her arrest this year.

She landed in ICE custody in July after accidentally crossing the Canadian border due to a GPS mixup during a family road trip in Michigan. In her absence, her two adult daughters – both U.S. citizens – took charge of their school-age siblings and the family’s painting and cleaning business.

“I have four kids of my own,” Aguilar said. “So we’re kind of just all over the place, taking turns.”

Benitez was among more than 25,000 people ICE arrested in July alone, a Wisconsin Watch analysis found. Monthly arrests eclipsed 30,000 by September, including at least 143 in Wisconsin. Relatively few of those detainees have remained in the U.S. More than 65% of those arrested from January through mid-October have already left the U.S., either through deportation or, less frequently, voluntary departure. 

The time between an arrest and a deportation can vary widely. One Mexican man picked up in an October ICE raid in Manitowoc, for instance, was deported within four days of his arrest, while a Nicaraguan asylum seeker arrested in the same operation waited over a month in custody before opting to return to Nicaragua. 

The Trump administration’s “big” bill-turned-law, encompassing most of its policy and spending priorities, took effect just days before Benitez’s arrest. It included a record $178 billion for DHS, including funding for at least 1 million annual removals, additional detention beds and thousands of new ICE officers and federal immigration prosecutors. The bill added or expanded upon nearly two dozen fees for immigrants, asylum seekers and seasonal visa holders, including a $1,600 fee that Benitez paid to cancel her removal from the U.S. 

Wisconsin’s jails at center of crackdown

The additional funding has enabled ICE to contract with a growing number of Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices to secure beds in county jails for its detainees. 

The Dodge County jail in Juneau, for instance, held an average of more than 100 ICE detainees per day in September – the most recent complete month of detention data. 

Other county sheriffs have supported ICE enforcement efforts by honoring agency detainer requests by holding inmates suspected of immigration violations past their scheduled release dates, buying time for ICE agents to take them into custody. The Wisconsin Supreme Court this month agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging the legality of such practices.

While Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, has claimed the administration is prioritizing “the worst first” for deportation, just over 40% of immigrants arrested by ICE nationwide between January and mid-October had prior criminal convictions, and nearly a third had no prior criminal history or pending charges. 

In Wisconsin, however, nearly 60% of immigrants arrested by ICE during that period had at least one prior criminal conviction, while less than 20% had no prior criminal history or pending charges.

Most immigrants with prior convictions or pending charges arrested by ICE in Wisconsin this year have been deported. Roughly half of arrested immigrants with no criminal record — such as Benitez — have not. 

But even the quicker deportations of immigrants facing pending criminal charges pose challenges. When defendants land in ICE custody, their criminal cases generally go on without them, often with no explanation of their absence. 

The immigration crackdown has left Wisconsin courts with loose ends: missing defendants, victims without a chance to testify and thousands of dollars in forfeited bail. For some defendants facing serious prison time, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne argued that deportation can serve as a “get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Asylum seekers face legal whiplash

Immigrants with no criminal history have often landed in drawn-out legal proceedings complicated by sudden rule changes. 

Reversing decades of precedent, DHS announced in July that most immigrants in ICE custody would be ineligible for bond and instead subject to “mandatory detention.” Benitez, whose arrest nearly coincided with the rollout of the policy, was among the detainees unable to leave custody as a result.

Asylum seekers have faced particularly intense policy whiplash. Among other changes, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals opened the door in October for immigration courts to more easily toss out asylum cases and instead deport applicants not to their home countries, but to “third countries,” primarily in Latin America and Africa. 

The volume of cases before federal immigration courts — faced with a backlog that has declined only slightly from a peak of 3.7 million cases in 2024 — and the pace of rule changes have led to inconsistent prosecutions. 

In November, DHS prosecutors moved to deport the Nicaraguan asylum seeker arrested in Manitowoc to Honduras. His attorney said he ultimately chose to return to Nicaragua, where he risks retaliation for his involvement in protests against authoritarian President Daniel Ortega, to avoid landing in Honduras, where he spent only a few days on his trek north to the U.S.

But DHS did not suggest third-country deportation when a fellow ICE detainee in Dodge County appeared in court just over a week later. 

Diego Ugarte-Arenas, a 31-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, was arrested alongside his wife during a routine check-in at a DHS office in Milwaukee in late October. An immigration court judge in Chicago granted the couple asylum last week, though Ugarte-Arenas will remain in ICE custody while DHS appeals the judge’s ruling. Meanwhile, his wife, Dailin Pacheco-Acosta, just returned to Madison, where the couple has lived since 2021. Pacheco-Acosta spent the past two months in an ICE detention facility in Kentucky, but a federal judge approved her release earlier this month.

“When you move this quickly and have this volume of cases, not every case gets treated the same,” said Ben Crouse, an attorney representing the Venezuelan couple. The inconsistency, Crouse added, reflects the “crazy arbitrariness of the system.” 

Arrest brings opportunity

The peculiarities of federal immigration law turned Benitez’s arrest into an opportunity to secure permanent residency. She had few pathways to legal status as an undocumented immigrant, her attorney Marc Christopher said, but her placement in deportation proceedings brought her before a judge who could cancel her removal and issue her a green card. 

Judge Richard Drucker of the immigration court in Cleveland signaled his intent to do just that on Nov. 6, citing the hardships Benitez’s absence would impose on her U.S.-born children. 

But the long-delayed background check stood in the way.

DHS notified the court on Wednesday that it was finally complete, setting the stage for what may be Benitez’s last hearing by the end of this week. 

The agency did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s questions about whether staffing shortages were delaying background checks systemwide.

Aguilar says the step forward in her mother’s case does not resolve the systemic problems that have kept her jailed.

“The disorganization surrounding my mom’s detention underscores a broader failure,” she wrote to Wisconsin Watch. “When families cannot get basic information or timelines, it reflects a system that has lost its ability to function responsibly.”

The post Background check delay shows crackdown’s strain on immigration system appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has agreed to hear a lawsuit challenging five Wisconsin sheriffs’ practices of holding detainees in their jail for handoffs to ICE.

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in September on behalf of the Milwaukee-based immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. It names sheriff’s offices in Brown, Kenosha, Marathon, Sauk and Walworth counties as respondents. 

All five sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers —  nonbinding requests that a law enforcement agency assist ICE in taking custody of a person suspected of being in the country illegally by holding an inmate in a jail up to 48 hours past the person’s scheduled release. The local law enforcement agency can then pass the detainee directly to ICE officers.

The lawsuit argues that the detainers qualify as an arrest and that state statutes prohibit law enforcement agencies from making arrests based on ICE’s administrative warrants.

While most Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices honor ICE detainers, the lawsuit claims that five named offices received roughly a quarter of all detainers issued to Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices between January and July of this year. 

The sheriff’s offices have differing relationships with ICE. Brown and Sauk counties, for instance, also contract with ICE to hold immigrant detainees in their jails, meaning a person could remain in the same jail after entering ICE custody. Kenosha County has no such contract, but it does participate in a federal grant program that partially reimburses local law enforcement agencies for incarceration costs in exchange for data on undocumented inmates. 

ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July of this year. Nearly 40% of those arrested were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case. Only one of those arrests took place in the Milwaukee County House of Corrections. ICE agents have arrested at least four people at the Milwaukee County Courthouse since April.

In its initial petition, Voces de la Frontera urged the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case as a statewide concern. The court’s order, published on Wednesday afternoon, allows the plaintiffs to skip the lower courts entirely.

Liberal justices have a 4-3 majority on the court. At least four unnamed justices voted to immediately accept the case. Justices Annette Ziegler and Rebecca Bradley, both conservatives, dissented. Justice Brian Hagedorn, who often votes with conservatives, discussed the process in an opinion that did not specify his vote.

“When this court grants review in a case, we almost always let our grant order proceed without comment or dissent,” he wrote, later adding: “Even if some of my colleagues publicly record their dissent, as in this case, that does not necessarily reveal which justices voted for or against the petition in closed conference.”

Voces de la Frontera has 30 days to file a brief in the case. The court has not yet scheduled oral arguments in the case.

None of the five sheriffs’ offices named in the lawsuit immediately responded to requests for comment.

“We are reviewing the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s order and evaluating our next steps in this litigation,” Milwaukee attorney Sam Hall, who is representing all five sheriffs, wrote in an email Wednesday evening. “We are confident, however, that Wisconsin sheriffs who honor ICE detainers do so fully within the bounds of Wisconsin law and the federal legal framework governing immigration enforcement.”

The post Wisconsin Supreme Court to weigh sheriffs’ cooperation with ICE appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Stacey Murillo Martinez arrived at the Fond du Lac County courthouse in June to pay a $1,500 cash bond for her husband, Miguel Murillo Martinez, as he sat in jail facing drunken driving, bail jumping and firearms charges. 

Scraping the funds together was no small feat. Stacey lives on a fixed income, so Miguel’s boss chipped in. She expected the court to eventually return the $1,500. Bond is meant to serve as collateral to incentivize defendants to show up for their court dates, as she believed Miguel would. 

She did not know U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers would wait inside the Fond du Lac County Jail later that day to take Miguel, an immigrant from Honduras, into their custody. 

Five months later, Miguel still sits in an ICE facility near Terre Haute, Indiana. His detention caused him to miss a court date in September, prompting the Fond du Lac County judge to issue a bench warrant for his arrest. 

“They didn’t tell me, ‘You’re guilty’ or ‘You’re not guilty,’ ” he said, his voice muffled and distorted by the facility’s phone system. 

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Stacey said in early November, referring to the fate of her husband and the bail money – three times the monthly rent for the couple’s double-wide in a Fond du Lac manufactured home park. 

ICE records list more than 130 arrests at county jails in Wisconsin between January and July 2025. Nearly 40% were awaiting a ruling in their first criminal case. Only one of those arrests took place in the Milwaukee County House of Corrections.

ICE agents have arrested at least four people at the Milwaukee County Courthouse since April, including a man facing battery, disorderly conduct and bail-jumping charges in late October. According to his defense attorney, the man’s family had paid his $5,000 bail prior to his arrest by ICE.

While defendants sit in ICE custody, their criminal cases generally continue without them — sometimes with no explanation of their absence to the court. As ICE ramps up its enforcement efforts nationwide, Wisconsin courts are increasingly left with loose ends: defendants without their day in court, victims without a chance to testify and thousands of dollars in forfeited bail paid by family, friends and employers.

“If I get out, I’m going back to my house, and then I have to appear in county court,” Miguel said. 

Miguel is not the only recent example: ICE picked up his nephew, Junior Murillo, at the Fond du Lac County Jail in October as he faced charges for disorderly conduct and domestic abuse.

The Fond du Lac County Jail has transferred 10 people into ICE custody this year, Sheriff Ryan Waldschmidt said. His county is among 15 Wisconsin local governments to have signed agreements with ICE to assist in identifying and apprehending unauthorized immigrants. These are often called 287(g) agreements, referencing the section of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act authorizing the program. 

Fond du Lac is also among the more than two dozen Wisconsin counties participating in the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, through which the Department of Justice partially reimburses incarceration costs for agencies that share data on unauthorized immigrants in their custody. Fond du Lac County received nearly $25,000 through the program in fiscal year 2024, according to Waldschmidt.

Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney said ICE has been “very easy for us to communicate and work with,” and his prosecutors inform judges if a defendant is arrested in the courthouse. Waldschmidt noted that while his office communicates with prosecutors about inmates in county custody with ICE holds, it lacks a written policy requiring them to notify prosecutors of handoffs to ICE. 

Criminal and immigration courts collide

Wisconsin courts do not consistently track whether a defendant has entered ICE custody, but multiple Wisconsin defense attorneys told Wisconsin Watch that immigration authorities frequently arrest defendants shortly after they post bail. 

“The judge will issue a $500 cash bond, somebody in the family will post it before I’m able to tell them, ‘please don’t,’ and the client will get transferred into immigration custody, where they’re really not able to make the appearance in circuit court,” said Kate Drury, a Waupaca-based criminal defense and immigration attorney.

In rare cases, prosecutors work with ICE to extradite defendants from detention centers in other states – or, even rarer, from other countries. Doing so is complicated and expensive, especially for smaller counties.

Toney said his office can’t justify expenses for bringing any out-of-state defendant back to prosecute lower-level cases, such as driving without a license. 

Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne is similarly reluctant to spend thousands to extradite defendants from faraway detention facilities. “If it’s a misdemeanor retail theft (charge), let’s say, and the person is in California, that extradition cost may be $5,000,” he said. “We’re probably not going to spend $5,000 or bring that person back.”

Ozanne’s office did, however, successfully fight for custody of a Honduran woman accused of killing two teenagers while driving drunk on Highway I-90 north of Madison in July. ICE detained Noelia Saray Martinez Avila, 30, after her attorney posted a $250,000 bond to release her from the Dane County jail in August. Martinez Avila is scheduled to appear in Dane County court in December.

Defendants in ICE custody can sometimes appear for Wisconsin court hearings via video call, though some attorneys report struggling to schedule those from immigration detention centers. 

“Jails and private prisons that operate immigration detention facilities aren’t super focused or motivated in helping defendants make their scheduled court appearances,” Drury said.

When a defendant misses a court date, Toney’s office typically requests a bench warrant and moves to schedule a bail forfeiture hearing — regardless of whether ICE detention caused the absence, he said. 

Making exceptions for ICE detainees would mean “treating somebody differently because of their immigration status,” Toney said. Still, attorneys in his office can exercise their own discretion when deciding whether to seek a warrant or bail forfeiture, he added. The prosecutor responsible for Junior Murillo’s case, for instance, did not request that the court forfeit his bail after his ICE arrest.

Ozanne argued against forfeiting defendants’ bail if they miss a court date while in ICE custody. 

“It wasn’t their unwillingness to show up” that prevented them from appearing in court, he said, adding that his office would be willing to return bail money to whomever posted it on the defendant’s behalf.

“The problem is that we don’t necessarily know” whether a person is in custody, Ozanne added. While he, like Toney, has reported no difficulties communicating with ICE, the agency doesn’t proactively inform his office when it arrests immigrants with active cases in Dane County. 

ICE did not respond to emailed questions from Wisconsin Watch.

Mindy Nolan, a Milwaukee-based attorney who specializes in the interaction between criminal cases and immigration status, said judges generally issue warrants for defendants in ICE custody to keep their criminal cases alive if ICE releases them or they return to the country after deportation. 

“Over the years, what I’ve heard from judges is (that) if the person is present in the United States in the future, they could be picked up on the state court warrant,” she said.

Hearings without defendants

Wisconsin law gives courts at least 30 days to decide whether to forfeit a defendant’s bail. 

“The default assumption seems to be that the immigrant could appear and the statute places the burden on the defendant to prove that it was impossible for them to appear,” Drury said. “But how does the defendant meet that burden when they’re being held in immigration custody, transferred all over the country, potentially transferred outside the United States?”

Wisconsin courts have held more than 2,700 bail forfeiture hearings thus far in 2025, though the state’s count does not provide details on the reasons for defendants’ absence. If the defendant misses the hearing, the defendant’s attorney or those who paid the bail can challenge the forfeiture by demonstrating that the absence was unavoidable. 

On a Friday morning in late October, a Racine County judge issued a half-dozen bail forfeiture orders in just minutes. The court had scheduled a translator for most of the cases, and she sat alone at the defense table, occasionally scanning the room in case any defendants slipped in at the last minute.

“The problem is getting someone at the bond forfeiture hearings to assert those arguments on behalf of clients,” Drury said. Public defenders are often stretched thin, and family members may be unaware of upcoming hearings. Court records indicate Miguel Murillo lacks a defense attorney assigned to his case in Fond du Lac, leaving only Stacey to argue against bail forfeiture. 

Such hearings tend to be more substantial when attorneys are present, boosting the likelihood of bail money being returned. 

Miguel Murillo’s case does not involve an alleged victim, meaning forfeited bail would go to Fond du Lac County. Court costs typically exceed the value of forfeited bail, Toney said. 

When cases involve alleged victims, Wisconsin law requires that courts use forfeited bail for victim restitution – even without a conviction.

What’s missing are judicial findings that the defendant is responsible for the alleged actions and caused suffering to the victim, Drury said. 

“Without a conviction, I don’t understand how you maintain that policy and the presumption of innocence, which is such an important constitutional cornerstone of this country.”

Immigration arrests often throw a wrench in the gears of the criminal justice system, Ozanne said. 

“It’s most problematic for us when the person hasn’t gone through their due process,” he said. “We have victims… who don’t really get the benefit of the process or have the ability to communicate with the courts about what they think should happen.”

“In a sense,” he added, “that person has a get-out-of-jail-free card.” 

Months in ICE detention 

Miguel Murillo left Honduras a decade ago, initially settling in Houston. While in Texas, he says he survived a shooting and sought, but never obtained, a U-visa, which provides temporary legal status to victims of certain crimes. 

The shooting prompted him to head north to Wisconsin, where he found construction work and married Stacey, a lifelong Wisconsinite. Court records mark occasional run-ins with law enforcement and misdemeanors over the last five years, culminating in the April 2025 charges that preceded his ICE arrest. 

Stacey, who is receiving treatment for breast cancer, relied on her husband to keep their household afloat. In his absence, she said, “I have to beg, plead, and borrow to get any assistance.” 

“Right now, as I go through this situation… there’s no one to take care of her,” Miguel told Wisconsin Watch. The couple hope that argument will sway a Chicago immigration court judge to release him from ICE custody. The court held its final hearing on his order of removal case in late October, Stacey said, but has yet to issue a ruling.

Junior’s case progressed far more quickly. After his arrest in October, he spent just over a week in ICE custody before immigration authorities put him on a plane to Honduras. 

Miguel, on the other hand, has spent roughly five months in various ICE detention facilities. He was scheduled to appear by video in Fond du Lac County court Thursday morning. He never joined the call. 

“I don’t know what happened,” he wrote to Wisconsin Watch afterwards. “I was waiting and (facility staff) didn’t call me.”

Stacey couldn’t attend the hearing for health reasons, and Miguel has yet to secure an attorney for his Fond du Lac case. Court records do not indicate whether the prosecutor requested forfeiture of his $1,500 bail.

The post Courts left with loose ends when ICE detains criminal defendants appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Two of the biggest political issues of the year are immigration and health care.

In the latest Marquette Law School Poll, 75% of Republicans said they were very concerned about illegal immigration and border security while 83% of Democrats said they were very concerned about health insurance. Those were the top issues among those groups. (Among independents, 79% said they were very concerned about inflation and the cost of living, making it their top issue.)

Here’s a look at some recent fact checks of claims related to health care and immigration. 

Health care

No, Obamacare premiums aren’t doubling for 20 million Americans in 2026, but 2 to 3 million Americans would lose all enhanced subsidies and about half of them could see their premium payments double or triple.

Yes, Obamacare premiums increased three times the rate of inflation since the program started in 2014. They’re making headlines now for going up even more.

No, 6 million people have not received Obamacare health insurance without knowing it. There wasn’t evidence to back a claim by U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., about the level of fraud in the program.

No, Wisconsin does not have a law on minors getting birth control without parental consent. But residents under age 18 can get birth control on their own.

Immigration

Yes, unauthorized immigrants have constitutional rights that apply to all people in the U.S. That includes a right to due process, to defend oneself in a hearing, such as in court, though not other rights, such as voting.

No, standard driver’s licenses do not prove U.S. citizenship. There’s a court battle in Wisconsin over whether voters must prove citizenship to cast a ballot.

Yes, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is offering police departments $100,000 to cooperate in finding unauthorized immigrants. It’s for vehicle purchases.

No, tens of millions of unauthorized immigrants do not receive federal health benefits. 

The post Here are 8 claims related to health care and immigration … and the facts appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Milwaukee immigration attorney Anthony Locke spent the first weekend in November wrapping his head around the latest ground-shaking rule change for asylum cases. His Department of Homeland Security (DHS) counterpart apparently did the same while pushing to deport one of Locke’s clients.

Locke represents a Nicaraguan asylum seeker arrested in a late September ICE operation in Manitowoc. That client was set to appear before an immigration court judge on Nov. 4 in a hearing Locke hoped would move the man closer to securing his right to remain in the U.S. 

But five days earlier, the Board of Immigration Appeals — a powerful, if relatively obscure Department of Justice tribunal that sets rules for immigration courts — had paved the way for courts to more easily toss out asylum cases and instead deport applicants, not to their home country, but to a “third country” they barely know. 

Just before the Nov. 4 hearing, the DHS attorney motioned to dismiss Locke’s client’s case and deport him to Honduras, through which he had only briefly passed on his trek north. Locke now has until early December to argue that his client could face “persecution or torture” in Honduras. 

“Trying to demonstrate that they’re scared of a place they’ve had minimal contact with,” he said, is akin to proving a negative. 

If the judge sides with DHS, the Nicaraguan man will be sent to Honduras without an opportunity to make his case for remaining in the U.S.

“I am, quite frankly, not too hopeful, and I’ve had to be quite honest with my client about that,” Locke said. “This is so sudden, so jarring, and it has such an immense impact.”

The full impact of the appeals board ruling remains to be seen, but it has the potential to affect the cases of thousands of immigrants who entered the asylum process since President Donald Trump’s first administration in 2019 began establishing “safe third country” agreements, starting with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. 

U.S. law for decades guaranteed anyone physically present in the U.S. the right to seek asylum, but the agreements allowed the U.S. to instead send asylum seekers to third countries to seek legal status there. 

While Joe Biden suspended most third country agreements during his presidency, Trump, upon returning to office in January, revived them as a means to limit asylum applications and facilitate deportations. The list of countries willing to accept the deportees is still growing, though not all have signed formal “safe third country” agreements.

The Board of Immigration Appeals overhauled the process of sending an asylum seeker to a third country. Its ruling allows DHS to send asylum seekers to countries through which they did not pass en route to the U.S. It also requires immigration courts to consider whether asylum seekers can be sent to a third country before hearing their cases for remaining in the U.S., creating the proving-a-negative scenario Locke described. 

The ruling may not impact those who filed for asylum before third country agreements were forged. 

DHS did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s request for comment.

Locke’s client entered the U.S. in 2022, requesting asylum on the grounds that his protests against Nicaragua’s ruling party made him a target for persecution. The man entered the country through a Biden-era “parole” program that allowed some immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live and work in the U.S. for two years, Locke said. Roughly a third of new arrivals to Wisconsin who entered the immigration court system since 2020 came from Nicaragua, though not all secured parole. 

The Trump administration ended the parole program earlier this year, claiming that the roughly 500,000 immigrants who entered the country through the program had not been properly vetted and that participants limited opportunities for domestic workers.

Locke’s client landed in the immigration court system in September after his arrest in Manitowoc. He is currently in custody in the Dodge County jail — one of a growing number of local detention facilities in Wisconsin housing ICE detainees. 

One of his fellow detainees, Diego Ugarte-Arenas, faces a similar predicament. The 31-year-old from Venezuela entered the U.S. in 2021 alongside his wife, Dailin Pacheco-Acosta. The couple filed for asylum upon reaching Wisconsin, citing their involvement in opposition to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. Pacheco-Acosta found work as a nanny in Madison, and Ugarte-Arenas found a restaurant job. 

ICE last month arrested the couple during a routine check-in at DHS’ field office in downtown Milwaukee, forcing them to argue their asylum case in the immigration court system. Ugarte-Arenas remains in Dodge County, while his wife sits in a county jail in northern Kentucky. Another recent Board of Immigration Appeals decision limits their ability to post bond and continue their case while reunited in Wisconsin. 

The couple appeared in court for the first time on Nov. 12, both via video call. Though separated by hundreds of miles, the cinderblock walls behind them made their settings look almost identical. 

As they waited for their case to reach the top of the queue, the couple watched the court field-test the new rule on third-country deportations as the DHS attorney motioned to send another asylum seeker to an unnamed third country. But when Judge Eva Saltzman called their case, the DHS attorney did not make the same motion.

“When you move this quickly and have this volume of cases, not every case gets treated the same,” said Ben Crouse, an attorney representing the couple. The inconsistency, Crouse said, reflects the “crazy arbitrariness of the system.” 

After scheduling a follow-up hearing, Saltzman allowed the couple to speak to one another for the first time since their arrest. 

“Everything will be OK, you hear me?” Ugarte-Arenas said through tears. 

Saltzman moved on to the next case.

The post ‘So sudden, so jarring’: Immigration ruling streamlines deportations to countries asylum seekers barely know appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

A Venezuelan couple arrested Oct. 23 during a routine check-in at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s downtown Milwaukee office are attempting to continue their asylum cases while detained — one in ICE’s Dodge County detention facility and the other in a Kentucky facility. 

The arrests reflect an apparent shift in ICE’s interpretation of protections for asylum seekers, posing new risks for those waiting for immigration officials to hear their cases.   

Diego Ugarte-Arenas and Dailin Pacheco-Acosta fled Venezuela in 2021, crossing the border at Eagle Pass, Texas, by November of that year and encountering border patrol officers, according to an ICE spokesperson. Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have made the same journey in the last decade, of whom at least 5,000 have settled in Wisconsin. 

Milwaukee immigration attorney Ben Crouse, who took on the couple’s case after they were detained, told Wisconsin Watch that border patrol officers initially provided Ugarte-Arenas and Pacheco-Acosta with notices to appear in immigration court. Critically, those notices didn’t provide a date or time for their future hearing, preventing the immigration court system from opening removal cases against them. 

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at that time routinely issued notices to appear without specifying a hearing date, Crouse said, despite multiple U.S. Supreme Court rulings underscoring that notices must specify a time and date. 

“There was a lag time between the Supreme Court saying they had to have times and dates on the notice to appear and DHS actually communicating with (the Department of) Justice to put things on calendars,” Crouse noted.

The couple then made their way to Wisconsin and filed for asylum, a legal protection from deportation for immigrants fleeing persecution. Their joint application cited their involvement in the political opposition to Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro as grounds for asylum, Crouse said.

The paths to asylum in the U.S.

Immigrants can take two paths to claim asylum in the U.S. 

Ugarte-Arenas and Pacheco-Acosta filed for “affirmative” asylum, managed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and generally open only to those without removal cases before an immigration court. Without complete notices to appear, Crouse noted, the couple’s cases had not yet reached the court, opening the door to this pathway.

Immigrants with open removal cases apply for “defensive” asylum with an immigration court judge.

At least 100 immigrants with Wisconsin addresses have entered the defensive asylum process between January 2020 and August of this year, court records show. Most came from Nicaragua, Colombia and Venezuela. Between 2019 and 2024, immigration court judges in Chicago — the court with jurisdiction over most Wisconsin cases — denied roughly 40% of asylum petitions, according to data collected by the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Under the Biden administration, immigration authorities began correcting incomplete notices to appear, enabling them to move asylum applications from the affirmative process to the defensive process. That swap rarely landed asylum seekers in detention, Crouse said.

Ugarte-Arenas’ and Pacheco-Acosta’s arrests are part of a broader shift in ICE’s attitude toward asylum. Multiple Milwaukee-area immigration attorneys say the agency is now detaining immigrants after terminating their affirmative asylum case. 

An ICE spokesperson did not respond to Wisconsin Watch’s questions about its new approach. 

“ICE does not ‘randomly’ arrest illegal aliens,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “Being in the United States illegal (sic) is a violation of federal law. All aliens who remain in the U.S. without a lawful immigration status may be subject to arrest and removal.”

The couple is now pursuing the defensive asylum process while separated by hundreds of miles. In September, DOJ’s Board of Immigration Appeals, which can set rules for federal immigration courts, ruled that immigrants in ICE custody who entered the country “without inspection” are ineligible for release on bond. The decision mirrors an argument that the Department of Homeland Security has made in immigration courts nationwide since July. 

Navigating the asylum process from ICE detention is logistically difficult, Crouse noted. Scheduling a brief phone call can take days, he said, and attorneys must rely on faraway sheriffs’ offices to ferry paperwork to and from their clients. 

“Tiny little things take days to fix,” he added.

A shifting approach

ICE’s shifting approach to asylum is not limited to affirmative cases.

In recent months, the agency has also begun filing motions to dismiss the immigration court cases of defensive asylum seekers, said Milwaukee immigration attorney Marc Christopher. Once the immigrants’ cases are dismissed, ICE can place them in “expedited removal” proceedings — a fast-moving process that does not require a hearing. 

In some cases, Christopher said, “they dismiss a case in court and ICE is waiting right outside. Or they wait until they come to a check-in and arrest them there.”

ICE agents arrested roughly 75 immigrants at or near its Milwaukee office between January and July of this year, more than at any other Wisconsin site listed in agency arrest records during the period. Most of those arrested at the office, including Ugarte-Arenas and Pacheco-Acosta, had neither a past criminal conviction nor a pending criminal charge.

The Milwaukee office also includes a “holding room” in which an average of six people were detained at a time as of June, according to Vera Institute of Justice data. 

DHS recently extended its lease on the property, which is owned by the Milwaukee School of Engineering, until April 2026, with options to retain the space until 2028. ICE is preparing to open a new office on Milwaukee’s northwest side this fall.

The post ICE arrests of asylum seekers in Milwaukee show shifting tactics appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

A Manitowoc County dairy worker arrived for her shift early on a Thursday morning in late September and waited for a message from her husband. It’s their routine, she said: rise early, commute to jobs at separate dairies and check in by phone.

“But when I called him, he didn’t answer,” she said in Spanish. “And so I was calling and calling and I said, ‘something happened, because he’s not answering – that’s not normal.’”

Her husband, Abraham Maldonado Almanza, was among the 24 people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers in Manitowoc County on Sept. 25. As far as she knows, officers picked Maldonado Almanza up in the Walmart parking lot where dairy workers gather to carpool hours before sunrise. Within a matter of days, he had — at least from her perspective — effectively vanished, carried away at breakneck speed by the Trump administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

Eighty miles south of Manitowoc in Milwaukee, immigration officials have also ramped up enforcement. Detentions at the ICE facility in Milwaukee have increased since the beginning of the second Trump administration. 

At the same time, deportations are moving more quickly. 

Of the roughly 200 ICE arrests recorded in and around Milwaukee between January and July, just over half list “departure dates,” meaning the person arrested has left the country, either through deportation or a process called “voluntary removal” that leaves the person with a clean record.

People arrested in and around Milwaukee have waited an average of nearly 24 days before their removal — a faster turnaround than in years past.

Many cases of those arrested since January were still marked as “active” in July, meaning that they had yet to receive a final order.

Those arrested since January without a prior criminal history are less likely to have been removed than those with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. But ICE arrests increasingly lead to removals even for those without a criminal record.

The vast majority of those arrested by ICE in and around Milwaukee since January were from three countries: Mexico, Nicaragua and Venezuela. Nicaraguan nationals made up a disproportionate share of arrestees without criminal records.

The pace of enforcement operations, lack of transparency and sudden shifts in policy have disoriented both those targeted in the crackdown and immigration attorneys already managing overwhelming caseloads.

A Department of Homeland Security press release tied the arrests to a joint operation with the FBI, IRS and other federal law enforcement agencies targeting an alleged human and drug trafficking ring. Neither DHS nor the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Wisconsin responded to inquiries about whether the investigation has resulted in criminal charges against any of those arrested last month, nor did federal district court dockets point to criminal charges resulting from the investigation as of Friday.

Over the following days, the dairy worker says she made her way through a list of immigration attorneys’ phone numbers, none of whom agreed to take her husband’s case. She attributed the reluctance to a preexisting removal order on her husband’s record, which can speed the deportation process. But without a reliable source of information, she was left relying on hearsay to keep track of Abraham’s case.

As the federal government entered a shutdown on Wednesday, several Wisconsin immigration attorneys said they were surprised to hear that, unlike during other shutdowns in recent memory, immigration court hearings for clients not in ICE detention would continue as planned. 

Attorneys had not expected the shutdown to slow down the cases of immigrants in detention, but the speed of operations has still caught some off guard. Some of those arrested in Manitowoc County last month were already out of the country days before Congress missed its funding deadline, according to Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison.

“Historically, people are taken to (the Dodge County Jail) and we’re able to at least do an intake and speak with them before anything else happens,” Olivarez said. “But it seems like in this operation, they knew who they were looking for, or exactly what they were going to do. … They did this really, really fast.”

As of Friday, three of the six arrestees named in a DHS press release about the Manitowoc County operation were still in the Dodge County Jail, according to ICE’s detainee locator tool. 

Maldonado Almanza was not among them, though his name and photograph appeared in the press release, which also claimed he had a prior conviction for identity theft. 

Wisconsin circuit court records yield no matching criminal record, nor do trial court records in Iowa, where his wife says they lived after emigrating from Mexico and before moving to Wisconsin. Iowa court records do, however, reflect that Maldonado Almanza was fined for driving without insurance in 2009.

As first reported by the Wisconsin Examiner, another man named in the September DHS press release on the Manitowoc County operation had been in ICE custody since July. That man, Jose Hilario Moreno Portillo, was charged with second-degree sexual assault of a child in Manitowoc County in May. 

The dairy worker said her husband had previously received a deportation order in an immigration court case that began while the couple was living in Iowa. That detail matches Olivarez’s understanding of the Manitowoc operation. “It does seem like there were people who have been ordered deported before,” she said. In those cases, “without a quick stay of removal or motion to reopen, the government executes that removal order right away.”

“Because there is such a low capacity (of attorneys) in the state in general, when people already have removal orders, we can’t work fast enough to stop it,” she added.

Maldonado Almanza’s whereabouts remained unclear as of Friday.

Milwaukee immigration attorney John Sesini says his firm took the case of another man picked up in the Manitowoc operation only to discover he had been deported to Mexico within four days of his arrest. The man had no criminal record, Sesini said, and it remains unclear whether he had a prior deportation order. If not, it may still be possible to challenge the deportation in court. 

Only about a third of immigrants in Wisconsin with upcoming hearings in federal immigration court have legal representation. Unlike courts operated by the federal judiciary, immigration courts – part of the U.S. Department of Justice – do not provide free representation. Instead, immigrants must pay out of pocket, rely on the few free and low-cost legal services organizations like Olivarez’s legal center or face the courts alone. Those able to find attorneys are vastly more likely to avoid deportation than those who attempt to represent themselves. 

For some immigrants facing court dates in the coming weeks, a typical government shutdown could have provided breathing room. In past shutdowns, the DOJ has typically deemed only the cases of immigrants in detention “essential” enough to move forward. The shutdown from late December 2018 to mid-January 2019, for instance, forced the cancellation of at least 80,000 hearings nationwide, according to immigration court records analyzed by the nonprofit Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

A Wisconsin Watch analysis of federal immigration court data suggests that as of August, almost 1,000 immigrants with Wisconsin addresses had hearings scheduled for October. So far, the DOJ has not called off those hearings en masse, though the agency has also not clarified whether immigration courts will continue holding hearings of immigrants who are not detained during a prolonged shutdown.

But in a press release issued on Wednesday, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin underscored that the shutdown will not slow ICE. “The deportations will continue,” she wrote.

The post Rapid deportation push leaves immigrant families in the dark appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.

Of the roughly 6.6 million immigrants who landed in the federal immigration court system over the past decade, at least 41,000 listed addresses in Wisconsin.

Those immigrants, many of them new arrivals, are now in the spotlight. 

A small fraction of cases in federal immigration courts involve immigrants with Wisconsin addresses.

Immigrants with addresses in Wisconsin have accounted for less than 1% of the federal immigration court system’s new caseload since 2015.

 

More than half of all immigrants who entered the court system during that period settled in just five states.

 

Roughly 20,000 more immigrants with new court cases listed addresses in neighboring Minnesota compared to Wisconsin.

IA

FL

WI

MI

MN

CA

IL

TX

NY

NJ

Case arranged chronologically be date of the first notice to appear issued to a unique case ID. Address information in immigration court records may be outdated or inaccurate.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

Federal immigration courts received millions of new cases over the last decade. Only a small fraction involved immigrants with addresses in Wisconsin

Immigrants with addresses in Wisconsin accounted for less than one percent of the federal immigration court system’s new caseload since 2015.

 

More than half of all immigrants who entered the court system during that period settled in just five states.

 

Roughly 20,000 more immigrants with new court cases listed addresses in neighboring Minnesota than in Wisconsin during the same period.

IA

FL

WI

MI

MN

CA

IL

TX

NY

NJ

Case arranged chronologically be date of the first notice to appear (NTA) issued to a unique case ID. Address information in immigration court records may be ourdated or inaccurate.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice

The Wisconsin Assembly voted earlier this month to bar local governments or state agencies from subsidizing or reimbursing health care for immigrants who are not “lawfully present” in the United States. One bill sponsor described that proposal as mostly “preemptive,” given that undocumented immigrants are already ineligible for most Wisconsin Medicaid coverage. The ACLU of Wisconsin is asking the state Supreme Court to prohibit local jails from holding immigrant detainees on behalf of federal immigration authorities, even while some law enforcement agencies attempt to wade further into the realm of immigration enforcement. 

Many of the human details of those interactions – immigrants’ names, for instance – aren’t recorded in the spreadsheets listing immigration court hearings and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests. But the records do provide clues about where new immigrants to Wisconsin came from, where they settled and how they have fared in the immigration court system. 

The records also illustrate a 10-year history of shifting immigration enforcement priorities, including the beginning of the Trump administration’s ongoing crackdown. 

At least in Wisconsin, immigrants with legal permanent residence outnumber new arrivals. Roughly 21,000 new immigrants in Wisconsin obtained permanent residence between 2015 and 2023: the most recent year for which those data are available. Most were relatives of U.S. citizens, employees of American companies or refugees, though the number of refugees arriving annually in Wisconsin has declined. Of the nearly 7,000 immigrants in Wisconsin who became legal permanent residents in 2023, roughly a quarter were from Mexico. 

Those with cases before immigration court, on the other hand, often overstayed visas or entered the country without them, complicating their paths, if any exist, towards legal permanent residency or citizenship. Most came to the U.S. within the past five years, making their way north and registering with the court using a Wisconsin address. Others arrived as children decades ago, first appearing in immigration court records well into their adulthoods. 

Unlike federal district courts, immigration courts do not operate within the judicial branch, nor are immigration court judges political appointees subject to Senate confirmation. Instead, the courts operate within the U.S. Department of Justice, hearing cases of noncitizens who the federal government intends to “remove” – in other words, deport. The courts can also consider immigrants’ requests for asylum and other forms of relief.

Wisconsin has no immigration court of its own. The immigration court in Chicago handles most cases involving immigrants with Wisconsin addresses, while a court in Fort Snelling in Minnesota handles a smaller number. But other new arrivals have cases in courts as far away as California and Puerto Rico – an indication of the bewildering range of paths through the federal immigration system. 

Immigrants with cases before the courts have the right to an attorney, but the federal government is not generally required to provide one. Unable to afford private attorneys’ fees, many immigrants opt to represent themselves. 

Roughly a third of immigrants in Wisconsin who entered the immigration court system over the past decade have been represented by an attorney at some point in their case. 

The limited address data available in court records suggests that these new immigrants have settled in major cities and rural communities across Wisconsin, often following jobs in agriculture and manufacturing. Small cities like Abbotsford and Darlington have received more of those recent immigrants per capita than Green Bay, though parts of Milwaukee and Dane County absorbed the largest numbers, both in absolute terms and per capita. 

More than half of the new arrivals came to Wisconsin from Mexico and Nicaragua. Wisconsin received roughly 1 in 20 Nicaraguan immigrants to the U.S. over the past decade – behind only Florida, California and Texas, and by far the most disproportionate number in the country relative to the state’s overall share of recent arrivals. 

“Most Nicaraguans (in Wisconsin) came from the northern parts of the country and are used to working in agriculture,” said one woman who immigrated to Wisconsin from Nicaragua in 2021. Wisconsin Watch agreed not to name her due to fears of legal repercussions. 

A spiraling economy, nationwide protests and a violent police crackdown in 2018 prompted many of her neighbors to leave the country, she said, and word of abundant – and familiar – agricultural jobs drew many to Wisconsin. “By the time I left, only the grandparents remained,” she recalled in Spanish. “There were no more young people, no more children, no more parents.” 

Nicaraguans made up the largest share of new immigrants on Milwaukee’s south side, whereas new immigrants from Mexico outnumber those from Nicaragua in the neighboring suburbs.

But the makeup of new immigrants varies substantially between Wisconsin communities. Venezuelans make up the largest share in parts of Dane County, as do Cuban immigrants in parts of Outagamie County, Vietnamese immigrants in Menomonee Falls and Indian immigrants in Oak Creek. 

Representation rates vary significantly between immigrant nationalities: Only about 20% of Nicaraguan nationals had representation at some point in their case, compared to roughly 90% of Indian and Chinese nationals. 

Not everyone with a case in the immigration court system lacks legal status. Some have obtained Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which currently shields nationals from a dozen countries from deportation, though Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem has moved to terminate those protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Venezuela and Haiti in the coming months. DHS terminated TPS for Nicaraguan nationals in early September.

ICE, a branch of DHS, can move to deport immigrants without a hearing in some cases.

ICE records through late July indicate the agency has arrested roughly 1,700 people in Wisconsin since September 2023. Roughly 45% of those arrested have left the country, either via deportation or “voluntary departure.” Those able to leave via “voluntary departure” avoid adding a removal to their record.

The pace of ICE arrests in Wisconsin is rising during the Trump administration’s nationwide immigration enforcement surge.

In recent months, those arrests have primarily targeted immigrants with criminal convictions or pending criminal charges. The records offer no specifics on the nature of the convictions or charges.

In that regard, Wisconsin is out of step with countrywide trends. ICE data indicates that immigrants with no criminal history made up nearly 30% of arrests nationally in 2025 as of late July, compared to just over 15% of arrests in Wisconsin.

Still, arrests in Wisconsin of immigrants with no criminal history and subsequent deportations  are ticking upwards. Milwaukee immigration attorney Davorin Odrcic says the trend reflects a new set of priorities among immigration enforcement officials.

“There was an unspoken rule,” he said, that if an immigrant was seeking legal status and “not a danger to the community, didn’t have any convictions, ICE would let them go through that process.” Based on one client’s recent arrest and detention, Odrcic believes that unspoken rule has vanished.

While location data on ICE arrests is sparse and often unreliable, the agency’s records point to hundreds of arrests in Wisconsin jails and prisons over the past two years. Those figures will likely grow as Wisconsin sheriffs increasingly sign agreements to help ICE locate and take custody of undocumented immigrants detained in local jails. 

Arrest data from the Biden administration included hundreds of records of arrests at an ICE office in downtown Milwaukee, the vast majority of which involved Nicaraguan immigrants with no criminal history. Only a handful of those arrests resulted in deportations, suggesting the immigrants were quickly released. Researchers at the Deportation Data Project, which collects and publishes federal immigration enforcement data, say the “arrests” may simply represent immigrants checking in at the ICE office. 

Many of Odrcic’s clients are still required to check in at an ICE office periodically – a visit that has become far more daunting under Trump’s recent crackdown. “It’s a challenging situation,” he said. “I can’t advise you to blow off one of these appointments. I could advise you that there is a possibility of detention. So I just have to leave it at that.”

The post What you need to know about immigration trends in Wisconsin  appeared first on Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service.