No more police cooperation with the ICE agenda
This post originally appeared at The Recombobulation Area, part of the Civic Media network. FUN NEWS: A column I wrote for the RC last year has won a Milwaukee Press Club award for "Best Single Editorial, Statement of Editorial Position or Opinion" category! Many thanks to Dan for giving me the platform and the support.
A mother in Sheboygan Falls on the path to her green card. A family man, restaurant owner, and green card holder in Madison. A Milwaukee Hmong woman and legal permanent U.S. resident.
These are just a few of the Wisconsinites recently swept up by President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s sweeping anti-immigrant raids. Our friends, families, and neighbors are dealing with the direct consequences of a campaign of terror by the federal government and enabled by too many local law enforcement agencies.
Ever since Trump took office for his second term, we’ve witnessed the heartbreaking and frankly grotesque escalation of his regime’s anti-immigrant agenda. Lies and misplaced fears have been weaponized to justify full-scale occupations of American cities and the violent kidnapping, detention, and deportation of hundreds of thousands of people. The vast majority of those arrested and deported have no criminal record. Many are in the country legally via the asylum or green card process. Hundreds have been American citizens, including Native Americans. Adults and children alike are being held in huge detention centers and in terrible conditions.
We’ve watched in horror as our neighbors in Minnesota have been terrorized, brutalized, and murdered by ICE agents during the recent surge. Though not facing the same level of attack as our neighbors to the west and south, ICE arrests in Wisconsin have increased dramatically since the beginning of Trump’s second term.
We know definitively now that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been using daily arrest quotas to jack up their numbers, that it uses surveillance tech and databases that almost certainly violate every protection provided by the U.S. Constitution, and that the agency and its supporters have no regard for the law or over 4,000 orders by the courts that they are jailing people illegally.
Part of why ICE continues to lose in court is due to their reliance on using administrative vs. judicial warrants. Judicial warrants must be issued and signed by a judge and allow officers to enter and search your home or private place of business without your consent. Administrative warrants do not, which complicates due process in these arrangements with local law enforcement, which would require a warrant issued by a judge. ICE is authorized to lie to people about what kind of warrant they have and even when they’ve been rebuffed, often the officers force their way in to make arrests anyway. Adding local police to the mix only creates an even more dangerous and legally murky situation for residents while further eroding trust.
Horrifyingly, over a dozen Wisconsin counties and sheriff’s offices are actively cooperating with and profiting from ICE’s campaign to indiscriminately round up and disappear people. There are at least 14 formal agreements between Wisconsin counties and ICE. They vary from “warrant service officer agreements and a jail enforcement model, which gives local law enforcement more power, such as the ability to question people in custody about their immigration status,” according to reporting from WISN. Of those, four counties (Kenosha, Kewaunee, Marathon, and Waukesha) have signed jail enforcement model agreements as well.
At least 11 other counties are also part of the warrant service officer program, including Brown, Calumet, Fond du Lac, Manitowoc, Marquette, Outagamie, Sauk, Sheboygan, Washington, Winnebago and Wood.
According to Wisconsin Watch, “Since January 2025, ICE has transferred at least 108 immigrants from Minnesota to the Douglas County jail in Superior, Wisconsin.”
Meanwhile, the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office has continued to profit from its long-standing 287g agreement with ICE to transport and imprison detainees from Chicago’s horrific Broadview Detention Center. A recent case has led to allegations that, after a U.S. citizen was detained at O’Hare and brought to Broadview, she was then transported without notice to the Dodge County jail and then released in the middle of the night. ICE and the sheriff have denied this happened, despite compelling evidence to the contrary.
The ACLU of Wisconsin is suing to stop these agreements, and rightly so. “Wisconsin has not granted the power to honor the detainers, and that is something Congress left up to individual states,” Tim Muth, an attorney for the ACLU of Wisconsin, said on “UPFRONT.” In other words, we have the right to block cooperation entirely.
A few locations are standing up against the surge. Dane and Milwaukee Counties have ended or barred cooperation with ICE. It’s a start, but it’s not enough. More counties can and must act in the meantime to refuse to enter into these agreements or nullify the ones already in place. No amount of money is enough to erase the moral stain of cooperating with an administration hell-bent on terrorizing its citizenry and people here seeking better lives. We should be seeking to throw every possible handful of sand into the gears of this vicious process.
Republican lawmakers instead introduced a bill that would have forced all state law enforcement agencies to help ICE, at risk of losing state funding. Evers has said he would veto it, but moves like this only emphasize the need to elect a legislative majority and a governor in November who will continue to stand up against the cruelty and excess of the Trump regime.
They hope that by barreling in with shock and awe, by ignoring court orders and shuffling people around the country and in the dark of night, we the people will be too overwhelmed or cowed to stand up and put a stop to their actions.
We’ve seen that they can be opposed, though. Our neighbors in Minneapolis, Chicago, Los Angeles, and other targeted cities are showing us the many ways that everyday people can show up for each other. There are many tools at our disposal. An important one is to support legal efforts to prevent all local cooperation with ICE. Talk to your elected officials. Vote for people who will stand up against the terror, including county sheriffs. Know your rights and help others understand theirs. Let’s make sure we all have the things we need to weather the storm.
Take Action.
Voces de la Frontera - Wisconsin's main immigrant rights network provides rapid response, know-your-rights training, and legal support to those in need.
Trans Continental Pipeline - Donate to help trans folks leave dangerous states for safer climes.
ACLU of Kansas - Support their fight to stop the draconian anti-trans laws in that state.
LGBTQ Foundation of Kansas - Mutual aid and other support for queer and trans Kansans.
Now Read This.
“A madman’s war” [Lyz Lenz]
If we’ve learned one thing from the Epstein files, it’s this: The problem is never just one man, one moment, or one action. It’s the hundreds or thousands of other people who willingly enable him so they can profit.
It doesn’t matter whether Trump is out of his mind or not. It doesn’t matter if he’s a narcissist, if had a stroke, if he secretly has cancer, or anything else. Because the problem with America isn’t just the problem of one man. It’s a whole system that props him up, does his bidding, and sponsors his propaganda. It’s all the sane people behind him.
“Madison needs a wakeup call” [Christina Lieffring for Tone]
Madison needs a wake-up call. We need to take a long, hard look at the disconnect between that identity and recent actions (or lack of action), because we simply are not acting like the community we believe ourselves to be.
“The Science of Unlearned and Why Organizers Need It” [Kelly Hayes and Lewis Raven Wallace for Truthout]
Drawing on neuroscience, trauma research, and stories of people who have broken with deeply held ideologies, Wallace argues that real change rarely happens through debate or persuasion. Instead, transformation grows out of relationships, shared struggle, cognitive dissonance, and practice. Together, Kelly and Lewis explore what organizers can learn from the science of neuroplasticity, the role of rupture and confrontation, and why movements need to focus less on “changing minds” and more on creating conditions where people can unlearn harmful beliefs and step into collective action.
Good news/nice reads.
“Berkeley Students Make 300,000 Wikipedia Edits to Preserve Queer History Against Trump” [them]
Amid the Trump administration’s ongoing attempts to erase queer and trans history, a University of California Berkeley professor’s students are working to right these wrongs — through Wikipedia edits. Over the past decade, students in ethnic studies, gender and women’s studies, and performance studies professor María Rodríguez’s courses have edited and even created Wikipedia articles about LGBTQ+ history, with an emphasis on queer and trans people of color.
“The art of haunting” [Colin Dickey for the Virigina Quarterly Review]
Literature, at its best, produces a certain kind of “shock,” and it’s a shock, Calvino reminds us, “that occurs only if the writing machine is surrounded by the hidden ghosts of the individual and of his society.” The gauntlet thrown down in any attempt to write is to give voice not to the familiar and commonplace, but to the strange, the uncanny, the ghostly that interrupts waking life and offers up what might not otherwise be expressed. The ghost story, in other words, will always, on some level, fail to capture the haunting, just as the algorithm will always fail to capture the life—both are anathema to the very existence of the unpredictable and the messy. The goal of good work, rather, is not to be reassuring, not merely to affirm platitudes, but to push the boundaries of our understanding into the unknown, to force a confrontation with the unexplained presence, the mysterious other. To seek that which cuts against the banality of the world, and the writing that chases this without ever fully catching it.
“Anti-Trans Democrats Blown Out in North Carolina Primary Election” [Erin in the Morning]
Anti-transgender Democrats who cast a deciding vote against their own party's values risk their political futures, that much is clear from recent elections. The message from Democratic voters is not subtle. Abandoning transgender people does not win you new supporters—but it may win you an uphill primary challenge you are likely to lose.
March Sadness tournament is ON
One of my favorite annual traditions of recent years is the March Xness essay tournament that invites writers of all stripes to pen odes to their favorite songs under a different, specific category each time. I’ve had the privilege of entering two essays of my own over the years. This March’s bracket madness is centered on the saddest songs of the ‘90s. There have already been some absolute banger essays both winning and losing their match-ups, but there’s still plenty of time for you to jump in, read, and vote for your favorites in the final round!
“600 acres in the Adirondacks return to Haudenosaunee care” [The Nature Conservancy]
“This historic return is an overdue step toward land justice and I’m deeply grateful for the shared commitments that make it possible,” said Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer, author and founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, SUNY ESF. “Land and people will benefit by the revitalization of Indigenous-led land care. Reuniting Haudenosaunee youth with traditional homelands sows seeds for restoring intergenerational relationships to place. I’m so eager to witness the reunion of Indigenous people, knowledge and land.”
Final Frame.
The snowdrops are always the first blooms in our local woods. Happy spring!
‘Til Next Time.
Take care of yourself and of each other. Free Palestine.
This newsletter is an AI-free, venture capital-free, bespoke labor of love. If you like my writing, please consider supporting my work with a paid Grist From the Mills subscription - or just send me a tip in the amount of your choice!
