Tommy Washbush
An illustration of ICE agents knocking down a door shaped like t
A restaurant across the street from my office near the Capitol, the Tipsy Cow, closed temporarily during the ICE raids that terrorized Dane County in 2018, in the first Donald Trump administration. Less than a mile away, Eldorado Grill on Williamson Street shut down after one of its cooks was arrested.
Now Trump is coming back, and one of his top campaign promises is a “mass deportation” that will be bigger and harsher than his last crackdown on undocumented people. Some state and local officials are enthusiastic about the prospect. Texas has even offered the incoming administration a 1,400-acre ranch for the purpose of building a massive new detention facility.
So far local officials in Madison and other deep blue cities have not been speaking out at protests or announcing plans to create sanctuaries as they did early on in Trump’s first term. Partly that’s a reflection of the fact that no one knows precisely what to prepare for. But Democratic officials also don’t want to draw negative attention or make targets of their cities. In a reversal of the political stunt by Republican red-state governors in Texas and Florida, who sent busloads of migrants from the border to liberal, northern communities, the incoming Trump administration could deploy federal agents to target restaurants and other businesses in blue states to haul away the immigrant workers who fuel local economies.
In a post-election episode of This American Life, Jason Houser, President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff for ICE, said he expects anti-immigrant policies in the next Trump term will be “more intimate.” “You’re going to see kids not in your schools. You’re going to know where they’re at because they’re waiting in a detention cell and they have cell phones. You’re going to see it in social media. You’re going to see businesses not be able to open up because their workers didn’t show up. You’re going to see businesses being raided.”
Of course, we don’t know yet what will happen when Trump gets into office. And fear itself is clearly one of the goals of his anti-immigrant rhetoric. Advocates and local officials in Madison are trying to offer comfort and solidarity to worried community members at the same time that they prepare for a variety of possible scenarios.
“I hate it when people say, ‘Stay calm,’ because when your heart is beating fast, that actually makes it beat faster, right?” says newly elected Dane County Executive Melissa Agard.
Agard has been meeting with community members as well as police chiefs, school superintendents and other elected officials throughout the county to “break down silos” and talk about what to do in various scenarios if the military or ICE comes into Dane County again.
When we spoke, just before Thanksgiving, there was no written plan in place yet, and Agard emphasized that the county’s sheriff and district attorney “are elected in their own right — I can’t tell them what to do.” But she felt confident, she said, that she and they have a shared commitment to “creating a community that provides hope and support for people.”
The economic effect of mass deportation could be catastrophic. Immigrants comprise an estimated 70% of the workforce on Wisconsin dairy farms. Almost all of them are undocumented because Congress has not created a visa for year-round low-skilled farm work. The whole industry would go belly-up overnight without the immigrants who work around the clock milking cows and shoveling manure. Restaurants, construction companies, hotels and landscaping firms would also be hard hit. But the human toll is more appalling. In 2018, ICE staked out a Head Start center in Dane County, waiting to grab parents as they arrived to pick up their preschoolers. Agard remembers talking with teachers who rode the bus home with their students after school, worried that their parents might not be there to meet them.
“I think they’re going to be intentionally chaotic about what it is that they’re doing,” Agard says of Trump’s promised immigration crackdown. “We, as a county, need to make sure that we’re upholding the rights every single day of the people that live here and fight back against policies that are attacking our friends and neighbors.”
Grant Sovern, a Madison-based immigration attorney, helped start the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC), which defended people facing deportation here during the first Trump term. Dane County officials helped land a grant from the Vera Institute of Justice to fund legal services for people facing deportation through the CILC and Immigrant Justice Clinic at the UW-Law School.
Sovern points to the Vera Institute’s evaluation of the nation’s first public defender system for immigrants facing deportation in New York City. (The Dane County initiative was the second such effort.) Before the project, only 4% of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48%.
Recently, however, funds for that legal effort have dried up, although the county still maintains the immigration affairs office launched in the wake of the 2018 raids that provides social work and other assistance to immigrants.
The prospect that the new Trump administration will go further than it did before, conducting raids in churches and schools, “sends shivers down everybody’s spine,” Sovern said. But it’s also important to remember that under current law, “they can’t do all the bad things they want to do all at once.” He and his colleagues are working to ramp up legal services again.
Agard has said she wants to be a county executive for everyone. And, she adds, “that includes some folks that are likely to be targeted by the Trump administration.”
“We need to come together as a county government, as well as with our robust nonprofit and service agencies,” she says, “especially our kiddos, you know, they are some of the most vulnerable people, and they deserve to know that they’re going to be OK.”
Ruth Conniff is the editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner.
