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DESPITE THREAT OF MASS DEPORTATION, IMMIGRANT WORKERS AND WISCONSIN
DAIRY FARMERS CARRY ON  
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Ruth Conniff
January 10, 2025
Wisconsin Examiner
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_ In rural Wisconsin, which voted heavily for Trump, some farmers who
support Trump don’t believe he intends to deport their hardworking
employees — that his targets are criminals. But Trump made all
undocumented immigrants a priority for deportation. _

, A Wisconsin barn in winter. | Photo by Gregory Conniff for
Wisconsin Examiner

 

President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to deport millions of
undocumented immigrants shortly after he takes office on Jan. 20 has
triggered a flood of calls to advocates and local officials in
Wisconsin. 

“There is palpable fear and anxiety with our clients,” said Carmel
Capati, managing immigration attorney for the Catholic Multicultural
Center in Madison. Capati and another immigration attorney, Aissa
Olivares of Dane County’s Community Immigration Law Center, gave a
presentation during a Dec. 27 community forum on immigrant rights
organized by former state Rep. Samba Baldeh (D-Madison).

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Former state Rep. Samba Baldeh | official photo

“As we anticipate a change of national leadership, immigrant
communities across our state are fearful of what may be coming,”
Baldeh said.“It is essential that we as elected officials address
that fear, stand up for the rule of law, and advocate for human
rights-based policies that acknowledge the contributions of immigrants
— who are our neighbors, co-workers, and friends.”

“There is still a lot of uncertainty,” Dane County Sheriff Kalvin
Barrett said during the forum, which was held on Zoom. “No one knows
what’s going to happen.” But, Barrett assured participants, “We
will not be proactively involved in any sort of round-ups, any sort of
immigration enforcement.”

During their presentation, the immigration attorneys addressed the
concerns of university students, Deferred Action for Childhood
Arrivals (DACA) recipients, refugees and people from countries
eligible for Temporary Protected Status during the administration of
President Joe Biden — a status they said they expect Trump to
revoke. Wisconsin’s immigrant residents should apply for benefits
still available to them under the Biden administration, the lawyers
said, to get their identity documents in order, and to make an
emergency plan in case they are detained, including designating
someone to pick up their children from school.

“It’s very important that we do avoid situations where we might be
subject to arrest,” said Olivares. “And if unknown people are
knocking on your door, don’t open the door.”

‘How in the hell will we continue to be the Dairy State?’

Nowhere would mass deportation have a bigger impact than on
Wisconsin’s dairy farms, where an estimated 70% 
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the workforce is made up of immigrants, mostly from Mexico and Central
America. Because Congress has never created a year-round visa for
low-skilled farm workers, almost all of Wisconsin’s immigrant dairy
workers are undocumented. Without them, experts say
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the whole industry would collapse.

At a Jan. 3 press conference in the Capitol, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers
called the threat of mass deportation “illogical,” and said “we
will do everything in our power to prevent it.”

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 Gov. Tony Evers at his  Jan 3 press conference in the State
Capitol. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

“The bottom line is, in Wisconsin, 70% of our farms … 70% of the
people may be part of the federal government’s idea to move them
elsewhere, out of our country,” Evers said. “Think about that. How
in the hell will we continue to be the Dairy State with no one to milk
the cows and do the other important work?”

Yet, despite the existential threat posed to dairy workers and
Wisconsin’s marquee industry by Trump’s proposed roundups, during
a recent reporting trip to rural Buffalo County — a heavy dairy
producing area in Western Wisconsin — workers, farmers and local law
enforcement officials told the Examiner they were not scrambling to
prepare for raids.

“What are we going to do? We can’t do anything,” said a dairy
worker from Mexico who goes by the nickname Junior and who works for
Buffalo County dairy farmer John Rosenow. “We can’t hide. All we
do is work, go home, go back to work, back home, back to work.”

“We all came here not for fun but out of necessity,” he added,
speaking about the estimated 10,000 
[[link removed].]immigrant
dairy workers in Wisconsin. 

Junior, 19, has been working on Rosenow’s farm for the last year and
a half, sending home money to help support his 3-year-old daughter.
Like many of his co-workers, he came north to milk cows because the
average wage for dairy workers, at $11 per hour, is far more than he
could earn in Mexico, where a factory job pays the U.S. equivalent of
just $20 per week. For decades, Mexican workers on Rosenow’s farm
and other farms in the area have saved enough money to build houses,
start businesses, and put their children through school back in
Mexico.

The risks these workers have taken to come here include walking across
the desert at night, evading kidnappers, and nearly suffocating while
being smuggled in the trunk of a car. It can take a full year of work,
rising at 4 a.m. to milk cows and shovel out barns, just to pay off a
typical $12,000 debt to smugglers for a border crossing. Compared to
all of that, workers say anti-immigrant political rhetoric does not
seem like the biggest threat many of them face — especially those
from Mexico who came to Wisconsin to build a better life, not, like
many asylum-seekers, to flee violent persecution in their home
country.

“I haven’t heard any workers ask about what might happen in the
new administration,” said translator Mercedes Falk, who travels
among about 20 farms in the Buffalo County area, interpreting for
farmers and workers. “Farmers and workers are continuing to work
side by side because they know that they are the ones that will make
sure the cows are taken care of and the farms run smoothly. I think
they both have been doing the work for so long that they understand
that no one else is going to step in to do the work if it’s not
them.”

“In our area, which is typical of most any dairy farm area in the
country, most all farms with over 100 cows have immigrants working for
them,” Rosenow said.

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John Rosenow tours a house one of the workers on his farm is sending
home money to build in Veracruz, Mexico, during a Puentes/Bridges trip
in 2019. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

Rosenow, an outspoken advocate for his workers, helped found the
nonprofit Puentes/Bridges [[link removed]], which
takes dairy farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota on an annual trip to
rural Mexico, to see the homes and businesses their workers are
building with the money they earn in the U.S. Falk, the translator,
leads these trips. 

“Trump says Mexico is not sending us their best,” Rosenow said
during one such trip in 2019. “These Mexican towns _are_ sending
us their best when they send their young men up north.” His former
workers, he said, have returned home to become leaders in their
communities, local employers, and important supporters of two
economies — in Wisconsin and in Mexico. 

Mexican workers sent home $51.6 billion from U.S. jobs to help the
Mexican economy in 2021, accounting for 4% of Mexico’s GDP (oil and
gas only accounts for 3.3% of GDP for this petroleum producing
country).

But while former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador called those
workers “living heroes
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Trump has called them criminals and rapists
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promised to send them all home.

In rural Wisconsin, which voted heavily for Trump, some farmers who
support Trump have told the Examiner
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don’t believe he intends to deport their hardworking employees —
that his real targets are criminals. But Trump made all undocumented
immigrants a priority for deportation in his first term, unlike Biden,
whose immigration policy has focused on deporting those who committed
crimes or posed a threat to national security.

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 Photo by Gregory Conniff for Wisconsin Examiner

Republican U.S. Rep. Derrick Van Orden, whose district ecompasses a
large swath of Western Wisconsin, including Buffalo County, sits on
the House Agriculture Committee. Van Orden made cracking down on
“criminal illegal aliens” a centerpiece of his 2024 reelection
campaign. At a press conference
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September, he highlighted a violent attack on a woman by a Venezuelan
immigrant to denounce U.S. immigration policy. Van Orden acknowledged
at that event that dairy farmers in his district rely on immigrant
labor, but then went on to praise the H2A seasonal farmwork visa,
which is not applicable to dairy farm work. 

“I’m 100% behind making sure that we get as many people into the
country lawfully to help support our industries,” Van Orden said.
“I’m absolutely, adamantly opposed to letting a single known
criminal enter this country, because this is what happens.” 

Campaign rhetoric about crimes committed by immigrants runs counter
to studies
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show lower crime rates among immigrants in the U.S. than among
U.S.-born residents.

During Evers’ press conference earlier this month, a reporter
pressed the governor on whether he believed undocumented immigrants
who commit crimes should be deported. 

“What crime, speeding?” Evers asked. “Violent crimes,” the
reporter clarified.

“It shouldn’t be treated any differently,” Evers said. Both
immigrants and U.S. citizens should be prosecuted and put in prison if
they were guilty of crimes, he added. “Serving that time is equally
important for someone that is documented and someone that is not.”

The view from Buffalo County

In Buffalo County, local law enforcement officers told the Examiner
they have not seen more crime among the immigrant population than
among U.S. born residents of the area. Instead, police say, they can
often be the victims.

Recently, Buffalo County Deputy Sheriff Aarik Lackershire got a call
from Rosenow’s dairy farm.  A worker there had asked Rosenow to
lend him $1,500 to pay off a U.S. official who was demanding money and
telling the worker he had to pay or be prosecuted for a crime.

Rosenow suspected his employee, Junior, was being scammed. Instead of
loaning him the money, he called the sheriff. Lackershire arrived on
the farm, Rosenow recalled, “with coke-bottle glasses, wearing full
riot gear — leather, with a gun on his belt … I swear he was 18 at
the most.”

[cow]
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A cow peers out of the milking parlor on Rosenow’s farm. | Photo by
Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

Relations between local law enforcement and the immigrant workers on
Wisconsin dairy farms have become strained in recent years because of
workers’ fear of deportation. During the first Trump administration,
high-profile raids and a hostile political climate caused some workers
to return to their home countries while others simply stopped going
out
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Many live on the farms where they work and avoid contact with the
police. Rosenow has fewer than a dozen employees and most of them,
young men and a few women, came up from Mexico without their families
and live in a barracks on the farm to save money and send more home.

Lackershire did not come to Rosenow’s farm to arrest Junior.
Instead, the deputy spent a long time talking to him in Rosenow’s
office, next to the milking parlor, listening carefully and explaining
to Junior that he had been the victim of a scam. 

“He obviously wanted to help,” said Rosenow. “The next day I was
in Alma, so I stopped at the sheriff’s office to thank them for
doing such a great job.” 

Farmers and workers in rural Wisconsin say they hope the national
anti-immigrant climate will blow over, and that they can’t afford to
abandon an economic relationship both groups depend on for their
livelihoods. Throughout rural Wisconsin, immigrant workers and the
state’s U.S.-born residents continue to coexist and, in many cases,
try to help each other, as Lackershire did for Junior.

‘They don’t know who they can trust’

At first, when Lackershire showed up at Rosenow’s farm, Junior was
reluctant to talk. “It’s a person you don’t know, and you’re
telling him things — you feel nervous,” he said in an interview
later, in Spanish, recalling the scene. But Lackershire spent a lot of
time listening patiently to Junior’s story, with the assistance of
Falk, the interpreter, whom Rosenow called and put on speaker phone.
Lackershire explained to Junior that the person who called him
demanding payment could not have been a U.S. official, since the call
came from outside the United States.

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Deputy Aarik Lackershire | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

“After that he warmed up a little bit,” Lackershire recalled in an
interview, sitting at the dining room table at his home in Durand. It
was a convoluted extortion scam involving three different callers, one
posing as a woman with a sick child who needed help, one as a law
enforcement officer, and one as a friend of Junior’s from Mexico.
Lackershire said he’s encountered many similar scams, but this was
“probably the most layered one I’ve dealt with.”

“He’s telling me about three different people, three different
stories, and none of it’s making sense,” Lackershire recalled.
“Wow. So that was an obstacle. And obviously, doing all this through
translators, some stuff gets lost in translation.”

Falk said she was impressed with Lackershire’s patience. “I never
got a sense of any ounce of frustration from him even though it was a
long interaction at 9 p.m.,” she said. The whole experience, she
added, “gave me a newfound appreciation for humanity and how
empowering it is to connect on a human level in spite of speaking
different languages and being from different cultures.”

Scammers target people of all backgrounds, Lackershire said. But
immigrants are particularly vulnerable and, in his experience, are
more frequently shaken down for large sums of money.

“It seems like they take more advantage of immigrants because they
don’t know the legal system of the U.S.,” Lackershire said. 

“This group of people obviously has a fear of being sent back to
where they came from,” he added. “They don’t know who they can
trust.”

That lack of trust makes it harder for law enforcement to do its job.

“We have to go to every 911 call, and we’ve had hang-ups at worker
barracks at 4 in the morning,” Lackershire said. “And obviously
going around knocking on doors as a police officer at 4 in the morning
on a primarily illegal population stirs everybody up and they get
nervous. The intention is to see if somebody needs help, and a lot of
people aren’t even willing to talk.”

Over time, Lackershire feels he has gained the confidence of people
who used to avoid him. Some will now translate for him on occasion.
Lackershire himself grew up in the area and went to school with the
children of immigrant farm workers. “They are just trying to support
their families, which I respect,” he said.

‘We treat the immigrant workers and nonimmigrant workers the same’

When, in October 2023, Minnesota stopped requiring proof of legal
residency to get a driver’s license, Lackershire began carrying
around handouts from a Minnesota immigrant rights group to give to the
unlicensed immigrant drivers he pulls over, encouraging them to get a
Minnesota license. (The Wisconsin Legislature changed state law in
2007 to bar undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver’s
licenses.)

Lackershire said he sees a lot of immigrant drivers in Wisconsin who
have registered and insured their vehicles in Minnesota, “trying to
do the best they can.” But he still hands out a lot of tickets in
Wisconsin for driving without a license. “That’s not something we
typically make an arrest for; that’s usually a traffic ticket,” he
said. But after they get too many tickets, unlicensed drivers in
Wisconsin are treated as though their licenses have been revoked,
Lackershire explained, “and then it’s a driving after revocation.
And that’s actually a criminal charge.” Criminal charges can
trigger an immigration hold and deportation proceedings.

[Voces de la Frontera and allied organizations hold a lobby day at the
Capitol. This was part of a two day call to action. (Photo | Isiah
Holmes)]
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 Voces de la Frontera and allied organizations held a lobby day at
the Capitol during the Day Without Latinos and Essential Workers
general strike in 2022. | Photo | Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner

Having a lot of unlicensed drivers on the road creates a public safety
hazard.

Lackershire’s boss, Buffalo County Sheriff Mike Osmond, said in a
phone interview that he and his deputies often come upon abandoned
cars that are registered to people with no driver’s license and left
in a ditch after a crash. “If they are immigrant workers, they tend
to not stick around,” he said. 

“We treat the immigrant workers and nonimmigrant workers the
same,” Osmond added. “If you’re the victim of a crime, I want
our deputies to spend time and educate you. We’re not out there
looking for immigrant workers.”

As for the possibility that his department might be asked to help with
mass deportations, Osmond said he’s not worried. “I guess I’ll
figure it out when it happens, if it happens,” he said. He’s not
prepared to say what his department policy will be on cooperating with
federal immigration agents. 

“In my entire career I don’t know I’ve ever had a request from a
federal agency to help with immigration, except once when there was an
ICE hold on someone in the jail,” he said. That was during the first
Trump administration.

“If President-elect Donald Trump was sitting in the passenger seat
of my truck right now, I’d tell him to deport the people out of the
jails and prisons — these are folks who’ve come here and committed
a crime.”

‘I have a lot of goals, a lot of dreams’

Falk teaches a regular Monday night English class on Rosenow’s
farm. 

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Mercedes Falk teaches an English class to workers on John Rosenow’s
farm. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

On a recent December evening, she greeted Junior as he came out of
Rosenow’s milking parlor, as three people in their early twenties
— two young men and one young woman — arrived for class. The three
students laughed and teased each other as they took turns translating
the sentences Falk wrote on a white board.

Junior, standing off to the side, said he had taken Lackershire’s
advice and blocked the people who scammed him. He was glad he’d only
given them $600.

Junior’s father also clocked out of the milking parlor while the
English class was going on. He had been on the farm for the last four
years, he said, and was planning to go home to Mexico next year.

“It’s always next year,” one of Falk’s students said,
laughing. His father, who also works on the farm and sends home money
to the rest of the family, says the same thing every year, he added.

As for Junior, “I just have a couple of years left. That’s enough
for me, then I’ll go back,” he said.

In that time, he hopes he’ll have enough money to build a house.
“I have a lot of goals,” he said, “a lot of dreams.”

_THIS IS THE FIRST INSTALLMENT IN AN EXAMINER SERIES ON IMMIGRATION IN
WISCONSIN._

_Ruth Conniff is Editor-in-chief of the Wisconsin Examiner. She
formerly served as Editor-in-chief of The Progressive Magazine where
she worked for many years from both Madison and Washington, DC.
Shortly after Donald Trump took office she moved with her family to
Oaxaca, Mexico, and covered U.S./Mexico relations, the migrant
caravan, and Mexico’s efforts to grapple with Trump. Conniff is the
author of "Milked: How an American Crisis Brought Together Midwestern
Dairy Farmers and Mexican Workers" which won the 2022 Studs and Ida
Terkel award from The New Press._

_The Wisconsin Examiner is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news site offering
a fresh perspective on politics and policy in our state. As the
largest news bureau covering state government in Madison, the Examiner
offers investigative reporting and daily coverage dedicated to the
public interest. We take our inspiration from the motto emblazoned on
a ceiling in our state Capitol: “The Will of the People Is the Law
of the Land.”_

_The Examiner is part of States Newsroom
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nonprofit news organization, supported by grants and donations
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independence._

* immigrant labor
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* Dairy Farms
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* deportations
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