What it's like to live in fear of being deported
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This is On Point. I'm Deborah Becker, in for Meghna Chakrabarty. President Trump's promise of mass deportations is reverberating in communities throughout the country. Take some of the small towns around Madison, Wisconsin, for example, where hundreds of migrants have settled over the past few years. It's where Joaquin has worked as a cook at a local restaurant for about three years.

He sleeps above the restaurant and works most days to send money back to his family in Nicaragua.

Joaquin is seeking asylum in the U.S., citing what he says is government repression in his home country. He hoped to have a better future here. Until now. From the moment the new president took charge and he signed all those executive orders, it's just things haven't been the same. You watch the news, so much stuff has happened. They're grabbing people at work, they're doing raids.

I don't feel safe. Joaquin is not his real name. We're using an alias because of his legal status. There are no reports of large-scale immigration raids in Wisconsin, but what's happened in other cities is creating fear among migrants throughout the U.S. Recently, President Trump was asked by reporters how his promises of, quote, the largest deportation operation in American history was going. Here's what he said.

-The deportation's going very well. We're getting the bad, hard criminals out. These are murderers. These are people that have been as bad as you get, as bad as anybody you've seen. We're taking them out first.

And the them President Trump is referring to there are those accused of crimes. But many migrants here have heard law enforcement officials say that being in the U.S. without legal status is a crime. So they're worried exactly how the president's takeout operation is going to work. Joaquin says he's afraid. Now he barely leaves his home except to go downstairs to work, but he doesn't feel safe there either.

Instead, they come in from the back of the restaurant. More than anything, what we live with is fear. We can't go out without same liberty. We don't feel safe going to the store because you just don't know what you're going to come across. The stuff we need in our home, we can't go out and get in peace.

Joaquin has started to prepare for possible deportation. That includes packing up his things and shipping them back to Nicaragua. Because it's cost me sweat, sweat and tears. Spent so much time away from my family, from my kids, just to get a few things. Not expensive stuff, like simple things. And the idea that I could be deported...

You have any idea the kind of sadness. You know it's yours. You earned it. It's yours. And then to have someone come and throw it in the garbage without really caring.

Some of Joaquin's most prized possessions are his Western boots and hats. Back home, he says buying these things would have been unimaginable. Just one of these items could take about 15 days of work to pay for in Nicaragua. Here in America, he's built a collection, one that he used to proudly show off around town. The most valuable thing to me, my hat and my boots.

Many people see it as a fashion trend, but for me that's a part of who I am.

Joaquin plans to ship his things back to Nicaragua this month. He doesn't know how much time he has left in the U.S. And if he's sent back to Nicaragua, he's sure he won't be safe. I used to feel safe here, like I could go out and nobody would come hurt me. But now we're seen as traitors to our country because we came here for refuge. They grab us and send us to Nicaragua. Who's going to help us?

Nobody. We're at their mercy. Who wants to help Nicaraguans? Once you've been deported, no one gives you the light of day there. If they grab us, we die. That's Joaquin, a migrant from Nicaragua who's been living outside Madison, Wisconsin, since about 2021. Again, we are using an alias to protect Nicaragua.

his identity. Joaquin is one of many Nicaraguan migrants who've settled in Wisconsin, and he's among those who have been packing up their things and sending them back home because they're worried about being deported. Melissa Sanchez, a reporter for ProPublica, has been writing about this. She joined us back in November before the election to share her reporting about immigrant communities in Wisconsin. After Donald Trump's inauguration last month, she returned to the state.

and met with many migrant families to talk about what it's been like there since. Melissa, welcome back to On Point.

Hi, thanks for having me. So I wonder, you heard Joaquin's story there. And as we said, you spent a lot of time reporting on migrant communities in Wisconsin. I'm wondering, you know, he hasn't, Joaquin hasn't left yet. He's preparing in case he has to leave. What do you think would be the factor that would push him to leave Wisconsin and try to get back to Nicaragua?

So I think he, like a lot of the people that I've spoken to, are waiting until the deportations hit close to home. Joaquin is waiting to see if his brother gets picked up, if his cousin's

if his coworkers, if his friends, almost everybody I've talked to said that's it. Right now, it's just rumors that they're seeing on TikTok or on Facebook. I get text messages from people in that community, photos of Border Patrol vehicles. They're really afraid. They know that there's agents close by, but until they know somebody who's been picked up and taken, they're not prepared yet to leave most of them.

But Joaquin's case is a little bit special because he's also one of the few Nicaraguans I've talked to in Wisconsin that has really significant fear of returning to Nicaragua because of his involvement in political activities there. So he's also wondered if he doesn't go back, should he go back to a different country? So I think he's got some more planning to do. A lot of the other Nicaraguans I talked to are more willing, they're packing and they're planning to leave more quickly.

Right, right. So let's talk about, though, the rumors, because that's happening everywhere. Social media, photos of immigrations and customs enforcement officers around the country, certain arrests, ICE now posting on Twitter, or X as it's now called, how many people are being deported and arrested every day, or at least ICE was doing that for a short time and then stopped. I'm not sure if ICE has resumed.

But there's a lot of concern about exactly what's happening. What are you seeing, at least in Wisconsin? Not a ton of activity yet. I spent a lot of time in Whitewater, like you mentioned earlier.

It's a little town between Madison and Milwaukee. And maybe a week after inauguration, I started getting messages from people there that ICE was around, that they were chasing somebody, that they were at the Walmart, that they were at a chicken factory. And people were really afraid. And it took a while. My colleague happened to be nearby, so she went and looked into it. And it sounds like maybe ICE was there looking for one particular person, and they pulled a relative over there.

But the guy they were looking for who was wanted on some criminal charges wasn't in the vehicle. And so they didn't detain anybody else. There were no collateral arrests like we've heard before. And like we're seeing here in Chicago where I live. So at the moment, it's...

It's mostly rumor in Wisconsin. I've talked to some immigration attorneys there, and they're not seeing very much activity. But everybody's kind of bracing and expecting that it will come. Right. And what does that do to folks while they're bracing for something to come? How do you think that's affected the community?

I mean, I think it's pretty traumatic and difficult to imagine. I mean, people don't leave their homes. Like Joaquin was saying, he described feeling like a mouse up and down, up and down, up and down, and not leaving unless he absolutely has to. A lot of people are like that. One woman I know quit her job at a cheese factory because she was afraid that that would be an easy place for ICE to show up at because it's all undocumented immigrants who work there.

people are spending less money. I mean, they don't make a ton of money, but they make enough to go out every once in a while to go out to eat, to have fun, to go to a bar, to go to a club. And people don't do that as much anymore. So local businesses are seeing a little bit of a hit. I mean, I think that's part of it. And then what are they telling their kids? I think

I think kids are going to school afraid of whether when they get home, their parents will still be there. And are a lot of folks like Joaquin also packing up their belongings to send them back?

Yeah, I was really surprised, but I learned about this just before inauguration. A community health worker I knew in central Wisconsin told me that a lot of the Nicaraguans that she was working with were packing up their things in big blue barrels or these boxes almost the size of refrigerators and just shipping all of their favorite belongings back home. And I just

I couldn't believe it, so I went to go see it for myself and almost everybody I met either was doing it or knew somebody who was doing it or had already sent their stuff home. So I met people who had sent home bicycles, stilettos that they'd bought, who'd sent home all of their children's toys, like portraits of their kids.

Like you name it. One woman sent a box of chocolates home, a clothing iron. A woman told me that she had one of like a beautiful kitchen blender at a grocery store. She hadn't even opened it yet, but she packed that up and sent it along with almost everything in her kitchen that she didn't absolutely need. So she could have it there waiting for her if and when she got sent back.

You know, the On Point team visited Whitewater last year, and we interviewed the police chief about how the community was affected by campaign trail rhetoric, really, that came up at the time, pointing to Whitewater as a symbol of a city overrun by immigration.

This time around, the chief declined our interview request. He said he didn't want any more political attention. But he did stress that immigration enforcement is not the role of local law enforcement. And we've heard this from other police departments as well. They say we just don't have the resources to take up immigration. Does that –

Give any sort of assurance to the folks that you've spoken with in Wisconsin that there may not be a lot of manpower to carry out the extensive deportation operation that's been promised by the White House.

I don't think so. And even though that is true, it's not good for law enforcement, for local law enforcement to do this, in part because they don't have the resources and also because it's kind of hard to maintain trust with people who you might want to talk to you if there is a crime, if you need to talk to witnesses. That's all the case. But the police in Wisconsin are routinely ticketing undocumented people for driving without a license. We wrote about this, too, a couple of years ago, that cops just as a matter of routine are –

are running the license plates of folks and if they see that the plate matches somebody who doesn't have a license, they're pulling them over. And once you're pulled over and ticketed, you end up in criminal justice system, which can land you into immigration. Okay, well, we'll continue talking about this after a break. We're talking about immigrant communities in Wisconsin to look at the real-time effects of potential mass deportations. I'm Debra Becker. This is On Point.

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This is On Point. I'm Deborah Becker. We're talking about potential mass deportations in the U.S. and how that's affecting some immigrant communities in Wisconsin. With us is Melissa Sanchez. She's a reporter covering immigration and labor for ProPublica. And Melissa, I want to go back to something you were saying right before the break, and that's about local law enforcement and how

Many people were being ticketed, many migrants were being ticketed for driving without a license, a minor offense that could land them in the criminal legal system and begin deportation proceedings. Do you think that that has increased since the inauguration?

I don't think it's increased maybe in part because people are driving less, but people do have to drive. So I think we're going to continue to see ticketing and we will probably see increased enforcement on the ICE side. So when people are in jail and, you know, it is a misdemeanor at first, but it escalates. Like the more tickets you get, it becomes criminal. So I think once people are in jail, we will see more people getting picked up by ICE from there. Yeah.

You know, when we spoke with you back in November about the attention that Whitewater was getting on the presidential campaign trail then because of really a false narrative about what was happening there. I wonder, though, could you just remind our listeners about Whitewater? What kind of community is it? How big is it? And why have so many migrant families settled there?

Yeah, Whitewater is a nice little college town. There's an offshoot of UW, of University of Wisconsin there, about 15,000 people. And over the past three or four years, it's seen a pretty significant number of Nicaraguan migrants.

A lot of them are asylum seekers, people who came in illegally but then asked for asylum on the border and are in some stage of that process. And it's an economic story. So they come to work. There's a lot of places that are delighted to hire people regardless of their status. A lot of factories in the Whitewater area, chicken processing. There's a lot of just random factories that make even like toilet parts or food processing products.

And people pretty easily plug into jobs either with work permits that they get through that asylum process or using fake papers.

And Whitewater got a lot of attention from President Trump after the police chief there wrote a letter to then President Biden asking for additional resources because his officers were just encountering a lot more people driving without a license, like I mentioned. And those tickets were a big time suck. And he asked the White House for help just dealing with all of this, like more manpower and

And he got very little response from the White House, but Trump kind of took it and ran with it and talked about how the city was overrun with criminals, which wasn't exactly what the police chief was saying. But that became part of Trump's regular stump speech when he visited Wisconsin, which we know was a swing state. You know, one person that we did speak with when we visited Whitewater was Chuck Mills, the owner of Mills Automotive. He's a Trump supporter.

And he said, you know, at first he was not happy about the influx of migrants to Whitewater. But then he changed his mind. He's gotten along with members of the community. And we asked him then if his community would be any different if President Trump did, in fact, carry out his promise of mass deportations. And what he said then was similar to what he says now. Let's listen. I still don't think they're going to do it.

I think they're going to go after all the criminals. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind. They're going to go after the criminals just like they'd come after me. As far as this town goes, you know what I'm saying? There's no witch hunt here. Nobody's after anybody. I can tell you that nobody's being picked on or anything like that. Trump had to say what he said during the election in order to get the votes. Now that he's in, just like last time, he only went after MS-13 murderers and rapists and stuff like that. Last time, he never went after anybody else.

So, Melissa Sanchez, is that a common perception here, that it's violent criminals who might be targeted in any kind of White House mass deportation effort? And it's most people will be safe from this and they will not be deported. Do folks agree with that?

I think a lot of people say that even within the immigrant community, a lot of the farmers I've talked to say that, too. You know, I was I actually wrote a story at some point last year with a colleague about how a lot of undocumented Mexicans were supportive of Trump. And in part, in part, they didn't think that they would be affected by by deportations because they hadn't committed any crimes here besides being here illegally.

But that's not what we've seen before and it's not what we're seeing currently. Although the numbers are very small, like I said, we are seeing collateral arrests. We are seeing people get picked up even though ICE was looking for somebody who does have an attempted murder charge or some other criminal conviction. So I think if –

this country is to get the numbers that Trump has promised, and he has promised millions of deportations, you know, the biggest deportation operations in the history of this country, then by necessity, he will have to go after everybody. They're going to run out of criminals, you know, air quote criminals, before, you know, at some point. So if they are to reach that goal, then they will. If Chuck is correct and it's all bluster, maybe they won't. But I think we're already starting to see some collateral arrests. And I think we will see more. Mm-hmm.

There are some folks in the immigrant community who also think it's not going to be this large-scale mass deportation that will catch a wide variety of folks, but it will focus on this. Any kind of deportation effort would focus on

Really serious criminals. And they were Trump supporters and they continue to be Trump supporters, thinking that perhaps it will be good for the community if folks involved in crime are removed. Are you hearing that as well?

Of course. Yeah, a lot of the Mexican folks that I spoke with in Whitewater said just that. And that first incident that I mentioned where there was rumors of ICE in town looking for somebody, I talked to a lot of the people who were Trump supporters who are undocumented Mexican immigrants. And to them, knowing that ICE had gone after just one person and didn't take any collateral arrests in that one case was sort of proof for them that they are safe. But again, we're less than one month into this

this administration. So we'll have to see. You know, we spoke with Karimi Morales, who's from Chiapas, Mexico. And I want to play you a little bit of this interview here. She moved to Wisconsin three years ago. She said she wanted a better life. She's undocumented, but she has a year and a half old daughter who was born in the United States. Because of her status and because of Trump's promises to get rid of birthright citizenship,

She said she didn't know what was best for her family. And it was very complicated for me to stay because when the new administration came in after the elections, we learned that Donald Trump won and that seeds of fear were being planted.

and they were saying that they were going to repatriate a lot of people, including us, first. Karimi decided she did not want to risk deportation, so on December 2nd, she got on a bus and she fled back to Mexico. Returning to my country, which is Mexico, was a very complicated decision.

And to this day, I feel guilt because the United States, to us, is a first world country. And it's a place where there is more possibilities for opportunities. And I had to quickly make a decision because I am, I was, an immigrant in Wisconsin. And I was afraid that I would be separated from my baby. I was afraid that they would separate me from my baby.

Karimi says she still doesn't know if she made the best decision. She wanted to give her daughter a better life in the U.S., but under President Trump, she says that did not seem possible. Life here in Mexico hasn't been easy at all. Honestly, I've been having a hard time. I'm going through a lot of stress. My hair started falling out. I've broken out with acne, so much acne.

I've been dealing with that for two months, and every day it gets worse as I worry about how I'm going to provide for my daughter.

That's Karimi Morales, a Mexican migrant who fled the U.S. after the election of President Trump. Melissa Sanchez from ProPublica is with us. Melissa, are you hearing stories about people who have just left? They're going back to their home countries or perhaps other countries because of concerns about potential mass deportations?

Yeah, just like almost everybody I met knew somebody with a box. Almost everybody I met knew somebody who had already left.

And it's, you know, I've spent a lot of time talking to store owners at the little grocery stores all over the state, and they've all talked about people who were either planning their return trips to Nicaragua or Mexico or had already left. So I think it's a little bit common right now. I realize, you know, it's impossible to quantify, right? But we're also hearing there's a big drop in the number of folks who

trying to cross the border. So do people in Whitewater say that they've noticed that the number of folks coming in has declined as well, or that what they're seeing or hearing from folks about leaving? I mean, how do you describe this as a trend or in a broader stroke here?

It is really hard. I mean, some of the businesses that I've talked to said business has dropped by half, but it's just also really hard to tell when the weather is very cold and people stay home. But we had been hearing for months that there were fewer newcomers coming to places like Whitewater in Wisconsin. I think it's going to take some time to see if we're seeing the drops in the number of kids in schools, for example, or if workplaces start needing more workers.

What about the fact that folks might not necessarily be sent back to their home countries? That, you know, we know, for example, that the White House has opened the 9-11 prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to hold folks who are deported. Does that factor into the decision-making here that it's not as if, well, if I get caught, I get sent back home? It's, I don't know where I might end up. How is that affecting people?

No, I mean, I think that scares people even more, which is why people are thinking about, let me do this by my own free will, like with my own planning and making a decision to return. I know of a group, a couple of families in a little town in central Wisconsin that are, that were planning. And I think this week or next week to just all of them, I think there was about 10 of them. They were going to return because they didn't want that decision to be taken from them. They, I mean, and, and, and you hear the fear, especially with,

parents of young children, like Kariemi, whose voice you heard. She left because she's afraid of getting separated from her kid. And a lot of folks know what happened last time Trump was in office. They know of the separation of parents and their children at the border. So they suspect that it might happen to them

So those, a lot of the mothers I spoke with, with kids who were born here, were racing to get their kids' passports, to get records, some sort of proof that the kid belonged to them so that they don't get separated, so that they can take their children home. Right.

You know, we heard from Sandra Ramirez, who's an ESL teacher in Mayville, Wisconsin. She used to work in the Whitewater School District, so she's connected with the Nicaraguan community in the state. And she says after the inauguration, the community was in a panic, and many folks stopped sending their kids to school. Let's listen. And they really wanted some assurance from administrators to know

If this happens, if I were to come to school, how do we feel that they're protected? We have met with parents face to face. We have delivered the messages that we want to deliver. There is a procedure to follow and at least my school district, that's what we did.

And we met parents, you know, after school and kind of acknowledged the fear. And we kind of said, this is what we can and we cannot do. And just please be assured that we, that you will be part of this, that we are not going to let your kids go without you being part of, of this. You will be the first one to know what's going on. Yeah. We've heard, uh,

Melissa Sanchez at many schools, school officials and other local officials telling people children can still go to school and explaining what the legal rights are of students and families when kids are in school. Of course, churches are involved in this as well, because we've heard that ICE agents may go into churches and be able to arrest people. And so church leaders are getting involved and getting involved in lawsuits. It's very complicated.

But I wonder what you're hearing from the community about educating folks about their rights and telling them what can happen in places like schools and churches and other areas where they may have felt safe before, but that may not be the case now.

I mean, I think there's Know Your Rights trainings happening all over the state, some virtually, some in person. They're hard to attend for people who work long hours, but I think that message is getting around. But like I said, so is the fear. I mean, here in Chicago, there's even more information, more workshops than in Wisconsin. But I was just at an apartment complex where some Ecuadorian families live. And during the school day, there were kids, school-age kids.

hanging out at home. And I think part of it has to do with that fear of what's going to happen. And I've heard from teachers and from educators that they're starting to see like a reduction in the number of kids showing up. So, I mean, yes, there's Know Your Rights trainings, but there's also just very clear messaging from the White House that we can go to your schools, we can go to your church. And it could just be bluster, like Chuck says. But

It's just hard to tell. And when you're in a very vulnerable position, you take people at their face value. So what are the advocates telling folks then at this point? I mean, what are they saying? Are they telling them, yes, maybe it's a good idea to box up your belongings and send them back? What advice are they giving? And I do wonder, you know, part of this may be a part of the strategy of the White House to get people to self-deport, right? Yeah.

Yeah.

People are worried about whether they can even go to their immigration court hearings. And it's really hard for lawyers to know what to say. I've talked to so many lawyers. They've never gotten so many calls from clients as they have in these past few weeks. And their clients are sometimes, you know, doing things that their lawyers are advising them not to. But it's hard for lawyers. It's hard for lawyers to stop them because they're not dealing with that same fear. So I think, you know,

People are trying to live as normal as they have in the past and be reminded that last time around there weren't mass deportations in the interior like had been promised. But it's just really, really hard to believe that in the face of the rhetoric and the media, all the images are seen on Facebook and Twitter. Yeah.

I'm just really curious, what sort of things are their clients doing that their lawyers are telling them not to do? So one thing I heard is like asking for particular kinds of benefits, like trying to put in certain claims like in immigration cases, like whether it's like requesting like a spouse or a parent at this moment. And so what I've heard from some lawyers that they're asking them to wait a little bit to see kind of how the court

shakes out, how things are looking, but people are just so anxious or trying to get in their paperwork to, you know, to potentially, you know, sponsor a loved one here. And they want to get that in, but it's kind of unclear to the lawyers if like strategically, is this the best moment for whatever other factors are in their case? It's a little bit convoluted, but that's the kind of thing people are trying to speed up some of their immigration court processes, even though their lawyers might say like slow down. But at the end of the day, the lawyers are just kind of

doing what their clients say or withdrawing from the cases. Right, right. Well, we'll continue talking about this after a break. Stay with us, Melissa. We'll be right back. We're talking about immigrant communities in Wisconsin to look at the potential effects of mass deportations that have been promised by President Trump. I'm Deborah Becker. This is On Point. At New Balance, we believe if you run, you're a runner, however you choose to do it. Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way...

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This is On Point. I'm Debra Becker. We're talking about immigration and the large deportation operation that's been promised by President Trump. Melissa Sanchez, a reporter covering immigration and labor for ProPublica, is with us. And we started the show, Melissa, with the story of Joaquin. He is shipping his belongings back to his home country of Nicaragua, and he's afraid to

to return to Nicaragua because of his political activities. And you mentioned that that was unusual. And I guess I'd like to get a little bit deeper here of why so many Nicaraguans are in Wisconsin and what happened there in terms of a crackdown on dissent that might make Joaquin concerned about his potential return.

Yeah, so Nicaragua isn't a country that traditionally has sent a lot of immigrants to the U.S. Historically, poor people in Nicaragua have gone to Costa Rica to work in agriculture and domestic work and then return kind of going back and forth.

And that started changing around 2018. The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, has been in power, I don't even know, since 2006 for a pretty long time and has done a lot to kind of maintain power and not leave. And he has cracked down pretty significantly on dissidents.

And in 2018, there were these big student-led protests that had to do with this government policy to change kind of like a social security type program for the elderly. And a lot of people were killed in those protests, either by police or paramilitaries, a few hundred people. And there were protests all over the country and allegations of a lot of like government-sponsored crackdowns and violence.

Joaquin says, and this stuff is really hard to verify, but he says that he was hit with the butt of a gun, of a rifle, and stabbed in the arm. And I've seen his arm

In one of these protests, a lot of people kind of in communities like, you know, stood in support of the students. And other people who were not very political but spoke openly of democracy or the right to free speech felt like they were being watched by the ruling party, by local members of the ruling party, the Sandinistas.

And so there was kind of this like culture of fear of speaking out if what you believed and said was an opposition to the government. So that's part of it. The other part and maybe the bigger part is economic. And Nicaragua has long been one of the poorest countries in Latin America. And things have only gotten worse as the political situation has just completely devolved. You know, there's sanctions. There's all sorts of inflation. Just it's really difficult to get by.

And so a lot of the people who have fled Nicaragua come from rural parts of the country. A lot of the people that I met initially in that whitewater story were from a community very close to the border with Honduras in the north. And they're very rural people who kind of have lived off the land and just couldn't survive anymore and were coming at a time that it was understood that

that you can make an asylum claim at the U.S. border, that if you made it all the way across those 1,500 miles or so to the U.S.-Mexico border and crossed illegally, that you could find a Border Patrol agent and then turn yourself in and say, I am looking for asylum. And saying that, saying I'm afraid to return to my country, whether that's true or not, if you could demonstrate a credible fear, then you are allowed in legally.

with paperwork that said, "I will return to court and I will make an asylum claim." And you have time to kind of see that claim play out. And so as a couple of people started doing that from some communities and made it successfully to this side and found jobs and were able to send dollars back home, then their relatives back home were like, "I can do this too."

you know, entire communities follow one or two pioneers. And that's what's happened in Whitewater, where almost the entire community of a place called Murrah is now in Whitewater working, working all these jobs.

And will Nicaragua take folks back if they are deported? It's really hard to know. I just saw something. It might have been on social media or a news story where the government kind of, you know, it's a very anti-imperialist, anti-U.S. kind of government where they made these, they had photos of the first deportees coming back.

And they were talking about how we will treat them with dignity. We will give them money to return back to their home villages. We will treat them well, you know, in contrast to the U.S. That's what they're saying right now. I don't know what's going to happen if some of the people who return are people who are very clear political dissidents. Like I said, a lot of the people who left are just very poor people who are struggling to survive. Some of those people made claims that were more political in nature. And like I said, it's very hard to vet people.

But I think we'll see if you have very, very strong political anti-Ortega activists coming back. I don't know. The country has jailed a lot of people. It's exiled a lot of people. It's just withheld Nicaraguan citizenship from some people. That might happen. It's really hard to know.

And let's talk about if it does happen, what also might be some of the ramifications, the economic ramifications in Wisconsin. It's estimated that about half, right, half of the country's farm workers are farmers.

undocumented, and that would include a lot of workers in Wisconsin. And we did speak with some folks about this there. John Rosenau, who's the owner of Rosenholm Dairy and Cow's Mow Compost in Cochran, Wisconsin, and that's a small village in the central west part of the state. Now, John runs this business with his wife, but the farm has been in his family for 125 years. And he told us that since he took over

One of the biggest problems he's faced in running this farm is labor. - Since the year 1998, we began hiring immigrants. And because we couldn't find anybody locally to work on the farm anymore, our first one that we hired was Manuel Perez. He worked for a while here and was so good that all of a sudden my biggest problem became not a problem at all, labor. And right now we have 13 immigrants

Immigrants from Mexico working for us. And those 13 employees, John says, provide about 90 percent of the farm's labor. And that's not uncommon for dairy farms in Wisconsin. John recalls that when Trump first got elected, many dairy farmers across the state felt the effects of Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric.

There was a lot of concern and a lot of people left. They were concerned about their children. They were concerned about being in detention and stuff like that. So they just left and went back home to Mexico at that time. Most farms, dairy farms at that point, were running with a lot less employees. Everybody was working a lot of hours trying to get things done.

And on average, probably everybody was four people short or maybe 20 percent of normal. After about seven months or so, people started coming back because the fear had gone away. Unfortunately for John, he was able to stay fully staffed. But there was a lot of uncertainty and worry during that first year of Trump's presidency. And John says that worry has returned now that Trump is back in the White House.

Immediately, we would have to get in the milking parlor and start milking cows while we were calling the people to buy the cows and get them out of here. We can't wait an hour. We can't wait two hours. We can't just put everything on hold. Everything has to keep going. Otherwise, bad things like deaths and everything else can occur with the animals, which we are really, really concerned about.

So we would have to somehow find a buyer for the cows and the calves and heifers and everything and get them out of here. That would end our career as dairy farmers,

Because there is no other option. The only option we have is immigrant labor. We can't just go to a hiring agency and hire somebody because nobody would do it. That's John Rosenau, owner of Rosenholm Dairy and Cosmo Compost in Cochran, Wisconsin. Melissa Sanchez.

When you hear stories like that, the only option that they have is immigrant labor. I wonder what industries do you think in Wisconsin would be most affected if we do see the mass deportations that have been promised by the president?

Well, I mean, I think dairy farms, definitely. I don't know how many we visited, but it's almost all immigrant labor, all of them, unless it's a management position. Meatpacking, there's a lot of small meatpacking facilities and it's mostly immigrants. A lot of the factories, I think...

People would be surprised to learn how many people who work in factories are immigrants. Factories often depend on staffing agencies, temporary staffing agencies, that end up, you know, wittingly or not, serving as like a shield or an intermediary between the employer and the employee and protect the employer from having to know whether the people they're hiring are documented or not.

A lot of immigrants I know work through temp agencies. They use fake papers to get jobs. And the factories do everything from making sheet metal to, like I said, toilet parts to, you know, packaging sandwiches, making cheese. Like you name it and there's probably immigrants working there. And typically the shifts that like white people don't want, like overnight, the really late shifts are.

And for immigrants who are coming from countries with collapsed economies and very little ability to get by, even though the wages might be considered small, like $14 an hour, it's still better than what they have back home. So they'll take those jobs. And are Whitewater or Wisconsin business owners, these owners of the farms and the factories and the meatpacking facilities, are they –

you know, saying anything about this or doing anything about this to try to make sure that they can, you know, help migrants who are there, even if it's in their own self-interest, right?

I mean, if they're saying something, they're not saying it to me. It's really hard to get employers to speak openly about their hiring practices. John is one of the rare farmers in Wisconsin who talks about this. There's a couple of farmers I've talked to who are willing to say the things that John's able to say. But most places, it just...

Ignore calls from reporters. I have heard that a lot of the folks who came seeking asylum did eventually get work permits. So they're in this kind of weird limbo state where they're not quite, they're not like US residents or citizens, but while they're waiting for a court date, they might be three or four years off, they're legally able to work in this country. So a lot of the factories that I'm familiar with in the Whitewater agency were

were able to shift from hiring mostly undocumented people through temp agencies to a lot of folks with work permits who do have the legal ability to be here, to work here. And I've heard, and this is just like rumor and secondhand, but I've heard that a lot of these places were like delighted to have those workers.

And that kind of like saves them from having to worry about getting an ICE audit or anything like that. And that there had been this like shift from undocumented to work permit, like asylum seekers or in other parts of the country, like TPS holders, right?

But as these designations kind of go away, they're taken away by the government or expire, then they're going to go back to having their undocumented workforce pool to choose from. And so we'll see what happens then. So a big hit to Wisconsin overall if these mass deportations happen.

Sure. And to the rest of the country, I think. Yeah. Like I said, we'll have to see if it's actually logistically possible to do what's been promised. And I think John might be right. It might be a few months of fear of some people self-deporting, of sending their stuff home, but then everything's OK. I do think that if Trump wants to deliver on his promise that he's made to his voters, then he will have to deport more people. And that's going to involve just like the regular folks who are working these jobs that nobody else wants. Yeah.

You know, I want to just play a little piece of tape here from Brooke Rollins during the Senate confirmation hearing of Rollins for Secretary of Agriculture. Rollins was asked by California Senator Adam Schiff how farmers in America will cope if, in fact, there are mass deportations and because so much of the workforce is undocumented. So here's a bit of that questioning from Senator Schiff.

If we deport a large percentage of our farm workforce, farm labor is going to be scarce. Isn't that inevitably going to push up food prices?

And if so, isn't that in sharp contrast with what the president said he wanted to do to bring down egg prices and food prices and everything else? I think, well, first of all, we're speaking in hypotheticals, but certainly these are hypotheticals we do need to be thinking through. And I think it's a very fair point. I believe that we will be able to find in our toolkit what we need to do to solve for any hypothetical issues that end up turning out to be real moving forward over the coming months and years.

So, Melissa Sanchez, what do you take from that? What do you think folks in Wisconsin, where you've done much reporting on immigration and labor, what do you think folks there take from those statements that were made during the Senate confirmation hearing of Brooke Rollins for Secretary of Agriculture?

I mean, so in a lot of industries, and I was thinking about eggs, I forgot to mention that near Whitewater there's a lot of egg farms, and eggs are still expensive at the store these days, right, because of the avian flu and whatnot. Things like egg processing, like meat processing, and like dairy farms are exempt. They're not allowed to access our federal guest worker program. And a lot of the other agriculture that we know of, like apple picking or cherry picking or cucumbers, et cetera,

A lot of those farms have shifted to the guest worker program where they're able to legally bring in workers for a temporary period of time and then send them back after the season's over. But these other industries that I mentioned that are agriculture kind of adjacent, because they're year-round work, they are not –

able to access that. So I think when they talk about a toolkit, that could be part of the toolkit that they access to be able to find a legal way to bring in workers. Or it could be what happened last time around. And a lot of these industries just do not get touched in workplace enforcement. Like, I mean, I've

I haven't heard of any dairy farms that have had workplace raids, like, for example, the last time around or in the past many years. So I think those are the two options, either pretend you don't see it or open up these industries to a legal guest worker program. So we've talked about what many of the migrants are doing in Wisconsin communities, packing up their things, living with fear. Business owners who will talk are concerned. Not many will. What about...

I've heard from some advocates, but what about officials there? Do you think that they are also preparing for mass deportations to become a reality? I don't know. I

I don't know, a lot of the officials, especially in small communities in Wisconsin, are Republican and they did vote for Trump. And so I think what I've heard kind of historically from these folks over the past couple of years is that they don't think those kinds of actions will affect their local community. Like it's something that's going to happen someplace else, like Chicago, like New York, the big sanctuary cities. The message I've just heard repeatedly over the years is that Trump is talking about somebody else when he talks about them, not our immigrants in our community. You think that people will get a rude awakening, Melissa?

I hope not. But I think if, you know, I try to take people at face value. And I think that the only way that math works is if a lot of people get deported.

All right. Melissa Sanchez is a reporter covering immigration and labor for ProPublica. She was on our show in November to talk about her reporting on the immigrant community in Whitewater, Wisconsin, and how it got caught up in the national immigration debate. You can find a link to that show and her articles at our website, onpointradio.org. Melissa, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you for having me. I'm Deborah Becker. This is On Point.