U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are terrorizing immigrants across the Midwest. In addition to arbitrary arrests of Spanish-speakers, some of them U.S. citizens, in Chicago, federal agents have randomly snatched roofers in St. Paul, Minnesota; a handful of men remodeling a house in suburban Illinois; twenty-four dairy workers in Manitowoc, Wisconsin; and seven construction workers sharing a home in Madison. The people being seized are not “criminals” or “terrorists,” as the Trump Administration claims. They are longtime U.S. residents—landscapers, farmworkers, construction crews—working people contributing to the U.S. economy and supporting their families.
Along with the nightmarish crackdown by masked agents in unmarked vans, the Trump Administration is deliberately moving people from local detention centers to facilities in faraway states very quickly, making it hard for their lawyers and family members to locate them and putting them on a quick path to deportation.
“We’re having to go to federal court and sue the government to get people out of detention because the feds are saying that they are not eligible to be released on bond if they are unauthorized crossers,” Madison immigration attorney Aissa Olivarez tells me. “Now we’re doing two to three cases in one, because we have to sue to get them out on bond, where we used to be able to say they’re not a danger or flight risk.”
The quick arrests, sometimes by local cops acting as agents of the federal government, and the shuffle of the people they arrest out of town, “increases that pretrial-to-detention pipeline,” Olivarez says. “It means so many people are being deported before they ever have a day in criminal court.”
Some people are so desperate to get out of indefinite detention that they are signing away their rights, accepting voluntary deportation even when they have a good case.
“Mass deportation” was a Trump campaign promise in 2024. But the reality is shocking to some Trump voters who rely on immigrant workers, including farmers across the Midwest.
“Taking hardworking employees off farms does not make communities safer,” Brian Rexing, a dairy farmer from Indiana, said during a panel discussion on immigration and farm labor at the World Dairy Expo in Madison in October. He described the Hispanic workers on his farm as “way more than employees—they work together with me and my family side by side.”
Recently, even the Trump Administration’s Labor Department declared that the nation’s food system faces an emergency due to the administration’s aggressive mass deportation program, warning in a federal filing first reported by The American Prospect that the immigration crackdown on agricultural workers has created a significant “risk of supply shock-induced food shortages.”
“The Department does not believe American workers currently unemployed or marginally employed will make themselves readily available in sufficient numbers to replace large numbers of aliens,” the filing states, contradicting Trump Administration rhetoric about immigrants stealing American jobs.
Farmers have also been hit hard by Trump’s tariffs and trade wars, with high prices on farm equipment and fertilizer driven by tariffs draining their pocketbooks, and a record soybean crop stuck in storage after China, U.S. farmers’ biggest soybean customer, stopped buying U.S. soybeans in May. By the time China lifted its embargo, plenty of damage had already been done.
“Farmers are getting it in so many ways; their exports are down, their costs are up, and they’re losing their workforce,” says Gbenga Ajilore, chief economist at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities and a former senior adviser for rural development at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Despite all that, farmer sentiment “actually hasn’t really moved as much as you would expect, given what’s happening,” he says. He attributes it to a wait-and-see attitude among farmers who have faithfully supported Trump for years. But now, he adds, “the impact is starting to really hit home.”
Those big Trump banners are still flying over soybean fields in Wisconsin. But the chaotic economy, scary ICE raids, and the Republicans’ refusal to renew health insurance subsidies under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) are beginning to take a heavy toll on rural, Trump-voting areas of the state.
During the protracted government shutdown battle, it became clear that Republican members of Congress in lockstep with Trump are willing to inflict maximum pain on their constituents in order to deliver a win to their leader. The Agriculture Department asserted in late October that it would not follow its own plan to tap into contingency funds to cover food assistance for more than forty-two million people after November 1. The agency removed its assurance that it would protect Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits from its website and instead posted a take-no-prisoners banner: “Bottom line, the well has run dry. At this time, there will be no benefits issued November 1,” the banner declared. “We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats.”
Federal courts ordered the Agriculture Department to release the funds, but delays in food assistance still hit vulnerable families in November.
Eager to pin the resulting catastrophe on Democrats, Republicans smugly declared that they can either drop their insistence on protecting ACA health insurance subsidies or watch children go hungry. We might be approaching an inflection point for Midwestern MAGA voters, too. How much longer will people be taken in by the propaganda emanating from a party that controls every branch of the federal government, yet insists it is powerless to stop the destruction it has unleashed?
The brutality, boorishness, and sheer tackiness of the Trump Administration are overwhelming.
Even as the horizon gets darker across the United States, Trump took a wrecking ball to the White House, in order to convert it into a Mar-a-Lago-style McMansion with a gaudy, oversized $350 million ballroom. A timeline on the official White House Instagram feed promotes the destruction of the East Wing with official, black and white images of White House renovations by previous administrations. Swiping through the timeline, you can take a walk through a history that appears relatively normal until you reach recent Democratic administrations: “Bill Clinton scandal,” with a picture of Monica Lewinsky, “Muslim Brotherhood Visit” with a picture of President Barack Obama in a turban, and “cocaine scandal” with an image of President Joe Biden’s son Hunter sitting bare-chested in a bathtub. It’s a gleeful middle finger to about half of U.S. voters who didn’t choose Trump, and to anyone who believes there should be a shred of dignity attached to the office of the President.
We are living in dangerous times.
“The only way to get through this is through connecting with each other, using the knowledge of our rights,” Christine Neumann-Ortiz, founder of the immigrant workers’ rights group Voces de la Frontera, said during a forum at the University of Wisconsin–Madison on responding to Trump’s immigration crackdown earlier this year.
Know-your-rights training and quick-response teams are making a difference. Voces and other groups have ramped up rapid-response efforts, fact-checking misleading ICE reports that spread needless panic, and sending teams of observers out to meet real ICE raids when they happen.
It’s encouraging to see video posts of neighbors standing up for neighbors, blowing the whistle on ICE, and refusing to let community members be dragged away. And it’s important to know that immigration lawyers continue to defend people from deportation and win in court.
In our weird, hyperpartisan, siloed social media world, reality can be elusive. It’s harder than ever for many to break with their political team, especially after hanging a giant banner on the side of the barn. Hard, but not impossible.
“I think it’s true for all of us that it’s hard to come to the conclusion that it’s time to change after you’ve been going one way for a good while,” Ben Wikler, the former chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, commented to me recently. “But it’s also the case that in Wisconsin, things don’t have to change very much to get a dramatically different result.”
Small acts of courage and resistance can add up to the dramatic difference we need to make.
Keeping in touch with our sense of justice, decency, and our shared humanity is the only way we’ll come out of these dark times. That, plus continuing to fight like hell.