From a Manitowoc foundry to a south-central Wisconsin dairy, immigrant workers and their employers are grappling with visa changes, enforcement crackdowns and an increasingly fragile labor pipeline.
Paul Kiefer / Wisconsin Watch
Paul Kiefer joined Wisconsin Watch in September 2025 as a Roy W. Howard fellow, focusing largely on immigration and data reporting. He grew up in Washington state, first setting foot in a newsroom as a teenage producer-in-training at a Seattle public radio station. He went on to cover criminal justice in Washington for both the Seattle news site PubliCola and InvestigateWest. He headed east in 2023, finding work as a state politics reporter for Delaware Public Media before receiving a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and interning with the Washington Post’s metro desk.
As ICE surges next door, share your questions about immigration enforcement in Wisconsin
Here’s how Wisconsin Watch has covered immigration so far. What should we report on next?
Refugee resettlement agencies try to keep doors open as White House shuts out new arrivals
Wisconsin agencies are navigating funding losses and layoffs after the Trump administration halted most refugee admissions. Some are resettling South Africans under a controversial Trump program, out of principle and to preserve a system they say will be needed again.
Background check delay shows crackdown’s strain on immigration system
An immigration judge backed a green card for a Sheboygan Falls mother arrested after accidentally crossing the Canadian border, but a delayed background check prolonged her ICE detention for weeks.
As energy-hungry data centers loom, Wisconsin ratepayers owe $1 billion on shuttered power plants
Obsolete power plants continue to cost ratepayers. Now, the push to generate unprecedented amounts of electricity for data centers risks creating another $1 billion in “stranded assets.”
Wisconsin Supreme Court to weigh sheriffs’ cooperation with ICE
The ACLU sued on behalf of the immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. The lawsuit challenges detention practices in Brown, Kenosha, Marathon, Sauk and Walworth counties.
Courts left with loose ends when ICE detains criminal defendants
When defendants sit in ICE custody, their criminal cases generally continue without them — sometimes with no explanation of their absence to the court.
‘So sudden, so jarring’: Immigration ruling streamlines deportations to countries asylum seekers barely know
A Board of Immigration Appeals decision makes it easier for federal officials to toss thousands of asylum cases and send applicants to a “third country” where they have never lived. But the mechanism is being used inconsistently.
ICE arrests of asylum seekers in Milwaukee show shifting tactics
A Venezuelan couple arrested during a routine immigration check will try to continue their asylum cases while detained hundreds of miles away from each other.
Rapid deportation push leaves immigrant families in the dark
The pace of the Trump administration’s crackdown and lack of transparency have disoriented affected families and overwhelmed immigration attorneys.
