Community Shares of Wisconsin’s The Big Share Is March 3rd: Broad Community Impact (Part 2 of 2)
The Black Men’s Coalition’s Sedrick Page (l-r), the Community Immigration Law Center’s Grant Sovern and Community Shares of Wisconsin’s Cheri Dubeil
by Jonathan Gramling
Back in 1971 — 55 years ago — Community Shares of Wisconsin was founded as the Madison Sustaining Fund, an outgrowth of Madison’s antiwar movement. Over those 55 years, Community Shares has grown and evolved, becoming more inclusive as its value of social justice has grown and evolved from its antiwar roots.
In December 2025, Community Shares added 16 new members, a growth of 20 percent. Two of those new members are the Community Immigration Law Center and The Black Men’s Coalition Foundation. Each of them take a different path towards the common goal; of social justice.
In many ways, CILC is on the front line slowing down the Trump deportation train to ensure that everyone’s rights are respected and that due process is followed.
“There is this thing in America — I don’t know if you remember it — called Due Process,” said Grant Sovern, CILC’s board president and administrative officer. “It had a good run, 248 years. We were doing okay in certain places. But it has just fallen off a cliff. Now, we are falling back to our racist roots, which is pick people who we don’t want to be near. And they are just picking those people off the streets based on the way they look or their accent. Our legal system still will protect people, but it is a baseline that we have lost. And that’s what having lawyers and due process mean to people. At least you get your say in court. It’s not a perfect system. But we have so so fallen off the cliff. You read the media and you think the government is not paying attention to any court orders. They don’t care what the law is. It’s true that they push beyond. But that is what the court system, for the most part, is still doing. And our lawyers can tell you that.”
Having legal representation does make a difference.
“When we get someone’s day in court, they get some modicum of due process, so that it’s not just ICE agents with no training and lots of weapons picking people off the street based on what they look like,” Sovern said. “You see that happening and they do get picked up. But then they go through a process where we can show what their status is. Should they be deported? Shouldn’t they be? The laws are still maybe not what we would all agree the law should be. But at least let us apply those laws. And that’s why it’s about building our community in addition to saving families. If we can have a community that at least represents some bit of process, we can feel like we have something and can start building on it. We didn’t start from a great place two years ago. But we have to at least get back to there.”
There is basically an offense and a defense in fighting what is happening to immigrants.
“The front end is the civil rights side of it and who’s is getting picked up and how they are getting picked up,” Sovern said. “It’s abhorrent. It’s terrible. We see what happens in Minneapolis. And we have some organizations that are working on that like the ACLU and various state bar organizations who are trying to get people ready for that preparation. CILC is more on the defense side after someone gets picked up to defend them so that they have due process in the deportation proceedings. But it is scary what we are seeing on the front end. That’s where the government is going beyond beyond. And there are organizations that are suing. But it takes 1-2 years to get through that process. In the meantime, the Supreme Court makes a shadow docket decision that stops an injunction that keeps border patrol from doing these terrible things. So it’s really a two-part process. And we are the second part, which is a lot behind the scenes. But it is the most important part to making sure that people who don’t deserve to be deported if you can call it that under our current laws.”
And while some may say that Minneapolis can’t happen in Madison, there are people in Madison who believe that it can.
“There’s an Emergency Immigration Response Taskforce that includes city government, the city police, the sheriff, the school district and surrounding communities who are all planning for what we have seen in Minneapolis,” Sovern said. “And it’s an amazing amount of coordination of people getting together. So we will know how to get to people quickly and it won’t be as big of a surprise. But it is going to take a lot of resources.”
Sedrick Page, the Coalition’s chief operating officer, understands the dynamic of what is going on today from a historical perspective.
“The law or legal processes and justice have a cost to it in the United States,” Page said. “And everyone doesn’t have access. So your level of access to attorneys, quality of attorneys and representation dictates what your justice can be in this country. And we’ve seen that with the Epsteins and those kinds of things.”
And the use of race to obtain and maintain political power is nothing new as well.
“When I see our president, he’s just a repeat of Nixon and he is a repeat of Ronald Reagan,” Page said. “If you look at the campaigns, they ran very similar. The slogans are very similar. They’ve just been modified. So we’ve been here before. We’ve been here through Emancipation. The issue is most of the people who are out here now don’t remember. So if you forget, you’re doomed to repeat then things over and over again. And as my colleague and I were talking, you go back to 9/11 with the Patriots Act and people not understanding that it was a direct attack on the Bill of Rights and birthplace citizenship. It was done on purpose and the legal things that came from that. So everything that we are dealing with with ICE, which is part of Homeland Security are things as a country, we said we wanted them to do for our protection. So be careful for what you ask for because when the focus is here, the focus turns to the rest of us.”
While the immediate issue is immigrant rights, in the end it’s all about the rights of every U.S. citizen.
“How ironic it is that the two people who lost their lives in Minnesota — I am sorry for their families — were two Caucasian people living in Minnesota who were against the illegal detainment of people unjustly and being able to protest,” Page said. “So when you lose your right to protest, you lose your rights to advocate for yourself in a peaceful manner, which is under attack. And then you lose your voice. So as far as I am concerned, everyone in the country should be concerned. And there should be a rally call to go out and understand the law because if you don’t understand your rights, then you don’t know the rights you need to be fighting for.”
In the long run, the U.S. must decide what kind of country it is going to be.
“We have to look in the mirror and make a decision as a country on who we are going to be,” Page emphasized. “I’m a proponent of history and I believe things always circulate back.”
And for Page, it is also people deciding for themselves who they are going to be.
“I grew up in the South, in Mississippi and New Orleans,” Page said. “I grew up being told that the world is your oyster and you can do whatever you want despite the landmines and the road blocks that lay ahead. I was empowered to fight against racism and different discriminations, but also to understand that yes, that may be the lay of the land. But that has nothing to do with your success and it has nothing to do with your contributions. I find in the Midwest and Madison that we have an attitude of victimization here, which is uncomfortable for me. And we have a community, that at times, makes excuses for those perceived victims instead of empowering them in ways to push them forward in validating their intelligence, validating their ability to be successful despite what society says their limitations are.”
In some ways, the fight is about freedom and the right to decide who we are and the role we are going to play in society. And it’s also about removing the barriers that prevent us from exercising those freedoms. And that is what social justice is all about.
