Voces de la Frontera Leads Four Days of Protests and Education: May 1st Day without Latine (Part 1 of 2)
Top: Christine Newman Ortiz, the head of Voces de la Frontera, speaks at a rally in Milwaukee Below: Luis Rodriguez, head of the Madison chapter of Voces de la Frontera
by Jonathan Gramling
Christine Newmann-Ortiz founded Voces de la Frontera in 1994 as a small bilingual newspaper focusing on maquiladora rights on the Texas/Mexico border while a student at UT-Austin. And since that time, she has grown it into a formidable immigrant rights group in Wisconsin.
“We do have a statewide presence,” Newmann-Ortiz said. “We have followed the route of the Latine community for the many years that we have been organizing in Wisconsin when we started as an all-volunteer organization in 1998. We have systematically built our organization. And we have a presence now with offices and support staff in Milwaukee, Waukesha and Madison. We’ve recently grown in Monroe, Sparta and Arcadia. And then we have had a college chapter in Waukesha and Green Bay. We have a new statewide membership where we actually have physical offices and support staff in those certain areas where they have high concentration of the Latine population in Wisconsin.”
Voces has been the force behind large immigrant rights marches in Milwaukee, Madison and other places.
Small gains have been through the years for immigrants, both documented and undocumented. But with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president in November 2024, Voces took notice. While many took Trump’s threats against immigrants and mass deportations as mere election rhetoric, Voces took him at his word.
“We have been meeting people where they are immediately after the elections,” Newmann-Ortiz said. “The greatest urgency and need has been for people to understand what rights they have to apply for documentations that would ensure that their children are not taken away from them in the event of deportation. Having all of their documents in place. That’s the most immediate stuff. And that’s been very time consuming and demanding to build capacity to meet the need. We have had to create regional train the trainer options so that we can build more leadership and knowledge to be able to in different spaces whether that is in someone’s home for coworkers or with folks on a farm or with teachers providing after school training with the students and the parents. In very different spaces, there is diverse interest and demand. The good thing is obviously the need to build extra capacity at a time when we need a lot of unity. That has been the greatest demand.”
Trump villainized immigrants as a drag on the United States and as criminal during the campaign and only intensified his rhetoric when he assumed office on January 20th and immediately began to issue executive orders, which included greasing the skidsa for a mass deportation process. Innocent and contributing members to society have been caught up in the vast dragnet.
“Yesenia Ruano is originally from El Salvador and came here in 2011,” Newmann-Ortiz said. “She had family members who had been killed by cartels, had received threats. Her first time coming across the border was aborted. The second time, she was given the opportunity to apply for asylum, to have an interview for credible fear, which she was granted and was then able to start that process. To make a long story short, she was able to because of some legal advice that she had and because of the changes in the enforcement priority, she came up on the radar screen for deportation even though she had no criminal record. But because of that reentry charge, she had a certain protected status taken away. Within a week, we were able to make her story public. Organized a 150 person-strong court of accompaniment to her ICE check-in where she was told that she was going to be detained and deported. She had U.S. citizen children. She was a paraprofessional in the Milwaukee public schools. And again, that was an example. Now because she did have a pending human trafficking visa pending and because of the community support, they did not detain and deport her.”
Another example is Ma Yang
“Ma Yang, a young woman, was recently deported to Laos, a country that doesn’t recognize Hmong refugees. She was deported there and she is in limbo now because neither Thailand nor Laos recognize Hmong citizenship. She left her U.S. citizen children and fiance who has a physical disability here. And she did have a record. She served her time and was not a priority for deportation, but was deported.
And again, we see the real life consequences. There is no benefit to these deportations of people who have working class families, are building a life, are supporting their families. In the case of Ma Yang, a young woman who made a mistake and did her time deserved a second chance while supporting her family and now her family is struggling to survive. It creates emotional havoc. It creates financial hardship. It’s a humanitarian threat. I think one of the challenges is that what we are facing in the big picture right now is that as we know, the Trump administration is painting everyone with a broad brush in terms of immigrant to try to create fear, that people are a drag, that people taking away from others as opposed to people who are contributing to the well-being of our economy, who are supporting their families. They are really trying to put on a show to justify violating constitutional rights of immigrants and thus all of us, constitutional rights like freedom of expression, freedom to organize, freedom of lawful attainment.”
Indeed, Newmann-Ortiz feels that the immigrant deportation push is part smoke screen to obscure people’s view of the real harm that Trump is doing to democracy and the United States.
“It really is a period in which they are trying to justify all of the attacks they are making on public programs whether that is Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security and public education, the whole attack on the VA system, all of that,” Newmann-Ortiz said. “The aggressive privatization to make the rich richer. They are playing this game because they are hoping they can use immigrants as a scapegoat. That’s why there is all of this theater and propaganda. And what is coming to light — and it is important that continues to come to light — is as people are coming in, they are taking away. We saw that recently with the Palestinian activists, people who have done nothing unlawful, who are not a threat, who are using freedom of expression and assembly. They are being unlawfully detained. And we are seeing this broad sweep of working-class immigrants who have no criminal record or aren’t a threat whatsoever. They are being stigmatized and portrayed as a threat and being used as scapegoats. It is a very critical moment in terms of what direction we go in and to make sure that we build a movement rooted in organizations that can stand together and push back against these efforts to divide people and to resist and condemn everything that is happening around us, this assault on our rights.”
So far, Wisconsin has been relatively spared from the large-scale round-ups.
“We have not yet seen the kind of operation that other cities have experienced in New York, Chicago, Denver and Los Angeles where they have really made an effort to conduct large-scale raids,” Newmann-Ortiz said. “While that is true, there is a lot of fear without seeing them. We are seeing the effect of the changes in the Trump Administration that are casting this very wide net from targeting immigrants without legal status and those with legal status too. The biggest raids that we have seen have been for people who were not a priority for deportation. That was one of the gains of the immigrant rights movement was enforcement priority, which said only if you posed a serious threat, had been convicted of something of a serious nature and posed a threat would you be a priority for deportation. That was one of the gains of the immigrant rights movement. When Trump got in, he repealed that and took away a lot of the enforcement priority including the sensitive locations memo that said that you couldn’t go into certain spaces that are protected such as churches, schools and human services, relief programs that happen such as natural disasters. That created a lot of concern.”
While Voces’ immediate effort was to prepare people for the onslaught of deportations and make sure that people were secured and prepared, it is also time to move on the offensive. Voces and its allies have been quietly erecting an infrastructure that will support a mass action and mobilization on May 1st.
“I think this is the first time since May 1st became a tradition in the immigrant rights movement back in 2006 that there is broad, broad support for what is known as a general strike,” Newmann-Ortiz said. “It became a tradition with the message A Day without Latinos. That was very successful in 2006, which became this domino effect of what became over a million workers and families and supporters going on a general strike: no work, no purchases, students and parents taking time from school to participate, small businesses closing during that time to participate. It’s basically a National Day of Action with now over — the last number I heard — over 30 cities participating and growing. Here in Wisconsin, we are organizing a statewide march and rally on May 1st, assembling at 9:30 a.m. and then marching at 10 a.m. at 8th and Mitchell, which is where we have our statewide office in the heart of the Latine community. And then we will have a march to the Federal Courthouse and have a rally. It’s probably going to be an hour-long march. We also invite people to go to the Federal Courthouse if they don’t want to march. We are organizing transportation in 30 cities to make sure that people who can’t legally drive don’t take any kind of risks. Voces knows that this has really been a tradition with some of the largest marches and strikes in the history of the state of Wisconsin. And it’s been a very important tool for us to leverage political demands at critical moments. And we are certainly in one of those moments, perhaps the greatest moment.”