Voces de la Frontera Continues to Fight for Immigrant Communities: The Detentions Continue (Part 2 of 2)
The staff and volunteers of Voces de la Freontera’s Madison office: Pablo Ortiz, Karen Romo, Iris Christensen, Itzhel Velazquez Rubio, and Luis Velasquez.
by Jonathan Gramling
At the beginning of 2026, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was aggressively rounding up immigrants in Minneapolis wearing masks. They were almost like an occupying army, often ignoring people’s rights. While the Trump administration stated that they were rounding up immigrants with criminal records, in fact the vast majority had no records. It seemed that ICE’s approach was to round up everyone “who looked foreign” and sort it out later. Two Minneapolis citizens were killed by ICE agents and many more injured.
This very visible approach began to turn the majority Americans against the Trump administration’s aggressive approach. A change in ICE’s leadership was made and it appeared that fewer visible confrontations were occurring. The issue of ICE enforcement seemed to fade from the media spotlight and a sense of quiet occurred. But the detentions and ICE raids continued.
Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant defense action group based in Wisconsin, feels that the recent immigration detentions have been as a result of 287g agreements between county sheriffs and ICE. Dane County is not one of them.
“70 percent of the detentions are happening through that pipeline of the local jails,” said Luis Velasquez, who leads Voces’ Madison-based effort. “Most of them are immigrants who are going from home to work who don’t have the drivers license. That’s a significant issue. That’s why things seem to be quiet. But they are still detaining folks who end up in their local jails. These are people detained by the local sheriff and then they inform ICE who picks them up.”
But it appears that there is no rhyme or reason why others are being picked up.
“For right now, it does seem like it was a shift,” Velasquez said about the low-key ICE effort. “They are still coming to our communities. But it hasn’t been like the beginning of the year, how it was done in Minneapolis. But there still is this shadow where people think, ‘Oh, it’s just targeted. They must have an issue. They must have a criminal record.’ But the facts that we are collecting, what we know is that is not the case. Their own data shows that 70 percent of their detainees didn’t have criminal backgrounds.”
The intent, so it appears, is to instill fear in immigrant communities.
“What we are noticing is this spontaneous, chaotic enforcement that is not making sense,” Velasquez said. “It’s not following a precedent. It’s just so scattered. That has created more fear. And we don’t know if it is intentional or unintentional? Is this intentional to create more terror and anxiety so that people will just self-deport themselves and leave. And that is the data that they are showing. Last I heard, about a million people were deporting themselves, leaving the U.S. This campaign, in many ways, has been working unfortunately.”
In addition to targeting who have allegedly entered the U.S. illegally, the Trump administration is now stripping away the status of some people who entered the U.S. legally, which adds another layer of fear.
“There has been a massive overhaul of TPS, Temporary Protected Status,” Velasquez said. “Salvadorians and Venezuelans have lost those protections. People have had their status stripped away. People who have come to this country and have followed the process. But essentially their protection is stripped away. And that leaves them vulnerable for deportation. We know that with DACA as well. There’s been folks who applied for that and are facing deportation because their permit hasn’t been renewed. They submitted their permit on time and are waiting to receive word from USCIS. I think the systematic way of stripping away these protections have put people in danger. People who don’t have these protections are at risk of ICE enforcing their deportation.”
Voces is undertaking or are a part of a number of efforts to combat the impact of ICE and keep fear to a minimum. One of their biggest weapons is 1-800-427-0213, Voces’ 24/7 hotline.
“It is a 24/7 hotline for ICE sightings and ICE detentions,” Velasquez said. “The operators are folks who are volunteers who are trying to do their best to be in solidarity. ‘Hey, I want to do something meaningful for the community.’ And so we have about 47 operators who are managing the hotline. We have community verifiers, folks who are taught to be legal observers, to document, to make sure there is a video or a picture because we know that they allege certain things and then the facts are showing otherwise. Sometimes it’s not what is happening, but the perception of what is happening. People are fearful. They hear something. ‘It’s ICE.’ So for us, we make sure that we are sharing the facts. ‘No, that wasn’t ICE.’ Or ‘Yes it was ICE. It was a specific case.’”
Knowledge is power and so Voces has been educating immigrants about their rights.
“We continue to do Know Your Rights trainings for community members who are at risk,” Velasquez said. “We are also doing Power of Attorney clinics that are able to prepare folks and make sure that they know what they need. And then the Court Accompaniment Program has been huge. It’s for folks who have their appointment in Milwaukee, either with USCIS or with ICE, making sure that there is a companion who is trained, who can take them to where they need to be and to be that moral support. That has been huge. So we continue to make sure that folks know their rights.”
Voces is also working with its partner organizations to provide some legal representation.
“Madison has been very pivotal in making sure that if there is a neighbor who is picked up that the family is able to have the legal support and the Community Immigration Law Center and Centro have been very pivotal with that,” Velasquez said. “They make sure that we stick together, that we are able to provide the support that families need.”
And then there are the grassroots mutual aid organizations that are springing up to provide support and resistance.
“The neighborhood organizing has been essential because it has created a decentralized structure,” Velasquez said. “It isn’t just Voces. There are different organizations. The neighborhoods are organizing. There’s just the power that has been building around these issues that have been threatening the community. Madison has stood up in a real way. That has made me very grateful for living here in Madison, just the level of solidarity, the level of coordination within a decentralized structure. But at the same time, there is coordination. And we have been able to stand up with our immigrant neighbors.”
And there has been a positive impact on the lives of immigrants living Wisconsin.
“We have these wonderful stories of reunions, folks who have been detained,” Velasquez said. “We have this fellow José who was detained over eight months at the Dodge County jail. He’s an asylum seeker. We don’t know why ICE picked him up. And through the advocacy and the legal support that he got, he was released just recently and was reunited with his wife who had a medical issues.’
And there was one closer to home.
“There is one person in Dane County that we were able to witness the reunion here,” Velasquez said. “This shouldn’t be happening, but it is happening. There was an asylum seeker, about 24-25-years-old. She was following through the process. And she was detained for 2-3 months. Her partner is a U.S. citizen. And she works for a local cup cake shop in Middleton. The business owner and the community were supporting her. They asked why she was detained. She hadn’t committed a crime. She also was freed.”
While the U.S. has a need for immigrants, documented and undocumented, because of the dictates of regional and global labor markets and regional migration patterns — U. S. citizens are continuously migrating to Mexico, the Caribbean and South America — policy does not reflect reality. While the need for Voces de la Frontera has been evident for decades, with the Trump administration anti-immigrant of color efforts, the need for Voces is bigger than it has ever been.
