Wisconsin city seeks White House help to manage surge of new migrants

 

WHITEWATER, Wis. (CBS 58) -- Inside The Community Space, there had already been bilingual signs and attempts to help Spanish speakers in the food pantry and clothing sections.

However, director Kristine Zaballos said around early 2022, the Whitewater nonprofit began to notice there were more people who seemingly had no idea how the space operates.

"We noticed that there were new people visiting the space who didn't really understand that they could come back repeatedly as they got settled," Zaballos said in an interview Thursday.

For officials in Whitewater, a city of about 15,000 in the far northwest corner of Walworth County, the strain has become far more severe.

On December 28, Police Chief Dan Meyer and City Manager John Weidl wrote a letter addressed to the White House and President Joe Biden.

The letter outlined how migrants, mainly from Nicaragua and Venezuela, began arriving in the city in early 2022. Now, there were an estimated 800 to 1,000 migrants in the city, and it was draining municipal services.

"Communication, transportation, housing and documentation/identification concerns are some of the top obstacles that we have been addressing," the letter read.

Meyer and Weidl wrote they weren't reaching out as a way of "denigrating or vilifying this group of people," adding they saw "great value in the increasing diversity" the migrants would bring.

Still, they outlined a number of challenges. Police noted they were now seeing three times as many unlicensed drivers, which has made it much harder to police proactively. Language barriers and trust issues led to longer investigation times. Some of the serious offenses involving migrants included a kidnapping, sexual assaults and the death of an infant.

The Whitewater officials called for federal funding that allow for new hires at the police department and for the city to have a full-time "immigrant liaison."

Zaballos said the number of visitors to the space hadn't grown dramatically, going from 25,438 visitors to 2021 to 22,252 in 2022 to 24,866 in 2023.

Still, the number of new migrants meant lots of people didn't know what to do when picking out food and clothes, and Zaballos said that led to some chaotic scenes.

"I'm not gonna lie, we did close for two weeks at one point just to sort of re-assess how we were serving the needs of everybody," Zaballos said. "Sometimes, we felt we had people who were maybe taking more than they needed just because they didn't know they could come back."

Zaballos also emphasized that while The Community Space is next to the Democratic Party of Walworth County's office, the nonprofit has no connection to the political chapter.

Why Whitewater?

When asked if he knew why so many of the migrants were settling on Whitewater, Meyer said it was a "complex question" to answer.

The police chief went on to say city leaders believe it all ties back to the COVID-19 pandemic. As classes went virtual for an extended period, housing that would typically by taken up by students was sitting vacant.

"Around that time a few families came here from Central America," Meyer wrote in an email Thursday. "Those families then became sponsor families for individuals who were crossing the US/Mexico border."

Meyer said those sponsor families could then have other relatives taken into Whitewater by bus after they'd been flown to a major city nearby.

"That process happened many times and caused the population of immigrants to grow relatively quickly," Meyer said.

When asked if the city has gotten any communication from either the state or federal governments about aid that would be coming, Meyer said it had not.

Steil among House Republicans at border

Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Wis.) represents Whitewater in congress, and he is among the more than 60 House Republicans who traveled to the southern border this week to draw attention to a surge in migrant traffic.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data, there were more than 250,000 migrant encounters at the southwest border in December. It was the fifth straight month with more than 230,000 encounters. Prior to last August, CBP data show only two other months ever recorded with more than 230, 000 encounters; those were April and May of 2022.

Steil said the reason for the trip was to demonstrate the need for Congress and the Biden administration to prioritize border security over any other aspect of immigration policy.

"There's a couple of things that we need to do. One, you gotta clean up the mess. But first and foremost, you gotta turn off the spigot," Steil said in an interview Thursday. "And you turn off the spigot by actually putting in place border security policies that allow us to secure the border."

A bipartisan group of Senators is trying to package a deal that would beef up border security while also making the legal immigration process easier. That package would also include money for Israel and Ukraine.

Local immigration advocates, including some who have recently met with White House officials, have maintained immigration policy reform, such as fast-tracking work permits, would help steer migrants toward legal means of entry.

Steil said the group of House Republicans would not take up policy until after there's more funding for border security, including more asylum judges.

"We have broken legal immigration system. We have a broken illegal immigration system," Steil said. "The illegal immigration system has gotten so bad that we have to solve that first."

The Biden administration has continued to defend its $14 billion proposal to address the border, which includes funding for surveillance and more judges but doesn't include some of the detention and deportation measures Republicans seek.

"The president understands that there's a problem at the border," White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at a briefing Thursday. "He put forth, on his first day, something to deal with that problem."

The state of state planning

As for whether the state is prepared for planes or busses carrying migrants making unannounced stops in Wisconsin, which has been happening for months in Chicago and in Rockford on Sunday, Gov. Tony Evers' spokesperson, Britt Cudaback, said the administration has been "planning and coordinating with partners on this topic for some time."

For specifics, Cudaback referred to the Department of Children and Families (DCF) and Wisconsin Emergency Management (DMA.)

A DCF spokesperson said migrants who don't arrive through sanctioned programs, like the refugee resettlement program, are not eligible to receive state aid. The agency said it was working to help migrants find resources within the communities in which they settled.

Andrew Beckett, a DMA spokesperson, said DMA had begun planning around the issue of migrant arrivals in the fall of 2022.

"Those efforts have included multiple meetings with state and local partners to help develop plans and a response framework," Beckett wrote in an email Thursday. "WEM also hosted a tabletop exercise for state and local partners in May of 2023."

Beckett added the agency has not received a request for state resources from Whitewater.