MADISON, Wis. – Today, the Wisconsin Legislative Socialist Caucus, legislative allies, and advocates for Wisconsin’s immigrant communities released a package of bills addressing the fear and chaos stoked by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) agents throughout Wisconsin.
The “Keep Families Together” package would fund immigration defense work, prevent government actors from acting while masked and unidentified, prohibit the use of state, county or city facilities for detaining people based solely on their immigration status, and ban agreements appropriating local government resources for immigration enforcement, among other protections.
The Wisconsin Legislative Socialist Caucus (Rep. Ryan Clancy, Rep. Francesca Hong, Rep. Darrin Madison, Rep. Christian Phelps) released the following statement:
“As socialists, we know our communities are safest when people’s real, urgent needs are met by fully funding public education, providing everyone with the healthcare they need, and making housing a human right. By ensuring that our neighbors are welcome, treated with dignity, and given the resources they need to thrive, we make Wisconsin stronger. We should all be spending our time, energy, and passion on that.
Instead, President Trump is commanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) to detain and deport people to fill his arbitrary quotas, almost always without a judge’s oversight, often while agents are masked and unidentified. This is textbook authoritarianism. Fascists always attack marginalized communities first, but they won’t stop there. Ultimately, attacks on our undocumented neighbors undermine everyone’s safety.
It’s our duty as legislators to act decisively and boldly in this new Trumpian crisis. We’re releasing this package of bills to clarify where we stand, as representatives of the people of Wisconsin: we demand that law enforcement and other government employees work for us, not ICE. We refuse to see public resources go towards private detention centers, a polite way to say “for-profit internment camps.” We cannot allow masked, unidentified people to terrorize our communities – whether they work for the federal government, or are merely pretending to.
We’re already joined by so many of our Democratic colleagues, who’ve helped shape these proposals and communicated their constituents’ fears and hopes to make them meet this moment. We’re grateful for their support, and remain hopeful that members of the majority will reexamine their hearts, change them, and join us too. We can put aside partisan politics in the interest of our common humanity, or we can continue the persecution of our neighbors, family members, and friends on the basis of their immigration status, instead of making a bit more space for people who simply want to live here, with us. We choose humanity.”
