'Which shall rule — wealth or man; which shall lead — money or intellect?' asked a former Wisconsin Supreme Court chief justice | Getty Images Creative

Does it matter to Wisconsin voters that Elon Musk is trying to buy a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court? Maybe not to “Scott A.” as Musk called him, the Green Bay voter to whom Musk gave $1 million as part of his campaign to reward Wisconsinites who sign a petition against “activist judges,” while at the same time handing over their personal data to Musk. Scott A.’s haul is one-fifth the size of Musk’s $20 million investment in campaign ads and door-knocking to support his preferred candidate, Brad Schimel. 

And Musk’s $20 million spending spree accounts for about one-fifth of the total, record-breaking $100 million that makes the April 1 contest the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history.

The race is a test of many things: Whether Musk, serving as unelected and unpopular co-president to Donald Trump, is a political asset or a liability; whether the new liberal majority on the Wisconsin Supreme Court will endure; whether the highest bidder is destined to win state court races even as the ad war becomes a blitzkrieg; whether three months into the Trump administration, amid mass firings, the dismantling of federal agencies and voter unease about the destruction of their health care and retirement security, Wisconsin might be the place where things begin to turn around. 

The money pouring into the Supreme Court race is obscene and a bad sign for the health of democracy regardless of next week’s outcome. But the sickness didn’t flare up overnight. It has been getting steadily worse for almost two decades.

Schimel makes the claim that he is running to restore the Court’s “impartiality,” motivated by his disgust at how “political” the Court’s new liberal majority has become. In truth, the politicization of the Court goes back almost two decades and Schimel, a highly partisan Republican, is an unlikely candidate to take us back to pre-partisan times. On the other side, Susan Crawford is backed by the Democrats and big out of state donors including George Soros. In a recent debate she conceded that the public has an interest in ethics rules that would require judges to recuse themselves from cases involving their donors, but the current rules don’t require that. Neither candidate has promised to recuse from such cases.

The turning point that led us to the current moment came in 2008. That was the year disgraced former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman defeated incumbent Justice Louis Butler in a dirty campaign that broke all previous spending records. The race cost $6 million — at the time, an astounding sum.

Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, Gableman’s biggest-spending supporter, paid for ads calling Butler “Loophole Louie” and accusing him of being soft on crime. Gableman himself ran a disgusting ad that placed Butler’s face next to the mugshot of a convicted rapist. Both men were Black. The ad misleadingly claimed that Butler “found a loophole” and let the man out of prison “to molest another child.” In fact, Butler was not the judge in the case. As a public defender assigned to defend his client, he lost in court and his client was imprisoned, then later reoffended after he was released, having served his full sentence. 

Gableman went on to help destroy ethics rules on the Court, refusing to recuse himself from cases involving WMC, which had spent more than $2 million to help elect him. He played a key role in passing the current ethics rule allowing justices to decide for themselves whether to recuse in cases involving their big-money campaign contributors. 

Gableman embarrassed supporters, including Dodge County District Attorney Steven Bauer, who publicly withdrew his support during the campaign because of the attack ad. Tellingly, after he left the Court, Gableman disappeared, never landing a job at a law firm or in public service. His brief return to the limelight, as Assembly Speaker Robin Vos’s chief investigator of nonexistent voter fraud, featured Gableman threatening to jail the mayors of Democratic cities and wasting more than a million taxpayer dollars on a farcical investigation that ended when Vos fired him.  

But the damage done by Gableman and the people who poured money into electing him endures.

The 2025 Supreme Court race, which is on track to double the cost of the last record-breaking election in 2023, is 15 times as costly as Gableman’s expensive and shamefully politicized campaign. 

Ads featuring scary crime stories are still a major feature of Supreme Court races, sponsored by people who know and don’t care that tough-on-crime issues aren’t coming before the Court. Instead, the ads are paid for by ideological groups, political parties and corporations interested in favorable treatment — like Musk, who has a current lawsuit in Wisconsin seeking to overturn a state law blocking him from opening Tesla dealerships here.

Back in 1873, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Ryan worried about the rise of the robber barons, their accumulation of vast personal wealth and with it political power. Speaking at the University of Wisconsin Law School, he posed the question:  “Which shall rule — wealth or man; which shall lead — money or intellect; who shall fill public stations — educated and patriotic free men, or the feudal serfs of corporate capital?”

We are well on our way to becoming a nation of feudal serfs to Elon Musk. The liquidation of government agencies and institutions that serve the public interest are a giant step in that direction. The Wisconsin Supreme Court election will take us further down that road, or move us in the opposite direction. But until we do something about the arms race in campaign spending, Ryan’s vision of government by “educated and patriotic free men (and women)” will be increasingly out of reach.

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Open records and access to government is important for government transparency and trust. (Photo from www.sunshineweek.org)

A legacy of Wisconsin’s progressive tradition is its strong open records law, which compels the government to conduct its business in full view of the public and respond promptly to citizen demands for records from state agencies, public schools, city halls and police departments.

Just before Sunshine Week, this week’s annual mid-March public education campaign celebrating the importance of open records and freedom of information, the Wisconsin Examiner proudly accepted the 2025 Media Openness Award from the Wisconsin Freedom of Information Council for our reporters’ work forcing police department records into the open. 

Attorney Tom Kamenick, who runs the Wisconsin Transparency Project, the state’s only open records focused law firm, won settlements in two cases, against the city of Black River Falls and the Wauwatosa Police Department, and both government entities changed their policies so that future public records requests will be met expeditiously and without burdensome fees.

The city of Black River Falls attempted to charge more than $4,000 to fulfill reporter Henry Redman’s request for records regarding the disappearance and death of a Native American man whose family doubted police accounts of his apparent suicide. The family members were told by city staff that city officials advised them to ignore the family’s pleas for more information about their loved one’s death.  

“So when we brought the lawsuit, yes, it was about making the request a little cheaper than $4,400,” Redman said in accepting the award at the March 6 Wisconsin Newspaper Association dinner. “But it was also about changing the system in a small corner of the state, so people in Black River Falls, reporters and citizens alike, can turn a critical eye on their local government officials and help families like my sources get answers.”

Sharing the award was Isiah Holmes who, in a separate lawsuit, sued the Wauwatosa Police Department for failing to respond in a timely manner to his records requests filed in 2020 and 2021, “that the Tosa PD had essentially just decided to just not respond to — to ignore,” Holmes said. 

As part of the settlement, the department released hundreds of emails as well as interrogation video. 

“It’s not just about our requests,” said Holmes. “It’s about anyone who has to go to the Tosa PD, for example, people who may not have the knowledge or resources that we have as journalists. And actually, it’s kind of an act of bravery, depending upon what agency you’re dealing with, to go up and even ask for records.” Hopefully, he added, “we helped make that process a little bit easier for people.”

Sunshine Week had its beginnings shortly after 9/11 when, in the name of national security, the government began to make all kinds of previously available information secret. 

Tim Franklin, the editor of the Orlando Sentinel, noticed that data and information that was once readily available was disappearing from government websites. “Suddenly, we’re seeing government secrecy at an all-time high,” Franklin is quoted as saying on the official Sunshine Week website. “It was becoming an issue that was unchecked because anytime it was questioned, the response was “it’s a matter of national security.’”

Even the Florida state Legislature started passing government secrecy bills at an alarming clip. 

Standing up to that pressure, as a group of journalists and First Amendment advocates in Florida did, is critical to the health of our democracy. But that’s not always clear to the public.

In moments of moral panic, whether over an imaginary communist menace during the McCarthy era or a fictitious “invasion” of violent criminals from other countries in our current moment, people forget that defending free speech, dissent, and public scrutiny of government are essential to our liberty and democracy.

As we enter a dark period in American history, with a president who took office and immediately began flouting the law, ransacking federal agencies, letting an unelected billionaire seize citizens’ private data, deporting people without due process, and promising to use the full force of the federal government to persecute his enemies, we need sunshine on the activities of our elected officials more than ever. 

Thank God for journalists and citizens who are willing to commit those little acts of bravery Holmes describes. Those watchdogs will help see us through to a brighter day. 

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At a protest on Saturday at the Capitol in Madison, a man who asked to be identified only as Tony said he was worried about cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

It was a blustery, grey Saturday afternoon on March 15 as about 40 people wearing togas, carrying signs and waving upside-down American flags gathered on the steps of the Capitol in Madison to protest Donald Trump, Elon Musk and the current administration’s assault on democracy. 

The Madison rally, part of a loosely organized nationwide effort launched by the 5051 Movement, was one in a series of 50 protests held in 50 states on a specific day. The theme on this day was the “Ides of March” — hence the togas and signs denouncing Trump and Musk as American Caesars.

“I am tired of bullies in our state and in our national government,” said a white-haired man who asked to be identified by only his first name, Tony. “I think they’ve lost the whole idea of what our government is all about.” Threatened cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the withdrawal of U.S. support for Ukraine’s effort to repel Russia’s invasion were among the issues that brought him to the protest.

“I’m old,” said Ann Kimber, 70, explaining why she showed up to the Capitol in her wheelchair. “I get Medicare. My daughter’s on Medicaid. And I know some people who need their VA benefits. I want people to know we’re concerned they might go away.”

Kimber organized a Facebook group of Fitchburg seniors, she said, because she felt there was nothing happening to resist the dangerous assault on the federal government by the Trump administration. She was optimistic that protests were having an effect, causing the administration to backtrack on some of its planned cuts. “I think each group that has some stake in the matter should be out there protesting all the time,” she said.

Kimber recalled the massive 2011 protests against former Republican Gov. Scott Walker, whose attack on public employee unions and drastic cuts to education propelled tens of thousands of Wisconsinites to mount historic rallies at the Capitol. She said she thought Trump and Musk, like Walker, would suffer an inevitable public backlash because of their arrogance, acting like kings. “If they would have been a little more subtle about it they would get farther,” she said. 

Madison, home to one of the top research institutions in the country, stands to lose $65 millions as Trump takes a meat cleaver to National Institutes of Health funding, with dire ripple effects for the state’s economy and for critical progress on everything from curing childhood cancer to dementia.

But unlike the 2011 Wisconsin uprising against Walker, the public response to the stunning aggression of Trump and Musk has been eerily quiet. Some of the Madison protesters said they thought too many people were intimidated about speaking out, especially after the high-profile arrest of Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian protest organizer Mahmoud Khalil, who was taken from his apartment in New York earlier this month and held under threat of deportation at a detention center in Louisiana.

“If they’re gonna start arresting people for the stuff they say … that’s fascism 101,” said Julie Mankowski, who helped organize the Madison event and showed up wearing a king-size bedsheet. “When the first person disappears, if there’s not enough outrage, it becomes no resistance at all, just fear,” she added.

People of various ages and backgrounds joined the march, including “a lot of faces I haven’t seen,” said Mankowski, “a lot of people with diverse concerns, but the real theme seems to be this is not what our country is about.”

After chanting on the State Street corner of the Capitol for a while, the group made a lap of the Capitol square, flags flying, led by a cheerful young man with a megaphone who chanted, “Fascists out of the White House!”

A couple of self-appointed marshals stopped at each intersection, facing traffic as the group crossed the street. One young man had a handgun in a holster on his hip and a “defend equality” patch on his shoulder with the image of a military-style assault rifle against an LGBTQ pride flag. The jarring suggestion of violence was muted by the jolly mood of the gathering. Cars honked and passers-by accepted handbills promoting free speech.

The Ides of March theme had shifted to free speech, explained Carrie McClung, another toga-clad protest organizer, after Khalil’s arrest.  “I hope more people start coming out,” McClung added. “I know people are frustrated. I know people are angry. And I hope it encourages people — this is our right to be out here.” 

The first popular test of the Trump/Musk regime will take place in Wisconsin on April 1, in a state Supreme Court race Musk has spent millions to try to buy. Some protesters carried signs supporting Judge Susan Crawford in that race and opposing Musk-backed candidate Brad Schimel. The race has garnered national attention since,  as The Wall Street Journal reports, it will show whether Musk could be a political liability for Republicans.

Buoyed by all the honks of encouragement and  thumbs-up from passing pedestrians, the Madison protesters wound up back on the corner of State Street where they bopped to tunes on a boom box.

While Democrats and much of the public have been too shocked and disoriented by the scale of Trump’s assault on democracy to react, the ragtag group stood out in the wind, trying to spark a movement. 

In fact, this spring, signs of a bigger backlash have begun to appear, including a 3,500-person rally with Bernie Sanders at UW-Parkside in Kenosha earlier this month, where an additional 500 people were reportedly turned away from a packed arena. Videos of Sanders’ Fighting Oligarchy tour have gone viral. The same weekend as the small Ides of March Madison protest,  I heard a gravelly Brooklyn accent coming through my teenager’s bedroom door.

“From the bottom of my heart, I am convinced that they can be beaten,” Sanders said of the billionaires taking a chainsaw to the social safety net and Hoovering up the wealth of our nation. “Despair is not an option.”

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Sunrise over Orizaba, Mexico, seen from the Cerro del Borrego nature preserve. | Photo by Mercedes Falk. Courtesy Puentes/Bridges

In Tlaquilpa, a mountain village in the clouds, women wearing long skirts and colorful blouses walked to mass. Outside a colonial church with bright orange and yellow walls, a crowd of people holding Baby Jesus dolls celebrated Candelaria, the February holiday that combines Catholic and pre-Hispanic traditions, marking the end of the Christmas season and the beginning of spring.

Shuan Duvall, a retired Spanish teacher from Alma, Wisconsin, and her husband Jamie, a retired judge, rolled past the church on Feb. 2 with a truckload of other U.S. visitors and stopped in front of a small restaurant. The owners, Maximino Sanchez and Gabina Cuaquehua, have two sons in Minnesota, who’ve been away from home for more than 20 years. Shaun got to know the sons when she was working as a translator on dairy farms in western Wisconsin and Minnesota. Later, she and Jamie became godparents to their U.S.-born children. 

Sanchez and Caquehua greeted the Duvalls in their living area downstairs from the restaurant and performed an impromptu ceremony, lighting incense and hanging flower leis around the Duvalls’ necks while reciting prayers.

“We thank you because you are like second parents for my grandchildren,” Cuaquehua said. “You help them and accompany them on the path of life.”

“I ask that over there you take care of our children as if you were their parents,” said Sanchez. “You’re there in person, not like a video call or a cellphone call, which isn’t the same.”

The Duvalls were surprised and moved, still wearing the flower leis around their necks and wiping tears from their eyes when they met up with the rest of the group outside the restaurant.

Shaun Duvall described the experience as an honor. By becoming a godparent to the family’s children, she said, she hoped to honor them, too, for “all the things they go through, the struggles and sacrifices and also the joy, because there is real joy.”

The same motivating idea drives Puentes/Bridges, the nonprofit she started while working as a translator, to help build cultural understanding between Midwestern dairy farmers and the families of their Mexican workers.

Duvall has helped a lot of people, fostering better communication and better relationships between farmers and the immigrants they employ, connecting workers with medical care and helping them get away from abusive bosses and partners, and sharing her appreciation of the people of Mexico with a whole generation of Midwesterners who have had life-changing experiences going on the trips she organized for two decades, before she retired a few years ago from the organization she founded.

“I don’t think what I did was that big. I helped people out when they needed help – who wouldn’t do that?” she said. “It’s some kind of connection that goes beyond helping people — [to say] you are a treasured, precious person in my life.”

That spirit of warmth on Duvall’s part, and on the part of Mexican families who’ve put their trust in her and in the Midwestern dairy farmers who employ their loved ones, shines like a beacon in our current political moment, when the ostentatious cruelty of the Trump administration threatens to stomp out the quiet virtues of compassion and human connection.

The most remarkable thing about the relationship between Midwestern dairy farmers and the Mexican immigrants who work on their farms is not the economic ties that bind these two groups of rural people, or the astounding amount of money the workers contribute to the economies of both Mexico and the U.S. Instead, it’s the realization that getting to know and care for each other can transform and enrich our lives. 

Carrie Schiltz has had that transformative experience. Her Lutheran congregation in Rushford, Minnesota helped put Octavio Flores — a relative of the same family that honored the Duvalls — through forestry school. Schiltz learned of Flores through his sister, who is a member of her congregation, which has made it a mission to build relationships with immigrants in the area. 

During the Puentes/Bridges trip, Flores shared what he’d learned with Schiltz and the rest of the group, taking them to see the dramatic Cascada de Atlahuitzia waterfall and explaining his work on a project to restore biodiversity in the national park around the Pico de Orizaba volcano and with the Sembrando Vida program, a reforestation effort through which the Mexican government pays farmers to plant trees and preserve local plant species.

Part of the goal of Sembrando Vida (“sowing life”) is to help people in rural areas stay in Mexico, instead of migrating to the U.S. to support their families.

Mexican economist Luis Rey says there is a need for more such efforts to to help keep Mexican families together. “There is no value, in Western economics, placed on the grief of a mother whose children go to the U.S. to work and leave her alone. Her loss means nothing in mainstream economic terms.” Rey, who teaches at the University of Oaxaca, has students from rural villages who work on projects to preserve local culture in their communities, including recording local, indigenous songs and dances in order to preserve them. That form of cultural wealth and community cohesion should be valued as much as monetary earnings, he believes. But staying in your village in Mexico can also mean living in poverty. 

One of Rey’s students worked to convert an abandoned building in his town into an arts center, where he offered music lessons. The community center he created was a triumph, giving local musicians, dancers and artists a place to share and pass on their art. For his final project, the student gave a performance, Rey recalled, “And I noticed he had used a black marker to color in his socks so no one would notice the holes in his shoes.” 

José Tlaxcala, a builder who worked in Oregon framing houses for several years, returning to Mexico after he injured his spine, said something nagged at him from his time working in the U.S. “When I was helping to clean out and demolish houses in Oregon, three times we cleaned out houses where elderly people lived, and they died horribly, all alone. The houses were full of garbage, alcohol bottles, rotten food. That’s not how I thought people ended their lives in the U.S. I think of people there having a higher standard of living. But the young people had moved away and left these older adults, who died all alone in horrible conditions. Here, older people live with their families. What do you think about that?”

There is no one right answer to the question of how to live a good life. But the hollow triumphalism of the current president of the richest nation on Earth, proclaiming the supremacy of wealth and power by terrorizing immigrants and threatening to inflict maximum suffering on the most powerless people among us is a sure sign that we have lost our way.

In her many years of work building bonds between rural people in the U.S. and Mexico, Duvall has come to see the human relationships she’s watched develop as “sacred” — although she feels a bit self-conscious about using that word.

“Mexican traditional culture can be deeply sacred,” she said, reflecting on the moving ceremony binding her to the grandparents of her Mexican godchildren. “Those bonds are so important — way more important than money.” But there is also plenty of cruelty to be found in Mexico, she added. It’s a profoundly unequal society. The U.S. is quickly moving in the same direction.

People everywhere have the capacity for both good and evil, Duvall said. “Maybe the challenge in life is to really emphasize the sacred aspects of ourselves, so we can kind of evolve away from the cruelty.”

This story is Part Four in a four-part series. Read Part One: Amid Trump’s threats to deport workers, Wisconsin dairy farmers travel to Mexico Part Two: A deceased farmworker’s son finally returns to Mexico to meet his father’s family and Part Three: Deportation threats give people pause, but not for long, Mexican workers say

José Tlaxcala worked framing houses in Salem, Oregon, until he sustained a spinal injury and moved back to San Juan Texhuácan. People will continue crossing the border to work in the U.S., regardless of what politicians say, because of 'economic necessity' he says. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

VERACRUZ, MEXICO — President Donald Trump’s threats to deport millions of Mexicans who are working in the U.S. without authorization does not have a large number fleeing the U.S. in fear, nor will it stop Mexican citizens from crossing the border to find work, according to many residents who shared their stories with the Wisconsin Examiner.

“Yes, it has put the brakes on things a bit, I know people who were thinking of going and now they’re waiting,” said Fatima Tepole, who worked on a dairy farm in Minnesota for four years, earning money to build her house and start a school supply store in San Juan Texhuácan. “Of course it caused people to pause. It now costs $15,000 to cross the border. If they send you back? Of course you are going to stop and think about that.”

But, she added. “They are going to try again when things calm down. It’s inevitable.”

Tepole’s friend Blanca Hernández, a teacher at a bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl school, agreed. She crossed the border to work in the U.S. three times, smuggling herself in the trunk of a car and nearly suffocating on her way to take a factory job in North Carolina and returning two more times to milk cows in Wisconsin. She saved enough money to build her house and buy a car before returning home. “Yes, there are people who are afraid now,” she said. “But Mexicans are stubborn. They are going to keep immigrating.”

José Tlaxcala says no politician in either country has changed the underlying drivers of immigration. “People in Mexico continue to think about going to the U.S. to work because of economic necessity,” he said.

In his opinion, that’s the Mexican government’s fault. “The Mexican government isn’t doing enough. There’s not enough good work for the people,” Tlaxcala said. In the area where he lives, around San Juan Texhuácan, most people work in agriculture, growing coffee and corn, partly for subsistence and partly to sell. But the prices for agricultural products are very low. “It’s not enough to support a family,” Tlaxcala explained

A Stateline analysis of U.S. Census community survey data in 2018 found a sudden drop in the Mexican immigrant population in the U.S. between 2016 and 2017. More than 300,000 people went home that year, which experts attributed to deportation threats in the first Trump administration as well as improving job prospects in Mexico. Mexicans still represent the largest group of immigrants living in the U.S., but their numbers have been declining for more than a decade, from a peak of 11.7 million in 2010 to 10.91 million in 2023.

It’s too soon to tell if the second Trump administration, with its even more aggressive focus on rooting out immigrants, pushes down those numbers more.

But anecdotally, at least among dairy workers in the Midwest, that doesn’t seem to be the case — at least for now. 

“The concern was significantly more in the last Trump administration,” says Wisconsin dairy farmer John Rosenow, who has 13 employees from Mexico. “Especially people with families were afraid of being deported and separated from their children. Farmers were typically running three or four people short … I haven’t seen that this time.” 

High-profile immigration raids in the second Trump administration have so far focused on major cities, including Chicago, New York, Denver and Los Angeles. Some people who worked in restaurants have been deported, and have been able to return to the villages Rosenow recently visited in rural Veracruz.

“I have a friend who was deported,” said Tepole. “He went to get food one day and they grabbed him and sent him back, just like that, after eight years. Luckily, he had already built his house.”

As Rosenow traveled among mountain villages, meeting family members of his dairy workers, he stopped to see a large cement house one of his current employees was building. Guadelupe Maxtle Salas was plastering a wall inside. He showed us the attached garage where Rosenow’s employee intends to set up shop as an auto mechanic when he finally returns. 

Maxtle Salas worked in the U.S. from the age of 14 until he was 19, he said. He milked cows on a dairy farm not far from Rosenow’s. He is thinking about going back to the U.S. after he finishes helping to build the house. He had applied for a work visa and then, when Trump took office, the app that allowed him to get the visa was abruptly cancelled. “I lost my chance,” he said. Now he thinks he might go illegally. “If I get there, I’ll look for you,” he told Rosenow.

Tlaxcala, 30, won’t be going back because of an injury that prevents him from resuming the heavy labor he did when he was in the U.S. He came back home one year ago. He was working in construction in Salem, Oregon, framing houses, when a beam fell on his back, fracturing two disks in his spine. 

He had been working abroad for five years, sending home money to support his family in San Juan Texhuácan. After the accident, he decided it was time to come home. 

He doesn’t blame his employer for what happened.

“After I hurt my back I couldn’t work. That’s the risk I took,” he said. “Unfortunately, I was working without insurance – illegally. My employer was not going to be responsible if I was hurt. I knew that.”

His employer paid the hospital bill. But Tlaxcala wasn’t eligible for unemployment benefits. Since returning home, he  hasn’t been able to afford medical attention to deal with continuing problems with his spine.

Immigrant workers who don’t have authorization in the U.S. are barred from receiving unemployment benefits even though they pay into the system through tax withholdings. According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, workers without authorization paid $1.8 billion into unemployment insurance, a joint federal and state program, in 2024. During the COVID-19 pandemic, 12 states created programs to temporarily provide unemployment benefits to excluded workers. Only Colorado has made its program permanent.

Asked if the risk he took to work without protection in the U.S. was worth it,  Tlaxcala laughed. “Maybe yes, maybe no,” he said.

“It depends on your situation. If you’re lucky nothing happens to you.”

It cost Tlaxcala $11,000 to cross the border, he said. “Obviously it was a big risk. You have to deal with organized crime in the north of the country to go through the desert. The cartels are still in control. Every person who crosses the border puts his life in the hands of the organized crime syndicates. It seems necessary to us. I know a lot of people who have died trying to cross.”

Like Tepole and Hernández, he doubts the deportation threats will have a big impact on Mexican workers. 

“It’s just politics,” he said. “It’s the same as in Mexico. Politicians say lots of things they don’t follow through with. Mexicans understand that.” For example, he said, for generations, Mexican politicians have said they are going to end poverty. “They don’t,” Tlaxcala said.

“When I was growing up I felt that I didn’t have things that I needed.” he added. “I had to go to school in broken down shoes. Sometimes I didn’t have shoes. I didn’t have a backpack, and I wore old, worn out clothing – for lack of money. I was determined to do something about that.”

Before he went to the U.S., Tlaxcala worked as a truck driver in Mexico. But the only way to get ahead, he said, is to start a business and it was all he could do to come up with the initial investment to get his store going. “I had to use all of the money I earned to pay off the bank. By working in the United States, little by little I could get ahead.”

After working abroad for five years, he was able to afford to pay off his debts, buy a house and finance his business, a small store. “Bank loans, credit — you can’t cover those things with a regular salary here,” he said.

Another reason Tlaxcala doesn’t believe millions of Mexicans will be deported, he said, is the sheer number of immigrants he saw when he was living in the U.S. “In Salem 30-40% of the population is Latino. I’d go to Walmart and see people from my village,” he said. “Plus, it’s very heavy work — construction, roofing — and it doesn’t pay well. They need people.”

In the U.S., 1 in 4 construction workers is an immigrant, according to a National Association of Home Builders report that emphasizes the industry’s reliance on immigrant labor as well as a significant labor shortage. “The concentration of immigrants is particularly high in construction trades essential for home building,” the report found, including plasterers and stucco masons (64%) drywall/ceiling tile installers (52%), painters, (48%) and roofers (47%).

By building houses in the U.S. so they can send home money to build houses in Mexico, Mexican workers are fueling the economies of both countries.

“I understand that there are people who do bad things and those people should be sent back,” said Tepole. “But the manual labor force that is strengthening the country? Most of them are Mexicans.”

This story is Part Three in a series. Read Part One: Amid Trump’s threats to deport workers, Wisconsin dairy farmers travel to Mexico and Part Two: A deceased farmworker’s son finally returns to Mexico to meet his father’s family

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After a long flight and a rugged overland journey, Julio Hernandez and dairy farmer Stan Linder approach the Hernandez family home in Mexico. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

TEPANZACUALCO, Mexico — Julio Hernandez wasn’t even a year old when he first visited this tiny mountain village in the Mexican state of Veracruz. 

He doesn’t remember the trip he took with his mom, to attend his father’s funeral.

At the end of January, the 21-year-old finally returned. This time his mom stayed at home and he was accompanied by Stan Linder, 83, a dairy farmer his father Federico once worked for in Pepin County.

For the last 24 years, Linder has made an annual trek to Tepanzacualco to visit the Hernández family, which has sent a procession of relatives up North to work on Linder’s farm. This year he was determined to bring Julio along.

Like most dairy farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota, Linder relies heavily on Mexican workers. The decades-long relationship of interdependence between rural Midwesterners and rural Mexicans has fostered not just economic but also social ties. Nowhere is the strength of those ties more visible than in the life of Julio Hernandez. 

Julio’s father, Federico, met and married Julio’s mother, a local woman whose family had lived in Wisconsin for generations, while he was working for Linder. One day in 2003, Federico went swimming with some friends in Lake George and drowned. It was Linder who showed up to tell Julio’s mother that her husband was gone. 

Fawn Hernandez, 42, remembers when Linder came to her door. “He said, ‘I got some news,’ and I was like, ‘What? Is Federico in trouble?’ And he said, ‘No, he passed away — drowned.’”

“I was married, widowed and had a kid all at the age of 21,” Fawn said.

Federico Hernández’ brothers and cousins chipped in to have his body sent home. Fawn remembers the difficulty of getting to the funeral. “They had to carry the casket down a hill on a goat trail, because the road washed out just before we got there.”

For the last 20 years Fawn has worked at the same McDonald’s restaurant in Menominee, raising Julio and taking care of her mother, both of whom live with her in a mobile home in Cedar Falls. Julio went to high school in nearby Colfax. He attended the community college in Chippewa Falls for three months before dropping out. Now he works summers on a crew pouring cement for the Pember Company in Menominee.

He knows some of his father’s family members who’ve put down roots in Wisconsin, including his cousin Emanuel Montalvo Tzanahua, who married a U.S. citizen and runs a successful barbershop in Arcadia. Another cousin still works on Linder’s farm and has two teenage sons both born in the U.S. (who plan to go to college in Minnesota). But he was nervous about the trip to meet his family in Mexico. It was the first plane ride he remembered, and the steep mountain roads alarmed him. In the back of the pickup truck on the rugged ride up the mountain to Tepanzacualco on a winding dirt road, he started to panic. 

“I’m not comfortable. I want to get out and walk. I don’t like this,” he said. Linder pounded on the truck until the driver stopped and dairy farmer John Rosenow came back and switched places with Hernandez, so he could ride the rest of the way in the front.

In Tepanzacualco, Hernandez and Linder hiked the last half mile up a steep footpath to the family home. The view was spectacular, with the sun shining on the valley below, cows and burros grazing in the fields and huge bunches of calla lilies sprouting along the path, as if plucked from a Diego Rivera painting.

As they drew close to the house, Julio’s grandmother, Paula Montalvo Cervantes Hernández, came out to embrace her grandson. “Mi hijo, mi hijo,” (My son, my son) she said, taking Julio’s face in her hands to gaze at him and then hugging him over and over.

One of his aunts said he looked just like his father.

Inside the house, a sign on the wall said “Bienvenidos” (“welcome”). Julio’s aunts and cousins were preparing a big meal, patting out handmade tortillas and cooking them on a wood-burning stove, alongside breaded fried chicken, green salsa and Spanish rice.

Julio sat at the table next to his grandmother and put his head on her shoulder. “My son, thank you for remembering us,” she said in Spanish.

“How could I forget?” he replied in English.

One of his aunts, Aurelia Hernández, commented approvingly, “His hair is very black. He doesn’t look like  a gringo.”

Her husband, Juan, came in and greeted Linder. He had worked on Linder’s farm for four years.

Julio handed his grandmother and aunt a baby picture of himself. They produced a large, framed photo of him from when he was a toddler and passed it around.

Julio said to everyone: “I’m glad to meet you and grateful to be part of your family.”

Linder translated.

“Gracias, gracias — mucho thank you!” said Julio’s grandmother, smiling broadly and patting his arm.

Julio began to cry. “Why is he sad?” his grandmother asked. 

“I feel like I’m home. I’m with my family,” Julio said through his tears.

Everyone listened to the translation, then responded in a chorus, “Awwww!”

When Julio asked if the family had anything of his father’s, one of the cousins went to another room and fetched an enormous suitcase Federico had used when he traveled to the U.S.

Julio and each of the family members took turns posing for pictures with the suitcase. 

Arnulfo, Julio’s 86-year-old grandfather, who came up to the house when Julio arrived from working in the fields, said, “Tell him I’ll give him some land to build his house, just choose where.”

“You can send money and they’ll build it for you,” Linder told Julio. That’s what many family members have done, saving up from their U.S. jobs and sending money home to build houses on the family’s property.

For Julio, who works during the summers in Wisconsin at his construction job, the idea of building a house to spend at least part of the year in the place where his father grew up, though surprising, didn’t sound that far-fetched. He turned it over in his head for the rest of the trip.

A house in Mexico can cost between $25,000 and $35,000 to build, workers told the Examiner. That’s a lot more reachable than in Wisconsin, where, according to the Wisconsin Realtors Association, the median home price in January was $293,000.

But the most striking thing for Julio about his trip, he said, was the unexpected feeling of being so welcomed by his father’s family. “I didn’t think they’d love me so much,” he said.

After lunch the family went outside and took photos in front of the ruins of an ancient pyramid which sits directly behind the house on the family’s land, never excavated by the Mexican government. Then Julio and Linder walked down the mountain to a house being built by Julio’s cousin who still works for Linder. She has been building it for the past two decades. In a couple of years, when her sons graduate from high school, Linder said, she intends to finally move back to Mexico. “That’s when I’ll retire,” he said.

Recently, Linder brought her sons down to meet the family for the first time. Like Julio, they were warmly embraced. 

Since he didn’t speak a word of Spanish, Julio relied on Linder and a translation app on his phone, to help him communicate during his visit.  “I feel like I’m missing a part of myself because I can’t speak the language,” he said.

On the second day of his visit, the whole family took a trip to the cemetery in San Juan Texhuacán where his father is buried. Julio laid flowers on the grave. 

Julio returns 

After three days with his family, Julio and Linder met up in Zongolica with the rest of a group from the U.S. led by Mercedes Falk, a translator on dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota and director of the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, which organized the trip. The whole extended family came along for a protracted, tearful goodbye.

“The thing I learned the most is they like it the way they have it,” Julio said, reflecting on the visit. “They care so much about family, they want to stay where they are. They’re willing to live on top of each other just to be with family. And for me, to be part of it? It’s something that will change my life forever.”

He wants to bring his mom to visit next year.

After taking a tour of the town and learning about the pre-Columbian history of Zongolica, Julio marveled, “They’ve been here for so long. Like longer than the United States – I like that.” He wished he’d asked more questions about the pyramid behind the Hernández family home.

Back in Wisconsin, after the trip was over, Julio was starting to lift weights to get in shape for the construction season. It’s hard work, he said. But now he has a new sense of purpose. After working summers in construction, he’d like to spend winters in Mexico.

He’s been staying in touch with his cousins on WhatsApp and using DuoLingo to try to learn Spanish. “I honestly thought about giving up, it’s been so difficult,” he said. “But I know I have to do it to be able to communicate with my family.” 

This story is Part Two in a series. Read Part One: Amid Trump’s threats to deport workers, Wisconsin dairy farmers travel to Mexico.

 

Mercedes Falk, executive director of the nonprofit Puentes/Bridges, which takes Midwestern dairy farmers to Mexico to meet their workers' families, talks with Teresa Juarez Tepole in her home | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

VERACRUZ, MEXICO — John Rosenow climbed into a pickup truck in Zongolica, a small city in rural southern Mexico, squeezing into the front with several friends and relatives from Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the back of the truck, six more people crowded onto benches, holding onto each other as the truck bounced over rutted dirt roads, climbing into the clouds as it traveled among little mountain villages in the state of Veracruz. The truck slowed down for a girl herding goats across the road and passed tiny wooden houses perched on the steep mountainside, with chickens in the yard and a few cows tied up by their horns.

“This never gets old,” said Rosenow, a 75-year-old dairy farmer from Waumandee, Wisconsin, who has made the same trip every winter since 2001, often joined by other dairy farmers who come to visit the families of their Mexican workers. He warned the group he might cry when he met up with some of his former employees. One current employee he’s particularly close to, Roberto, was contemplating moving home in December, but decided against it. “Man, that was the best Christmas present,” he said.

Along the way, the group saw wooden shacks with no indoor plumbing, dirt floors and tin roofs sitting next to big brick houses with shiny tile floors — the bigger houses built with money sent home by Mexican workers laboring in the U.S.

Economic interdependence and decades-long relationships have long bound dairy farmers in Wisconsin and nearby Minnesota to Mexican workers and their families. 

Of Rosenow’s 18 employees, 13 are from Mexico. That’s not unusual. Latin American workers, most of them from Mexico, perform an estimated 70% of the labor on Wisconsin dairy farms. The money they send home has lifted many of their families out of poverty. And without them, dairies like Rosenow’s would go belly-up. Yet almost all of the immigrant workers who milk cows in the U.S. lack legal status. That’s because, while the U.S. government provides visas for migrant workers who pick seasonal crops and for immigrants with specialized technical skills, there is no U.S. visa program for low-skilled labor in year-round industries like dairy.

In San Juan Texhuacán, about an hour up the mountain from Zongolica, Rosenow and the group visited Fatima Tepole, 42, who milked cows on a farm in Minnesota for four years, from 2012 to 2016, saving enough money to build a house next door to her parents and siblings and to start her business, a little school supply store. 

“Here the average worker can make 300 pesos a day,” (about $15) she said. “There you can make that much in an hour.” (Her estimate is close to what Mexican government data shows: Mexico’s average monthly salary is the equivalent of $297 U.S. dollars, or about $15 per day for a five-day workweek. Subsistence farmers in rural Veracruz generally make less and work longer hours.)

The visitors from the U.S. gathered in Tepole’s parents’ kitchen to learn how to make tortillas on a wood-burning stove. Then Tepole and her family served them a feast – meat stewed in green chili sauce with fresh tortillas and cheese and bean tostadas. Tepole had hosted many other Bridges groups over the years, including the farmer she worked for in Minnesota. “You’re the first Americans deported by Donald Trump!” she joked. 

Building a house — ‘our biggest dream’

Tepole’s sister-in-law, Celeste Tzanahua Hernández, 31, stood near the stove while the group ate. “We thank you for visiting us,” she said. “It’s good that other people know that we’re not all bad people — that people know and can value the work and sacrifices we are making.”

Tzanahua Hernández’s husband, who previously milked cows and now works at a sawmill, has been away from his two children, ages 5 and 12, for the last three and a half years while working in the U.S., she said. They expect him to return in a few months.

Waiting for him has been “a heavy emotional burden,” she said. But with the money he sends home, supplemented with her earnings as a preschool teacher, they’ve been able to build a home — a spacious, open-plan living area and modern kitchen attached to the compound where the extended family lives — buy a used car and afford school tuition, music lessons, tae kwon do, dental work and doctor’s appointments for the children.

When he comes home, her husband is planning to buy some equipment and set himself up in business as a builder.

Lately the family has been worried about Trump’s deportation threats.

“My husband saw ICE at a restaurant. It scared him a lot. That would not be the best way to have to come home,” Tzanahua Hernández said. “He has a car there. He wants to sell it. My dad is worried about what will happen if he goes to jail, or if he has to leave with no money — and how they treat immigrants on the border.”

The family has urged him to send home his valuables: “If he has some good shoes, good things, start sending them home so he doesn’t lose them,” Tzanahua Hernández said.

“He comforts us by saying that the situation is not so dangerous,” she added. “But we see the news reports — the young men who had recently arrived and now have been deported. … He says he feels better knowing that now our house is built, which was our biggest dream.”

Tepole and other Mexican workers estimated that it costs $25,000 to $35,000 to build a small house — the goal of many who are sending home money from jobs in the U.S. The strength of the dollar means the money people earn in the U.S. goes much farther in Mexico.

“For the first year you work there, you pay off your debt to cross the border,” Tepole said. Border crossings can cost between  $11,000 and $15,000, workers told the Examiner. “If you work really hard you can do that in seven or eight months,” Tepole said. “After another year, you have enough to start building. But you are also covering expenses for your family. So it depends on those expenses how far you get. After that, in two or three more years you can finish your house if you give it your all.”

“Young people can do it faster,” she added. “It takes more time if you are paying expenses for your kids.”

Money sent home to Mexico by workers in the U.S. is the country’s largest single source of foreign income — more than Mexico brings in from tourism, exports of manufactured products or petroleum sales. In 2023 Mexico received $63.3 billion in remittances from its citizens who labor in the U.S. — about 4.5% of total GDP — according to a recent report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Mexico ranks second only to India for the size of the contribution made by people working abroad to their home country’s economy. And the amount of money sent home by Mexican workers in the U.S. has increased dramatically in recent years, by roughly 32% between 2019 and 2023, according to the same report. Beyond covering families’ basic expenses, remittances drive economic development, “providing households with the means to save money and make investments in education, upskilling, and community improvement,” the report found.

On the U.S. side, undocumented workers pay about $97 billion in total taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. About $26 billion of that goes to fund Social Security and $6 billion for Medicare — programs from which those workers are excluded. “We shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking immigrants are taking money out of the pot,” says David Kallick, director of the Immigration Research Initiative in New York. His group has done a lot of research over the years “to show how immigration is a big contributor to the overall economic success of this country,” Kallick adds. “But the economic damage done by tearing people away from their jobs is even bigger.” 

“You’re talking about 19% of the labor force and $4.6 trillion in economic output,” Kallick says of immigrant workers’ overall contribution to the U.S. economy. Deporting the estimated 11 million workers in the U.S. without legal status would have devastating ripple effects from the loss of farms, restaurants, construction projects, home health care and child care, he says. “We have a broken immigration system that has made it possible for people to become very much part of the economy across the board, and yet to be trapped in the lowest wage jobs in every sector.” 

“The reality,” he adds, “is there are not enough U.S.-born people to take the place of millions of people doing these jobs who are undocumented.”

One unintended consequence of the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border is that workers without authorization who would otherwise go home to Mexico have stayed in the U.S. for longer stints in recent years, knowing that once they go home they might never be able to cross the border again to come back.

‘When they go, it’s sad’

Up the hill from Fatima Tepole’s house, her friend Teresa Juarez Tepole, age 48, has four adult children between the ages of 26 and 33 who are working in the U.S, while she takes care of their children. Mercedes Falk, a translator on about 20 dairy farms in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and the director of the nonprofit group Puentes/Bridges, which organized the trip to Mexico, told Teresa that the farmer one of her sons works for in Minnesota is “an incredible person,” who wants to give her son special training so he can advance in his job. Teresa was glad to hear it. “He has confidence in my son,” she said, smiling.

When her children were very small their father died, Teresa said, and she barely scratched out a living by taking in washing and making tortillas. Sometimes the family was hungry.

She couldn’t afford to send the children to school beyond the early grades. From the time they were little, they helped with the washing and making tortillas. Her oldest son started working in a bakery as a teenager. “They’d give him four or five loaves of bread and he would bring them home, because I couldn’t afford to buy bread,” she said.

Now they’ve all gone to the U.S. “to see their kids grow up, to give them an education, too, because here there’s no money.”

Her granddaughter is in secondary school. “I can’t read or write well, but I tell my granddaughter she has to study hard because her mother is suffering so she can study,” she said. 

Teresa’s 30-year-old daughter has been in the U.S. for the last three and a half years. She picked fruit for the first year and a half and for the last two years has been milking cows on a dairy farm in Minnesota.

“When they go, it’s sad,” Teresa said. “You don’t know how long it will take them, when they’ll arrive, how they’ll be treated … I cried a lot.”

Even though she is proud of her children, she misses them, she said. “When they were growing up, at dinner time we always sat down together.”

And now, on top of the loneliness, there is more worry, she said. “With the president there, I start thinking of my kids and, my God, there they are and what if he throws them out? What if they’re mistreated? … There’s nothing to do but put ourselves in God’s hands, may he protect us.”

Hoping there aren’t mass deportations

At each stop on the Puentes/Bridges trip, people asked about Trump’s planned deportations.

Rosenow told several families that Brooke Rollins, Trump’s agriculture secretary, has said that deportations won’t hurt dairy farms. Rollins testified during her confirmation hearings that she supported Trump’s plan for mass deportations but that she would work with the administration to “make sure none of these farms or dairy producers are put out of business.”

“I’m counting on that,” Rosenow said. During the trip, his wife called with another worry: Trump’s tariffs were reportedly about to wreak havoc with exports of butter to Canada and drive up the price of the peat moss they import to make the compost they sell on their farm.

At a stop outside the little town of Astacinga, the conversation again turned to deportation. Rosenow stopped to visit the family of his favorite employee, Roberto, 45, and Kevin, Roberto’s 21-year-old son, who came North a few years ago to work with his dad on the farm. 

In the kitchen, Rosenow told Roberto’s mother, Concepciona Acahua Macoixtle, 62, , with Falk translating, “Roberto is my best friend. He gets along with anybody. And he has become a better golfer than me.” The two men golf together every week during the season, and Roberto has become something of a local celebrity on the golf course in Buffalo County.

Rosenow got out his phone to show a picture of Roberto playing golf.

Roberto’s wife, Veronica, asked how her son Kevin was behaving. Assured by Rosenow that he was “a delight,” she then turned to her other worry. “Is there a lot of immigration enforcement up there?” she asked.

“There are a lot of rumors, but I have a lot of confidence in the secretary of agriculture,” Rosenow said, once again explaining that he’s relying on Rollins’ assurance that farms won’t go out of business because of immigration enforcement. 

“If not, tell my husband to come home,” Veronica said. “Or his boss should get him a visa.”

“I’d do it in a moment,” Rosenow said, as Falk translated.

Falk explained that six-month visas are for seasonal work and dairy farmers can’t apply for them for their workers. Roberto’s mother nodded. “You have to work every day.”

“Some people are getting grabbed by immigration,” she said. Restaurant workers from nearby Astacinga were deported to tent cities in the north of Mexico, she said, adding, “that’s why we’re worried about our children.”

Veronica’s son Aaron, 15, wanted to go up North, too, but Kevin calls and lectures him about staying in school, his mother told the group. Now he’s going to high school in Astacinga and will graduate in a couple of years, Veronica said. 

Concepciona’s grandchildren have vastly different lives from her own life growing up, or that of her children. Her mother died when she was 4 and she never went to school. Instead she tended the family’s sheep when she was young and met her husband at 18, when both were working in the fields cutting sugar cane.

When they were raising their children, Concepciona said, “We all lived together in one kitchen room. Sometimes there wasn’t enough food. They didn’t have shoes sometimes. They didn’t always have tortillas.”

As a teenager, Roberto went to work and took care of his little siblings, sending home money from jobs in Mexico City and later Kentucky, so they would have enough to eat. He first went to the U.S. when he was 16, but returned several times — the last time was when Meagan, 10, was born. He hasn’t been home since she was 3 months old.

“I told him to come home, but he doesn’t,” Concepciona said. “It’s not that he doesn’t want to. The problem is here there’s no money. There, he can earn money to help with his kids’ education. Ten years he’s been there.” She began to cry. 

“My mother- in-law has lost all five of her sons. They’re all up there,” said Veronica. 

During the years Roberto has spent in the U.S., he has built a home for his parents, and Veronica has overseen the excavation and building of their own two-story home with a carport, which looks like it was transplanted to the mountainside from a U.S. suburb. Brick pillars frame a heavy metal gate, behind which a manicured grass lawn is surrounded by a low rock wall and a garden full of fruit trees, palms and rose bushes. 

Veronica and Roberto also purchased more land nearby, where they keep a flock of sheep. With some of his earnings Roberto has helped his nieces go to college. One is finishing up studying to be a teacher and lives with Veronica, she said.

Meagan, a fifth grader, has always gotten good grades, Veronica said proudly. Meagan gave the U.S. visitors an impromptu performance of the Mexican national anthem in Nahuatl — she’d been practicing for a competition at her bilingual Spanish/Nahuatl school.

As the Puentes group got ready to leave, Concepciona said, “Tell my boys to take care. Ask when they are coming. They always say August, December. Then the next December comes and they don’t arrive.”

“The problem is the risk if they don’t have papers,” said Veronica, “so they can’t come back.”

This article is Part One in a series. In Part Two, the U.S.-born son of a deceased Mexican dairy worker meets his extended family in Mexico for the first time. 

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Elon Musk and Donald Trump are busy smashing the state. Wisconsinites will have a chance to weigh in on candidates who support and oppose the anti-government crusade on April 1. | Getty Images Creative

Wisconsinites voted for Donald Trump by a narrow margin in November. Does that mean a majority of voters here want to cancel farmers’ federal contracts, shut down Head Start centers across the state and turn loose Elon Musk to feed federal agencies into the woodchipper while hoovering up private citizens’ financial information?

The new Trump era is putting Republican nihilism to the test. In our closely divided swing state, the first official indication of whether Trump voters are developing buyers’ remorse will come, fittingly, on April Fool’s Day. 

In the Wisconsin Supreme Court race, candidate Brad Schimel has received Elon Musk’s endorsement and is benefitting from a huge ad buy by Musk’s political action committee. And while some Republicans have expressed qualms about Trump and Musk’s assertions that they have unchecked power to ride roughshod over judges and the U.S. Constitution, Schimel has, notably, sided with Trump and Musk against the courts. 

Last month, Schimel took to Vicki McKenna’s rightwing talk radio show to denounce the prosecution and sentencing of the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol after Trump lost in 2020, saying juries in Washington, D.C., were too liberal to deliver a fair verdict. Recently, on the same talk radio program, he criticized federal judges for blocking the ransacking of federal agencies by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), accusing the judges of “acting corruptly” by daring to issue temporary restraining orders.

The race between Schimel and Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford will determine the ideological balance of the Court and, it seems, whether a majority of justices believe in the integrity of the court system at all. 

Also on the April 1 ballot is the race for state schools superintendent, which pits a lobbyist for the private school voucher industry against a defender of public schools — an existential choice as the growth of schools vouchers is on track to bankrupt our state’s public school system and enrollment caps on voucher programs are set to come off next year.

The ideological struggle over the future of our state was on stark display this week as Gov. Tony Evers presented his budget plan — an expansive vision that uses the state surplus to boost funding for K-12 schools and the University of Wisconsin, health care, clean water and rural infrastructure, and leaves a cushion to help protect communities against what Evers called the “needless chaos caused by the federal government” under Trump.

In a familiar ritual, Republican legislators immediately shot down Evers’ plan, denounced it as “reckless spending” and promised to throw it in the trash and replace it with a stripped-down alternative based on austerity and tax cuts.

“Wisconsin voted for Donald Trump and his agenda to cut spending and find inefficiency in government,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared.

But did they? 

It’s not clear that most Wisconsinites wanted what Trump and Musk are delivering — cuts to health care and veterans’ services, the claw-back of infrastructure projects, mass firings at the park service and the chaotic suspension of promised federal funds for child care and other essential services in Wisconsin.

For generations, Republicans have complained about “red tape” and “big government” and promised “freedom” and lower taxes to constituents who liked the sound of all that. Under Trump, we are seeing anti-government ideology reach its full, unchecked fruition. Trump’s No. 1 private donor, the richest man in the world, is laughing all the way to the bank. He’s using his access to trillions of dollars in taxpayer funds to cancel food programs for poor children and to bolster federal contracts that enrich himself. 

This, in the end, is what privatization is all about — taking the collective wealth of millions of people who contribute to maintaining a decent, healthy society and concentrating it in the hands of one very rich, self-interested man.

The long-term, existential struggle between private wealth and the public good in Wisconsin includes the fight over whether to fund public schools or give away money to subsidize the tuition of private school families. It includes whether to be the second-to-last state to finally offer 12 months of postpartum Medicaid coverage to new mothers — something even our Republican legislators support, minus Vos. The two sides of our divided government are locked in a battle over whether our universities, public parks, infrastructure, clean water and affordable housing are a boondoggle or something we ought to protect. 

Given what’s happening to our country, Wisconsinites will have to think hard about which side they’re on. 

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Sen. Ron Johnson via official Facebook page

Back during President Donald Trump’s first administration, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was known as Trump’s most reliable ally in the U.S. Senate. He led investigations into Hunter Biden, Hillary Clinton and alleged irregularities in the 2020 election that Trump lost. A proponent of conspiracy theories about COVID-19 vaccines and climate science, Johnson is not one of those Republicans who had to overcome principle to get in line behind Trump. 

He is completely at ease with the new administration — including the pardons of the Jan. 6 rioters who stormed the Capitol, battered police officers and sought to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence. The blanket pardon for the rioters, including those convicted of violent crimes, was “maybe a little more sweeping than I wanted to see,” he averred during a Politico breakfast this week. But, overall, Johnson said, the Jan. 6 defendants were victims of a “grotesque miscarriage of justice.” So Trump was right to pardon them.

If ever Johnson struggles to go along with Trump’s more out-there ideas, like slapping huge tariffs on imports that could devastate Wisconsin businesses and farms, he just figures he must not truly, deeply understand their wisdom. 

“When I don’t necessarily agree with him, I always ask myself, what am I not seeing here?” he told Politico’s Zach Warmbrodt. Like any good enabler, Johnson figures Trump must have some extra-tricky reason for doing harm that actually makes what he’s doing good. 

That kind of thinking will come in handy during the next four years. It could prove particularly useful to Trump as he tries to hold together supporters drawn to his promises to lift up the working class — the “forgotten men and women of America” — and tech billionaires including Elon Musk who want to liquidate the safety net, drive down wages and establish a permanent American oligarchy.

Johnson embraces white grievance and the racist, right-wing populist “replacement theory”— suggesting Democrats want more immigrants to cross the southern border and come to the U.S. to “change the makeup of the electorate” — but he is also fully, cheerfully on board with oligarchy. 

Nothing suits Johnson better than the Trump administration’s plan to cut taxes for the very rich and slash entitlements to pay for it.

This was the gist of his appearance at the Politico breakfast this week, where he was introduced as someone who will have “a big role” in tax battle, having played “a very important role” in Trump’s 2017 tax cut. 

Johnson basked in the glow, recalling how he held up the whole 2017 law until he managed to shoehorn in a big tax cut for “pass-through corporations” Johnson confirmed that he personally benefited from the change in the tax code that he pushed through in 2017. He cast the deciding vote for Trump’s tax code rewrite giving corporations tax cuts worth $1.4 billion — but only after he arm-twisted Trump and Congress into including special benefits for so-called “pass-through” corporations — companies like his own PACUR plastics firm — whose profits are distributed to their owners. A few months later, Johnson began the process of selling his company, reaping the benefits of the tax law change, which increased the value of pass-through companies and made him more money on the sale.

According to Politifact, “Analyses from the Joint Committee on Taxation and the National Bureau of Economic Research have found that ultra-wealthy Americans have received billions in tax savings stemming from that deduction, while those earning less have gotten less of a break.”  The news organization cites one study by the National Bureau of Economic Research that found the top 1% of Americans received nearly 60% of the tax savings created by the provision, with most of that amount going to the top 0.1%.

“I made sure all the passthroughs got a tax cut, that was my contribution,” Johnson said. 

“Whatever we do, we need to make it permanent,” Johnson said of the individual income and estate tax provisions of the 2017 Trump tax law. That law was heavily skewed to the rich. Households with incomes in the top 1% will receive an average tax cut of more than $60,000 in 2025, compared to an average tax cut of less than $500 for households in the bottom 60%, according to the Tax Policy Center.

Thanks to the law, revenue as a share of GDP has fallen from about 19.5% in the Bush years to just 16.3% in the years immediately following the Trump tax cuts, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. That leaves commitments to Social Security and health care benefits for retirees in jeopardy, the Center concludes.

Nor did the tax cut yield the big benefits Trump projected. ​​New research shows that workers who earned less than about $114,000 on average in 2016 saw “no change in earnings” from the corporate tax rate cut, while top executive salaries increased sharply, the Center reports. “Similarly, rigorous research concluded that the tax law’s 20% pass-through deduction, which was skewed in favor of wealthy business owners, has largely failed to trickle down to workers in those companies who aren’t owners.”

Yet making those tax cuts permanent is among the “top priorities” for Congress and the new administration, Johnson said. His biggest contribution to the next tax debate will be his push to rewrite the tax code and “keep it simple,” and cut spending to pay for more cuts. 

“We have to return spending levels to some reasonable pre-pandemic levels,” he told the audience at the Politico breakfast. Building Trump’s border wall and keeping low taxes that benefit the very rich are the top two priorities for government, Johnson said.

Everyone would be able to see the wisdom of that program, as long you “keep it simple,” he added. The formula he laid out was “eliminate expenditures” and then you can dramatically cut rates. 

He wants to “free corporations from all this complexity in the tax code,” he said, adding he favors “a corporate tax rate of zero.”

Health care and Social Security, though? Not so much.“Stop trying to socially and economically engineer through the tax system,” Johnson advised. 

Let the rich keep their money. Slash the safety net. It’s simple. 

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A sign in Madison, Wisconsin touting a municipal well project funding by President Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law. | Photo by Ruth Conniff/Wisconsin Examiner

In the last days of the Biden administration, just before Trump’s triumphant return and swearing-in on the site of the violent Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection, I happened across a sign touting federal investment in an infrastructure project on Madison’s east side. 

Next to a strip mall, set back from the road and barely visible from busy East Washington Avenue, the sign touted PFAS treatment and upgrades to a municipal well. In large type it declared: “Project Funded by President Joe Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.”

Too little, too late, I thought. The sign, practically hidden on a scruffy corner where few eyes can see it, seemed like a metaphor for the Biden administration’s failed effort to take credit for all the good it did. Through federal investments it paved roads, repaired bridges, shored up the economy and set us on a path to recovery from a global pandemic. By the end of 2024, wages, job growth, employment, even consumer prices that had spiked worldwide after COVID hit, apparently driving voters in this country to elect Trump, are all in good shape. In the third quarter, real GDP hit its highest level of 2024 at 3.1%. Consumer spending was up. Unemployment was 4% nationally and 2.9% in Wisconsin. And everywhere across Wisconsin, federal investments have boosted the economy and improved lives.

As Erik Gunn reports, the Biden administration touted  $9.2 billion in federal infrastructure investments in our state, including $1 billion for desperately needed repairs to the Blatnik Bridge connecting Superior to Duluth, Minnesota. There were also hundreds of smaller projects like PFAS remediation in that municipal well on Madison’s east side, which was shut down in 2019 and will be operational again by the summer. 

Because of the Biden administration’s efforts, about 300,000 Wisconsin Medicare recipients are saving an average of $475 per year in prescription drug costs, which were capped under the Inflation Reduction Act. And the Department of Education projects that 62,000 Wisconsinites have had over $2.4 billion in student debt canceled thanks to Biden’s student debt relief efforts.

These are just a few of the highlights in a long list of Biden administration accomplishments put out by the Democratic National Committee as the former president bade farewell. 

Wisconsin lost 83,500 jobs during Trump’s first term. During Biden’s four years in office, it added 186,800 jobs, as we bounced back from the pandemic. Federal pandemic relief funds allowed Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers to shore up schools, infrastructure, child care and health care in our state, even as Republican legislative leaders tenaciously blocked every effort to use the state’s historic multibillion-dollar surplus to fund any of those priorities. 

Now Biden is gone and Trump’s MAGA Republican party has taken over every branch of the federal government. Here in Wisconsin, as across the country, MAGA loyalists are repeating Trump’s counterfactual talking points about how terrible Biden was for the economy and how government must be cut back in order to unleash a new era of American prosperity.

The battle between those who want to harness the power of government to help people and those who would rather drown it in the bathtub has been going on for decades. But the contrast between those ideologies has grown sharper. It’s more important now than ever to recognize what’s at stake.

At the start of the new legislative session, Wisconsin Republicans pledged to ignore Evers’ budget requests and focus exclusively on giving away the state surplus in the form of tax cuts.

“The money that we set aside for that tax cut will not be spent by this Legislature on other wants,” Assembly Speaker Robin Vos declared, “no matter how many special interests or tax-and-spend politicians apply pressure to get it out of the treasury’s hands.” 

“More than $4 billion of taxpayer money is sitting in a bank account here in Madison, while rising prices impact the families who sent us here to serve them,” Senate Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu concurred. “[Evers] wants to use that money to grow the size of government and send Wisconsin backwards.” 

Even a state effort to curb school shootings, through Evers’ office of violence prevention, which he announced after the Abundant Life school shooting in Madison, came in for scathing cynicism from Republican legislative leaders. 

“It takes a bureaucrat to think that another government agency is actually going to be effective,” Vos spat, summing up the effort as “a whole bunch of touchy-feely bureaucrats that are going to go around wasting time, wasting money.”

At the federal level, Republicans are singing the same discordant tune.

Scott Bessent, the hedge fund manager Trump nominated to lead the U.S Treasury Department, said during his confirmation hearing that extending Trump’s 2017 tax cut which disproportionately benefited the very wealthy is “the single most important economic issue of the day.”

“If we do not renew and extend, then we will be facing an economic calamity,” Bessent said. When Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock pressed Bessent on whether people who make more than $10 million per year really need a tax cut, Bessent replied, “There is no income level that I don’t think we should continue the [tax cut] as it was.” On the flip side, he endorsed deep cuts to federal spending that benefits less fortunate Americans. “We do not have a revenue problem in the United States of America; we have a spending problem,” Bessent said. 

The real economic calamity is shaping up as the incoming Trump administration eyes deep cuts to Medicaid and other cuts that will fall most heavily on poor families. For good measure, Bessent also said he opposes raising the federal minimum wage above $7.25 an hour.

Ever since Ronald Reagan championed trickle-down economics in the 1980s, Republicans have promised that cutting taxes on the wealthy and reducing the size of government will benefit most Americans. But it hasn’t worked out that way. “Cutting taxes for the rich over the past 40-plus years has had a huge impact, leaving less money for public programs that benefit millions of Americans while enriching a tiny percentage of the population,” the Center for Public Integrity reports. Income inequality skyrocketed: “As more money flowed upward, the gap in accumulated wealth widened,” the Center reports. “In 2019, the top 10% of Americans had three times the wealth of everyone else in the country combined.”

It comes down to this: Do you believe it’s better for rich people to get tax cuts and for all of us to pay more to meet basic needs — getting only the health care, education, infrastructure – even firefighting — we can afford to pay for out of pocket? Or do you think we can, as a society, create a world where there is a baseline level of wellbeing, decent education, food, shelter and security for all? 

Republicans have been arguing for a long time that government is broken, should be “drowned in the bathtub” — that no one should be required to chip in to support things like public schools or provide decent housing and health care and education to all, including children born into families that can’t afford all these things on their own.

Now we face an aggressive push by the incoming Trump administration and the Wisconsin Leislature’s majority to destroy programs that benefit poor kids, poor families and society as a whole

After years and years of underfunding Wisconsin’s public schools and our once-great university system, Republican  legislators now say there’s no point throwing good money after bad, using the struggles of an underfunded system as an excuse for further cuts.

If we can’t remember what it’s like to have a functional society, it’s easy to become cynical and give up on the idea of a healthy public sphere. 

Now, as we enter the era of Trump 2.0, it’s important to remember what we had, what we lost, and what we need to fight like hell to hang on to.

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