Two dozen GOP state lawmakers are asking President Donald Trump to weigh in on whether utilities already doing business in Wisconsin should be given first dibs on building new transmission lines.

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Sturgeon spearing in Wisconsin rebounded this year after an unseasonably warm winter put a damper on the sport in 2024.

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President Donald Trump’s expanded tariffs on steel and aluminum are expected to drive up costs for Wisconsin manufacturers but have less of an impact on homebuilders.

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The New York Jets are moving on from quarterback Aaron Rodgers after just two seasons, the team announced Thursday.

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Two Republicans who chair state legislative committees on energy and utilities say they want to bring more nuclear power online in Wisconsin in the coming years.

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On Jan. 28, the EPA sent letters to Solar for All recipients telling them their grants had been paused until further notice.

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Clean energy advocates say solar projects are an essential part of the transition away from fossil fuels. But some critics of the projects say local communities don't get a say in where they go up.

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The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources is calling on ice fishing enthusiasts to take care after a rash of fatalities involving recreational vehicles.

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The Milwaukee County Zoo is closing its aviary for “the foreseeable future” as a precaution against highly contagious avian flu, the zoo announced Thursday.

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According to a new report, Wisconsin could try to expand online sports betting to create additional tax revenues, but doing so could come with negative side effects.

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Farah, an Afghan refugee, moved to Appleton in January 2022 after fleeing unrest in her home country. 

She had never experienced winter before and arrived in Wisconsin during what’s traditionally the coldest month of the year.

“I was crying,” Farah recalled. “I told my husband, ‘No, I don’t want to stay here. It’s so cold. I really cannot.’” 

But she and her husband both found jobs soon after and eventually chose to make the Badger state their home, even if she still hasn’t gotten used to frigid Wisconsin winters.

“The people are very friendly,” Farah said of Wisconsin residents. “Most of the time, when I talk to people, they say, ‘Haven’t you faced any racist things or any negative comments from the people?’ I say, ‘No, I really haven’t.’”

She’s one of many Afghan refugees who are making a home in Wisconsin after fleeing Afghanistan when the Taliban returned to power. According to the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families, more than 800 Afghan refugees resettled in Wisconsin in 2022. Of those, 181 resettled in the Fox Valley.

On President Donald Trump’s first day in office in 2025, he suspended the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. That has left a number of Afghans who worked alongside the U.S. government and military for years in limbo, NPR reported. Beginning in 2021, thousands of Afghan refugees in similar situations were sent to Fort McCoy in Sparta, and some eventually settled in the state through that program.

WPR is withholding Farah’s last name out of concern that her family in Afghanistan could be targeted by the Taliban due to her role in helping advance American interests in Afghanistan before the 2021 U.S. withdrawal.

Farah is now a group program specialist for World Relief Wisconsin. She has helped Afghan refugees in the Fox Cities tell their stories and connect with neighbors. One way is through a recent oral history exhibit in the region. 

World Relief partnered with the History Museum at the Castle in Appleton to design the “Our Afghan Neighbors” exhibit. 

The exhibit, designed as mobile pop-up banners, features portraits and stories of Afghans who immigrated to the U.S. seeking education, freedom and democracy. Farah conducted interviews with refugees highlighting the diversity within the Afghan community, but also their shared values and aspirations.

“These people who are coming, all of them hate war and violence — they just escaped from that,” Farah said. “They just want peace. They value education. They want to improve their life here. They want to support their kids. They want their kids to be happy here.”

Farah and her husband have a son. But especially for Afghan refugees with daughters, Farah says moving to the U.S. provides better opportunities.

“In Afghanistan now, the girls cannot go to school after their sixth grade, so they will be at home, and it is the worst thing that can happen to a family,” she said. “The people who have daughters, they know that they have a future here.”

Dustin Mack, chief curator for the History Museum at the Castle, said the community’s response to the exhibit has been “overwhelmingly positive.” He said the exhibit was designed to be able to be moved between different places like schools, universities, churches and businesses.

In fact, the exhibit is already booked through most of the spring, he said.

“Anybody can reach out to the History Museum and book the exhibit and bring it to their facility to help continue to share this story and get to know our new Afghan neighbors,” Mack said. “It’s been great to see so many people interested and willing to continue to share this story.”

Life in Afghanistan

Not only did Farah help make the exhibit a reality, but her story is featured in the exhibit. 

Farah grew up in western Afghanistan in the Herat Province, one of 34 provinces in the country. She loved going to school.

“I have very good memories of my parents supporting me going to school, then university,” she said.

When she went to college, she studied education and English literature. After finishing her university studies, Farah began working for the Lincoln Learning Center in Afghanistan in 2014 as part of a United States-funded project.

“I was teaching English as a second language for university and school students,” Farah said. “We were advising the students who wanted to come to the United States to continue their education, and we did a lot of cultural programs. I did a lot of information programs for women’s rights or girls’ right to education.”

The partnership with the U.S. government, Farah said, helped thousands of Afghans come to the United States for their master’s or doctorate degrees before they returned to Afghanistan to teach in universities. Farah’s husband also worked with the U.S. government as a university lecturer. 

Their work for the American government made them both eligible for a Special Immigrant Visa, which allowed anyone who worked for the government for more than two years eligible to leave Afghanistan when they felt at risk, Farah said.

As the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan declined throughout 2020 and into 2021, the Taliban was seizing more and more land.

When the Taliban came into Herat in the summer of 2021, Farah remembers being told by her employer that she was no longer safe and she needed to go to the capital city of Kabul with her husband and then-two-year-old son.

Farah, her husband and their son lived out of a hotel in Kabul for about a month, Farah said. After the Taliban had taken control of the Afghan government, she described it as a time of immense fear.

Farah said Afghanistan had experienced social reforms before the Taliban returned to power that gave women more freedom to get an education and advance. 

That all went away when the Taliban returned to power, Farah says.

“Everything changed,” she said. “Women didn’t want to stay in that country and experience the same things that they had like 20 years ago. That was the reason everyone just wanted to get out of Afghanistan and not see those scary scenes from their childhood.”

One day at the hotel, Farah said she received a call from her father-in-law who asked, “Where did you put your documents?”

He explained that people were searching homes to learn who was working with the U.S. government. She told him her documents were in her bedroom.

“They burned all the documents that we had, like certificates and a lot of things that we had with the U.S. government,” Farah said.

Coming to America

After living in a hotel for about a month, Farah, her husband and their son decided to leave Afghanistan. Her employer helped them get a visa to enter Pakistan. Farah says it was fairly common for people in Afghanistan to go to Pakistan for medical reasons.

“Whenever you met a person from the government, like the Taliban, they’d ask you why you are going to the airport. Who did you work with? A lot of questions,” she said. “If they knew you worked with another government, especially the U.S., they would kill you, or they wouldn’t let you go out of Afghanistan.”

Farah and her family were able to get out of the country, traveling first to Pakistan and then to Qatar before coming to the United States.

After arriving in Wisconsin, Farah not only had to adjust to the cold winters, but also to other cultural differences. She said it was difficult to find halal foods that she and her family would eat back in Afghanistan.

But she said she had a lot of support in adjusting to life in the Fox Valley.

“We were resettled by World Relief. They gave us a good neighbor team, who helped us with transportation, and they even took us to further areas like Oshkosh or Milwaukee to get halal food and all of that,” Farah said. “They were a very huge help for us to find the things that we needed.”

Now, Farah is working to help other refugees adjust in her role as a group program specialist with World Relief Wisconsin. The organization’s financial future may be uncertain after threats to federal funding by the Trump administration in January 2025.

“The cost of living is lower than in some other states, so we are seeing other Afghans coming,” Farah said. “We have an Afghan family who opened a store here, so we don’t need to go to Oshkosh or Milwaukee. It’s going well, and we are still learning about life here.”

This story was originally published on wisconsinlife.org.

‘Our Afghan Neighbors’ exhibit explores life for Fox Valley refugees is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

If tariffs are implemented, Steven Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison, said he expects they will lead to higher prices. But how much higher will vary based on demand for products.

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A new data center could be coming to Beaver Dam as a flurry of similar projects across the state are raising concerns about whether utilities will be able to keep up with rising energy demand.

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The natural gas plant We Energies plans to build at its Oak Creek power plant campus will produce more than 1.3 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year, according to a new report from state regulators.

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Farah, an Afghan refugee, moved to Appleton in January 2022 after fleeing unrest in her home country.  She had never experienced winter before, and arrived in Wisconsin during what’s traditionally […]

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After struggling for much of the last year, Menomonee Falls-based Kohl’s Corp. is reducing its corporate workforce by about 10 percent.

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Last month, the Waupaca City Council unanimously approved a resolution asking ThedaCare to reconsider closing the birthing unit.

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U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin is calling on the Trump administration to take action to curb China’s dominance in the shipbuilding industry, saying a new government report confirms the country’s use of unfair trade practices.

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Master Lock will close its corporate headquarters in Oak Creek as part of an effort by its parent company to consolidate its offices in Illinois, essentially ending a more than century-old legacy in the Milwaukee area.

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Caiden Stachowicz made his initial court appearance Wednesday via Zoom from the Fond du Lac County Jail.

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