Complaints about Trump dominate noisy listening session with U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil

First District U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) holds an in-person listening session at Elkhorn High School in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, Thursday evening July 31, 2025. (Copyright Mark Hertzberg/for Racine County Eye)
ELKHORN — At a raucous listening session in a high school auditorium Thursday evening, U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil (R-Janesville) defended the immigration and tariff policies of President Donald Trump and the Republican budget reconciliation law that Trump signed on July 4.
From the roars of the crowd, critics of the congressman appeared to account for the majority of the group that filled nearly two-thirds of the 600-seat Elkhorn High School auditorium. But there were also recurring cheers, shouts and applause at key moments from a smaller coterie of supporters in the room.
Steil represents the 1st District in Congress, which covers Southeastern Wisconsin from Janesville and Beloit east to Racine and Kenosha on the shores of Lake Michigan.
Over the last several months, Republican members of Congress have been counseled not to hold in-person events with constituents after publicity about angry crowds turning up at some GOP town halls.
Steil’s constituents have been protesting weekly outside his office in Racine for months, calling on him to hold an in-person meeting rather than telephone ones.

Taking the stage shortly after 5 p.m. and lasting for about 80 minutes there, Steil stuck with a cheerful, breezy tone. He treated the loud, impassioned and often angry audience cries as mostly a difference of opinion.
When an audience member asked Steil how he might take a stand against other congressional Republicans “who lie to the American public and malign the dignity of 70 million people on Medicaid by suggesting that they are lazy,” Steil lamented the tone of political discourse and vowed not to denigrate anyone. Then he turned the subject back to the boisterous auditorium.
“I’d say the overall majority of people here want to learn and understand my perspective, want to hear the question,” he said. “And then there’s a small group of people that are challenging.”
It was left to the moderator of the session, Janesville radio host Tim Bremel, to lecture the crowd to refrain from shouting over Steil’s answers during a Q&A period.
During one interruption, the radio host scolded, “Ladies and gentlemen, we will never get questions if we can’t keep the auditorium quiet. And please do the person who asked the question the respect of allowing his question to be answered.”
Pledge of Allegiance
Steil kicked off the session with the Pledge of Allegiance, inviting the audience to join him. They did so, some shouting the final words “and justice for all” with vehemence.
He followed with a short talk offering “just kind of an overview of where we’re at in this country to get ourselves back on track” — words that prompted more angry taunts.
Steil said that the nation’s spending is about “$1.8 trillion more than on the revenue side,” a comment that prompted scattered shouts scoffing at “tax breaks.”
He defended the expansion in the budget reconciliation law of work requirements for SNAP food aid, saying the change followed a model that Wisconsin had already instituted for the program in the 1990s.
When he switched to immigration and a graph that Steil said showed “the dramatic drop, the decrease that we have seen in border apprehensions,” a cry of “We are all immigrants!” came up from several rows of seats.
Nine minutes in, Steil made a pitch for his office’s constituent services, then appealed for restraint from the crowd.
“The more civil we are with each other — there’s people that have different views in here, we heard applause and boos on the border security issue, we’ve heard it a couple of times,” he said. “We have people on all sides, it’s great, that’s what makes us so great.”
Tariffs, ICE and deportation
The questions that followed came from members of the audience who filled out forms at tables in the school lobby.
Bremel told the crowd that the questioners would be chosen at random. Some greeted that claim with loud skeptical scoffs. Over the course of the hour, however, the vast majority of people who were chosen asked questions sharply critical of Steil, Trump, the Republican congressional majority, or all three.
Criticizing Trump’s tariffs, Tom Burke asked Steil “what dire economic circumstances” justified the president’s executive orders to impose them.
“What we need to do is make sure that we’re having other countries treat the United States fairly,” Steil replied, adding that the U.S. should “work collectively with our allies to address the real culprit, which is China.”
Burke wasn’t satisfied with the answer. U.S. allies, “seem to be alienated beyond belief,” he told Steil, adding that until he got a satisfactory answer to his question about their rationale, “I’m going to be totally opposed to these tariffs — period.”
Specifying that her question was about “not politics, but morality,” Jean Henderson of Elkhorn told Steil, “What I see happening to our immigrant population embarrasses me, terrifies me.”
Henderson criticized the deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel, their faces hidden by masks, against immigrants “who are doing the right thing by going to the immigration office,” only to be taken into custody. “It is a trap,” she said. “Why is this happening and why aren’t you stopping it?”
Steil began in reply, “What I view is the moral hazard created by the Biden administration…,” prompting a roar of disapproval from the crowd, then a shout of “Joe Biden sucks!” from someone perhaps more sympathetic to the congressman.
The rest of Steil’s response was largely drowned out.
When it was her turn at the microphone, Kelly Neuens connected the experiences of her grandparents and great aunt and great uncle, who were held in U.S. internment camps during World War II as U.S. citizens of Japanese descent, to the conditions in the El Salvador prison where the Trump administration has sent some immigrants taken into custody.
“President Trump said, ‘Homegrowns are next’ when he was speaking to the El Salvador president,” Neuens told Steil. “My worry is that we are repeating history here.”
A plea for the climate
In his answer, which was repeatedly interrupted, Steil described the World War II internment as “one of the more darker chapters of American history,” then added, “As we look at the engagement that law enforcement is doing now against immigrants who are in the country illegally, I don’t see the exact parallel.”
Another questioner asked Steil to explain “why you support Linda McMahon and defunding the Department of Education?”
Congress, Steil said, is still “analyzing what the spending will be for the upcoming fiscal year.” He added that the department “has burdened a lot of our local school districts with unnecessary red tape” in the course of distributing funds to the states. “I think what we will see as we negotiate this going forward is a way to make sure that those funds are there” for local schools, he said.
When it was her turn to ask a question, Sharna Ahern of Fontana thanked Steil and his staff “for answering all the contacts I’ve made with you over the years.”
She enumerated a wide range of concerns she has had — about the Department of Education, about the treatment of immigrants, “about the rule of law and civil rights” — and then turned her focus on the environment.
“Extreme weather conditions are happening more frequently as we experience them,” she told Steil. “The EPA is deregulating the standards that are in place to fight climate change, to protect the citizens. Where do you stand on this issue? And how can you be an advocate for us to initiate legislation to restore our safeguards?”
Steil praised Wisconsin as “one of the most beautiful states in the country” and asserted that “making sure that we’re protecting our air and water and soil is absolutely essential.” He said that on the issue of climate change, “what we need to be doing is focused on addressing that global aspect. But again, make sure other countries are doing their fair share of it.”
The crowd largely jeered at the response. When another audience member asked about Trump’s executive orders rolling back Biden administration measures to address climate change, Steil said that action was necessary to “correct … the overreach in the previous administration.”
It was after 6 p.m. when Bremel called for the final question.
A few minutes earlier, someone had shouted a question about “children starving in Gaza,” and the woman whose turn it was asked Steil to address that topic as well as to defend the SNAP cuts.
“I can do them both,” Steil said. He started with SNAP, reiterating his earlier assertion that Wisconsin would not be affected by the program’s changes to work requirements because of policies the state had in place already.
Turning to Gaza, Steil said, “To me the easy answer to address this crisis is for Hamas to surrender and release the hostages. Release them. Israel was unfairly, unjustly attacked.”
His comments gave rise to another brief demonstration, punctuated by repeated chants of “60,000 people are dead!”
By the time the chanting ended, Steil had left the stage.

The photos accompanying this report are not available for republishing except by agreement with photographer Mark Hertzberg.