The lawmakers say the data sharing would ensure veterans’ federal benefits take priority over state assistance.

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When Neenah resident Tom Frantz got a pair of identical emails last Friday, saying they were from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, he just shrugged it off at first, believing it was spam.

But then, he said, he read the email more closely and was “really bothered” by the content.

The email said Frantz — a 68-year-old retired college administrator and teacher and American citizen born in western Pennsylvania — was in the United States on humanitarian parole and his parole was being terminated. 

“If you do not depart the United States immediately you will be subject to potential law enforcement actions that will result in your removal from the United States,” the email stated.

“Do not attempt to remain in the United States — the federal government will find you,” it added. “Please depart the United States immediately.”

Frantz has never been on or applied for humanitarian parole. He’s lived in the Fox Valley since moving in 1981 for a job at what is now the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh at Fox Cities.

Because of the threatening nature of the email and the lack of information about what to do if you were a U.S. citizen who received the notification, Frantz said he decided to do some research. He discovered that an immigration attorney in Massachusetts received a similar letter from immigration officials. 

“I thought, ‘Boy, if an immigration attorney is alarmed about this, then I should be, too, and I should pay attention to what is being said here,’” Frantz said.

He said he was worried about the possibility of immigration officials showing up at his home, arresting him and ultimately deporting him. As a retiree, he said he was also worried about a reference in the letter to losing benefits because he spent years paying into Social Security and Medicare.

“I was not naive enough to believe that the government never makes a mistake,” he said. “But my fear was that it could compound. And if it compounded, then what were the consequences for me?”

Frantz spent much of that Friday debating what to do about the letter. He ultimately decided his best bet would be to reach out to one of his representatives in Congress. On Monday morning, he said he left a voicemail with U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s office and received a phone call less than an hour later.

“After I contacted Sen. Baldwin’s office, they were working (on) it right away,” Frantz said. “I felt like I had an advocate, somebody who really understood my situation and knew the inner workings of government to try to address it.”

Baldwin’s office got in contact with the Department of Homeland Security and discovered the email was incorrectly sent to Frantz. 

The notice that Frantz received went out to email addresses in the Customs and Border Patrol Home App, according to Baldwin’s office. The emails typically belonged to a person applying for parole or asylum, immigration lawyers, non-governmental organizations and financial supporters of applicants.

Frantz said he did not use the app or fit the description of those categories. He still isn’t quite sure why he received the email. Baldwin’s office says it has been in contact with federal immigration officials to ensure the issue was resolved.

While he says the Department of Homeland Security didn’t apologize to him directly, he says the department did apologize through Baldwin’s office. Frantz said the department reached out with a number of questions, and he got the sense “they were trying to figure out what went wrong.” 

If Baldwin’s office hadn’t worked with him, Frantz said he planned to reach out to U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson’s office and the office of Rep. Glenn Grothman.

“Had none of them responded … I probably would start carrying around different forms of identification, birth certificate and other stuff, to prove citizenship,” Frantz said. 

The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Frantz’s situation and why he received the notification.

In a statement, Baldwin criticized the Trump administration’s handling of the situation, which could have resulted in the wrongful detention or deportation of a Wisconsin resident.

“This is completely illegal — President Trump is trying to deport an American-born, law-abiding citizen and has provided absolutely no justification,” Baldwin said in a statement. “The President cannot kick Americans out of the country just because he wants — no one is above the law, including the President.”

In reflecting on the situation, Frantz said he’s lucky because he knew how to find help. He said he expects that more U.S. citizens likely received similar emails by mistake. 

“If I’m getting this, and that attorney in Massachusetts also got it, there’s probably a lot of other people who got this,” he said. “We don’t know how many people are on the distribution list.”

“I think it’s important that people stay vigilant and that they take emails seriously. Don’t click on the links, but investigate them,” Frantz added. “If it looks legitimate, I would definitely treat it as legitimate, and I would seek assistance from officials.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

‘The federal government will find you’: Immigration officials wrongfully told a Fox Valley man to leave the US 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.

The report examined what goods produced in Wisconsin sell to international markets, who buys those products and where in the state they come from.

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The NFL draft is expected to draw close to 250,000 people to Green Bay. But a little more than a week out from the event, multiple Airbnb properties near Lambeau Field still had availability.

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Wisconsin’s seasonal moratorium on utility shutoffs ends Tuesday, just weeks after the Trump administration fired all of the federal employees running a program that provides energy assistance to low-income households.

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The state superintendent and education officials in northeast Wisconsin are calling on the Legislature’s Republican-controlled budget committee to boost funding to K-12 schools in the next two-year state budget.

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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.