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For the people of Green Bay, the long-awaited deal to move century-old coal piles from the riverfront near downtown is a big deal.

How big?

“This is our Louisiana Purchase. This is our purchasing of Alaska,” said state Rep. Dave Steffen, R-Howard. “It doesn’t get any bigger than this. We are not only just witnessing history, we’re part of it today.”

Steffen was one of the Green Bay-area lawmakers of both parties who were on hand Thursday before the Brown County Board of Supervisors approved a deal that will pave the way toward moving the hulking black piles that local officials and residents have hoped to oust for decades.

Thursday’s deal, approved unanimously after a closed session of the county board, sets the general framework for a lease agreement that will allow the coal to be relocated.

The coal sits on land along the Fox River that community leaders see as ripe for redevelopment. A very visible and not-so-pretty symbol of the city’s industrial heritage, it is also a nuisance for some residents who say dust from the piles blows into nearby neighborhoods.

But they are also a landmark, one that was immortalized by pranksters who decades ago made a “Ski Green Bay” poster of a man skiing down a coal pile with the skyline of the city behind him. That image was more recently included in a mural downtown.

A desire to move the coal piles to someplace less visible has been on the wish list of generations of city leaders.

“It’s literally something that mayors of the city of Green Bay and other community leaders have been working on for upwards of 75 years,” said Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich.

Thursday’s vote means the county will not lose a $15 million federally-funded state grant that was in jeopardy after the county board altered a previous deal in December and negotiations stalled. The county had until Tuesday to come to an agreement and until Friday for the board to approve it, or risk losing the grant.

C. Reiss Co. owns the coal piles. The company has operated the bulk commodities storage facility on Mason Street, located along the the Fox River, since 1900.

Under the deal, C. Reiss and the county will work to finalize a lease agreement for a 16-acre parcel of land at a former power plant site the county is redeveloping for the Port of Green Bay. The company would also lease up to 1.5 acres for a stormwater pond that it would maintain. 

But the agreement stipulates that C. Reiss, or other users, may not store coal at the power plant site.

Rather, CEO Keith Hasselhoff said coal would be stored at a site near the power plant, known as the Fox River Terminal. C. Reiss’ parent company currently stores salt and other bulk commodities at the Fox River Terminal.

When the 16-acre parcel is ready, Hasselhoff said C. Reiss plans to move salt from the terminal site to the power plant. 

“As that salt at Fox River depletes and opens up more space at Fox River, we’ll be able to land new vessels of coal at Fox River, which then will allow us to deplete the inventories that we have at Mason Street,” Hasselhoff said.

At a press conference before the meeting, Brown County Executive Troy Streckenbach said moving the coal from downtown “is not going to happen overnight” and could take “a number of years.”

County Board chair Patrick Buckley said the final negotiations came down to the eleventh hour. He said talks were ongoing up through Tuesday night, when all parties came to a consensus. He said the county’s corporation counsel spent Wednesday and Thursday getting the agreement in writing for the board’s approval.

“It’s really a group effort here to get this done,” he said. “A lot of people did not think this was going to get done. … But a lot of hard work went into it.”

The lease for the power plant site still needs to be fully ironed out, but the agreement requires the lease be fully executed by Sept. 15 or the parties could be required to go to arbitration.

According to the conditions approved Thursday, it would run for 60 years with the annual rent set at $350,000 with inflationary increases every five years.

The length of a lease had been one of the biggest sticking points in past agreements. Back in December, C. Reiss had wanted a lease that ran up to 75 years, while the county board wanted a 30-year lease with a 10-year extension option.

Streckenbach acknowledged that the board previously had reservations about a long-term lease. But he said all sides had to make concessions in the negotiation.

“Ultimately, because of what we came to an agreement with and everybody making concessions, the county board felt comfortable going forward with the length that was proposed,” he said.

The agreement also stated that the city of Green Bay would provide up to $2.2 million if the county faces funding shortfalls related to the coal relocation effort. 

Genrich said the addition of the city’s financial commitment was “one of the latter changes” that was made to the agreement and was something that he and Council President Brian Johnson had committed to in their discussions with county officials.

“Our priority is Mason Street and (doing) whatever was necessary within reason to make that redevelopment project possible,” he said. “The commitment that we all made to each other in the room was like, ‘We’re going to get this done regardless.’”

Genrich said the full Green Bay City Council will discuss the up to $2.2 million in funding at its meeting on Tuesday.

This story was originally published by WPR.

‘Our Louisiana Purchase’: Deal reached to move Green Bay’s century-old coal piles 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.

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A newly opened commercial-scale sawmill in Antigo is the only training sawmill of its kind in the U.S. 

The sawmill at Northcentral Technical College’s Antigo campus will be a teaching tool for northern Wisconsin students and members of the lumber industry. It’s part of the school’s wood sciences program and was funded by about $4.5 million out of an $8 million state Workforce Innovation Grant to the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point’s Wisconsin Forestry Center. That grant is meant to provide career training that will help address worker shortages in the lumber industry.

In late May, wood sciences program director Logan Wells, who has been an instructor there for five years, stood by a stack of recently sawn lumber from cherry wood — the first batch of cuts from the sawmill to have gone through the kiln-drying and finishing process. The boards are all eight feet long, but of different widths.

“We take whatever width the log will give us,” Wells said. 

Scanners in the sawmill find knots and other imperfections inside the logs like woodpecker holes or bark pockets. Boards that are at least 83% “clean” are top-grade. The lowest-grade cuts will be used for pallet wood. Part of the art and science of milling is figuring out how to cut each log to yield the most high-quality lumber possible.

In addition to the eight students enrolled full time in the program for the fall, Wells leads certificate programs and continuing education courses for industry professionals looking to sharpen their skills or gain experience with new technology. About 100 students per year come through those programs.

Wisconsin’s forest industry employs about 58,000 people, according to the state Department of Natural Resources, and its forest products are worth more than $24 billion per year. In addition to building materials and pulpwood used for papermaking, notable Wisconsin-made wood products include white oak staves used for whiskey or wine barrels and high-grade maple for the hardwood basketball courts used by NBA teams and in the NCAA’s Final Four.

But the industry faces challenges, made worse by aging and declining populations in much of northern Wisconsin, where many of the state’s hardwood forests are located.

Wells, a Green County native who has worked in sawmills and as a forest products specialist for the Department of Natural Resources, said the industry is also in a time of technological advancement. Like other manufacturing industries, lumber companies are incorporating robotics and artificial intelligence. Advances in engineered wood have led to new uses for wood, such as the mass timber skyscrapers now going up in Milwaukee and elsewhere.

“It’s a very dynamic industry,” Wells said. “It’s been around a long time, and it’s gonna continue to be around.” 

Inside the 10,000-square-foot mill, most equipment is elevated. Logs move on conveyor belts through the process of being debarked, sawn into slabs and refined. 

From a cockpit with computer controls, Wells demonstrates how operators calculate cuts to the outside of the log until it resembles a massive railroad tie, then slice it into boards that are shaped and given square edges by other machines. 

Sawdust from the mill is collected and used for packaging material by a local potato farmer. Other byproducts are turned into wood chips used for landscaping at NTC.

Wells said giving students and industry professionals a chance to work on professional-grade tools will help the industry continue to adapt to fast-moving technological changes.

“We’re just scratching the surface with the new sawmill,” he said.

This story was originally published by WPR.

Antigo school’s first-in-the-nation training sawmill readies students for lumber industry 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.

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Since January, Milwaukee has been dealing with dangerous levels of lead dust in some public schools, resulting in nine school closures.

On Tuesday, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Senate committee there was a federal “team” in the city from the CDC’s Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Program — though the positions were cut in April.

“We are continuing to fund the program in Milwaukee, we have a team in Milwaukee, we’re giving laboratory support to the analytics in Milwaukee, and we’re working with the health department in Milwaukee,” Kennedy said when questioned by Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, during a hearing before the Senate Committee on Appropriations.

The Milwaukee Health Department disputed Kennedy’s statement.

“There is no team from HHS or CDC in Milwaukee assisting with the MPS lead hazard response,” department spokesperson Caroline Reinwald wrote in an email.

Kennedy has previously suggested the childhood lead program would be reinstated and told U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin last week that lead poisoning in children is an “extremely significant” concern. Reed had asked Kennedy about the program’s fate in light of those comments.

“If the secretary had information that hasn’t been proffered to myself or my team yet, I would welcome, again, continued support from the CDC,” said Milwaukee Health Commissioner Mike Totoraitis on Wednesday.

“Admittedly, I was wondering if they potentially got stuck in traffic in Chicago and didn’t make it to Milwaukee,” he said of Kennedy’s statements about a “team.”

Federal experts were part of Milwaukee’s lead crisis response

Childhood lead poisoning experts from the CDC communicated with the Milwaukee Health Department at the start of the city’s school lead crisis, Totoraitis told WPR.

“They validated our concerns about the testing results that we were finding in the schools,” he said.

He said federal experts recommended school closures as a response, which the city’s health department had originally avoided, not wanting to disrupt learning.

“But given the significant threat of permanent brain damage from lead poisoning, we had to rely on our federal partners to make that decision,” Totoraitis said.

In March, the city requested that a CDC Epi-Aid team come to Milwaukee, hoping to beef up the city’s school lead crisis response.

But in early April, Totoraitis learned that the experts who would’ve managed that team had been laid off. His request was denied.

The team would’ve expanded the city’s testing capacity, he said, and could’ve used its lead specialization to detect trends city officials wouldn’t catch.

But even without a special team, losing the ability to remotely consult CDC experts had an impact. Totoraitis said they had helped his department make investigation plans for lead-contaminated schools and do “epidemiological, long-term digging” into where kids are getting poisoned.

“Those are the parts that are really lacking now,” Totoraitis said.

After the layoffs, one CDC expert offered to help the city as a volunteer, he said.

Totoraitis said the city might contract with some of the laid-off staff members directly. “We’re really hopeful that I can secure the funding, through one of our grants, to bring some of these former CDC staff on in June,” he said.

But he stressed that his department already has a “really robust” lead poisoning program, handling about 1,000 cases a year.

“We’re continuing our work with or without federal resources,” the Milwaukee Health Department’s Reinwald said.

One CDC laboratory specialist visited Milwaukee

One of Kennedy’s claims was that “we’re giving laboratory support to the analytics in Milwaukee.”

In response to a question from WPR about Kennedy’s contention that a team is working on the issue in the city, a spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services said the CDC was assisting on laboratory testing.

“At the request of the Milwaukee Health Department Laboratory (MHDL), CDC is assisting with validating new lab instrumentation used for environmental lead testing. Staff from MHDL are focused on the lead response and other routine testing while CDC will assist with testing validation, laboratory quality management, and regulatory requirement documentation to onboard the new laboratory instrument,” the spokesperson said in an email.

According to Reinwald, a CDC laboratory specialist visited the city for two weeks in May to help the health department set up a new machine.

The machine processes lead samples from across the city — including those related to the school lead crisis.

But that visit was planned before the school lead crisis started, Totoraitis said. He said the city had already been expanding its lead-testing capacity before the crisis.

The lab specialist was “requested independently of the MPS situation,” Reinwald said, and served a “narrow technical role specific to onboarding the equipment.”

“It’s a single person,” Totoraitis said. “I know the secretary had said a team was in Milwaukee helping us, but I don’t know who he’s referring to.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

RFK Jr. claims federal ‘team’ is in Milwaukee for school lead crisis; city says there isn’t 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.

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A rural county in central Wisconsin has filed a lawsuit seeking to remove its county treasurer elected less than a year ago and replace her with the person she defeated in that election.

Adams County filed suit last week asking the court to declare that Treasurer Kara Dolezal “vacated” her position and her former opponent Kim Meinhardt is “entitled to hold that office.”

The suit is essentially seeking a judicial sign-off on a resolution the Adams County Board approved in late April. But state Rep. Scott Krug, a Republican who represents a portion of the county, argued during and after the meeting that the county followed an illegal process to remove an elected official.

Dolezal, a Republican, defeated Meinhardt, an independent, by more than 900 votes in November 2024. In April, Dolezal was reelected to her post as town treasurer for the town of Lincoln in Adams County, a position she held prior to being elected to county-wide office. 

In both the lawsuit and the county board resolution, Adams County has argued Dolezal vacated her county office by accepting a “legally incompatible” position with the town. 

In a statement, Adams County said it is “confident in its legal position.” The county said it’s taking the issue to court to bring “finality” to the situation.

“Understanding that a lot of interest in this issue has found its way into the media and on social media, the County is not going to comment on ongoing litigation or try the case outside of the courtroom,” the statement reads.

But Krug said it’s long been common in Wisconsin for people to hold similar offices for both their town and county.

He said he’s working with colleagues to introduce legislation to clarify it’s possible for the same person to hold positions as county and town treasurer at the same time if both are elected positions.

“We are specifically going to say that there is no contradiction or incompatibility between the role of county treasurer and town treasurer when both are elected by people in their community,” Krug said.

But he also said the lawmakers are trying to do so without interfering with the court’s process.

“We’re trying to be cognizant of the court process while we’re introducing legislation,” Krug said. “But at the same time … we still want legislation coming forward to protect those individuals from having to go through the same type of thing, and, on the flip side of it, trying to protect their communities from having to go through exorbitant legal fees.”

While Dolezal has continued to perform her duties as county treasurer following the county board’s vote, Meinhardt took the oath of office for the position on May 12, according to the suit.

Dolezal has held both offices since January and was never asked to resign from her post with the town, she told WPR earlier this month. In a May 3 statement, Dolezal said she didn’t view the two positions as “incompatible” and she was transparent about being a town treasurer when she ran for county office.

“The voters still elected me as their County Treasurer,” she stated. “I believe it sets a concerning precedent if County Board Supervisors can override the will of the voters.”

Dolezal’s attorney, Catherine La Fleur, was not available for comment Tuesday.

In the lawsuit, attorneys for the county said public officials cannot simultaneously hold incompatible offices, citing a past state attorney general opinion that says the duties of a local treasurer and county treasurer are “wholly inconsistent.” 

“A town treasurer collects property taxes on behalf of, not only the town, but the county, state, and other taxing jurisdictions in which the town is located,” the complaint states. “As a result, the town treasurer is subordinate to the county treasurer.”

After Dolezal took office with the county in January, the complaint states that disputes arose between Dolezal and local treasurers within the county during the property tax settlement process in the spring of 2025.

According to the complaint, the dispute was “regarding the treatment of certain property tax payments, resulting in the County directing an audit of the County Treasurer’s office.”

Mary Lou Poehler, treasurer for the town of Springville in Adams County, spoke in public comment at the county board’s meeting last month. Poehler said “financial issues” had arisen with the county since Dolezal took office.

“Being a town treasurer, I know of a lot of these,” Poehler said at the April 29 meeting. “And our town, for one, was shorted quite a bit of money.”

But Krug, the area lawmaker, said the county did not follow the proper process for removing an elected official, which requires a notice, public hearing and two-thirds vote.

Regardless of whether the county felt both offices were incompatible or had performance concerns, Krug said the board still should have followed the process outlined in state statute.

“You could just follow a simple state statute process to legitimize it,” he said. “When you take time to think and slow down, you could actually accomplish the same goal without looking like you’re trying to do something behind the scenes.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

Adams County asks court to remove and replace elected treasurer 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.

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A Wisconsin-based research center focused on improving the health and safety of farmers and their children is under “existential threat” due to federal funding cuts.

The National Farm Medicine Center at the Marshfield Clinic Health System researches the causes of farm injuries and fatalities and provides education to rural communities both in Wisconsin and around the country. It’s also home to the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, one of 12 agricultural centers across the country funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH.

NIOSH is one of the federal health agencies that were demolished by mass firings under the Trump administration in April. The agency is expected to lose more than 90 percent of its staff. 

The National Farm Medicine Center declined WPR’s interview request. But in a newsletter sent last month, director Casper Bendixsen said the cuts pose an “existential threat” to the program, which has relied on NIOSH funding and resources for decades.

“If these cuts hold, approximately three-quarters of the research and outreach carried out by the National Farm Medicine Center is at risk,” Bendixsen wrote in the email. “These potential losses threaten our communities on many fronts. Research, education and prevention of disease and injury in rural places cannot be ignored.”

John Shutske is an agricultural safety and health specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has been a longtime collaborator with the center in Marshfield. He said farming is a dangerous occupation, and new health issues continue to emerge as farms change, from exposure to gas from manure pits to injury risks from new farm machinery. That’s why he’s concerned about the uncertain future of grants through NIOSH and similar agencies.

“Without the continued research that’s made possible with federal funding, it would set us back,” Shutske said. “We’ve seen over the last several decades a pretty dramatic decrease overall in our farm fatality rate. And while I think (the number of deaths) would probably plateau, I don’t think we would be able to continue to make the kind of progress that we’ve had.”

Federal cuts threaten future of safety guidance for farm kids, families

Shutske said the National Farm Medicine Center is a significant resource for Wisconsin, helping to study the leading causes of farm fatalities in the state. But he said the center is known nationally for its work to create a safer environment for children on farms. 

The program first developed guidelines for age-appropriate farm jobs in the 1990s, and Shutske said they’ve been instrumental in helping rural families better understand a child’s limitations when pitching in around the farm.

“(Children) may be tall enough and strong enough and physically mature enough to operate some piece of equipment, but mentally and cognitively, from a decision-making perspective, they simply are not equipped,” he said. “That whole language piece, of talking about child development as it relates to farm safety, can really be traced back in its roots to the people in Marshfield.”

Mary Miller is a retired occupational health nurse practitioner for the state of Washington who spent her career focusing on protecting children in workplaces. She said the National Children’s Center is one of the only places in the country that focuses on protecting farm kids working for their parents or another family member.

“Historically, that’s been kind of the elephant in the room, frankly, that kids are allowed to do anything and everything on a so-called family farm,” she said.

Miller said researchers in Marshfield have been key leaders in getting guidance to farm parents even when regulations haven’t addressed the issue. She said losing that resource will put children and their families at risk.

Programs for rural firefighters also at risk

Jerry Minor, chief of the Pittsville Fire Department in rural Wood County, said his department has worked with the National Farm Medicine Center since it opened in 1981 to develop guidance for fire departments to respond safely on farms. 

“The type of call we get on a farm is usually a pretty high intensity type of call, you know entrapments, severe injuries, and we don’t go to those calls very often,” he said. “We’ve helped them develop programs on how to teach firefighters to enter silos and treat tractor rollovers.”

He said they’ve also created a training program for fire departments that want to proactively work with local farms on improving safety. Rural firefighters are trained to look for common hazards and to provide producers with information on how to safely store farm chemicals or what safety equipment is needed.

More than 170 first responders in 16 states and five Canadian provinces have gone through the training, according to the program’s website.

Minor said these programs are “vital” to both first responders and farm families. He’s worried there will be no one to continue the work if the center loses funding through NIOSH.

“I’m very fearful of what might happen,” he said. “I understand being fiscally responsible, but sometimes you’ve got to sit back and take a look at the bigger picture.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

Federal cuts threaten Wisconsin farm safety center for children, rural communities 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.

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Cuts to the federal volunteer program AmeriCorps are already affecting projects in Wisconsin, with one conservation agency losing more than half of its staffers this year.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration effectively gutted the 30-year-old federal agency AmeriCorps after placing 85% of its staff on administrative leave and terminating nearly $400 million in federal contracts for AmeriCorps programs. 

The Trump administration said cuts were made because of $40 million of improper payments in 2024.

AmeriCorps dispatched about 200,000 Americans to projects nationwide last year, according to a release from the volunteer agency.

Eric Robertson is director of Wisconsin Conservation Corps, a nonprofit agency that focuses on environmental restoration projects across Wisconsin and the upper Midwest. The organization partners with state parks around Wisconsin and coordinates volunteers for projects ranging from constructing trails to environmental restoration efforts with the National Park Service. 

Robertson told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today” that support from AmeriCorps helps make up nearly 25% of his agency’s funding.

“We currently have a model that needs to be adjusted very quickly (so) that we can reduce our overhead costs, reduce our direct expenses while trying to maintain revenue and then rely on community support to get us through this,” Robertson said.

Wisconsin is among nearly two dozen states that are suing the Trump administration over the cuts to the federal volunteer agency.

Cuts to AmeriCorps funding are affecting a variety of programs throughout Wisconsin. Serve Wisconsin Executive Director Jeanne Duffy told WPR that her organization receives about $14 million of federal funding annually. AmeriCorps volunteers contribute to programs in Wisconsin ranging from education and youth programs to public health and disaster response programs. 

Duffy said AmeriCorps members in the Wisconsin Conservation Corps and the Green Bay Conservation Corps improved more than 570 acres of public land and around 170 miles of trails and rivers during the 2023-24 program year.

“The absence of AmeriCorps would hinder progress in preserving and improving Wisconsin’s natural resources for public enjoyment and conservation,” Duffy said.

Robertson said his organization is focused on pivoting operations and funding sources to meet the needs of current projects.

“Some of these projects have been in development for over a year, and some of these members who would have been joining us have committed to us six to nine months ago,” Robertson said. “We’re still trying to make sure that we can adjust these models, so that we can come out and say that the Wisconsin Conservation Corps can operate without these funds.”

This story was originally published by WPR.

Cuts to federal volunteer program AmeriCorps leave Wisconsin programs scrambling 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.

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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.