This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Ten years ago, when Wisconsin lawmakers approved a bill to allow unlimited spending in state elections, only one Republican voted no.

“I just thought big money was an evil, a curse on our politics,” former state Sen. Robert Cowles said recently of his 2015 decision to buck his party.

As Wisconsin voters head to the polls this week to choose a new state Supreme Court justice, Cowles stands by his assessment. Voters have been hit with a barrage of attack ads from special interest groups, and record-setting sums of money have been spent to sway residents. What’s more, Cowles said, there’s been little discussion of major issues. The candidates debated only once.

“I definitely think that that piece of legislation made things worse,” Cowles said in an interview. “Our public discourse is basically who can inflame things in the most clever way with some terrible TV ad that’s probably not even true.”

More than $80 million has been funneled into the race as of March 25, according to two groups that have been tracking spending in the contest — the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan law and policy group that follows judicial races, and the news outlet WisPolitics. That surpasses the previous costliest judicial race in the country’s history, approximately $56 million spent two years ago on the Supreme Court race in Wisconsin.

Money is pouring into this swing state election so fast and so many ads have been reserved that political observers now believe the current race is likely to reach $100 million by Tuesday, which is Election Day.

“People are thoroughly disgusted, I think, across the political spectrum with just the sheer amount of money being spent on a spring Supreme Court election in Wisconsin,” said Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause Wisconsin, which has long advocated for campaign finance reform.

But the elected officials who could revamp the campaign finance system on both sides of the aisle or create pressure for change have been largely silent. No bills introduced this session. No press conferences from legislators. The Senate no longer even has a designated elections committee.

The current election pits former Republican Attorney General Brad Schimel, now a circuit court judge in conservative-leaning Waukesha County, against Susan Crawford, a judge in Dane County, the state’s liberal bastion.

Though the race technically is nonpartisan, the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama, has endorsed Crawford; the party has received financial support from liberal billionaire George Soros. On the other side, President Donald Trump posted a message on his social media platform on March 21 urging his supporters to vote for Schimel, and much of Schimel’s money comes from political organizations tied to Elon Musk.

The stakes are high. Whoever wins will determine the ideological bent of the seven-member court just two years after Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the court and swung it to the liberals. With Protasiewicz on the court, the majority struck down state legislative maps, which had been drawn to favor Republicans, and reinstated the use of drop boxes to collect absentee ballots.

A Schimel victory could resurrect those and other voting issues, as well as determine whether women in the state will continue to be able to access abortion.

Two pro-Schimel groups linked to Musk — America PAC and Building America’s Future — had disclosed spending about $17 million, as of March 25. Musk himself donated $3 million this year to the Republican Party of Wisconsin. In the final stretch of the campaign, news reports revealed that Musk’s America PAC plans to give Wisconsin voters $100 to sign petitions rejecting the actions of “activist judges.”

That has raised concerns among some election watchdog groups, which have been exploring whether the offer from Musk amounts to an illegal inducement to get people to vote.

On Wednesday night, Musk went further, announcing on X a $1 million award to a Green Bay voter he identified only as “Scott A” for “supporting our petition against activist judges in Wisconsin!” Musk promised to hand out other million-dollar prizes before the election.

Musk has a personal interest in the direction of the Wisconsin courts. His electric car company, Tesla Inc., is suing the state over a law requiring manufacturers to sell automobiles through independent dealerships. Musk and Tesla did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the race.

Also on Schimel’s side: billionaires Diane Hendricks and Richard Uihlein and Americans for Prosperity, a dark-money group founded by billionaire Charles Koch and his late brother David. Americans for Prosperity has reported spending about $3 million, primarily for digital ads, canvassing, mailers and door hangers.

A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund, a union-supported electioneering group, has ponied up over $6 million to advance Crawford. In other big outlays, Soros has given $2 million to the state Democratic Party, while Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, another billionaire, gave $1.5 million. And California venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, donated $250,000.

In Wisconsin, political parties can steer unlimited amounts to candidates.

State Sen. Jeff Smith, a Democrat and a minority leader, called the spending frenzy “obscene.”

“There’s no reason why campaigns should cost as much as they do,” he said.

Asked for comment about the vast amount of money in the race, Crawford told ProPublica: “I’m grateful for the historic outpouring of grassroots support across Wisconsin from folks who don’t want Elon Musk controlling our Supreme Court.”

Schimel’s campaign called Crawford a “hypocrite,” saying she “is playing the victim while receiving more money than any judicial candidate in American history thanks to George Soros, Reid Hoffman, and JB Pritzker funneling money to her campaign.”

Quizzed Monday by a TV reporter on whether he would recuse himself if the Tesla case got to the state’s high court, Schimel did not commit, saying: “I’ll do the same thing I do in every case. I will examine whether I can truly hear that case objectively.”

A decade after Wisconsin opened the floodgates to unlimited money in campaigns in 2015, some good government activists are wondering if the state has reached a tipping point. Is there any amount, they ask, at which the state’s political leaders can be persuaded to impose controls?

“I honestly believe that folks have their eyes open around the money in a way that they have not previously,” Nick Ramos, executive director of the nonpartisan Wisconsin Democracy Campaign, which tracks campaign spending, told reporters during a briefing on spending in the race.

A loosely organized group of campaign reformers is beginning to lay the groundwork for change. The Wisconsin Democracy Campaign recently called a Zoom meeting that included representatives of public interest groups inside and outside of Wisconsin, dark-money researchers and an election security expert.

They were looking for ways to champion reform during the current legislative session. In particular, they are studying and considering what models make sense and may be achievable, including greater disclosure requirements, public financing and restricting candidates from coordinating with dark-money groups on issue ads.

But Republicans say that the spending is a natural byproduct of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which equated campaign spending with free speech and opened the spigots for big-money races.

“For the most part, we don’t really, as Republicans, want to see the brakes on free speech,” said Ken Brown, past chair of the GOP Party of Racine, a city south of Milwaukee. Noting he was not speaking for the party, Brown said he does not favor spending limits. “I believe in the First Amendment. It is what it is. I believe the Citizens United decision was correct.”

Asked to comment on the current system of unlimited money, Anika Rickard, a spokesperson for the Republican Party of Wisconsin, did not answer the question but instead criticized Crawford and her funders.

Post-reform bill opened floodgates

At one point, Wisconsin was seen as providing a roadmap for reform. In 2009, the state passed the Impartial Justice Act. The legislation, enacted with bipartisan support, provided for public financing of state Supreme Court races, so candidates could run without turning to special interests for money.

The push for the measure came after increased spending by outside special interests and the candidates in two state Supreme Court races: the 2007 election that cost an estimated $5.8 million and the 2008 contest that neared $6 million, according to the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign.

Candidates who agreed in 2009 to public financing and spending limits received grants of up to $400,000 for the race. The money came from the Democracy Trust Fund, which was supported by a $2 income tax check-off.

“​​Reformers win a fight to clean up court races,” the headline on an editorial in The Capital Times read at the time.

But the law was in place for only one election, in April 2011. Both candidates in the court’s general election that year agreed to take public funding, and incumbent Justice David Prosser, a conservative, narrowly won reelection. Then Republicans eliminated funding for the measure that summer. Instead, the money was earmarked to implement a stringent voter ID law.

By 2015, GOP leaders had completely overhauled the state’s campaign finance law, with Democrats in the Assembly refusing to even vote on the measure in protest.

“This Republican bill opens the floodgates to unlimited spending by billionaires, by big corporations and by monied, special interests to influence our elections,” Rep. Lisa Subeck, a Democrat, said in the floor debate.

Wisconsin is no longer cited as a model. Activists point to other states, including Arizona, Oregon and Rhode Island. Arizona and Oregon established disclosure measures to trace the flow of dark money, requiring campaign spenders to reveal the original source of donations. Rhode Island required ads to name not only the sponsor but the organization’s top donors so voters can better access the message and its credibility.

Amid skepticism that Wisconsin will rein in campaign spending, there may be some reason for optimism.

A year ago, a proposed joint resolution in Wisconsin’s Legislature bemoaned Citizens United and the spending it had unleashed. The resolution noted that “this spending has the potential to drown out speech rights for all citizens, narrow debate, weaken federalism and self-governance in the states, and increase the risk of systemic corruption.”

The resolution called for a constitutional amendment clarifying that “states may regulate the spending of money to influence federal elections.”

And though it never came to a vote, 17 members of the Legislature signed on to it, a dozen of them Republicans. Eight of them are still in the Legislature, including Sen. Van Wanggaard, who voted for the 2015 bill weakening Wisconsin’s campaign finance rules.

Wanggaard did not respond to a request for comment. But an aide expressed surprise — and disbelief — seeing the lawmaker’s name on the resolution.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

How Elon Musk, George Soros and other billionaires are shaping the most expensive court race in US history 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.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Alexandria Ehlert has pursued a college education hoping to become a park ranger or climate scientist. Now she’s wondering whether she’ll ever finish her studies at College of Menominee Nation.

The scholarship that kept her afloat at the tribal college in Wisconsin vanished in recent weeks, and with it her optimism about completing her degrees there and continuing her studies at a four-year institution.

Ehlert is one of about 20 College of Menominee Nation students who rely on scholarships funded through a U.S. Department of Agriculture grant. The Trump administration suspended the grant amid widespread cost-cutting efforts. Unless other money can be found, Ehlert and the other scholarship students are in their final weeks on campus.

“It’s leaving me without a lot of hope,” said Ehlert, a member of the Oneida nation. “Maybe I should just get a warehouse job and drop school entirely.”

Many staff and students at the country’s 37 tribal colleges and universities, which rely heavily on federal dollars, have been alarmed by the suspension of crucial grants early in Donald Trump’s second presidency.

Even before he retook office, the schools essentially lived paycheck to paycheck. A 1978 law promised them a basic funding level, but Congress hasn’t come close to fulfilling that obligation in decades. Today, the colleges get a quarter-billion dollars less per year than they should, when accounting for inflation, and receive almost nothing to build and maintain their campuses. Water pipes break frequently, roofs leak, ventilation systems fail and buildings crumble. Other than minuscule amounts of state funding in some cases and a smattering of private donations, tribal colleges that lose any federal funding have few other sources of income.

“You freeze our funding and ask us to wait six months to see how it shakes out, and we close,” said Ahniwake Rose, president of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which lobbies for tribal colleges in Washington, D.C. “That’s incredibly concerning.”

At least $7 million in USDA grants to tribal colleges and universities have been suspended, Rose said. The schools’ concerns have been magnified by a lack of communication from federal agencies, which she attributed partly to many federal workers being laid off as the Trump administration has made across-the-board cuts to the federal bureaucracy.

Staff at the College of Menominee Nation were seeking reimbursement for $50,000 spent on research and other work conducted in January, when a federal website indicated a grant from the USDA had been suspended. It was a technical issue, they were told when they first reached someone at the agency, and they needed to contact technical support. But that didn’t solve the problem. Then a few days later the department told the college to halt all grant activity, including Ehlert’s scholarship, without explaining why or for how long.

The frozen grants are administered by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or NIFA. They stem from a 1994 law, the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act, which designated the tribal colleges as land-grant institutions. Congress created the land-grant system in the 19th century to provide more funding for agricultural and vocational degrees.

The 1994 addition of tribal colleges to the list of land-grant institutions gave the schools access to more funding for specific projects, mostly focused on food and agriculture. Many grants funded food research and projects to increase the availability of food, which is particularly important in rural areas with fewer grocery stores and restaurants.

“It’s really precarious for tribal colleges,” said Twyla Baker, president of Nueta Hidatsa Sahnish College in North Dakota. Her college also lost access to NIFA funds that were paying for food research and a program that connects Indigenous farmers, ranchers and gardeners to each other. “We don’t have large endowments to fall back on.”

Several other college presidents said they were preparing for the worst. Red Lake Nation College in Minnesota was freezing salaries, travel and hiring, said President Dan King. So was United Tribes Technical College in North Dakota, which paused renovation of a dormitory originally built as military barracks in 1900. ProPublica reported in October that tribal colleges need more than half a billion dollars to catch up on campus maintenance.

“We’re hoping to get started soon, because we have a short construction season here,” said Leander McDonald, president of the United Tribes college.

At Blackfeet Community College in northern Montana, a NIFA grant is helping to create a program to train workers for the Blackfeet tribe’s new slaughterhouse. The college has started construction on a new building, but President Brad Hall worries that without access to promised federal funds, he might have to pause the project.

Like other tribal college leaders, Hall hasn’t been able to get clear answers from the USDA. Unlike some other schools, his college has been able to access federal funds, but he wonders for how long.

“Without the clarity and without the communication, it’s very hard to make decisions right now,” he said. “We’re in a holding pattern, combined with a situation where the questions aren’t being answered to our satisfaction.”

USDA spokespeople declined to answer questions. The agency emailed a written statement noting that “NIFA programs are currently under review,” but did not provide details on which grants have been suspended or for how long. The agency did not respond to requests for clarification.

Some tribal college leaders theorized they were targeted partly because of the formal name of the 1994 land-grant law: the Equity in Educational Land-Grant Status Act. The Trump administration has laid waste to federal spending on programs with “diversity,” “equity” or “inclusion” in the names.

While “equity” often refers to fairness in relation to race or sex, in the 1994 bill, Congress used the word to highlight that tribal colleges would finally have access to the same funds that 19th-century laws had made available to other land-grant colleges and universities. A spokesperson for the organization that represents nontribal land-grant institutions, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, said he was not aware of any USDA funds to nontribal colleges being suspended.

Tribal colleges argue their funding is protected by treaties and the federal trust responsibility, a legal obligation requiring the United States to protect Indigenous resources, rights and assets. Cutting off funding to the tribal colleges is illegal, several university presidents said.

“We were promised education and health care and basic needs,” said King at Red Lake Nation College. “The fact that we’re being lumped in with these other programs — well, we’re not like them.”

The College of Menominee Nation was only a year into its game-changing $9 million USDA grant, which was funding workforce development, training students in local trades such as forestry, and improving food access for Indigenous people. The five-year grant was a “once-in-a-lifetime award,” said college President Christopher Caldwell.

“We want our students to graduate and have healthy job opportunities,” Caldwell said. “Now it just kind of got cut off at the knees.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

She’s on a scholarship at a tribal college in Wisconsin. The Trump administration suspended the USDA grant that funded it. 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.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

A blender, still in its box, won at a grocery store raffle. Framed photos from a child’s birthday party. A rabbit-hair felt sombrero and a pair of brown leather boots that cost more than half a week’s pay.

Box by box, the Nicaraguans who milk the cows and clean the pens on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, who wash dishes at its restaurants and fill lines on its factory floors, are sending home their most prized possessions, bracing for the impact of President Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

In the contents of the boxes is a portrait of a community under pressure. The Nicaraguans are as consumed as everyone else by the unfolding of Trump 2.0, wondering whether the bluster about deporting millions of people, most of whom live quiet lives far from the southern border, is going to mean anything in the Wisconsin towns where they’ve settled. For now, many are staying in their homes, behind drawn curtains, trying to be as inconspicuous as possible as they travel to and from work or pick up their kids from school. Few have given up on their lives in America, but they’re realistic about what may be coming. Methodically, they have begun packing their most cherished belongings into boxes and barrels and shipping them to relatives back in Nicaragua, ahead of their own anticipated deportations.

“We don’t have much, but what we do have is important,” said Joaquín, the man with the love of western boots and sombreros. He’s 35 years old and has worked over the last three years as a cook at the restaurant below his apartment. “We have worked so hard and sacrificed so much in order to acquire these things,” he added.

The packing is happening all across Wisconsin, a state that in recent years has become a top destination for Nicaraguans who say they are fleeing poverty and government repression. And it is happening among immigrants of varying legal statuses. There are the undocumented dairy workers who came more than a decade ago and were the first from their rural communities to settle in Wisconsin. And there are the more recent arrivals, including asylum-seekers who have permission to live and work in the U.S. as they await their day in immigration court.

Nobody feels safe from Trump and his promises; in just his first week back in office, the president moved to end birthright citizenship, sent hundreds of military troops to the southern border and launched a flashy, multi-agency operation to find and detain immigrants in Chicago, only a few hundred miles away.

Yesenia Meza, a community health worker in central Wisconsin, began hearing from families soon after Trump’s election; they wanted help obtaining the documents they might need if they have to suddenly leave the country with their U.S.-born children, or have those children sent to them if they are deported. When she visited their apartments, Meza said, she was stunned to discover they had spent hundreds of dollars on refrigerator-sized boxes and blue plastic barrels that they’d stuffed with nearly “everything that they own, their most precious belongings” and were shipping to their home country.

At one home, she watched an immigrant mother climb into a half-packed box and announce, “I’m going to mail myself.” Meza knew she was joking. But some of the immigrants she knew had already left. And if more people go, she wonders what impact their departures — whether voluntary or forced — will have on the local economy. Immigrants in the area work on farms, in cheese-processing factories and in a chicken plant — the kind of jobs, she said, that nobody else wants. She’s talked to some of the employers before and knows “they’re always short-staffed,” Meza said. “They’re going to be more short-staffed now when people start going back home.”

Recently, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, I traveled to Wisconsin along with photographer Benjamin Rasmussen to capture what sounded like the beginning of a community coming undone. We talked to Nicaraguans in their kitchens and bedrooms, and in restaurants and grocery stores that have sprung up to cater to them. Many of the people we met either were packing themselves or knew someone else who was, or both.

Some were almost embarrassed to show us what they were packing — items that might have been considered frivolous or extravagant back home. Nicaragua was already one of the poorest countries in the hemisphere before its government took a turn toward authoritarianism and repression, further sinking the economy. But thanks to their working-class jobs at American factories and restaurants, they could afford these things, and they were determined to hold on to them. Some of their belongings carried memories of loved ones or of special occasions. Other items were more practical, tools that might help them get started again in Nicaragua.

From the stories these immigrants told about their belongings emerged others, stories about what had brought them to this country and what they have been able to achieve here. They spoke about the panic that now traps them in their homes and keeps them up at night. And they shared their hopes and fears about what it might mean to start over in a country they fled.

What’s in the boxes

Yaceth’s guilty pleasure is shoes. The 38-year-old left Nicaragua nearly three years ago and works in the same restaurant kitchen as Joaquín. Her wages allowed her to buy a pair or so a month on Amazon, mostly Keds lace-up sneakers, though she also owns glittery stilettos and knee-high red boots. The boxes fill the top half of her closet. Some pairs have never been worn.

We stood along the edge of her bed, admiring her collection. “I’m a bit of an aficionado,” she said sheepishly. Like the other immigrants we spoke with, Yaceth asked not to be identified by her full name to lessen the risk of deportation.

Yaceth said she stopped buying shoes after Trump’s election, uncertain how her life, not to mention her finances, might change once he took office. By the time we met, she had already packed one box of belongings and sent it to her mother in Estelí, a city in northwestern Nicaragua. In the corner of her already crowded bedroom, she kept a blue plastic barrel, which is where she’d planned to put the shoes, hoping it would keep them dry and undamaged during the shipping. If she goes, they’re going, too.

She rents a room in the apartment of another family. They, too, are thinking about what it might look like to return to Nicaragua. Hugo, 33, is setting aside items that might help him make a living back in his hometown of Somoto, about an hour and a half north of Estelí. This includes a Cuisinart digital air fryer he bought with his wages from a sheet-metal factory. Hugo used to sell hot dogs and hamburgers at a fast food stand in Somoto. If he has to return, he envisions starting another food business. The air fryer would help.

We visited a new Nicaraguan restaurant in Waunakee, a village in Dane County that’s seen significant numbers of Nicaraguan arrivals in recent years. One diner, a 49-year-old undocumented dairy worker, told me he plans to send barber trimmers and other supplies for the barbershop he’d like to open up if he’s deported. As we spoke, his dinner companion called a friend who lives a few towns away and handed me the phone; that man, also a dairy worker, told me he is sending back power tools he bought on Facebook Marketplace that are expensive and difficult to find in Nicaragua.

Other immigrants expressed deep uncertainty about whether they might face jail time or worse if they are deported, due to their previous involvement in political activities against the Nicaraguan government. If you don’t toe the party line, said Uriel, a former high school teacher, “they turn you into an enemy of the state.”

Uriel, 36, said he never participated in any anti-government marches. But he worried that local party leaders had been watching him, that they knew how he spoke about democracy and free speech in the classroom.

He said he left Nicaragua almost four years ago both because of the political situation and because he knew he could make more money in the U.S. He has an ongoing asylum case, a work permit and a job at a bread factory. His wages have allowed him to buy a plot of land for his wife and two children, still in Nicaragua, and begin construction on a house there.

He’d hoped to stay in Wisconsin long enough to pay to finish it. But bracing for the inevitable, he’s got a barrel too. Soon, he plans to pack and send a used Yamaha guitar he was given as a gift a few years earlier. Uriel learned to play the instrument by watching YouTube videos and now plays Christian hymns that he said make him feel good inside.

This summer, he plans to return as well. His children have been growing up without him. He has been told his 6-year-old daughter points to planes in the sky and wonders whether her father is inside. He worries that his son, 11, will grow up believing he has been abandoned.

It has been hard to be separated from his children, he said. But he left in order to provide them a life he didn’t believe he could have if he had stayed — a reality he thought was missing from so much of the new president’s rhetoric on immigration. “We are not anybody’s enemy,” Uriel said. “We simply are looking for a way to make a living, to help our families.”

A life in hiding

It used to be that on Sundays, his day off, Joaquín would pull on his favorite boots and sombrero to drive somewhere — to a restaurant or to visit family and friends who had settled in south-central Wisconsin. But ever since Trump’s election, he doesn’t leave his apartment unless he has to. Some days, he says, he feels like a mouse, scurrying downstairs to work and upstairs to sleep and back downstairs again to work, always alert and full of dread.

The gray 2016 Toyota 4Runner that he bought last year, his pride and joy, sits mostly unused behind his apartment building. He’s too afraid of driving and getting pulled over by police officers who, by randomly checking his vehicle’s plates, could discover he doesn’t have a driver’s license. Joaquín doesn’t have the documents he needs to qualify for one. He worries that drawing the attention of police, even for the smallest of infractions, could get him swept into the immigration detention system and deported. “What’s happening now is a persecution,” he said.

On a recent Sunday, his apartment was filled with the sweet, warm smell of home-baked goods. Joaquín said he spent two hours making traditional Nicaraguan cookies called rosquillas and hojaldras, one savory and the other sweet. We talked over coffee and the cornmeal cookies. Half of his living room floor was covered with piles of clothes and shoes, and one tall, empty box. There were shirts, pants and sneakers for each of his three children, who remain in Nicaragua. Most of the clothes belonged to Joaquín: a crisp pair of tan Lee jeans, rarely worn; several pairs of boots; a box of sombreros.

Joaquín said he plans to send all of it to relatives in Nicaragua in February. It pains him to imagine being trotted onto a deportation flight and leaving everything he owns here to get tossed in a landfill somewhere.

Another day, I spoke by phone with an immigrant named Luz, 26. Like Joaquín, she said she rarely leaves her apartment anymore. The week Trump was inaugurated, she stopped going to her job at a nearby cheese factory, afraid of workplace raids. She now stays home with their 1-year-old son. A woman she knows picks up the family’s groceries so they don’t have to risk being out on the street.

Like many of her friends and relatives, Luz came to the U.S. as an asylum-seeker almost three years ago. She missed an immigration court hearing while pregnant with her son and now worries she has “no legal status here.”

“Those of us who work milking cows, we can’t afford to hire a lawyer,” she said. “We don’t even know what’s happening with our cases.”

After Trump’s election, she began packing some of the things she’d accumulated in her time in Wisconsin, including some used children’s clothes she’d received from Meza, the community health worker. She packed most everything in her kitchen: most of her pots and pans, some plates and cups, knives, an iron and “even chocolates,” she said, almost laughing. “It is a big box.”

Luz said she wants all of her household items to be in Nicaragua when she returns with her family. They hope to leave in March. “I don’t want to live in hiding like this,” she said.

Family separation redux

Isabel’s son cried as she filled her box. In went the shiny red car, big enough for the 14-month-old to sit in and drive. It had been a gift from his godfather on his first birthday. She added other, smaller cars and planes and stuffed animals. A stroller. A framed photo from the birthday party, the chubby-cheeked boy surrounded by balloons.

The 26-year-old mother knew her son was too young to understand. But she hoped he would if the dreaded time came when they had to return to Nicaragua.

And to make sure she wouldn’t be separated from him, she applied for his passport early last fall, when she became convinced that Trump would win the election. She could see his lawn signs all around her in the rural community in the middle of the state where she lives. Her husband, who works on a dairy farm, told her he’d begun feeling uncomfortable with the way people glared at him at Walmart. Sometimes, they shouted things he didn’t understand, but in a tone that was unmistakably hostile.

Their son was born in the U.S. to noncitizen parents — exactly the kind of child Trump says does not deserve citizenship here. Isabel got his passport both to secure his rights as an American citizen and to secure her rights to him. She wants to make sure there is no mistaking who the boy belongs to if she gets sent away.

We met Isabel about a week after she’d shipped off the box with her son’s red toy car to her mother’s home in southern Nicaragua. It was the morning of Trump’s inauguration, and Isabel welcomed us into her apartment, her eyes still red and bleary from an overnight shift at a nearby cheese-processing factory.

She said they were ready to go “if things get ugly” and the people around her start getting picked up and sent back. But there was another box, still flat and unpacked, propped up against a wall in the living room. That one, she explained, belonged to a neighbor with the same game plan.

I ask her what happens if they don’t get deported, but their most precious belongings are gone. Won’t they miss those things? “Yes,” she said. But it would be even worse to go back to Nicaragua and have nothing.

Additional design and development by Zisiga Mukulu.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

Boxed up: a portrait of an immigrant community living under threat of deportation 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.