Reading Time: 9 minutes

This article was produced in partnership with the nonprofit journalism publication Bolts, which covers criminal justice and voting rights in local governments.

Click here to read highlights from the story

• Voters in Sauk and Winnebago counties will choose sheriffs who hold different views on local cooperation with ICE.
• Both Democratic candidates pledge to end their counties’ 287(g) agreements while their Republican opponents support continuing them in some form.
• In Sauk County, both candidates would maintain a contract allowing ICE to house detainees in the county jail, despite disagreeing over the financial and humanitarian implications.
• In Winnebago County, residents have also raised concerns about the law enforcement use of Flock license plate cameras.

Half an hour into a packed June candidate forum in Baraboo, the moderator turned to the issue looming over the race for Sauk County sheriff: immigration enforcement. 

“As chief law enforcement officer of Sauk County, how will you separate the demands of ICE from your duty to uphold the law and protect the residents of Sauk County?” Baraboo Optimist Club President Joseph Viney asked.  

The six candidates at the front of the public library conference room offered well-rehearsed responses.

Three months and a primary later, one Republican and one Democrat remain, with the question still central to the race ahead of the Nov. 3 election.

“People are fired up and they’re frustrated with ICE in general from a national perspective, and it does have local consequences,” Ryan Jesberger, the Democratic nominee, told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts.

ICE agents haven’t turned up in large numbers in the largely rural south-central Wisconsin county to check homes, jobsites and cars for undocumented immigrants. Unlike in neighboring Illinois and Minnesota, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has relied on jails and prisons to make most of its arrests in Wisconsin since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. 

Sauk County is no exception. ICE has recorded about 100 arrests in the county during that period, almost all through custody transfers at the local jail. An agreement between the sheriff’s office and federal authorities makes a small portion of those arrests possible by allowing county jail supervisors to play a limited role in immigration enforcement.

The Sauk County Sheriff’s Office is one of 20 county law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin that cooperate with ICE through 287(g) agreements: voluntary partnerships allowing designated local officers to carry out some immigration enforcement tasks. Voters in two of those counties — Sauk and Winnebago counties, 90 miles apart — will have a say in the future of their sheriffs’ ICE partnerships this fall. Trump won both counties by less than 5 percentage points in 2024.

The Trump administration has tapped local law enforcement agencies across the country for help in its immigration enforcement push, often in the form of 287(g) agreements. Those arrangements are drawing pushback from immigrant rights organizations and, in some cases, shaking up local elections.

Sheriffs are “the most important state(-level) race for immigration purposes,” said Hannah Schwarz, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Wisconsin. The civil liberties organization opposes local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. 

Sauk and Winnebago county voters will now choose between Republicans promising to stay the course and Democrats campaigning to dial back cooperation with immigration authorities. Both Democrats promise to quit the 287(g) program as soon as they take office.

But the partisan split conceals a more complicated policy landscape in Sauk County, where both candidates in the race favor keeping in place a contract that allows ICE to rent out space in the local jail to detain immigrants.

In Sauk, ICE cooperation takes multiple forms

Sauk County sits on the edge of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area, a region of sandstone bluffs and organic farms that has veered toward Republicans over the past three presidential elections after more than a decade of favoring Democrats. 

Baraboo, the county seat, peters out into cornfields within city limits. Wisconsin Dells, the Midwest’s waterpark capital, spills across the county’s northern boundary. The city’s resorts hire foreign workers on temporary visas ahead of the summer rush; other immigrants, many without visas, milk cows on the county’s dairy farms. 

Signed by Sheriff Richard “Chip” Meister in November 2025, Sauk County’s 287(g) agreement enables the county’s six jail supervisors to execute immigration warrants on people in county custody — a task ICE officers would otherwise perform. Executing an immigration warrant transfers them to ICE custody. 

The Sauk arrangement “streamline(s) our existing relationship with ICE,” Meister wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch and Bolts.

But Meister is set to retire this year after 16 years, leaving the future of this arrangement uncertain. He endorsed Capt. Matt Burch, a Republican, ahead of the August primary; Burch won the primary by a wide margin. 

He takes a position similar to Meister’s. 

“Our focus remains strictly on removing individuals who commit serious crimes rather than targeting members of our community solely based on their immigration status,” Burch wrote in an email. He does not, however, plan to extend the office’s partnership with ICE beyond the county jail. “Our authority applies exclusively to individuals who are already in our custody for violating local or state laws.” 

About half of people transferred from the Sauk County Jail to ICE during Trump’s second term had prior criminal convictions, a Wisconsin Watch and Bolts analysis shows; the other half had pending criminal charges. At least 8% of those transferred to ICE custody inside the jail had a prior conviction for driving while intoxicated — by far the most common conviction among Sauk County arrestees.

Jesberger, the Democratic candidate running against Burch and a University of Wisconsin-Madison police lieutenant, promises to end the county’s 287(g) agreement “on day one.”

“It’s not an anti-ICE or pro-ICE view,” he said. “We’re not talking (about) not doing any interaction,” he added, but instead about scaling back the county’s role. Jesberger also argues the 287(g) agreement sidesteps a contentious and unresolved question about the limits of local law enforcement’s arrest powers.

Law enforcement agencies with or without 287(g) agreements can choose to honor ICE “detainer” requests, which can entail holding people in jail up to 48 hours past their scheduled release to give immigration agents time to take them into custody.

The ACLU of Wisconsin petitioned the state Supreme Court in September 2025 to take up a lawsuit claiming five Wisconsin sheriffs’ offices — including Sauk County’s — violate state law by honoring the requests. The lawsuit argues that jailing someone beyond the person’s scheduled release date on an ICE detainer qualifies as an arrest and that state law does not authorize law enforcement to make arrests solely on the agency’s administrative warrants. 

The lawsuit is currently caught in a jurisdictional tug-of-war.

Jesberger shares the ACLU’s view on detainers, which he called “request(s) to take an action we are not authorized to take.” 

“It’s easy to say we should just hold onto someone,” he wrote in an email. “The problem is that under Wisconsin Law, there is no legal authority to conduct an arrest on this civil detainer.”

Jesberger would, however, honor warrants signed by a judge.

A 287(g) agreement enabling jail supervisors to serve immigration warrants is not the same as honoring ICE detainers, he added, but it still blurs jurisdictional lines. “Entering into the agreement to act as federal agents,” he said, “is going around state law.”

Jesberger also argues that even the county’s current agreement can strain sheriff’s office resources.

“Our deputies are busy enough doing things for the citizens of Sauk County,” he said, “so adding roles and responsibilities and, frankly, liability on top of all that is a concern of mine.”

Alongside its participation in the 287(g) program, Sauk County built on its partnership with ICE last year when it extended a long-standing agreement to hold federal detainees to include people held on immigration grounds. 

The county’s original agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service dates back more than two decades. The sheriff’s office modified that agreement in April 2025 to also include ICE. More than 200 ICE detainees have since passed through Sauk County, most of whom entered ICE custody either at the jail or in other Wisconsin correctional facilities.

ICE reimburses the county $106 per day for housing a person in removal proceedings, plus $38.45 per hour for staff time spent transporting ICE detainees. That contract yielded more than $150,000 for the Sauk County Sheriff’s Office between January and June – less than 1% of the office’s annual budget, and about 15% of what Burch calls its “flexible” budget, or the portion not already devoted to wages and benefits. 

“That money is important to us,” Burch said at the June forum.

Jesberger also promises to maintain the county’s contract to provide jail space for ICE detainees, though he pushes back on Burch’s focus on the revenue it yields, calling on law enforcement to “stop talking about human beings as numbers or revenue generation.” 

Instead, he sees the housing contract as a way to protect immigrants’ due process rights while they await rulings in their removal cases. 

Aside from offering Wisconsin-based attorneys easier access to their clients, Jesberger argues that a responsibly managed contract can ensure people in custody “are treated with respect and dignity, are not laying on a concrete floor with a foil blanket in overcrowded cells (and) are not being shipped out of state to detention facilities with inhumane conditions.”

Some Wisconsin immigration attorneys and immigrant rights advocates aren’t sold on that pitch. “Any amount of custody is an incentive for ICE to continue” its crackdown, said Aissa Olivarez of the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison.

Schwarz of the ACLU of Wisconsin agrees, saying that housing contracts like Sauk County’s make it easier — and cheaper — for the agency to scale up its operations.

Cooperating with ICE in any capacity has a “chilling effect” on immigrant communities, Milwaukee-based immigration attorney Marc Christopher said, and can make immigrants less likely to contact law enforcement in an emergency.

But Christopher also noted that Sauk County is far easier to reach than the larger detention facilities in Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana and Texas where many Wisconsin arrestees land while awaiting outcomes in their removal cases. “I can meet with them in person,” he said. “Their families know where they are, and their families can meet with them.”

Jesberger and Burch have no debates scheduled ahead of Election Day, but a local coalition that opposes all cooperation with federal immigration authorities is planning an Oct. 3 event featuring the ACLU of Wisconsin and immigrant rights group Voces de la Frontera. 

In Winnebago, sheriff candidates diverge amid a broader debate on surveillance

Eastern Wisconsin’s Winnebago County is more than twice as populous as Sauk County. Sheriff John Matz entered its 287(g) agreement — also a warrant service model — in March 2025. 

ICE has recorded roughly 25 arrests in the county since last January, almost all inside its jail. Capt. Darin Rice, the Republican running to replace the retiring Matz, says that low number is no reason to end the agreement. 

“I do believe that it needs to continue,” he told a packed audience in an Oshkosh City Hall conference room in September. Still, he underscored that he isn’t interested in “street-level enforcement” or renting jail beds to ICE.

Rice is running against his colleague, Patrol Officer Jason Rippl.

Rippl, the Democratic candidate, has broader 287(g) qualms than Jesberger. 

“I feel like the 287(g) agreement may open the door for additional involvement with (ICE),” he told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts, “and I think that by any modern law enforcement standards, we’ve seen pretty clearly that their tactics are sloppy.”

He promises to void the county’s 287(g) agreement on his first day in office, which he argues would free up time to “clean up our own backyard” by digging out of a backlog of warrants unrelated to immigration.

Rippl said he would honor warrants signed by a judge, but he doesn’t “feel it is the responsibility of local jails” to hold inmates beyond their release date based solely on a non-binding ICE request. 

Though Winnebago County isn’t named in the ACLU lawsuit, a ruling could affect any Wisconsin county’s ability to honor ICE detainer requests. Sheriffs could also refuse to honor detainers absent a court ruling, as some have done elsewhere.

The early attention on Winnebago County’s relationship with ICE may be shifting to law enforcement’s use of surveillance technology. Both Rice and Rippl said they had reservations about the handling of sensitive data from the license plate cameras, citing the well-documented recent history of the technology’s misuse.

The Winnebago County sheriff’s office decided in early September to suspend its partnership with Flock, the embattled tech company that has built up an extensive camera network nationwide and has drawn increasingly bipartisan backlash this year. 

Sauk County’s sheriff’s office continues to operate Flock cameras, introduced as part of a pilot project last year. Burch, the GOP nominee for sheriff, called the program a  “pet project” and credits the cameras for solving several high-stakes cases. Other law enforcement agencies in Wisconsin have, like Winnebago County, ended their contracts with Flock.

“We had a lot of pushback early on to the 287(g) program,” Rice told Wisconsin Watch and Bolts. “That’s now taken a back seat to Flock cameras.”

Rippl agreed that Flock is “certainly the more prevalent conversation topic” in his conversations with constituents, though he does not believe it has “overshadowed” the 287(g) debate.

Ongoing controversies over ICE’s use of Flock camera data link the two issues.

404 Media revealed last year that local law enforcement agencies across the country have queried data from Flock cameras on ICE’s behalf, including some in states with strict restrictions on local cooperation with ICE. Wisconsin has no such restrictions. 

The Sauk and Winnebago County sheriffs did not reply to a request for comment on how often their Flock cameras have been used for immigration enforcement. In Verona, a Madison suburb with a population roughly one tenth of Winnebago County’s, public records revealed hundreds of searches tied to ICE last year.

Correction: This story has been updated to note that Ryan Jesberger is a University of Wisconsin–Madison police lieutenant. A previous version incorrectly reported that he was a former lieutenant.

Two Wisconsin sheriff races test the future of local ICE cooperation 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.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Systems used to transmit unofficial election night results broke down in Green and Winnebago counties during Wisconsin’s August primary, causing problems processing and posting results.

The issues had no bearing on the official results that counties across the state are still certifying. But those breakdowns come as national experts have encouraged a move away from transmitting results over modems and toward physically delivering them. Many other states and election jurisdictions have shifted away from transmitting results by modem, but it remains common in Wisconsin.

Much of the concern about sending results over modems has related to cybersecurity. But experts say there are additional reasons to avoid the use of modems, and the recent issues in Wisconsin are one example. There’s no indication that the Election Day issues in Green and Winnebago counties, which both use Liberty Vote election technology, had anything to do with a hack.

Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, an elections technology organization, said election security is not only about preventing incorrect results or cyberattacks. It also means making sure the systems that election officials rely on are available and functioning when they need them.

A breakdown in transmitting unofficial results may not change the outcome of an election, she said, but it can still disrupt election night operations and consume significant staff time.

“It matters because it’s a time suck for the county and everybody trying to deal with it,” she said.

In a statement, a Liberty Vote spokesperson said the company has “every confidence these isolated issues will not occur in future elections.”

Green County changing results reporting process for November

The results transmission failure caused the most significant delay in Green County, where officials did not fully shift to a backup method for collecting results from municipalities until the next morning.

Officials there and their vendor, Liberty Vote, are still trying to understand what went wrong after county staff were unable to process the results that municipalities sent over via fax modems, Green County Clerk Arianna Voegeli told Votebeat.

When municipalities in Green County send their unofficial results to the county clerk’s office, they appear as encrypted files on a so-called listener server set up to receive the transmissions, said Voegeli, a Democrat. Normally, a different software called a results workstation pulls those files and uploads the results to the county’s unofficial results reporting system, but that process broke down on Election Day, she said.

County staff tried to troubleshoot the issue with Liberty Vote after discovering the issue at 9 p.m. on election night but couldn’t find a solution. That meant they had to turn to alternative methods to get the results from municipalities and didn’t have them all until the next morning — far later than most counties.

Voegeli said she consulted with the Wisconsin Elections Commission at the time to discuss what to do. The commission, she said, encouraged her to get municipal results as quickly as possible.

“Their recommendation was, at that point, to do my due diligence and do the best I can with trying to contact people (that) night to get those results in,” she said.

She opted not to use sheriff’s deputies to wake clerks that night, she said. Instead, she called all 24 of them; most didn’t return her call until early the following morning, but the few who responded delivered results over the phone. She got back to work at 6:30 a.m. on Wednesday to finish processing results as municipal officials either came in person to deliver the unofficial results or told Voegeli the results over the phone. All the results were uploaded by 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday.

Had it been November, she said, she would have employed sheriff’s deputies to wake up clerks. She opted not to do it this time around, Voegeli said, in part because the Wisconsin Elections Commission didn’t give hard guidance, and she didn’t feel she’d save meaningful time by waking them.

As of Monday, she said, officials still had not determined what caused the failure. But Green County is changing its approach for the November election.

Voegeli said nearby municipalities will drive to the county office to physically deliver unofficial results, and the faraway ones will verbally transmit results via telephone.

“Even if we determine what the cause of this issue is, I think we’re still going to plan on that for the general election,” she said. “We really want to make sure that we’re getting those results out in a timely manner.”

Winnebago County shifted gears on Election Day

Winnebago County, which also uses Liberty Vote systems, also had trouble transmitting unofficial results by modem, but officials there shifted to a backup plan that same night.

After polls closed, municipal clerks were initially unable to send unofficial election results over a cellular modem. County officials and Liberty Vote are still trying to understand what went wrong, County Clerk Julie Barthels said. After noticing the error, Barthels instructed municipal clerks in the county to drive in the results and hand them over physically. The last one arrived around 10:30 p.m. on Election Day.

The city resolved the results-reporting issue by 9 p.m., said Barthels, a Republican. But by then, municipal officials were already on their way to the county and Barthels said she didn’t want to turn the municipal officials around again to deliver them via modem.

Winnebago County isn’t planning for any shift in results reporting for November. But she said she’ll work with Liberty Vote to understand what went wrong.

“They’ve promised me this will not happen in November,” Barthels said about Liberty Vote. “We’re going to get to the bottom of what happened. I so trust our system. But it’s like any other computer. One day it works, and the next day it doesn’t.”

Some election security experts warn against modeming results

Smith, the Verified Voting CEO, said any method that requires election equipment to communicate with other devices — whether that’s through a secure cellular network or a physical phone line — introduces additional vulnerabilities.

“It’d be great if they would move towards a safer operation of not not having that connectivity,” she said

But Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, said transmitting unofficial results via modem does not pose a major technical risk as long as the official results are protected through testing and audits of paper ballots. Every method for transmitting results has trade-offs, he said: Driving a USB stick for an hour may have fewer vulnerabilities than an internet-connected method, but it also takes far longer.

The more important safeguard, Hale said, is for election officials to stay involved throughout the process, validating results and checking for errors — especially when verifying the official count. Hale previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

In this case, he said, Winnebago and Green counties responded appropriately by having backup plans in case their initial systems failed.

“This one doesn’t concern me quite as much as some other things I’ve seen,” he said.

Noah Praetz, president of Ready For Tuesday and a longtime election administration and security consultant, said jurisdictions embraced reporting results via modems in the 2000s and 2010s.

That momentum stalled around 2016, he said, amid Russian attempts to interfere with U.S. elections and after Ukraine’s results reporting system in 2014 was successfully hacked. After that, Praetz said, following responses from the FBI and CISA, and the designation of elections as critical infrastructure by the secretary of Homeland Security, election officials began recognizing that results in transit over modems posed a risk, even if the results were unofficial.

But a major benefit of using modems is speed, and Praetz emphasized the downsides of slower alternatives, as delays in reporting results can create openings for bad actors — including foreign governments — to sow distrust.

“People want to get results out of their hands,” he said. “They want to satisfy their voters.”

That was evident in Milwaukee on Aug. 11, when a human error in exporting results caused a 90-minute delay that exasperated election watchers and prompted widespread conspiracy theories about what had gone wrong.

Alexander Shur is a reporter for Votebeat based in Wisconsin. Contact Shur at ashur@votebeat.org.

Votebeat is a nonprofit news organization reporting on voting access and election administration across the U.S. Sign up for Votebeat Wisconsin’s free newsletter here.

Issues with election systems delayed primary results in two Wisconsin counties 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.

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Editor’s note: This story contains topics of domestic violence and abuse.

When Kimberly Johnson mustered the courage to leave her abuser, she hoped the Christine Ann shelter in Winnebago County would be a refuge.

Johnson said she didn’t leave her abuser when he went to prison for beating her, or when she got evicted because of the damage he and his friends caused to her home. It took her years to get away, and when she did, there was only one place she thought to go. 

What she didn’t expect was to be turned away.

Johnson is one of several domestic abuse survivors who, after what they describe as bad experiences with the Oshkosh shelter, left negative online reviews. Their stories raise questions about where survivors can turn when a shelter of last resort shuts them out. 

Christine Ann Domestic Abuse Services Incorporated, or CADASI for short, has long stood as a community pillar for domestic violence victims in Winnebago County. 

The center was founded in 1984 and renamed in 1991 after Christine Ann Schambow, who was murdered by her husband. That same year it moved to Algoma Boulevard near its current location a few blocks from the Fox River. In 2024, the shelter relocated again to a new 64-bed facility that provides legal and mental health services and up to two years of housing support.

When Johnson first arrived in 2024, she was assigned to an apartment with other women. She found a job as a cook at UW-Oshkosh and began to gain back some of her confidence.

But three days after she started working, she received a week’s notice to vacate. 

Johnson asked her counselor if she could stay until she received her first paycheck because she had nowhere to go. She recalled being told, “Well, we’re not a homeless shelter, (and) we feel that’s why you’re here, because you’re homeless.”

About two days later, after Johnson had asked her counselor how to file a grievance and discussed the situation with her roommate, who was also being kicked out, she heard a knock at her door. Her counselor, another shelter employee and two police officers were there.

Johnson said they accused her of threatening to “beat up” a CADASI staff member and told her she had 10 minutes to pack all her things before they would be removed.

Johnson recalled spending several days sleeping outside the Salvation Army in the freezing cold, before eventually being accepted into a homeless shelter. She said if she had not gotten into that shelter when she did, she would have gone back to her abuser.

Wisconsin Watch spoke with several former CADASI clients and domestic abuse survivors who reported being turned away, along with statewide advocates and government officials, about accountability for domestic violence agencies serving survivors’ needs. 

CADASI Executive Director Carly Hirsch said in an email that the organization is unable to respond to questions from Wisconsin Watch, but wrote in a statement that CADASI is “committed to empowering individuals and families, regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, or ability … by providing education, promoting safety, and offering compassionate support (while) always honoring the confidentiality of those we serve.” 

Former clients speak out

On websites like Charity Navigator and Indeed, CADASI’s shelter has overwhelmingly positive reviews for financial openness and working conditions. 

But out of the 62 service reviews for the shelter on Google, 17 are negative, and those reviews have overwhelmingly more likes than the positive ones. CADASI’s corporate office, which is listed separately online from the shelter, has only one review, which is negative. 

Wisconsin Watch confirmed the negative reviews with names attached were all from real people located in or near Winnebago County at the time. Among CADASI’s online reviews, three other women said the organization had kicked them out.

Jennifer, a single mother of three, said she sought support from CADASI sometime between 2011 and 2015 for an emotionally, financially and sexually abusive relationship. Jennifer, who wished to be identified by her first name, was often living in her car at the time.

She initially found the center’s programming to be helpful. She took a choice and consequences class with a former advocate whom she described as “awesome.”

“She would help me out when I was kicked out and didn’t have a job, but my kids needed something like a Halloween costume. She’d give me gift cards,” Jennifer recalled.

After that advocate left the center, however, Jennifer said things took a drastic turn. She got into an argument with her abuser, who told her he had contacted a legal advocate at the shelter. CADASI then abruptly canceled her services, refusing to speak with her or provide alternative resources because staff claimed a conflict of interest.

“Christine Ann has the right to decide who they can allow services or what a conflict of interest is,” she recalled the advocate telling her after repeated phone calls asking for an explanation. 

Multiple sources said CADASI used the phrase “conflict of interest” when refusing or withdrawing services, though it does not openly define this term. The nonprofit organization’s GuideStar profile says it has a conflict-of-interest policy, but it’s not publicly available on its website.

The United States Office for Victims of Crime says that “when a conflict arises between a victim’s interests and those of the victim assistance provider or program, the provider should verbally disclose the situation to the victim, refer the victim to an alternate provider, and/or consult a professional regarding appropriate resolution of the conflict.”

The experience ended up following Jennifer, who went back to her abuser. When she attempted to leave him again, she said Harbor House in Appleton, a CADASI partner, refused to serve her. 

She also said when she was hired for a job at Garage for Good in Neenah — a low-cost auto repair garage opened by CADASI and Harbor House for domestic abuse survivors that closed in 2020 — the job offer was rescinded the morning she was supposed to start working.

“Not only would they not help me, but now I can’t even have a job,” Jennifer said. “I finally got a job, and it was going to be good and I’ll make decent money so I’d be able to support myself, and I don’t have to go back. … And then the rug was just pulled out from under me.”

Jennifer didn’t talk to anyone about her experience with CADASI for a long time because she thought “no one cared.”

“The worst part about that was then when I left (my abuser) finally, permanently, I needed help, and I knew I couldn’t go to the Christine Ann center,” Jennifer said. 

Rejected survivors

CADASI is transparent about its inability to help all survivors in its community due to limited space — a nationwide problem as domestic violence shelters face funding cuts and uncertain futures. 

Advocates with Wise Women Gathering Place, a Green Bay nonprofit that provides culturally specific services to Native American victims of violence, told Wisconsin Watch that dozens of their clients have been turned away or abruptly kicked out of shelters across the state, particularly in the last few years. 

CADASI’s website notes that before the shelter moved and expanded from 37 to 64 beds in 2024, it turned away about 50 survivors annually for capacity reasons. But Johnson questioned that claim, saying her unit had five empty beds prior to her eviction. She said she saw two empty apartments on her floor and empty apartments throughout the third floor. 

Donna Prost said she was fleeing abuse and living in her car when CADASI turned her away in 2021. She said the shelter appeared mostly empty each time she visited, even though staff told her there was no room for her. 

CADASI declined Wisconsin Watch’s request for data on its occupancy rates, citing “the safety and confidentiality of (its) current and former clients,” though the shelter reports biannual point in time occupancy numbers to Wisconsin Balance of State Continuum of Care, which tracks homelessness.

Data from 2014 to 2025 shows CADASI has rarely been near capacity during the two nights each year the homeless advocacy organization recorded its occupancy rates. In half of the counts, occupancy rates were less than 50%, dipping as low as 13.5% in July 2022. The shelter has not exceeded 100% capacity during the counts since 2014.

A Wisconsin Balance of State Continuum of Care spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch a shelter might not appear full if it houses a family in a single unit with more beds than there are family members.

CADASI’s 2024 tax form, known as a 990, says the shelter provides families with private rooms, while single adults of the same gender may share rooms. The form also says the shelter does not limit how long clients can stay, though its website says housing is offered for up to two years.

Organization leaders did not respond to requests for clarification about the homeless counts and their bed capacity. 

After being turned away from CADASI, Prost returned to her abuser. “I had nowhere to go. I was selling my home at the time (and) ended up backing out of that,” she said.

She approached CADASI again in 2023 for help filing a restraining order due to an escalation in the abuse. She said CADASI was ultimately unhelpful — despite Winnebago County instructing people to contact CADASI for help with restraining orders. Prost ultimately completed her restraining order with help from the local library.

“I would probably have been killed somewhere along the line (without it),” Prost said. “I wouldn’t say (CADASI) was mean or anything like that … but both times they just didn’t want to be bothered.”

Carl, a 40-year-old Wisconsin military veteran who asked to be identified by his middle name because he feared retribution and wanted to protect his coparenting relationship, said a social worker friend encouraged him to call CADASI in 2018 for therapy resources after he showed her a video of his ex-wife verbally abusing him. He was hesitant to do so, half-convinced that he just had a “crazy ex.”

When he called the organization’s 24-hour helpline, Carl said it took time to convince the advocate on the other end that he wasn’t an abusive husband seeking help to stop abusing. Instead, he said, he wanted someone with whom to talk through his experiences. 

“I finally made her realize that, in my mind, I was a victim, and the response that I got will stick with me forever. She laughed,” he recalled. “She laughed at me and said that this was a women’s shelter. That they existed to protect women from people like me. (She said) men are not victims, and that I should just go check out the homeless shelter or something.”

Carl’s account was echoed by an anonymous online reviewer who said he filed a complaint with the shelter. 

The man said staff told him by phone he could stay after his girlfriend was arrested for domestic violence, but staff turned him away when he arrived because his presence would be a “conflict of interest” and that “women felt scared having a male stay there.” 

Studies show as many as 32% of Wisconsin men experience intimate partner violence, rape or stalking. CADASI’s websites and brochures say it serves “people of all backgrounds, genders, ages, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and abilities.”

CADASI receives annual government funding from the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF), the state Department of Justice (DOJ), Winnebago County Health and Human Services, the cities of Oshkosh and Neenah’s Community Development Block Grants and FEMA-EFSP. State law prohibits organizations that receive state funding from discriminating. 

Oversight and redress 

Some of the concerns raised about CADASI relate to a lack of transparency surrounding grievance and nondiscrimination procedures for clients. 

CADASI’s website says it encourages clients to report discrimination “promptly” after it occurs. According to GuideStar, a clearinghouse for nonprofit information, the organization “aim(s) to collect feedback from as many people (they) serve as possible” and makes additional efforts to collect feedback from “marginalized or under-represented people.”

The profile also says the organization has difficulty getting people to respond to requests for feedback because it lacks technology to “collect and aggregate feedback efficiently.” It says CADASI staff “find it hard to prioritize feedback collection and review due to lack of time.”

CADASI does not specify what its procedure is for collecting feedback, nor for addressing discrimination complaints or client grievances. CADASI declined to comment when asked by Wisconsin Watch.

Johnson said that when she asked an advocate how to file a grievance report two days before being kicked out, the advocate refused to explain the process. She still wants to officially report her shelter experience, but like many survivors in similar circumstances, has “no clue” where or how to do so. 

A Wisconsin DCF spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that domestic violence agencies receiving DCF grant funds are contractually obligated to have a grievance process for staff and clients. If a client has completed the program’s complaint/grievance process and does not feel that the complaint has been resolved, the person can submit a complaint to DCF’s general complaint form. DCF lacks a complaint process or records database specific to domestic violence shelters.

Should DCF identify “instances of concern or non-compliance” with grant requirements for a shelter, DCF said the program agency must “take immediate corrective action” or work with DCF on a Corrective Action Plan in serious cases. If the shelter doesn’t comply with the plan requirements, DCF said it may terminate the grant agreement.

Responding to a Wisconsin Watch records request, DCF said it received a complaint about CADASI in 2019. The complainant accused the organization of sharing her address with her abuser, denying her shelter due to medical needs and not preparing her for her court hearing or helping her with transportation.

Currently, all DCF-funded shelters must provide temporary housing and food, educational arrangements for school-age children, emergency transportation, a 24-hour crisis line and an intake process for clients.

In response to the complaint, a DCF spokesperson said the agency had a conversation with CADASI and shared the results of the conversation with the complainant. The agency was “satisfied” with the outcome of the conversations, the spokesperson said without providing more detail.

End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, a statewide coalition that works to “educate shelter and program volunteers and advocates, law enforcement, legislators, and community members to provide safety and support to survivors,” also has a multistep process for approaching grievances, communications director Elise Buchbinder told Wisconsin Watch.

When a client or survivor reaches out to End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin about a negative experience with a local agency, the coalition first tries to address the issue on a program level. The coalition may contact the agency informally to inquire about any problems, offer gaps in support and work alongside the agency to address survivor concerns.

The second step, Buchbinder said, is to bring the problem to the organization’s board members. The board is typically responsible for developing the policy, procedures and regulations of an agency, evaluating its programs’ performance and addressing client complaints.

Two former CADASI board members declined to comment for this story, and others did not respond to requests from Wisconsin Watch. 

Finally, if End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin receives many complaints about a shelter or agency, or if it is unable to address disputes locally, the coalition would contact the program’s funders and grant managers — including the DCF — as well as elected officials and the media. 

Buchbinder declined to comment on whether End Domestic Abuse has received complaints about CADASI.

The final option for survivors seeking redress is to contact the Wisconsin Department of Justice (DOJ), though its oversight also applies only to the shelters it funds, and even then is “limited” and “not regulatory” in nature.

When the DOJ receives a complaint about a domestic violence shelter, it first decides whether the complaint “relates to the terms and conditions of (its) grant” for that shelter. If it doesn’t, the DOJ either forwards it to an outside agency or returns it to the complainant.

“The DOJ generally does not have the authority to act on complaints regarding conduct that is not contemplated by the terms and conditions of the domestic violence shelter’s DOJ-administered grant program,” the agency said.

Discrimination complaints, for example, must be handled by the U.S. Department of Justice, but the Wisconsin DOJ typically assists complainants in submissions. 

When the DOJ finds that a grant recipient violated program conditions, it will typically work with the shelter or affiliated statewide coalitions to “achieve compliance,” sometimes attaching special conditions to grants or reviewing and revising the shelter’s policies.

In severe cases, the DOJ says it may reject future funding requests from the organization.

Some advocates argue that there is too little oversight or accountability for domestic violence agencies across the state. Shelters across Wisconsin, particularly in Winnebago County and the Fox Valley, have accumulated negative online reviews over the years.

Wise Women Gathering Place advocate and Oneida Nation member Julia McLester said many clients have faced discrimination from domestic violence agencies, including in Winnebago County. Advocates have called the police on clients and referred them to psychiatrists for practicing cultural rituals, discouraging some survivors from working with non-Native advocates altogether.

Nationally, more than half (55%) of Native women have experienced physical violence from an intimate partner. 

McLester has worked with the Wisconsin Coalition Against Sexual Assault to create a racial inclusion checklist for domestic violence agencies, but the idea hasn’t gained traction.

“Mainstream agencies need to be learning and growing and being accountable to how they provide training, trauma-informed care training, diversity, equity, inclusion skills, and accountability, how to check our own implicit biases so that it’s not creating harm to people coming in the door,” McLester said.

The aftermath of abuse

Buchbinder attributes the struggles many survivors are facing with Wisconsin shelters and coalitions to a systemic lack of resources for the survivors and agencies, rather than any ill will by the organizations.

“Our communities will continue seeing individual cases of escalated crises at the local program level due to an overarching lack of survivors’ needs being met,” Buchbinder said. “When an advocate is forced to say ‘no’ to (survivors’) basic needs due to lack of adequate resourcing, further escalation of crisis is too often a tragic outcome.”

Wise Women Gathering Place communications person Brenda John, who is also a member of Oneida Nation, echoed that statement. “The people who work in these settings, they care about victims … their resources are stretched thin as well, so they’re doing the best they can with what they have.” 

Nevertheless, they emphasized that institutional and societal responses to domestic abuse victims can inflict long-term trauma, such as feelings of shame and embarrassment that discourage survivors from seeking services. 

Following her eviction from CADASI, Johnson said she lived in a motel before being forced to live in her car. Now 56 and living with her mother, she struggles to find employment and lacks many of the resources needed to pursue her dream of attending college. 

“They were supposed to do everything they said in their ads,” Johnson said. “At that point I’m telling myself I am so broken, I don’t even know where to begin. And I need guidance, and I need help, and I’ve always been the type of person I will never ask anybody for anything. … I will not beg, you know? And that’s how they made me feel, like I had to beg for it.”

Jennifer said she felt like CADASI “slapped me in the face and victim-shamed me” and was “destroyed” for years after her experience. She remembers weeping in her aunt’s backyard when she was moving herself and three children into her aunt’s two-bedroom apartment. She called the suicide crisis hotline “too many times to count.” 

Though she managed to get a restraining order against her husband, Prost said that being turned away from CADASI made her life extremely stressful. The worry and fear keep her awake at night, even after her husband died in January 2025.

Carl said his CADASI experience was “shattering on a level (he) didn’t quite understand and wasn’t prepared to deal with.” Like Jennifer, he continues to coparent with his abuser without guidance.

Carl said a friend wanted him to go on a “warpath” against the shelter after hearing about his experience. But he advised against it. Carl doesn’t want the scrutiny and doubts anybody will believe him.

“Who are people going to believe?” he asked. “This one dude, or this shelter organization that has been active in the Fox Valley for who knows how long?” 

Still, many of the people Wisconsin Watch spoke with are healing after saving themselves from their circumstances when no one else would. 

They have gone to therapy, found jobs helping others and focused on building better lives for their children. By speaking up, they hope to raise awareness about how society treats abuse survivors and draw attention to the need for more empathy and transparency in the institutions that are supposed to help.

“I still have this dream in my head that I want to start my own shelter, get my own nationwide domestic abuse shelter going and not do this to women,” Johnson said. “It’s my life and my livelihood. How could you just disregard me like I’m less than a dog?”

Editor’s note: This story corrects the name of the local college in Oshkosh where Johnson worked as a cook.

An Oshkosh domestic abuse shelter has been panned online. Survivors describe what they experienced. 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.