Clark County in central Wisconsin has the most dairy farms of any county in the state, which advertises itself as America’s Dairyland. Its identity is so inextricably linked to the dairy business that a 16-foot-tall black-and-white talking Holstein sits outside the county seat of Neillsville.
To herd the cows, milk them, and clean their excrement at these dairy farms — the nasty, hazardous labour that keeps this multibillion-dollar business running — farm owners in Wisconsin and elsewhere depend on an illegal labor force.
However, the state makes it very hard for laborers to live outside of the farm without breaching the law. Undocumented immigrants in Wisconsin may own and register vehicles and trucks, but they cannot drive them. Those who continue to drive are repeatedly pulled over and handed citations that chip away at their salaries.
The statute prohibiting unauthorized immigrants from acquiring driver’s licenses has repercussions across the state. Officials say the roads are less safe because illegal immigrants aren’t taught or checked on fundamental driving regulations, yet they continue to drive – frequently without insurance. According to court authorities, fines for driving without a license crowd their dockets and deplete their scarce resources. Farmers claim they must construct or acquire employee housing to keep their employees from being fined.
The employees, many of whom come from rural and underprivileged regions in Latin America, are appreciative for the opportunities. Nonetheless, they feel stuck.
They are folks like a 33-year-old Nicaraguan who moved to Wisconsin two years ago after hearing from acquaintances that it was simple to get work on “los ranchos,” as dairy farms in Wisconsin are known to Spanish-speaking laborers. He lives in a modest, white home owned by their employer, a few kilometers down a county road from the farm, with three other Central American males.
A Neillsville police officer randomly checked the license plates of the worker as he drove a roommate’s Jeep to the grocery store one afternoon in March. When the officer discovered that the registered owner of the Jeep lacked a driver’s license, he pulled him over.
According to documents, the worker informed the police he didn’t have a license, and the officer gave him a $200.50 citation.
“I lost a day’s worth of work.” “It hurts,” remarked the guy, who works 14-hour days on a regular basis.
ProPublica has interviewed over 100 undocumented current and former dairy employees over the last year, in farm breakrooms, trailers and apartments where they reside, stores where they transfer money home, and courtroom cashier’s windows where they pay their fines. They claim to be secluded and trapped on the fields where they work and often reside. They have difficulty getting to food shops, schools, and immigration court appearances. They postpone medical treatment.
So they either depend on people to drive them where they need to go for a fee, or they violate the law and risk their chances.
“You can’t call Uber because none exist.” “You can’t take the bus because there aren’t any,” said John Rosenow, a dairy farmer in western Wisconsin who has emerged as one of the state’s most vocal supporters for foreign labor. “The nearest barbershop is fifteen miles away.” The nearest supermarket is 25 kilometers away.”
To make things worse, recurrent crimes may result in harsher consequences, including financial fines, criminal charges, and prison time. The prospect of deportation hovers over every police stop in counties that have established partnerships with federal immigration authorities.
What is occurring in Clark County and across Wisconsin is the consequence of Congress’ inability to figure out what to do with the millions of illegal immigrants who reside here and work in businesses that rely on them openly, such as dairy. That leaves state legislators with the option of crafting laws to handle the repercussions — or ignoring what’s occurring and hurting immigrants in the process.
According to estimates from the non-profit Migration Policy Institute, Wisconsin is home to around 70,000 illegal immigrants, the majority of whom are from Latin America. These are the folks who install drywall, clean hotel rooms, clean restaurant kitchens, and package the country’s cheese.
It’s very hard to say how many Wisconsin dairy employees are illegally. Workers use forged documents to get employment, farmers accept those documents without scrutiny, and state and federal officials make little effort to obtain an exact count. However, a recent University of Wisconsin at Madison research estimates that there are around 6,200 illegal Hispanic laborers on medium-to-large farms. This statistic does not include the numerous immigrant employees on smaller farms with less than 500 cows.
Immigrant advocates have pushed for years to convince politicians to provide unauthorized immigrants driving rights, as 19 states, mostly blue, have done. However, in Wisconsin, where legislative districts have been constructed to benefit Republicans, similar attempts have proved futile. Few Republican members have shown willingness to back such measures; political experts believe the politicians do not want to seem soft on immigration.
As a result, local communities are left to find their own answers.
In one county, authorities have discreetly implemented an experimental driver’s education program focused mostly at illegal immigrants who have been caught driving without a license. They are hesitant to talk openly about it for fear of provoking a conservative reaction.
Elected district attorneys in some counties have ceased prosecuting persons caught driving without a license; both Democrat and Republican prosecutors say they want to focus their limited resources on crimes involving victims.
And, a few years ago, community advocates collaborated with local law enforcement agencies and dairy farmers in four counties in southwestern Wisconsin to create identification cards that workers could show officers during traffic stops to prove that they worked in the area and, potentially, prevent those encounters from escalating.
“It didn’t keep them from getting a ticket, but it kept them from being handcuffed and hauled off to jail,” said Shirley Barnes, the recently departed co-director of Dodgeville’s MultiCultural Outreach Program. “The truth is that all of the cops in all of these counties know exactly where these people work.” They are aware that these folks are employed by local farms.”
A former Honduran dairy worker slipped onto a courthouse seat in the Clark County Circuit Court in downtown Neillsville one morning in May and waited for his name to be called. His 16-year-old son sat next to him, skipping school to act as an interpreter for his father. ProPublica has only identified the individual by his first name, José. He, like the other employees in this tale, requested anonymity because he is illegal and fears deportation.
A state trooper had pulled José over a month earlier for driving 15 mph above the speed limit on U.S. Highway ten. The policeman had ticketed him for driving without a legal license in addition to the speeding citation.
“We just enforce the law,” said Sgt. Brandon Gray, a spokeswoman for the Wisconsin State Patrol’s Eau Claire station, in an interview. “Obviously, if they don’t have a valid license, they get a citation.”
José expressed sorry for speeding. However, he said that it is difficult for him to meet the licensing criteria.
“It makes me so damn sad I could cry,” said José, who moved to the United States two years ago to better care for his kid. “I need to drive. Nobody else is coming to support my kid. Nobody else will pay my rent.”
José and his kid left court after paying $200.50 for driving without a license and another $175.30 for speeding. José drove home without a license.
According to census estimates, just 6% of Clark County’s 35,000 residents are Hispanic.
Nonetheless, according to statistics obtained for ProPublica by Court statistics Technologies, a Madison firm, 187 of the 245 cases handled in this court last year for driving without a legal license — or more than 75% — were Hispanic drivers.
ProPublica discovered a similar pattern in circuit and municipal courts throughout the state. (If it’s a first-time violation, citations for this charge may go to any form of court; circuit courts also handle recurring crimes, which can lead to criminal charges.)
According to Court Data Technologies data from 2022 cases, about half of the 16,000 circuit court convictions for driving without a valid license included Hispanic drivers.
The true number is probably greater, since Latin American immigrants are often labeled as “Caucasian” in court documents; José, for example, is labeled as such.
Hispanics account for less than 8% of the population.
“Those numbers are alarming,” said Primitivo Torres Martinez, statewide civic engagement deputy director for Voces de la Frontera, the state’s biggest immigrant rights advocacy organization, who heard of the information through ProPublica. “The problem is that farmers require [immigrant workers] to drive, so it’s a Catch-22 for a lot of people.”
Police and courts do not keep track of drivers’ immigration status. However, people involved in nearly every step of the traffic enforcement process — police, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, interpreters, and other circuit and municipal court officials — agreed across the state that the vast majority of Hispanic drivers who are ticketed for driving without a license are undocumented immigrants.
Records from these incidents commonly indicate drivers who offer police Mexican or Nicaraguan identity cards, do not speak English and need an interpreter, or claim officers they cannot get a license due to their illegal status. They may be seen in courthouse lobbies, hoping for an interpreter when the clerk offers to use Google Translate on her phone, or waiting nervously on courtroom seats, wondering whether they would be deported.
Thousands more citations for driving without a valid license were issued in the state’s approximately 230 municipal courts last year. Because these courts function independently of one another, there is no one source of case information that would enable a statewide examination of those courts.
However, ProPublica gathered data from roughly a dozen municipal courts and discovered that Hispanic drivers consistently earned a disproportionate number of these tickets.
They accounted for over 40% of the tickets sold in Milwaukee, the state’s biggest metropolis. 49% in Waukesha, a Milwaukee suburb. 58% in Manitowoc, near Lake Michigan. Hispanics make up 20% or less of the population in each of these cities.
The figures tend to be more stark in municipal courts located farther away from major cities. According to data from the Marshfield Area Municipal Court in central Wisconsin, 69% of these fines issued by the Marshfield Police Department went to Hispanic drivers. Hispanics make up less than 3% of Marshfield’s population.
It’s a similar tale in Sparta, a tiny town in western Wisconsin surrounded by dairy farms. Although Sparta’s municipal court does not keep track of defendants’ race or ethnicity, ProPublica discovered that 91 of the 131 fines issued for driving without a valid license last year — or around 70% — featured defendants with popular Hispanic surnames such as Cruz, Cortez, and Gonzalez. (According to the US Census Bureau, more than 85% of persons with those surnames are Hispanic.) Less than 6% of Sparta inhabitants are Hispanic.
Mention tickets at a modest Mexican grocery shop there, and the exhausted dairy employees in line will nod in recognition and fury.
“I’ve probably been pulled over 15 times,” remarked one guy, a long-time dairy worker from Mexico. He claims that sometimes the same police officer pulls him over. “They immediately recognize me and call me by name, saying, ‘I told you not to drive,'” the worker stated. “However, I have to drive to work.”
According to Andrea Ziegler, Sparta’s municipal court secretary, most Hispanic immigrant drivers do not challenge the citations and just pay in cash. According to data, Hispanic drivers in Sparta paid more than $8,400 in citations for driving without a license last year.
“I don’t believe it’s right. If you’re going to ticket them, you need to provide them a way to earn a license so they can work and contribute to our community,” Ziegler said.
“Our farms would not be able to survive without them.”
When we queried farmers about the legal status of their workers, many said they just accept the documents that applicants offer them.
“I don’t believe it’s right. If you’re going to ticket them, you need to provide them a way to earn a license so they can work and continue to contribute to our community.”
However, the dairy business has long recognized its dependence on unauthorized workers. It has attempted, but failed, to get access to an immigrant guest worker program at the federal level. Closer to home, dairy farmers have become staunch supporters of Voces de la Frontera’s effort to obtain illegal immigrants driver’s licenses.
Almost a dozen dairy producers in Wisconsin told ProPublica that they want their employees to get licenses.
In other ways, their purpose is just economic. Many farmers say they want to guarantee that their staff can go to and from work without being stopped and ticketed by police. Several others recounted receiving calls in the middle of the night from employees who needed a transport after being locked up. “If they throw them in jail, they’re no good to us,” one farmer in western Wisconsin said.
Farmers claim that empathy motivates them as well.
“It’s basically a human need issue,” said Randy Roecker, a third-generation dairy farmer in Sauk County, Wisconsin, who owns a 275-cow enterprise. “They need to be able to drive to get groceries, to the bank, to the doctor, but they don’t because they’re afraid of being picked up all the time.”
When Roecker and his family expanded their enterprise and employed their first immigrant employees in 2006, they, like many other farmers, chose to construct employee housing.
That was the year Wisconsin legislature prohibited illegal immigrants from obtaining driver’s licenses. Some dairy employees in the state at the time kept their expired licenses in their wallets in the expectation that the outdated papers would help them avoid traffic citations.
The statute was changed in reaction to the federal REAL ID Act, a post-9/11 bill backed by then-U.S. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Republican from Wisconsin, introduced legislation that standardized the form of identification that could be used to board flights and access government facilities. Wisconsin and other states started requiring evidence of U.S. citizenship or other legal status to get licenses in order to comply.
It was evident from the start that the bill would harm unauthorized immigrants residing in states that allow them to drive. For some legislators, such as Sensenbrenner, this was a positive thing; at the time, he told reporters that Wisconsin had become a “mecca for illegal aliens” seeking driver’s licenses.
Latino legislators and supporters argue that prohibiting illegal immigrants from driving would create more issues than it solves. According to Bernard Trujillo, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison at the time, if Wisconsin denies immigrants driver’s licenses, “they will just drive without it.”
“This is the ‘if I close my eyes, they’ll go away’ approach to dealing with the undocumented, which is policy ineffective,” he continued.
On a chilly February evening in 2021, John Rosenow waited outside his dairy farm in Cochrane, Wisconsin, and watched as a veteran employee was pulled over on his way to work.
A Buffalo County sheriff’s officer had been positioned in front of the property, watching traffic on a county road with a speed restriction of 35 miles per hour. Later, the deputy saw a vehicle driving at a “slow rate of speed,” then ran the license plate. The deputy pulled stopped the automobile after a records check revealed that the owner did not have a license.
Despite the language barrier, the worker was able to inform the deputy that he did not have a driver’s license but did have a Mexican identity card. The deputy informed him that he would be receiving a citation in the mail and advised him not to drive without a license.
The worker was charged with a misdemeanor in Buffalo County Circuit Court since it was his second citation in three years.
The traffic stop seemed to Rosenow to be racial profiling. He sent a letter to the case’s judge.
“Certainly, the court understands how important Juan and other Mexicans are to the agricultural and food processing industries in our area,” Rosenow wrote. “The Sheriff’s Department’s harassment does not make our community any safer.”
That argument failed to persuade the court. The worker, who has since gone to Mexico to be with his family, pled guilty and paid $443 in fines and court expenses, which included a DNA test, which is required in criminal cases. The whole sum was about comparable to five days’ take-home pay.
Buffalo County Sheriff Mike Osmond refused to comment on the traffic stop in a statement, but said he understood the concerns about possible racial profiling. However, he said that his deputies “enforce traffic laws impartially, without regard for race or ethnicity,” and that his office is “committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all individuals, regardless of immigration status.”
Across Wisconsin, scores of illegal immigrants who were stopped and punished just for driving without a license told ProPublica they were victims of racial profiling.
Among them is a 33-year-old Nicaraguan man who was pulled over while driving to the grocery store in Neillsville this spring following a random plate check. “How did he find out I didn’t have a driver’s license?”” He was perplexed. “I hadn’t done anything wrong, but I was pulled over.”
In an interview, Neillsville Police Chief Jim Mankowski said that allowing illegal immigrants to get licenses will assist police identify persons they meet more swiftly and correctly.
“How did he find out I didn’t have a driver’s license?” I hadn’t done anything wrong, yet I was pulled over.”
However, he claims that random plate checks may assist cops in discovering offenses related to the registered owner of a car, such as suspended or revoked licenses or outstanding arrest warrants. He said that authorities must have a reasonable suspicion that the person driving the car is the owner; for example, if a plate check reveals that the owner is a male without a license, it would be inappropriate to pull the vehicle over if a woman is driving.
“If it’s a tool that can help my cops do their jobs better,” he continued, “that’s something we have to embrace.”
Records from law enforcement and court cases throughout the state demonstrate that sheriff’s deputies and police officers frequently scan the license plates of passing automobiles — regardless of the driver’s racial or ethnic origin — and pull individuals over if they find a violation. However, Hispanic drivers are the most affected by the problem of not possessing a license.
One of the underlying causes is a state regulation that enables unauthorized immigrants to register their vehicles but not drive them.
“They put a bullseye on them,” said Tony Gonzalez, a north-central Wisconsin immigrant rights advocate. “The state collects the money at registration, and the registrant receives no benefit.” It’s analogous to taxes without representation.”
The state transportation department, according to a spokesman, “implements the laws as written.” The spokesperson could not disclose how many automobiles are registered to persons who do not have driver’s licenses.
Being pulled over by police after a random license plate check is so common that many undocumented immigrants have turned to the black market for protection: several people who spoke with ProPublica described paying someone with a license to register a vehicle in their name to avoid being pulled over. One guy, a house building worker in a Milwaukee suburb, claimed he stopped being pulled over and punished for driving without a license after registering his vehicle in his company’s name rather than his own.
Similarly, a dairy worker in Jefferson County, Wisconsin, claimed he felt “like an ATM” for police after spending hundreds of dollars in fines and court expenses for not possessing a license over the last several years. Then he stated he learned of someone in another neighborhood who would register his automobile under their name for a fee.
The worker said that the money was well spent. He hasn’t been stopped since.
