A Wisconsin city welcomed new refugees. Then the angry billboards went up

EAU CLAIRE, Wis. – The billboards featured a foreboding message. Taxpayer money, it said, was footing the bill for a nonprofit to traffic Somali refugees – and officials in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, had been hiding the facts for months.

When the City Council president, Emily Berge, saw the false accusations plastered in October above a thoroughfare in this river-crossed Midwestern city, her heart sank.

“I was shocked such claims would be made,” Berge said. “It was so xenophobic, and not at all what we stand for as a community.”

Xenophobic? “Hardly,” said Matthew Bocklund, an avid supporter of former President Donald Trump’s and an activist who helped raise funds for the billboards.

The message, he said, “got people to wake up and realize what was really going on.”

The billboards marked the beginning of a searing monthslong battle in central and western Wisconsin over 75 refugees, mostly from countries in central Africa. Each one had been vetted and then invited by the federal government to come to the United States. An evangelical nonprofit would help them settle, at least initially, in Eau Claire, a predominantly white, liberal-leaning city of 70,000, surrounded by a conservative swath of rural Wisconsin.

Standing against the resettlement: a loud protest group, dozens strong, made up in part of evangelical Christians, who said cities and states should be able to say no to refugees coming to their communities.

Often deploying selective facts and misinformation, they insisted the resettlement was unlawful and founded with ill intent, and that the refugees would bring a rise in crime, disease and disorder – along with Shariah law.

At the heart of their manifold arguments: a skepticism of all immigration that frequently bleeds into anger and abhorrence.

“I don’t want to live in a Third World hellhole,” one protester said at a public gathering.

Refugee resettlement has never been easy. But last year in Eau Claire, officials at city hall and at World Relief, a Christian nonprofit working with the refugees, were stunned to find their efforts threatened not just by local residents worried about the effects on neighborhoods but by a faction of vocal opponents, many of whom lived in rural areas outside the city.

Nothing could ease their distrust. They were unmoved by supportive proclamations, reminders that the refugees had been vetted and were coming to Wisconsin legally, or studies on the economic or cultural benefits.

Travis Albrecht, lead pastor at Valleybrook Church in Eau Claire, which supported the newcomers, described his city as a place where “a family has a tragedy and people show up with a meal.”

Rallying the opposition

In October, a television station aired a news report highlighting the plan to resettle refugees in Eau Claire.

The segment was positive, but it ignited a firestorm. Bocklund went into action. After a meeting at a VFW hall packed with critics of the resettlement, he organized what he called the Refugee Summit. The billboards went up. And picketers demonstrated outside a library where World Relief representatives described their plan.

Public meetings in Eau Claire and nearby counties began drawing overflow crowds.

Protesters questioned whether refugees should receive government assistance. Each refugee would receive federal support of about $1,325 for the first 90 days. Many were eligible for additional government money.

Eau Claire, the opposition pointed out, had a growing homeless population. Housing costs have gone up. Two of the area’s hospitals were soon to close. What about all that?

Many were also clearly fearful.

In February, at a packed supervisors board meeting in Chippewa County, which includes a small portion of Eau Claire, a swath of resettlement opponents conflated the legal refugees with immigrants living in the country illegally who arrived by foot over the Mexican or Canadian borders.

The refugees arrive

Immigrating under the Refugee Act of 1980 is no easy feat.

Roughly 3 million people have come to the United States under the law.

The State Department handpicks potential refugees, with preference given to these most in danger or need. Refugees go through screenings that take, on average, 18 months to two years.

The government works with nonprofits such as World Relief, which assumes responsibility for helping the newcomers find education, housing and jobs.

Kesiya and her family, who live in Eau Claire, had fled the civil war in Congo in 2008, eventually finding safety in a refugee camp in Zimbabwe. For 16 years, her family had lived in that camp, enough time for her to mature from a girl in grade school into a 26-year-old woman.

The seemingly endless wait included a final hard stretch of five years, during which Kesiya, her mother, her father and her three young sisters were repeatedly screened by the State Department.

Kesiya said she knew little about the refugee controversy and believed that was for the best. But she knows to be careful.

‘Get them out of the country’

During the pandemic, Bocklund became a prime mover for a faction of hard-right conservatives and patriot groups.

A 46-year-old financial planner who served two years as chair of the Republican Party in St. Croix County, Bocklund is hard to miss.

He drives down country roads in the “Freedom Tank,” as he calls it: his dented 22-year-old Toyota Avalon – festooned with bumper stickers hailing Trump, gun rights, the anti-abortion movement and Jesus Christ. He stops at roadsides to pound “Trump 2024” signs into the ground or to wade through pastures to affix a Trump placard on a grain silo.

At other times, dressed in a business suit and a crisp, white dress shirt with a red tie, he argues for MAGA causes at city council and school board meetings, parades and county fairs.

The anti-refugee organizing campaign he helps lead has had an effect. Rep. Tom Tiffany, R-Wis., who has been critical of President Joe Biden’s handling of the border, introduced a bill in Congress in February to give states and local governments power to reject future refugee placements.

Married with four children, Bocklund grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in a home full of Democrats.

For decades, he had little interest in anything political.

Then in 2016, he watched Trump in a Republican primary debate.

“Incredible,” Bocklund said. “He had the command of that stage. You knew that when he became president, he was willing to stand by himself against all enemies. He was going to be resolute.”

Fired up by what he heard and saw, Bocklund went all in.

As for immigrants living in the United States illegally, “get them out of the country,” he said, so we can “get our cities back in order.”

Only then, he said, can a new immigration system be born.

A believer, “full stop,” in Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, Bocklund also believes that the refugee program is part of a conspiracy to alter the politics of the country.

The next round

By late August, all of the refugees had arrived in Eau Claire.

Most hailed from central Africa, others from Colombia, Venezuela, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Five came from Somalia and relocated to Barron, a rural town about an hour’s drive north of Eau Claire.

In Eau Claire, the roughly two dozen new children in town prepared for school.

The adults found apartments and jobs. They worked late-night shifts stocking shelves at grocery stores, and they assembled fasteners at a manufacturing plant.

World Relief says it plans to bring up to 125 more refugees next year to Eau Claire.

The opposition has plans, too. The supervisors boards in the western Wisconsin counties of St. Croix and Chippewa have pushed forward resolutions asking for a pause on refugee immigration.

“The next step,” Bocklund said, “is to pass resolutions in counties across the state.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.