Springfield, Ohio, isn’t the only small Midwestern city dealing with an unprecedented influx of migrants and the strain it places on municipal services. Whitewater, Wis., Police Chief Daniel Meyer started noticing increased encounters between his officers and recently arrived migrants from Nicaragua and Venezuela in early 2022. Mr. Meyer estimates that at least 1,000 migrants from Central America established themselves in the city of 15,000 in 2022 and 2023. Officials in Whitewater, about an hour west of Milwaukee, have had difficulty managing the stresses on law enforcement, housing stock and schools. With no advance warning from the federal government, the city was caught completely unprepared by the migrant influx.
Several incidents illustrate the challenge. Police found a migrant family with a young child living in an uninsulated garden shed in sub-zero temperatures. Officers responding to a report of a fire discovered two migrant children sleeping alone on the floor of an apartment while food burned on the stove.
A school-resource officer discovered that a migrant father was forcing his 14-year-old daughter to work 30 hours a week rather than attending school. In the worst incident, a group of teenagers found the body of a dead baby in a box near a trailer park. After an extensive investigation, the migrant mother of the deceased baby was arrested and identified as a citizen of Nicaragua.
