What Happened in Whitewater

Dan Meyer, the police chief in Whitewater, Wisconsin, had been worried for months about the seemingly sudden arrival of hundreds of Nicaraguan immigrants to this quiet university town. But he rarely got to hear from any of them directly; most of what he knew, he had learned from his officers.

Then one afternoon in November 2022, a man named Ariel walked into the police station.

Meyer, 35 at the time, had been trying to get a handle on what was happening since the last week of January, when his officers responded to a series of unusual incidents involving the recent immigrants: Young children found alone in an apartment while their mothers were at work. A family living in a shed in below-freezing weather. A 14-year-old girl who said her father was making her work in a factory instead of going to school.

As the year went on, police responded to a rise in calls from an apartment complex that once was filled with college students and now housed immigrant families, including some who doubled and tripled up to save on rent. Meyer and other city officials met with people all over town, including the apartment building managers, to look for ways to address overcrowding and some of the other challenges they saw the new immigrants facing.

What kept his officers busiest were the Nicaraguans driving without licenses, often without car insurance or even much driving experience. Few of them spoke English, and many had no government identification at all or handed officers fake IDs. As a result, traffic stops that should take 15 minutes stretched into hours long investigations as officers used translation apps to find out the drivers’ real identities.

In the middle of all this, Ariel showed up at the station. He had moved to Whitewater in 2020 and had been building a new life for himself and his family. He’d found a job in town sorting recycling and trash, and he brought his wife and son up from Nicaragua. They went to church, spent time with their extended family and reconnected with friends who’d also made the move from the same mountain villages to Whitewater.

Ariel, 43 at the time, was one of the licenseless drivers the chief had heard so much about. He hadn’t gotten his license because he couldn’t: While Wisconsin offers a path for asylum-seekers to get a license, Ariel didn’t have all the paperwork he needed, including his Nicaraguan passport, to apply.

He drove anyway. It seemed impossible to do everything he needed to do — get to work and his son’s school and the grocery store — without driving, and he’d mostly managed to get away with it. Ariel had only been ticketed once for driving without a license. Then, about a month earlier, he got behind the wheel after stopping at a bar for a few drinks and drove his car into a ditch.

Ariel had presented officers the fake Nicaraguan ID he’d used to get a job. It was the only one he had, as his work permit hadn’t yet arrived. His wife had gently chided him after his arrest for drunk driving, saying she hoped it would straighten him out. Then, just a few weeks later, she was run down by a 21-year-old American motorist as she tried to cross a street at night.

His work permit arrived a week or so after her death. That’s what led Ariel to take the day off that November afternoon and walk the mile from his home to the police station. He wanted to set the record straight. He hoped doing so would help him start to put life in order for him and his son.

Meyer stopped what he was doing to meet with Ariel. There was a lot he liked about running the police department in this city of about 15,000 people, but he missed talking to residents. He did his best to introduce himself to Ariel in Spanish, a language he’d tried to pick up in college but never felt comfortable speaking. He asked a bilingual county employee who works at the station to join them.

The chief listened, taken aback as Ariel apologized for showing officers a fake ID. He had been a police officer for more than 12 years and had just recently been named chief, but even he still got nervous at the sight of flashing blue and red lights in his rearview mirror. He’d felt there was a trust gap between his department and the Nicaraguans who’d been arriving in Whitewater, but here was Ariel, voluntarily walking into a police station to admit wrongdoing.

The conversation between Meyer and Ariel didn’t last much more than 15 minutes. Before he left, Ariel asked whether there was anything the chief could do to help him drive without getting in trouble. Meyer told him he needed to get a license. Ariel thanked him and walked back home to the young son he now had to care for on his own.

Meyer wondered about Ariel and what brought him to Whitewater, but he didn’t ask. He went back to work, back to trying to figure out how his officers should best respond to the town’s newest residents. And, over the next year, he talked to city council members and anybody who would listen about the challenges his short-staffed department was facing.

The chief thought about what responsibility Washington bore for what was happening in Whitewater; after all, the federal government operated the nation’s immigration system. With the encouragement of city council members, Meyer wrote a letter to President Joe Biden asking for help.

Meyer, who had spent his career in Whitewater, would be the first to say he didn’t know much about immigration, though he was trying to learn. He’d never had to pay attention to immigration policy before the Nicaraguans came to town. For one, it wasn't his responsibility. And he knew how polarizing the issue could be.

At least he thought he did.

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“President Biden,” the letter begins. “I am writing to inform you of significant challenges the City of Whitewater faces related to ongoing demographic change, and I am asking for your assistance in obtaining resources to address the situation.”

It was late December 2023. By then, the chief estimated that between 800 and 1,000 new immigrants from Nicaragua and Venezuela had settled in town. “Some are fleeing from a corrupt government, others are simply looking for a better opportunity to prosper,” he wrote. “Regardless of the individual situations, these people need resources like anyone else, and their arrival has put great strain on our existing resources.”

Meyer wrote about how officers had issued close to three times as many tickets to licenseless drivers as before. Wisconsin had long banned undocumented immigrants from getting licenses. Many Nicaraguan immigrants in Whitewater had permission to be in the country, but they didn’t have the documentation they needed to apply for a license — such as a passport and proof of an ongoing asylum case. Others couldn’t read well enough in Spanish to pass the written test.

In his letter, Meyer wrote about how language barriers, the prevalence of fake IDs and distrust between immigrants and the police made investigating cases more time-consuming. The chief said the city wasn’t focused on immigrants’ legal status. What mattered was public safety. Meyer wrote about the family found living in the shed and other incidents, including the death of an infant, sexual assaults and a kidnapping. He considered those cases serious enough to merit extra attention.

The case involving the dead infant had, in particular, left many residents shaken. A Nicaraguan woman had given birth in her trailer, and some teenagers later found the body in a field. The woman was charged with neglect leading to a child’s death and hiding the corpse.

“None of this information is shared as a means of denigrating or vilifying this group of people,” Meyer wrote. “We simply need to ensure that we can continue to properly serve this group, and the entirety of the City of Whitewater.”

Meyer asked for funding to hire more police officers and for the city to hire somebody to work directly with the new immigrants. The chief signed the letter, as did other city officials, and they sent it off. Within days, Meyer’s phone started to ring. Reporters from all over were calling for interviews. Breitbart, a conservative national media outlet, had written about how “Biden’s migrants” had “flooded” Whitewater in a story that went viral on social media.

Then former President Donald Trump picked up on it and began talking about the city at his campaign rallies in Wisconsin. His Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, “has flooded the town with an estimated 2,000 migrants from Venezuela and Nicaragua,” he said during a rally last month in Prairie du Chien, in southwestern Wisconsin. “The police say they cannot handle the surge in crime,” he added. “The town’s in big trouble.”

He described what was going on in towns like Whitewater as an “invasion,” the way he would later talk about Venezuelan street gangs taking over apartment buildings in Aurora, Colorado. Both examples took kernels of truth and blew them out of proportion to inflame voters’ fears about immigration. Trump promised to “seal the border” and to conduct “the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

The Biden administration, meanwhile, didn’t respond to Meyer’s letter for almost two months. When it did, officials told Meyer about a program that had sent hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments and nonprofits providing humanitarian services to new immigrants. At the time, though, none of that money was available to smaller cities like Whitewater.

Meyer hadn’t asked for mass deportations. He just wanted more resources. And he said he never intended his words to become political ammunition for anyone. “It irritates me to no end because when I hear that, I know that there’s no actual desire to fix the issue here,” he said. “It’s a desire to use it for their own political gain.”

The city and its police chief were left on their own to figure out what to do next.

There are cities and towns like Whitewater all across America, places where hundreds or thousands of new immigrants have shown up in recent years. Their arrival has divided residents, fueled resentment and spread fear about dwindling resources and rising crime, prompting local officials to ask the federal government for help providing humanitarian relief. In large cities like New York, Chicago and Denver, Venezuelan immigrants have filled homeless shelters and slept on the streets. In smaller cities like Springfield, Ohio, Haitian immigrants became the subject of disinformation repeated by Trump and other Republicans who say the Biden administration has let too many people in.

Whitewater is a quiet, liberal city with an outsize university presence, a blue dot tucked between two red counties in a swing state. Nobody knows how many new immigrants have actually arrived, though the chief’s guess is about as good as anybody’s. Federal immigration court data shows that about 475 people with cases that were initiated since the start of 2021 have listed a Whitewater address. The vast majority are Nicaraguan, with only a handful from Venezuela. This count leaves out many immigrants, including those who came before 2021, like Ariel, and those who avoided getting caught by Border Patrol and are now undocumented, like some of Ariel’s relatives.

ProPublica reporters began visiting Whitewater in January and have returned more than a dozen times since. We’ve conducted about 100 interviews, reviewed hundreds of pages of records, and spent hours riding alongside Meyer’s patrol officers as they did their jobs. We’ve talked with many longtime Whitewater residents, including some who have gone out of their way to welcome the newcomers and others who worry that immigrant students are bringing down test scores in schools. We spoke to undocumented Mexican immigrants who settled in Whitewater three decades ago and are resentful that the Nicaraguan asylum-seekers moving into their neighborhoods have access to government privileges such as work permits and driver’s licenses — privileges that undocumented people do not have. We talked with a landlord in town who says the new immigrants are paying more in rent than his previous tenants, and we spent time at a tiny grocery store where Nicaraguans send home more than $100,000 each weekend to remote communities such as Murra, Jalapa, El Jícaro and Somoto.

Finally, we’ve interviewed more than three dozen Nicaraguans who live in Whitewater. Most arrived in the U.S. after Biden took office in 2021, crossing the border illegally between ports of entry, turning themselves in to authorities and asking for asylum. Ariel asked that we not write about his decision to emigrate to the U.S. and seek political asylum or use his full name; he worries about hurting his case and putting relatives back home at risk.

Most of the Nicaraguans we spoke to said they left their country because of a lack of economic opportunities and because it seemed like they would be allowed to enter the U.S. and would find jobs. A few said they had suffered political repression or violence at the hands of Nicaragua’s authoritarian government. Others came in undetected years earlier and had been quietly working in Wisconsin’s dairy industry before they learned of jobs in Whitewater.

And there are jobs. Steven Deller, an applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies smaller, rural communities in the state, said there have been many more job openings than unemployed Wisconsinites since the spring of 2021. “There was a real, real severe labor shortage,” he said. “A lot of employers were getting desperate.”

Enter immigrants, many of whom arrived with thousands of dollars in debts to the smugglers who shepherded them to the U.S.-Mexico border. Deller described the new immigrants as being willing to work for little money, in roles with few if any benefits, and in jobs that are “hard work, dirty work, perhaps not safe work.” And employers are happy to have them, he said. “That’s happening across the country.”

The Nicaraguans in Whitewater work at a range of food-processing facilities, factories and egg farms in and around town, places they refer to by nicknames in Spanish: “los pollos” for a meat-processing plant, “las pompas” for a rubber and plastic parts factory, “los huevos” for an egg farm. Many get hired through temporary staffing agencies. In recent decades, American factories have increasingly turned to staffing agencies to fill their jobs, an issue ProPublica has reported on. These agencies offer flexibility and can help shield companies from legal issues related to employees’ questionable immigration status or workers’ compensation claims because the agencies are the direct employer. We called companies we knew of that rely on the labor of new immigrants. Over and over, these businesses declined to talk to us or ignored our interview requests.

Not all of the newcomers in Whitewater have work permits, at least not at first. Many use fake papers to get hired. Records from traffic stops of Nicaraguan immigrants sometimes show officers discovering fraudulent IDs alongside work badges from prominent factories in town.

When Trump talks about immigration, he says immigrants are destroying communities with their “migrant crime.” But the reality in places like Whitewater is more complex. The city is not overrun with violent crime. For example, Whitewater hadn’t seen a homicide — one of the most reliable measures of violent crime — since 2016, predating the arrival of hundreds of Nicaraguan families. That changed this summer, when police arrested a University of Wisconsin, Whitewater student for the murder of another student.

“I don’t use the term ‘migrant crime,’” Meyer said. The new immigrants, he said, aren’t committing crimes at a greater rate than other Whitewater residents — and research from around the country backs him up. But police have struggled with other very real challenges tied to the arrival of so many people from another country. The new immigrants arrived in Whitewater with limited resources. They didn’t speak English. They were unfamiliar with local laws and norms. And, he said, they had no driver’s licenses and “no real opportunity to get one.”

Ariel got his first ticket for driving without a license in Whitewater in January 2022. Two relatives had come by to visit on foot in below-freezing weather. Ariel offered to drive them home in an old Chevy Trailblazer he’d bought used a few months earlier. On his way back home, Ariel found himself in a left-turn lane by mistake. He let the cars around him pass, then drove straight through the intersection.

“I didn’t know I couldn’t do that,” he said.

Ariel had come to the U.S. not knowing how to drive. He never had the opportunity to learn in his village in Murra, a province in Nicaragua’s mountainous north. Though Murra had a similar number of residents to Whitewater, life there was very different. Few people even owned cars or could use them on the winding, pockmarked roads that turned into mud in the rain.

Ariel, a farmer with a second-grade education, got around on foot and by horse or mule. He enjoyed riding around his land, about 35 acres, to survey his coffee plants, corn and beans.

He lived in a one-room adobe block house with no electricity and a growing family: Maricela, the girl with a crown of dark curls he’d fallen in love with years earlier, and their young son. Ariel and Maricela had put off a church wedding but had a long-term, common-law marriage.

Ariel left Murra in April 2019, at a moment when Nicaragua was seeing an exodus due to political repression and economic insecurity. Trump, meanwhile, was in the White House and looking for ways to deliver on campaign promises to keep immigrants out. Border Patrol agents hadn’t seen so many crossings in years, including from countries like Nicaragua that hadn’t previously sent many immigrants to the U.S. In the 2019 fiscal year, when Ariel arrived, authorities at the southern border encountered more than 13,000 Nicaraguans — nearly as many as in the previous decade.

Ariel said authorities confiscated his passport and ID and detained him for about four months in Texas. Then he was given a notice to appear at a later date in court and released on bond.

He knew where he was headed. Ariel had friends and relatives from Murra who had migrated north years earlier to work on Wisconsin dairy farms, establishing a path that would eventually make the state a top destination for Nicaraguans. Some nephews in Wisconsin bought him a bus ticket to Madison and helped him find his first dairy farm job nearby.

Ariel was comfortable working with animals but said “the work was brutal.” He milked cows and scraped away their excrement 12 hours a day, seven days a week. He worked at three farms in different parts of the state.

Then one day, early in the pandemic, he heard that factories and food-processing facilities in the Whitewater area, between Madison and Milwaukee, were hiring essential workers through staffing agencies. Unlike the farms, factories paid overtime. And Ariel needed every dollar he could get to pay back the $20,000 he’d borrowed to make the trek from Nicaragua and to bond out of detention. He also wanted to save up to bring Maricela and their son to the U.S.

In April 2020, he moved to Whitewater. He didn’t have work authorization yet; that would come later, after he found an attorney and filed for asylum. In the meantime, he used a fake work permit and fake Nicaraguan ID to get a job making $10.50 an hour sorting trash and recycling at a facility in town.

Ariel was one of the first Nicaraguans to arrive in Whitewater. As he told more and more people he knew about the job opportunities there, other Nicaraguans followed. First came one of his brothers, who had been working on a farm near Green Bay.

More family and friends arrived after Biden took office in January 2021 with the promise of a more humane approach to immigration. Border Patrol agents encountered more than 50,000 Nicaraguans at the U.S.-Mexico border in 2021, nearly four times as many as the year that Ariel crossed.

That February, Ariel sent for Maricela and their 3-year-old son. He missed them. Ariel and Maricela had spent nearly every day together in Murra for years, and it had been difficult to live apart. “She did everything with me,” he said.

Maricela, then 28, had rarely left their community before — had never even visited the capital city of Managua or flown on a plane. Now she was making a two-week, 1,600-mile trek to the U.S.-Mexico border. She called Ariel along the way when she could and told him they were tired and barely eating.

They made their way across the Rio Grande on an inflatable raft, then surrendered themselves to authorities. They were quickly released. Ariel borrowed a credit card from a friend to buy them plane tickets to Milwaukee and got a ride to pick them up at the airport. Maricela appeared in the lobby, their son in her arms. The cheerful, healthy pair Ariel had known now looked exhausted and emaciated from their journey. He wept as he embraced them.

Meyer’s job as police chief is nonpartisan and unelected. He prefers it that way.

In his letter to the president, the chief had tried to focus attention on the police department’s need for resources without staking out a political position on immigration. But his message kept getting lost. It felt like every time somebody, whether on the left or the right, spoke about Whitewater, they were talking about a more extreme, exaggerated version of the city that he knew.

“You’re kind of just like holding your breath, like, ‘What are they gonna say?’” Meyer said. “Because you know there’s gonna be major blowback for us here locally, questions from the people that live here. ‘Why are these people talking about us?’”

Even before he wrote the letter to Biden, he had seen how his comments on the new immigrants in town could stir fierce criticism. It happened last November when he took part in a press conference with Republican lawmakers. At that event, officials from a local sheriff’s department said Whitewater had seen significant drug cartel activity — though Meyer was unaware of any direct connection between the Nicaraguan immigrants and cartels. It happened again a few days later when Meyer spoke to the UW Whitewater College Republicans and his picture appeared on a poster that read: “Explore the safety concerns tied to illegal immigration in our community.”

Some residents were furious, saying Meyer was highlighting isolated crimes to make immigrants look bad. Others thought he was right to raise concerns about what they believed was evidence of Biden’s failed border policies.

After his letter went viral, Meyer’s inbox filled with messages from people in Whitewater and beyond who had something to say about the newcomers in town. One Whitewater resident offered to send $500 to help pay for the immigrant liaison Meyer wanted to hire. Another said she no longer felt “safe in my own yard or even to run to Walmart.” A man who said he was a retired police officer called Meyer a “pansy ass coward chief” for asking for help “instead of telling Biden to F-OFF and close the damn border.”

Meyer tried to not take his frustrations about the political spectacle home with him. It followed him anyway. Meyer, who is married and has three children, began hearing from friends and relatives from Eau Claire, the city in western Wisconsin where he’d grown up. They had seen Whitewater in the news and were curious about what was happening and how he was doing. “Why are we hearing about Whitewater?” they’d ask him. “Are you OK?” He’d explain that Whitewater had become a hot spot for new immigrants, which presented some challenges for his department — but that they were working through it. “We’re just trying to do our job,” he said.

Liberal residents who had worked hard to promote positive stories about immigrants were disappointed that Whitewater kept showing up in the news. Kristine Zaballos, a longtime resident and UW Whitewater employee, said she wished Trump and other conservative politicians would stop spreading misinformation and see Whitewater for themselves. “I was frustrated that all of the efforts of so many people in town, all of our voices, really seemed to come to nothing,” said Zaballos, who co-founded a local food and clothing pantry called The Community Space that serves many recent immigrants.

She and other residents who were already volunteering their time to help the newcomers were motivated to do even more. Recently they worked with city officials to make videos aimed at teaching immigrants about American social norms and offering tips for living in Whitewater — from why parents should send their children to school to the difference between the recycling and trash bins.

Conservative residents were glad to hear Trump talking about their community.

“Even little old Whitewater is important to President Trump,” said Chuck Mills, who runs a local towing company.

In his opinion, the Biden administration has failed to control the border and abandoned communities like his. But Mills doesn’t believe the city is less safe because of the new immigrants, though he worried about that a few years ago. His feelings changed once he got to know his new neighbors. He went to Spanish-language church services and learned that immigrants were filling menial factory jobs he thought locals didn’t want. He liked seeing families move into his neighborhood and seeing children riding their tricycles on the sidewalk in places where he once saw drunk college students.

“I managed to get my shit together and accept them,” Mills said. “We got lucky here in Whitewater. … These people came here to work and raise their families.”

After Maricela arrived, more of Ariel’s relatives and friends followed, including his brother’s wife and their children, a sister, nephews, nieces, former teachers and neighbors. Sometimes, it felt like all of Murra had come to Whitewater.

Nicaraguan flags started appearing on apartment windows. Mexican immigrants who’d settled in the city decades earlier rented out rooms to the new arrivals. On Sunday afternoons, a few dozen men began getting together at a city park to play baseball — Nicaragua’s national sport.

Maricela found work at a few facilities in town before getting a job power washing machinery at the meat-processing plant. She worked the night shift while Ariel worked days; that way, they could switch off for their son’s care. On Sundays, they attended Spanish-language mass at St. Patrick Catholic Church.

They were building a new life together in Whitewater, though Maricela missed her family in Nicaragua. She called her mother almost daily and talked about returning one day.

Ariel took on extra shifts to make more money and pay down their debts. He got rides when he could after his first ticket for driving without a license in January 2022. He wanted to get a driver’s license, but he couldn’t even apply until he made progress on his immigration case and retrieved his Nicaraguan passport. A friend put him in touch with an attorney in Milwaukee who filed his asylum application and requested that the government return his passport.

That October, Ariel got behind the wheel after drinking at a bar with friends. He quickly realized he was drunk and decided to sleep it off at the home of some relatives nearby. As he pulled into the driveway, he drove into a ditch.

Ariel said he waited 20 minutes or so to see if another driver might stop to help him. The next vehicle that drove by was a patrol car. In a police report, an officer noted Ariel’s glassy, bloodshot eyes and the smell of beer. A Breathalyzer test found that his blood alcohol content was more than twice the legal limit.

Maricela took his arrest and tickets in stride. “Maybe this will straighten you out,” she told him.

Chastened, Ariel stayed off the road.

A few weeks later, he asked a friend for a ride to a quinceañera party that his family was invited to outside of the city. It was dark when they left the party and headed home. There are no streetlights, crosswalks or sidewalks on that stretch of road, and barely enough room for a car to squeeze onto the shoulder.

As they pulled up outside, Ariel’s friend asked if he could drop the family off on the side of the road, across from their house, instead of pulling into the driveway. “No problem,” Ariel said.

He stepped out of the car, carrying his son, who’d fallen asleep in the back seat. Maricela grabbed the booster seat and followed as Ariel started crossing the road.

At a distance, he could see headlights. A car was coming, but it looked far away. Ariel remembered telling Maricela to hurry and then feeling a whoosh and hearing a thump behind him. He reached back, but Maricela was gone. She lay on the pavement, gasping for breath. A neighbor heard Ariel’s screams.

Maricela died the next day.

Last month, Meyer watched the first debate between Trump and Harris. Meyer was curious what the candidates would say about immigration. He heard Trump repeat right-wing talking points about immigrants in another American city. The former president claimed that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating cats and dogs.

Meyer said he felt sorry for the people of Springfield and their leaders.

“I know how tough that is to have the spotlight on you,” he said.

He was relieved the spotlight was off Whitewater and that he could focus on doing his job. Over the summer he took a Spanish class that the city offered its municipal employees. Some of the Spanish he learned in college came back.

And he kept looking for money for his department, which has 24 sworn officers but will need another eight within the next four years, according to a recent study commissioned by the city. This spring, after he received the Biden administration’s response to his letter, he looked into federal funding for cities providing humanitarian services to new immigrants, but Whitewater wasn’t eligible. The program has since been expanded, but Meyer didn’t apply. Instead he applied for a federal community policing grant he learned about from lawmakers after his letter went viral. Last month, he learned his department would be awarded $375,000 to help cover the salaries of three additional officers.

In an interview, a senior Biden administration official said the government has done a lot to help communities receiving large numbers of new immigrants, but recognizes that the “funding that Congress has provided is really just a drop in the bucket and is not sufficient.” The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

Ariel was unaware of the political controversy surrounding immigrants like him in Whitewater. He was too busy trying to keep his head above water as a sole parent. He and his son moved out of their apartment. They didn’t want to have to see the stretch of road where Maricela had gotten killed every day. The tire marks were visible for weeks.

The driver, a former UW-Whitewater student, had been drinking and smoking marijuana at a football game tailgate, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office investigation. Marijuana was later detected in his blood, but no alcohol. The man was ticketed for possession of marijuana and driving with it in his system.

A sheriff’s official said there wasn’t enough evidence to seek criminal charges in Maricela’s death, in part because she was crossing the road in dark clothes. Ariel couldn’t help but wonder if the outcome would have been different had the roles been reversed — if an immigrant like him had run over a U.S. citizen.

Since his wife’s death, Ariel has tried to stay out of trouble. But he still sometimes drove without a license. The tickets he received when he got caught have cost him thousands of dollars.

He now works at a recycling facility in Janesville, a half hour from Whitewater, and relies on a friend for a ride. He struggles to get his son, now in second grade, to school and to buy groceries. Some Sundays, they miss church when they can’t get a lift.

One morning in August, Ariel took another rare day off work and got a ride from a nephew to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Janesville. He smoked a cigarette in the parking lot. He said he was more tired than usual; his son had been sick and up all night, vomiting.

Inside the DMV, Ariel got in line and waited his turn. He finally had all the paperwork he needed to apply for a license. But he’d taken the written test in Spanish twice and failed both times. Even though he’d studied, he still had a hard time understanding the questions.

“I don’t know how to read very well,” he said. “I know the letters, but I don’t practice.”

Ariel was motioned to a computer terminal. He stared at the initial screen, unable to figure out what button he needed to press to begin. About five minutes passed before he advanced to the actual test.

A few people took seats at other terminals and completed their exams while Ariel remained at his computer, working his way through the questions for another 90 minutes.

Then the screen showed him his results. Ariel stood, walked over to his nephew and shook his head. He had failed again.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Mariam Elba, Jeff Ernsthausen and Mica Rosenberg contributed research.

Mariam Elba, Jeff Ernsthausen and Mica Rosenberg contributed research.