Stephanie Hirsch remembers growing up in the western Wisconsin city of Eau Claire when the community welcomed newly arriving Hmong refugees from Southeast Asia.
So Hirsch, now the Eau Claire city manager, said she was surprised at the hostility, fear, and anger she saw last fall, when residents learned several dozen refugees would start arriving legally in the community of about 70,000. Opponents spread misinformation — including on a billboard — about how many people were coming and from where, and people packed a city meeting to protest the resettlements.
"It's very hard for me to understand that fear," Hirsch said. "I completely disagree with being afraid of people from different cultures. In fact, I'm really excited about it."
But the way lifelong Eau Claire resident Fred Kappus saw it, the city should have other priorities.
"We really should attend to the homelessness situation before we bring in people from elsewhere," said Kappus, the vice chairman of the Eau Claire Republican Party.
The flaring tension over the resettlement of refugees in Eau Claire has been repeated in many other midsize communities across the U.S. And it served as a backdrop to a campaign rally Tuesday with Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, who has focused on immigration and anti-immigrant rhetoric as he and former President Donald Trump campaign.
Vance argued Tuesday that illegal immigration has devastated parts of the country, including places like Wisconsin that are far from the U.S. border with Mexico. He blames Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for problems such as the flow of illegal drugs, and says he and Trump will secure the border and "put Americans first."
"Every community is a border state," Vance said. "Every community is a border community."
The Ohio senator also has continued to promote false claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, are abducting and eating pets as he tries to draw attention to Democratic presidential nominee Harris' immigration policies. Officials have said there have been no credible or detailed reports about the claims.
Vance defended talking about the claims in Springfield when asked about it Tuesday.
"I haven't made up anything," Vance said. "I just listened to people who were telling me things."
Vance said he wants to travel to Springfield and speak with people there, but that wouldn't be in the city's best interests right now.
Western Wisconsin is a target for both sides in one of the "blue wall" states, along with Pennsylvania and neighboring Michigan, that both parties say they need to win to secure the White House. Vance campaigned in Michigan earlier Tuesday before going to Wisconsin.
Eau Claire — a regional economic hub about 90 miles east of Minneapolis — is reliably Democratic. But it is located in a county where margins of victory may make a difference in November. Biden carried the county by 11 points over Trump in 2020, when the Democrat won Wisconsin and the election. Trump lost the county by 7 points in 2016, but won Wisconsin that year.
Vance did not mention the resettlement in Eau Claire during his rally, but did talk about Trump's plan to deport people living in the country illegally, drawing loud cheers from the crowd. He also said communities that are "overrun" by immigration have seen problems such as rising rents, increased car insurance costs, and added pressure on healthcare and school systems.
The issue of immigration already has polarized people in Eau Claire and the surrounding area.
When news broke nearly a year ago that about 75 refugees who fled their countries due to war or persecution were headed to the region — representing about 0.10% of Eau Claire's population — Republicans introduced bills at the state and federal level designed to give local communities more say.
A misleading billboard accused Eau Claire city leaders of using tax dollars to "traffic Somali refugees" and keeping the plan secret, though no one from Somalia was part of the resettlement effort. An overflow crowd at an Eau Claire County Board meeting opposed the resettlement, but the board rejected a resolution that would have paused the effort.
There was also initially a "total and complete lack of transparency" related to the resettlements and where the refugees were coming from, said Kappus, the Republican critic.
Hirsch, the city's top official, says officials don't need to hold a public hearing anytime someone moves into town.
"We have many thousands of people who move to Eau Claire on an annual basis," she said. "There's nothing unusual about having people move to Eau Claire."
World Relief, a humanitarian aid group founded by the National Association of Evangelicals, settled 77 refugees in Eau Claire since February, about half from the African countries of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Republic of Congo, and Central African Republic, and others from Venezuela and Colombia, said Matthew Soerens, vice president of advocacy and policy. Five Somalis live in the nearby community of Barron, where family members had previously settled.
World Relief expects 100 to 125 more refugees in Eau Claire in the federal government's budget year, starting Oct. 1, to arrive at about the same pace since the group began operations in the Wisconsin city in February.
Bill Berg, 73, who was born and raised in Eau Claire and lived most of his life there, said, "It's a minority that disagrees with refugee resettlement."
"It's 'the other,'" he said Tuesday when asked why he thought some were opposed. "It's always 'the other.'"
He described Eau Claire as a "welcoming community" and said he had no problem with the refugees.
"Half of my family are of other races, which I think is a good thing," he said.
World Relief, one of 10 nongovernmental organizations that works with the State Department and the U.N. refugee agency to bring refugees to the United States after extensive vetting, has been expanding after leaner times. President Joe Biden raised the cap on bringing refugees to 125,000 in the budget year ending Sept. 30 from 18,000 under Trump in 2020, the lowest since refugee resettlement began in 1980.
Just over 84,000 refugees came to the United States from Oct. 1 through Aug. 31, a pace that falls short of the 125,000 cap. Wisconsin took in 1,500 of them, about one-third from the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is plagued by violent crime and civil unrest.
Eau Claire is one of several locations, along with Austin (Texas), Baltimore, and Scott County, Iowa, where World Relief grew over the last year, Soerens said. The group felt it succeeded in Appleton, Wisconsin — where it had settled refugees for more than a decade — and started looking for another Wisconsin city that offered jobs and a welcoming spirit. They spoke with police departments, school districts, potential employers, and churches.
"The community that sort of rose to the top was Eau Claire, in part because the local government was eager," Soerens said.
Hirsch was so confident that Eau Claire would be a good fit, she wrote the U.S. State Department last year that the county had an unemployment rate of 3.5%, with plenty of job opportunities, and "a long history of welcoming refugees."
But then the backlash hit.
Kappus, who lived his entire life in Eau Claire, thinks immigration is one of the top concerns of voters in western Wisconsin.
"Fentanyl is a problem here in west-central Wisconsin and Eau Claire," Kappus said. "It all goes back to our open borders."
World Relief, like other resettlement agencies, provides temporary aid that may include food, rent, clothing, furniture, and help with school enrollment and job searches. That's far different from Springfield, Ohio, where many Haitians are in the country under Temporary Protected Status, which spares people from being deported to countries that are considered unsafe due to natural disasters or civil strife. Refugees, unlike those on TPS, have a path to citizenship.
Eau Claire, the fastest-growing city in the northern half of Wisconsin, is attracting people from all over, including small towns and big cities, people escaping warmer climates and those from other countries, Hirsch said.
"We're happy to have people come to the community whether they are refugees from the Congo or a candidate for vice president," she said. "We want to be a community that's welcoming."