When an ICE surge reached western Wisconsin in late 2025 — families taken from small towns like Baldwin and River Falls — CVI reached out to help and found no rapid-response or mutual-aid network in place.

Within days, CVI helped stand one up across more than a dozen towns. When ICE reached CVI’s own community weeks later, the network was tested under pressure and held. At its height, the mutual-aid arm alone moved roughly 6,000 pounds of food and personal-care items a month to families who needed it.

The defining lesson wasn’t tactical — it was human. When immigrant community leaders said that publicizing ICE movements was terrorizing the very families it was meant to protect, CVI stopped, listened, and rebuilt its entire approach around what those leaders said they needed. The work was kept deliberately out of public view, at the community’s request.

Most of the valley still doesn’t know CVI did it, and that restraint is the point. The model became something others sought out: CVI was invited to present it on Indivisible’s national “Immigrant Justice Summer” call and helped seed similar networks in five other states. It is the clearest expression of CVI’s oldest principle — put the affected community first, even when that means giving up the credit.