This interview originally aired on "In the Moment" on SDPB Radio.
Secretary of Homeland Security and former South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem returned to the state last week. She received an honorary degree from Dakota State University and gave their commencement address.
The move by the university sparked protests in Madison.
Jon Hunter is publisher emeritus of the Madison Daily Leader and a member of the South Dakota Newspaper Hall of Fame.
Michael Card, Ph.D., is professor emeritus of political science at the University of South Dakota.
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The following transcript was auto-generated and edited for clarity.
Jon Hunter:
Noem was invited to be the commencement speaker when she was still governor, so this would've been sometime before January or whenever her resignation took place.
So over the years, Governor Noem and the Legislature and the Board of Regents and many others have been very supportive of Dakota State University's growth in cyber operations, cyber defense and others. She proposed in her state of the budget address or in the annual budget address, allocations or appropriations for each of those areas, specifically for areas for faculty recruitment, student recruitment. Most recently a quantum computing partnership with South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, so those who are in charge of those sorts of invitations thought that would be a good way to honor her.
Since then, the world changed and she resigned that position and became Secretary of Homeland Security at which she implemented some policies of the new administration. Some of them which were unpopular with people at Dakota State University, among them was the deportation of students, international students, especially allegedly those who were perfectly qualified to be here.
There was a high profile case out in, I believe it was Mines, wasn't it, Mike?
Michael Card:
School of Mines.
Jon Hunter:
Where a student was set for deportation, ended up being able to stay, but certainly international students were concerned with this and a big part of the student senate had its international students. There are a lot of international students at Dakota State. I can't remember the numbers exactly, but I think maybe five out of eight of the senators are from other countries, so some of them abstained from a vote for that. So the remaining ones were, I think it was less than a quorum taken on that. So those students ultimately were opposed by not passing something.
Faculty also had concerns, I think, on behalf of their students. Some faculty of course, are also international people. They've come from other countries and would be here in various states of citizenship and/or visas and that sort of thing.
So it was, I think a little bit of an awkward position for Dakota State then because having issued this invitation, and you don't rescind those typically, and I think it was a recognition of the real support that Governor Noem had provided while she was governor.
Let's catch up to May 10th then. On the day of the commencement, there were people protesting lined up along Washington Avenue on both sides of the street, lots of signs and so forth, and a fairly vocal, very peaceful, very honorable protest. And so that was most of the morning. I think they were there from about 8:00 o'clock to about 1:00 o'clock. The commencement took place late morning. And those kind of protests of course make local media, so Madison Daily Leader, television stations, other media of different sorts.
Lori Walsh:
Associated Press, yeah.
Jon Hunter:
Yes. And then when it was over, it was over. I didn't see any residual kinds of things after that, no protests once that had taken place, and I think people were moving on.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. So this idea as I was reading the Associated Press story, that people were speaking anonymously, Dr. Card, and they were concerned about being able to speak up because they were afraid of retaliation from the administration, the university administration, and also the federal government. They were concerned about things.
This seems to me to always be a delicate balance in higher education with people wanting to speak up, but then they're going to get jobs in the future and they're also balancing their future.
Are there any insights that you take from how this unfolded at Dakota State that you think particularly went well? Like this is how it's supposed to happen, there's a vote, the administration makes a decision, there's a protest, we move on, or areas that you think perhaps maybe need to be revisited?
Michael Card:
Well, I don't know that those necessarily need to be revisited, although I would add to this that the Secretary of Homeland Security is also in a position to perhaps funnel more money to Dakota State University for security issues. There are also students who are likely to be afraid of speaking up for anything. They just don't want to speak up. They often come up to the front of the class after it's over and ask what would've been a great question to take off, but that's the sort of thing that happens. It's the university president. It's a duty provided to them by their governing board. In almost all institutions, there's usually a commencement committee that determines who are some good candidates. They may make a recommendation or list a slate of candidates to the executive officer, the president of the university, who then checks it out with the governing board and sees if it's okay.
The idea of protests that there is free speech as long as it's not threatening to an individual, that's America, that they didn't try to deliberately disrupt the commencement is not cancel culture, that seems to be avoided. It allowed people to speak their minds and to state their views and perspectives. From what I've read and reported, I don't live in Madison, so I didn't get to see this, but it seems that it went about as well as it could go.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. And then, Jon, several days later, there is a series of arrests, eight arrests at two different manufacturing facilities in Madison.
I'm not finding anything that says those were related, are you?
Jon Hunter:
No, they aren't. I'm quite certain they're unrelated. I can't see how the other agencies besides ICE knew about this thing sometime in advance so that they could prepare for this possibility, so I don't think it would be related at all to that.
Lori Walsh:
So tell me what that was like with the coverage locally about the ICE workforce. I'm going to try and think of what they're called. According to information or allegations received by ICE, they did a "workforce enforcement action," in quotations.
Jon Hunter:
I'm glad you remembered because I didn't remember what it was.
Lori Walsh:
I didn't remember. I wrote it down. I was going to call it a raid, but it was not a raid according to ICE.
Jon Hunter:
"Enforcement action."
Lori Walsh:
It was a worksite enforcement action, so we'll use their language.
Jon Hunter:
Well, there were two Madison businesses that were involved in this. Three persons from one, and five from the other. They were taken by ICE because they were not documented properly.
Lori Walsh:
Allegedly.
Jon Hunter:
Allegedly, thank you. Part of the trick is that the action actually is partly against the employer. Remember, employers have responsibility to make sure that the people they employ check all these boxes.
I've done that as a small business owner, and you have to have everybody in there. Part of the trick is that businesses, and again, of all sizes don't have the capacity to recognize forgeries or false documents. And I'm pretty certain that's what happens here, they are actually available on the internet. You can get false documents to do that.
So it's very unfortunate that the businesses are caught in this situation where they asked for the right documents, they got the right documents, and they brought them forward, but the people were taken.
I think the businesses are, in some sense, saddened because I mean, there are your employees, you treat them well and they have co-workers and friends and so on. You hired them for a reason. They're doing a job, so you're missing five or three people from your operation.
So on the other hand, you want people to obey the law, and we've set up laws, and so it is awkward for the businesses. And I don't know, I didn't know any of the persons involved. I would've no way of knowing their names or anything.
Lori Walsh:
We haven't heard any fallout in the community from the school or the family, friends, relatives, legal aspects of how they're being treated, or that's not being discussed on the street.
Jon Hunter:
That's a great question though. And I think there is some discussion of that. And, again, they typically would have children in school and people working with them.
I would guess the top 50-sized towns in South Dakota would have someone working with people who speak other languages in some sort of English as a second language kind of programs, and there certainly is that in Madison. And so I would guess that they probably were working with some of the detainees and maybe had worked with their children in school and so forth, so I think there is a sense of losing a little something there.
Lori Walsh:
We don't know if they were parents.
Jon Hunter:
We don't know.
Lori Walsh:
Okay, just to be clear.
Jon Hunter:
At least I don't.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, I don't know. I'm making the assumption that out of eight people who were working at a manufacturing plant, there might have been children, but I do not know that.
Jon Hunter:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Jon Hunter:
And there may be other people who were in that same position who weren't detained in this particular one. We know these eight were taken. So I think it just feels like there's this little gap where we had some people and they're not here anymore.
I don't know, but people want to obey the law and they recognize there are rules set up for these kind of things, so I don't think anyone's saying this is illegal to do this or whatever.
Lori Walsh:
And again, they have to go through their court process too.
Jon Hunter:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
So we don't know how this resolves yet.
Jon Hunter:
We don't.
Lori Walsh:
But it has an impact on the community.
Jon Hunter:
It does. Even a small number of people among a population, I just think it's felt.
Lori Walsh:
Right. And you recently talked to the Madison Chief of Police, which you're going to write about in the future, and they were not part of this enforcement action, but they were listed among the cooperating agencies. But the city police don't necessarily enforce federal law.
Jon Hunter:
I always appreciate the insight when you get to talk to a chief of police or a sheriff, things that go on beyond what I normally know. And they were contacted by ICE earlier, as were other agencies. They were something they call perimeter control or something like this, so I think they're kind of on the outside in case something happens.
But there's so much cooperation among agencies in all sorts of things now and I became aware of some other ones. Whether it's controversial or not, I think it's a good thing.
We installed in Madison, the first city in South Dakota to install these cameras that take a picture of license plates and then compare them to databases. There's lots of cameras around. They're not the first to do that, but somehow is involved in this database matching.
If there's a car that's being pursued in another state, within 12 seconds or something like that of when that is taken, then we can be notified that this car is here. And so there are some people, criminals or alleged criminals, from other jurisdictions who come through Madison that we can be aware of whether they stop in Madison or they're just on their way through.
But what struck me, Lori, I think with that conversation is cooperation with multiple agencies. And you think, too, highway patrol has jurisdiction in Madison, partly because state highways go through there, the sheriff's department covers all of Lake County, Madison Municipal Department covers within the city limits, but then you've got ICE and you've got whatever else.
And communication, I think has improved a lot among agencies, just in my opinion. At least in Madison, it has. We have a new police facility now in Madison, which has a lot of improved capabilities, including things that you often don't think of, whether it's interview rooms, privacy interview rooms, either for victims or possible perpetrators where you can interview in a comfortable setting. It would be recorded, you can use it. It's not depositions necessarily, but just try to get the facts.
I was just very warmly impressed by the progress of both cooperation and technology in today's police work in Madison.
Lori Walsh:
Well, we look forward to reading that column in the Madison Daily Leader.
Jon Hunter:
Thursday.
Lori Walsh:
This Thursday.
Michael Card:
Can I jump into one part of the earlier story?
Lori Walsh:
Yeah.
Michael Card:
And that is we, human beings, tend to think that correlation is causation.
Lori Walsh:
Oh, sure. Yeah.
Michael Card:
So when we look at the timing of Secretary Noem's appearance in Madison compared to the raid several days later, we may think ipso facto, this is related.
And not necessarily. It may be, but then you need some evidence that leads that they are linked to each other and we haven't seen any of that in this instance, but it's something that all of us have to watch out for because we hear some correlation, some relationship, but we need some linkage between them before we jump to conclusions.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaking of law enforcement and criminal justice, let's talk about the Prison Project Reset. We have a new report earlier in the hour, we heard from Lee Strubinger talking about how the report is making lawmakers rethink the sentencing landscape, which I think is the new phrase you're going to be hearing a lot, and the cost of incarceration.
Mike, let's start with you. When you see some of the headlines or if you've had a chance to look at the report at all and you see the cost of incarcerating people with our current set of state laws, do we need a big change?
Because we're going to have to build more prisons, not just because our population is increasing, but because of how we are reliably tough on crime. Let's be honest.
Michael Card:
Well, we are, and South Dakota tends to incarcerate more individuals than most other states, if not all other states. And the comparison between ourselves in North Dakota, which has generally the same makeup of the population in terms of there's both areas that we might say are a little more wild than meets the common standard for civil conduct. There's dealing with the Bakken Formation, and in many cases we're dealing with an increasing size of Sioux Falls, which is going to attract more people. And the area around Sturgis, we know that there are more drug crimes during the rally, but it's also the case that we still incarcerate almost twice as many more people than North Dakota does.
And we've also in the Legislature this past year, I believe this year, we eliminated presumptive probation. And so we want people to serve full sentences.
And that is as if this is what the law says that you would serve, we want to limit judges' discretion to make sure that people are receiving the appropriate punishment. It seems that that's what's going on.
Well, that's really going to change because now we need to incarcerate those people rather than release them. The more people we incarcerate, the more difficult it is to conduct programs that can deal with drug treatments and other sorts of matters that might lead people to commit crimes.
And as we reduce the number that are getting released on the back end, our population is just bound to go up. And I think it was Lieutenant Governor Venhuizen who noted, we have to look at how these things are related to one another. And I think most of us have known that, but he just gave it words, and that's not just he gave it words. And so we've got a potential problem facing us that we're going to have to double the prison size by 2030 or thereabouts, which seemed to me like a long time ago. And then I remembered, "Oh, that's only five years."
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, that's right around the corner. And we've been saving for a while, it's hard to get the project done. And, Jon, a reality check perhaps for lawmakers, for South Dakotans about the cost of incarceration, do you think?
Jon Hunter:
I'm hoping lawmakers take one step away from that and said, "Look, let's figure out a way for the incarcerate people that we can return them back to society." It's the whole Department of Corrections kind of thing. And sometimes it is the Department of Punishment, and so that's part of what we do.
But I think I would be concerned, another conversation with our police chief in Madison. He was talking about meth crimes, which still exist and exists all over South Dakota where he talked about the number of months to get your body cleaned from that. He said nine months. I don't know if that's true or not. And there's probably double that to get your mind back. And so if we have some sort of release after six weeks or eight weeks or something like this for a meth crime, then it's just going to repeat that cycle.
So I think that takes all sorts of, there might be some crimes that could be rehabilitated very quickly, and some maybe that takes a very long time, some maybe never. But I do think that lawmakers have to look beyond just the one question, "Are you going to put them in prison or are they not going to go to prison?" That's too simple. It's much more complicated.
And I think the new prison facility and new programming can help control that number without saying, "Look, let's just not jail people."
Lori Walsh:
Yeah. And it's about a lot more than, "Does it go here or does it go here?"
Michael Card:
Right.
Lori Walsh:
There's a lot happening.
Michael Card:
And we've also got jails as opposed to prisons, jails who are much shorter-term methods of incarceration.
And I think another point is we do need to recognize that there are some people that need to be kept away from society for a period of time, but almost everybody gets out eventually.
So what are they prepared for as they leave? And if we don't have the appropriate facilities, as Jon noted, to give these people another life, then they will repeat the same life when they're outside the walls of the prison or jail and we're in trouble again.
Jon Hunter:
I think there's one more thing to that, and that is find where rehabilitation is working, where recidivism is low, and it doesn't have to be elsewhere in the United States. It can be in another country or whatever. And there are certainly cultural things to that, but let's find where we've had successes in this area and open ourselves up to those ideas, not say, "Well, this is the way we did it in 1880 when we built our current prison. Here's maybe a better way to do that."
So I'm hoping lawmakers are open to that idea too. Now, a three-month task force or whatever this is, probably doesn't have time to do that, but let's open ourselves to great ideas that are occurring elsewhere and take advantage of those.
Lori Walsh:
Yeah, I'm sure we can do better than 1880 South Dakota, I hope.
Jon Hunter:
150 years is a long time for a building.
Michael Card:
Well, and if we remember, the original idea behind a prison was from the Quakers, at least in the United States, was from the Quakers in Pennsylvania. And it was to isolate you so that you'd think about what you'd done and reflect upon how you can live your life differently.
We're a long ways away from that, and that isn't going to be appropriate for all individuals, so we have to have multiple strategies to get to where we want to go. When I was working at Miami University driving from Columbus, I drove past two 3,000 unit each maximum security presence. And yes, I did lock my doors, I drove fast. One of our graduate students would teach over there. I thought, "I'm not ready for that." It just shows what a wimp I really am, but they had been built and filled within five years.
And I think that's something we have to be prepared for is as we build new facilities to either rehabilitate people, not either, and to prepare them for the next life and to keep society safe from them.
If we build it, they will fill it. Who's the they? And I think we need to involve the judges in this, and we need to involve local law enforcement, state law enforcement, as well as correctional officials and people living in the society to think this is a complex problem, it's not going to be solved easily, as Jon was intimating.
Lori Walsh:
We're going to be talking about this for a long time. This is one of the things that we talk about because it is an ongoing problem that we are always going to be grappling with. So if you think that it's going to be a, "Here's this budget line item and now it's done and we've built the building and it's over," then you are probably not thinking about this the right way.
Jon Hunter:
And that happened in Minnesota. They just had as a budget line item, literally closing the Stillwater Prison.
And so it turned out it was in budget negotiations. It wasn't in human services or Department of Corrections negotiations or what's best for this. It was a budget line item where they said, "We need $50 million. Let's close Stillwater. Whatever 1,200 people there have to go to other facility.
I mean, it seemed like exactly the wrong way to approach that is from a line item budget perspective.
