ICE Arrests Mississippi Father at His Citizenship Hearing
In detention and threatened with deportation
By Nick Judin (Mississippi Free Press)
HAVANA TIMES – One morning, sitting in an immigration office in Memphis, Kasper Eriksen found himself transformed. Only a day before, he was a welding foreman, a husband and father of four who lived on a family farm in Sturgis, Mississippi. Now, he was a detainee, bound and shackled to the sterile white seats of a detention shuttle in Tennessee, headed southwest, barely able to wriggle.
It was here, late on April 15, with chains around his belly, hands and ankles, that the Denmark-born man fully realized that what he was experiencing was not a brief disruption from his many years in America—some clerical error that could be unmade in an afternoon’s discussion, or with the swift intervention of a judge.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement transported Kasper to the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center, also known as the LaSalle Detention Center, in Jena, Louisiana, with a dozen other detainees. Not sons, not fathers, not husbands, but detainees, “aliens”: in the eyes of the law, that remains his primary designation. ICE deposited him in a facility where he shares a cell with just under 100 other people, cycling in and out, sharing little in common beyond the uncertainty of their future.
Kasper has never been charged with or convicted of any crime. He has not been accused of being a member of MS-13 or Tren de Aragua. What led the government to rip Kasper out of the arms of his family was, to the best of his knowledge, a single document. Form I-751, appropriately clinical, a “Petition to Remove Conditions on Residence,” was just one of the endless documents he needed on his decade-plus journey to American citizenship.
Kasper and his wife, Savannah Hobart Eriksen, never submitted that form, which was due all the way back in 2015. She had suffered a stillbirth, losing their first child, and in the days of grief that followed, the deadline slipped right past them. But Kasper’s naturalization continued unimpeded. He corresponded with immigration officials numerous times over the next 10 years, and says agents never warned him that a critical document was missing. He paid taxes each year, reliably contributing a portion of his labor to the nation he already felt a part of.
Together with Savannah, they had four more children. He became a foreman at his job, and as 2025 arrived, he prepared for the final meeting with immigration services to formalize his naturalization and become an American citizen after spending nearly half of his life building a family here.
Savannah left that meeting alone. Kasper’s understanding is that his failure to submit I-751 led to a removal order—one immigration services issued without successfully notifying the Eriksens in 2019. That was 10 years after his first arrival in the U.S., four years after their miscarriage, and six years before he was chained to a seat on a bus in Memphis.
More than a month has passed since Savannah last saw Kasper, as ICE took him away in Tennessee. She doesn’t know when he will be either released or deported, doesn’t know if their lives will be uprooted to Denmark, his birth country. She is six months pregnant with their fifth child, due in August, and even now she doesn’t know if he will be there when she gives birth.
‘We Didn’t Even Get to Say Goodbye’
Kasper Eriksen spoke to the Mississippi Free Press from the LaSalle Detention Center on the morning of May 20, confirming first that he was safe and not experiencing any of the abuse reported in some ICE facilities elsewhere in Louisiana. In his experience, the GEO Group-run detention center’s food is palatable, the staff is professional, and the medical care is attentive.
He spends most of his day in a wide cell, housing upwards of 90 other detained immigrants at a time. He gets a couple of hours of yard time each day, a routine pleasure he says is critical to his sanity. Even so, Kasper has already lost about 25 pounds during his detention.
In his time at LaSalle, he has met other detainees from other walks of life. Some are young men, even teenagers. Some are much older, like one immigrant frail enough to be confined to a wheelchair. “ It’s all different stuff. Some people have an expired visa, for some, it’s a minor or larger crime. I would say that some of these people (are victims) of miscommunication,” Kasper said.
He, like many others in detention across the United States today, falls into that latter category. Austin Kocher, assistant professor at Syracuse University and a researcher of America’s immigration system, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 5 interview that stories just like Kasper Eriksen’s were growing significantly under the Trump regime.
“ ICE detention has grown dramatically. It’s up to about 48,000 people in detention. And that’s up from under 30,000 at the end of the Biden administration,” Kocher said. That number is not cumulative—it ebbs and flows as the government deports people. “With an almost 20,000-person growth, that definitely represents a lot more arrests.”
Private prison companies like the GEO Group, which operates the LaSalle facility where Kasper has been since March, are handling most of the increase. The GEO Group owns or operates 28 immigrant detention facilities across the U.S., and its corporate PAC was the first to max out its donations to the Trump campaign in 2024, Citizens for Ethics reported last year. After Trump’s victory last November, stocks soared for the GEO Group and another private prison operator, CoreCivic.
“The group that has been growing the most is immigrants with no criminal charges and no criminal conviction,” Kocher said. “The government’s narrative that they’re targeting criminals is not bulletproof. They’re picking up a lot of people who don’t have any criminal history at all.”
In Kocher’s analysis, since January, detentions of immigrants with no convictions or charges have had a relative growth three times greater than those of convicted criminals—the consequence of the cold logic that the easiest place to find immigrants to detain is at scheduled meetings.
“The easiest way, logistically, is just go after people who are following the rules. They’re the easiest to just snatch up when they come into the office,” Kocher said.
This was Kasper’s story. Until his detention, he had expected the appointment in Memphis to be the final step before his naturalization. Over the last year, the messages he received from their immigration portal seemed encouraging. “We are actively reviewing your Form N-400, Application for Naturalization,” a message on Sept. 12, 2024, read. “Our records showed nothing is outstanding at this time.”
Then, on March 7 of this year, “We scheduled an interview for your Form N-400, Application for Naturalization.” The meeting was only one month away.
Two hours after the Eriksens arrived at the office in Memphis, awaiting an early morning appointment with a case manager, the trap sprang. A law enforcement officer, whom Kasper recalled being a U.S. Marshal, was waiting for them when the meeting began.
The first stage was disbelief. Even the men who were about to collapse the Eriksens’s lives seemed mortified at the circumstances.
“I will say, the case manager in Memphis and the U.S. Marshal (had) a real sense of remorse because they realized it was an unfortunate circumstance,” Kasper said.
The case manager insisted that he had done what he could—the reason for the two-hour wait—to resolve this simple matter of paperwork.
“He said his hands were currently tied,” Kasper said. “He told us that, had it been a couple of months earlier, during the previous administration, the situation would have probably been different. With the new administration,” the official told him, “things have changed a lot, so they had to treat me like they were going to.”
ICE whisked him away to a holding facility in Memphis. And that was it. Both of the Eriksens, still in the early stages of denial, had no notion that this was the beginning of an odyssey.
“We’re still thinking this is one of those situations, like, where he got picked up and now we’re going down to court to bond him out and go home,” Savannah told the Mississippi Free Press on May 20. “Like it was a DUI or something.”
He was gone before the heartbreak set in. “We didn’t even get to say goodbye,” she said.
‘No One is Capable Like Him’
Kasper and Savannah met at 16, during Kasper’s study abroad at Starkville High School. They fell in love quickly and stayed in contact after he returned to Denmark. A few years later, he was back for good.
Those who know Kasper Eriksen describe him as a man of commitment. To hear Savannah describe him, he is an unerring provider and companion, the love of her life. His other connections are practically as inspired.
Justin Lindley, Kasper’s boss at The Welding Works, a metal fabricator, describes his work ethic with a sense of pride usually reserved for family. Kasper came to work for him in 2014, building the business up to its current success. Lindley’s life, in its own way, has been thrown into chaos by Kasper’s detention and possible deportation. He had just sketched out a retirement plan: by 2028, he would step back and leave the venture to Kasper.
“No one else is capable of taking it on like him,” Lindley told the Mississippi Free Press.
It’s unclear what awaits Kasper in the future. Already, the damage to his family is incalculable. Kasper is the Eriksens’ sole breadwinner; Savannah has more than a full-time job raising and homeschooling four children.
Even as a family fortunate enough to have the resources to fight, the drain on their finances is immense. Savannah estimated tens of thousands of dollars in fees and payments already. The family has started a GoFundMe to offset the extraordinary cost, raising over $18,000 so far.
But while the Eriksen family suffers, the private prison industry profits. Simply staying in close contact with Kasper during his detention at the facility in Louisiana costs the family hundreds of dollars per week alone, Savannah says. (In a May 21 statement, GEO Group Spokesperson Christopher V. Ferreira told the Mississippi Free Press that third-party vendors provide telecommunication services at GEO Group-contracted ICE detention facilities under a contract with ICE; those vendors set the rates, not GEO Group).
For Savannah, the hardest part of her family’s ordeal has been the slow acknowledgment to their young children that their father may not be coming home any time soon. Their children include an 8-year-old, a 6-year-old, a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old, with an infant on the way. The Eriksens are no good at lying to their children, so they couched Kasper’s detention with rapidly unraveling positivity.
“In the early days, we kept it vague. We just said, ‘Daddy has to stay for some more paperwork,’” Savannah said. “As it dragged out, we’ve let them in on a little bit more about what’s going on. First, they thought he was in a hotel. Now, (they realize) he’s probably not at a hotel. Or it’s the most horrible hotel they could have ever imagined.”
‘They Don’t Care if It’s Legal or Not’
Though stories like Kasper Eriksen’s may make up a significant portion of new growth in detentions, they bear little resemblance to the horror stories of criminal invaders that the Trump administration has pushed to justify its crackdown on immigrants.
Nathalia Rocha Dickson, an immigration attorney in Louisiana, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 6 interview that violent, criminal narratives are increasingly employed to justify a crackdown on all immigrants, the majority of whom have done nothing wrong.
“The government is more interested in feeding into rhetoric—these ugly stories about immigration. We’re feeding a monster for an administration that is not really concerned about the rule of law,” she said.
Dickson has represented clients in detention and deportation for eight years now. What strikes her most about the new deportation regime is how arbitrarily it operates. “It’s totally random. This is the stupidity of it,” she said. “There’s no way for you to determine who’s gonna be picked up and who’s not. You may show up for a scheduled hearing and get picked up. You may be driving and get pulled over. It’s really, really crazy right now.”
Kasper’s native tongue is getting rusty. He has little cause to practice it in Sturgis, Mississippi. Down at LaSalle, he had a chance encounter with an ancestral neighbor—a German-American living in Oklahoma, 71 years old, facing deportation to a country he hadn’t seen in decades. Kasper reached out to him in German, only to receive a bewildered stare back. The man had been American for so long, he’d forgotten his native tongue.
Dickson personally knows of a case in which the government attempted to swiftly deport a family of three who were waiting for ongoing appeals in an asylum case. In that case, she was able to legally intervene and get the family out on bond before the government could deport them.
“ Why would you detain someone who has zero criminal history whatsoever and has a pending case?” she asked. “ I could see the judge’s frustration. They asked, ‘What are you doing here? Why did y’all do this?’ And the ICE attorney is simply like, ‘Well, we don’t make the decisions when it comes to that. We just show up for court.’”
“That’s the thing about this administration. They don’t care. They don’t care if it’s legal or not. It just doesn’t matter anymore,” Dickson continued.
Federal Immigration Agencies Respond
The Mississippi Free Press contacted both U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services for this story, which was published after Christopher Harress first reported on it in The Mississippi Independent on May 15, followed by Emily Wagster Pettus at Mississippi Today on May 20.
Lindsay Williams, a spokesperson for ICE representing Mississippi and other southern states, told the Mississippi Free Press in a May 21 interview that ICE had little to do with the evolution of the long, confusing saga that began with a missing document and led to an order to arrest and deport Kasper Eriksen. USCIS, Williams explained, handles the entire process, only involving ICE to effect a removal.
“All I know is that once there’s a final (removal) order issued, and we get it, then you go on the list of folks who have a final order. Then, that’s our part of it. To arrest and detain and remove,” Williams said.
But what to make of the messages the Eriksens relayed to the Mississippi Free Press that they said they received from the case manager at their naturalization hearing? This reporter asked Williams what had changed, over a matter of months, that made this paperwork error unresolvable without the shackling and detention of a prospective citizen who had so willingly cooperated with the system.
“Well, I don’t know how negotiable a final order (of removal) has ever been,” Williams replied. Still, he acknowledged, mistakes were possible. ”We’re all fallible. There have probably, in the history of (deportations), been people who have received final orders or judgments that were incorrect, or that we have since corrected.”
Still, the new administration has not been inclined to err on the side of caution to avoid such errors.
“The president and the administration have been pretty clear about increased immigration enforcement,” Williams said. “If this person has a final order—meaning that they’ve exhausted their due process and all legal means to stay here—we are gonna effect that arrest and removal. The president’s been super clear about this. So that’s what has changed. This is the direction that we’re (going) in.”
Williams also responded to Kocher’s research finding that, contrary to the Trump administration’s focus on the most extreme criminality among immigrants, the new detentions were resulting in a much more significant portion of detained immigrants with no criminal convictions or charges.
“Sure,” Williams responded. “ You would see that if we’re out in the community looking for the violent people. If we encounter … other people who are here without status, regardless of their criminality, they’re arrested as well. You can see how quickly that non-criminal population can grow just because they’re encountered.”
Shortly before press time, USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser provided a statement to the Mississippi Free Press in response to inquiries about Kasper Eriksen’s case.
“It is the responsibility of conditional residents of the United States to apply to have those conditions removed before their Green Card expires—allowing them to obtain their permanent residence and ultimately citizenship,” Tragesser wrote. “This is a long-standing requirement set by law, and ignoring it can have severe consequences, including removal from the country.”
USCIS declined to comment on any specifics, including the 10-year gap between the missed document and Kasper’s detainment.
‘Everyone Is Stepping Up’
While mass deportations are what the administration has prioritized, arrests alone, Austin Kocher explained, are one of the few metrics actually growing.
“ICE detention is up. ICE deportations are not up, oddly enough,” he said.
Hard data and a unifying theory to explain it all are difficult to come by, but an inevitable reality is that mass detentions have encountered the simple rule of law.
“The administration can say what they want, but there are logistical barriers (to deportation), from due process to simply getting enough planes in the air. They’re seeing a lot more challenges, and part of the problem is that they don’t want to admit that to their supporters,” Kocher said.
Lindsay Williams at ICE acknowledged his point, but said that the deportations would spike in due time.
“On a base level, it’s much easier to arrest people than it is to go through the legal process to remove them,” he said. “We can always add more people into detention off the streets, right? That’s easy. So those numbers have increased dramatically. It’s much harder and it’s a longer process to complete the immigration proceedings. You have to have your day in court. You will see deportations increase as we have more facilities, more vans, planes, trains, buses, people—that’s a slower build.”
Mass deportations, of course, are a bipartisan affair.
“ The Biden administration deported over a quarter of a million people last year. That was the highest in 10 years,” Kocher said.
But he added that the Trump administration is going far beyond the already dramatic exercise of immigration authority seen in the past four years.
“They’re using all kinds of mechanisms that are very questionable in terms of their lawfulness, whether that’s the Alien Enemies Act, or making claims about a relatively unheard of gang being classified as a terrorist group, then making claims about people’s affiliation with that gang that are spurious at best.”
The Trump administration used vague insinuations of possible gang affiliations in March to justify sending 238 Venezuelan men, many without criminal records or proof of any gang affiliation, to an infamous prison in El Salvador without due process—and despite a judge’s order halting the deportations.
The administration has also revoked visas from and arrested pro-Palestinian college students for engaging in protests or writing op-eds. That includes Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE arrested in New York and transported to the same Jena, Louisiana, facility where Kasper Eriksen now resides.
At home in Mississippi, the burden of a family farm and a home full of children would have been unbearable for Savannah Eriksen to shoulder alone. But the Eriksens have not been alone. Friends, family, and the entire community of Sturgis have been of constant service, feeding and caring for their children, and keeping the farm alive, all while Savannah fights to free her husband.
“Everyone is stepping up to serve one another and love one another,” Savannah said.
Kasper can scarcely put into words what that means to him. “It’s relief,” he said simply. “It makes me feel relieved.”
On reflection, it occurs to the Eriksens just how common their story is. One story, one man in a detention center, held among thousands of others whom ICE pulled from their communities or separated from their families. Most of their stories will never be told. Few will have the intervention of their communities or the media.
Late Tuesday, Kasper received the first real news since his detention: a preliminary hearing is set for next week, May 27. For now, all that’s left to the Eriksens is an anxious hope that all of this can be undone.ç