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 M$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.
