ICE releases Wisconsin state trooper detained at airport while boarding domestic flight

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Carel Van Der Merwe, a Wisconsin state patrol trooper, in an image provided by his lawyer. Photograph: Courtesy of Marc Christopher theguardian.com

ICE has released a Wisconsin state trooper who was detained at an airport as he waited to board a domestic flight. Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe, a South African national who immigrated to the United States at 14, was freed on Friday subject to electronic monitoring and regular check-ins with immigration authorities, according to his lawyers.

His asylum case has been pending for seven years. While it waited, US Citizenship and Immigration Services — one agency within the Department of Homeland Security — granted him work authorization valid through 2030, which he used to serve in Wisconsin law enforcement. A video from his graduation ceremony last year shows his father pinning the badge on him in front of the state's governor. ICE, another agency within the same department, then detained him. DHS defended the arrest by saying he had overstayed a 2019 visa, and that "work authorization or a pending application do not confer legal status in the US." His lawyers at Christopher & De León countered that USCIS had "authorized him to work," adding: "We don't think ICE even believes its own statement." ICE did not respond to questions about what prompted the release.

The detention sits awkwardly beside the White House's own posture toward his group. Van Der Merwe's family of white South Africans arrived during Trump's first term, and after returning to office the president signed an executive order promising to "promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees" escaping what the order called government-sponsored race-based discrimination. The same administration's deportation drive has swept up visa holders, green-card holders and people with pending asylum cases at airports — detentions that some experts read as an effort to meet arrest quotas the White House has imposed on ICE. The release settles none of it: the trooper must still defend his immigration case before a judge.

His lawyers now advise noncitizens with unresolved immigration paperwork to consult an attorney before traveling by air. "Even if you have flown without problems before," they wrote, "do not assume the same will happen now."