“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.”
Nick Judin tells this one story of one family that is also the story of countless other families and communities and husbands and wives and children and families all across America: “ICE Arrests Mississippi Father at His Citizenship Hearing, Threatening Deportation.”
Judin tells this story with scrupulous reporting, empathy, and attention to detail. The opening paragraphs bear witness to this one family’s Kafkaesque nightmare:
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.
Judin’s piece keeps the focus on this family and the way this capricious act of bureaucratic tyranny has upended their lives. He pounds home how Kasper Eriksen is a typical “illegal alien” — someone in technical violation of the technical laws that make it nearly impossible for anyone not born here to be or to remain a legal alien. This clarifies how grossly misleading and stupid-making that language of “illegal aliens” turns out to be, creating a false impression of invaders and interlopers when the overwhelming reality is that most “illegal aliens” are people like Eriksen — good neighbors who work hard, follow the rules, care for their families, pay their taxes, and live responsibly, but who will also, inevitably, have some equivalent to a missing Form I-751 somewhere in their past.
Of course, one difference between Kasper Eriksen and most of the millions of other “illegal aliens” now being abducted and tormented by ICE and the Trump administration is that Eriksen was born in Denmark. He’s a white guy, and the primary emphasis of ICE’s crusade of mass-deportation — the primary motivation — is going after non-white people. Trump’s mass-deportation scheme is, essentially, about racial and ethnic hegemony.
By telling this story — this one story of one family that is the same story as that of all those other families — with a focus on this white family, Judin may be able to reach some people who might otherwise not be willing or able to hear the stories of people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia or Mahmoud Khalil or Rumeysa Öztürk.
The lawless extradition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a tyrant’s prison in El Salvador was a bureaucratic error defended after the fact by bogus allegations and clumsily photoshopped “evidence” of crimes for which he was never charged. The complete absence of constitutional due process in his case led many to note that “If it could happen to him, it could happen to any one of us.” That’s obviously true, but still perhaps abstract or hypothetical. Telling the story of Kasper Eriksen — a blue-collar white guy from Mississippi — makes that obvious truth seem more concretely true.
Given that Eriksen is a blue-collar white guy from Mississippi — that he fits the profile of a red-state redneck — many readers of Judin’s story wanted to know how he voted in the last election. Dumb question — he hasn’t yet voted in any election because he’s still only halfway through the decades-long process of becoming a naturalized citizen through the interminable and damn-near-impossible “proper channels.” His kids will probably be eligible to vote here before he ever gets to.
So, OK, those readers wondered, then how did his wife, Savannah Eriksen, vote in the last election? She homeschools their four children, which seems like a hint, but Judin’s article doesn’t seem interested in that question at all.
His editor at the Mississippi Free Press, Ashton Pittman, explains why in an editorial written after Judin’s piece gained wider attention, “‘FAFO’ is a Depraved Way to Respond to Suffering.”
Too often in the American national media, reporters tell stories on policies that have enormous implications for the lives of everyday people in terms of whether it’s a win for the Democrats, a loss for the Republicans, or a boon for the president.
Mississippi Free Press investigative reporter Nick Judin’s latest story is the exact opposite of that. It begins by telling you the story of a man, Kasper Eriksen, in vivid detail as his life and that of his family was unexpectedly thrown into a Kafkaesque hell.
And even though Donald Trump is undoubtedly the man who put the wheels in motion that rolled the father of four straight into an ICE prison, his name is not mentioned until about 800 words into the story on the Sturgis, Mississippi, welder.
We believe it’s important for us, as a news organization, to put humanity first as often as possible—and then contextualize the underlying politics in those terms. We should not treat the lives of people as mere pawns in a partisan game. People’s lives, after all, are the only reason politics matters in the first place.
In response to the specific complaint that Judin ought to have made his report mostly about whether the Eriksen’s were reaping what they sowed as (possibly) conservative white voters, Pittman ain’t having it:
With all due respect, that’s depraved. And it’s not how we operate. We hold powerful people accountable across partisan lines, but when it comes to everyday people, we aren’t going to hold their feet to the fire over their personal political views. The idea that anybody could deserve this because of how they voted is deplorable, and we strongly reject it.
Any journalist who would play “gotcha” games with victims of government cruelty to feed some perverse appetite for political schadenfreude on social media has lost their way. “FAFO” (an abbreviation for, “F— around, find out”) may be a popular way for some folks on social media to answer the suffering of people whom they perceive to be their political opposites, but it’s poison to the journalist’s soul.
We don’t expect everyone to have a limitless well of compassion. But doing our job well requires us to continue to exercise compassion and empathy toward everyday people from all walks of life, backgrounds, beliefs and political persuasions—even when it’s hard.
Let’s make Pittman’s rant the lens for reading this story from the Christian Post, which is, again, one story that is just like millions of other stories happening right now from all across MAGAmerica, “Evangelical pastor detained by ICE despite stay of removal, no criminal record.”
Maurilio Ambrocio, a pastor and owner of a landscaping business, was detained last month by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as part of a broader sweep championed by both state and federal officials.
Ambrocio had been living in Florida for 20 years. While he entered the country illegally, he had been allowed to remain via a stay of removal, which required that he meet with ICE officials for the last decade at least once a year, remain employed and not commit any crimes.
However, when Ambrocio met with ICE officials on April 18, he was detained, to the surprise of his local neighborhood, as National Public Radio reported last week.
“For my kids, it’s like the world ended,” Ambrocio’s wife, Marleny, told NPR.
The couple has five children aged between 12 and 19, all U.S. citizens.
Jasmine Garad’s NPR story linked there is as detailed and empathetic and human as Judin’s story up top. Like Judin, she focuses on the human story and the impact of this capricious abduction on this one, innocent, all-American family. Both pieces pull back to look at the bigger picture specifically to emphasize how the reality of mass detention and mass deportation has nothing at all to do with the depraved, fabricated, horror stories the Trump administration tells of invading alien gang members running amok. And neither piece is interested in twisting these real human stories into some Aesop fable about white welders or evangelical pastors and face-eating leopards.
Adrian Bott’s joke — “I never thought leopards would eat MY face, sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party” — is both funny and insightful in the way it articulates the vain, myopic flaw at the heart of Wilhoitian conservatism. And be not deceived, Galatians 6:7 is — usually, if not always — an accurate description of how we should expect the universe to work. So too is the Philly paraphrase of that biblical maxim: FAFO.
But the thing about the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being in charge is that leopards are eating people’s faces and that’s horrifying and bad. That means we have to save as many people from the leopards as we can — regardless of who they are. And tend to the wounded without condition.
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