Federal immigration officers arrested a 21-year-old Wisconsin State Patrol trooper on Thursday at Dane County Regional Airport in Madison, detaining a South African asylum-seeker who holds a valid federal work permit as he waited to board a flight.
The Department of Homeland Security says Carel Aaron Van der Merwe overstayed permission to remain in the country that ran out in September 2019 and will stay in ICE custody pending removal proceedings. His attorney called the arrest inhumane and despicable.
Van der Merwe was headed to New Mexico, where his father works on a sheep ranch. As of Friday afternoon, he was being held at the Dodge County Detention Center in Juneau, Wisconsin, awaiting a hearing in his immigration case.
A statement from his lawyers at the Christopher & De Leon Law Office said he tried to tell the officers about his work permit and pending asylum application. The officers said they did not care, put him in handcuffs and shackles and took him to immigration detention, according to the statement.
The government's case
A DHS spokesperson said Van der Merwe entered the U.S. in March 2019 with legal permission to stay until that September, and that neither work authorization nor a pending application gives a person legal status. The department described the arrest as part of a targeted enforcement operation and said he will receive due process.
The agency tied the arrest to a broader effort to keep immigrants without legal status off domestic flights. Its spokesperson said DHS had reversed what it called a Biden-era policy and is working to ensure such immigrants can fly only to leave the country and self-deport.
A trooper in limbo
Van der Merwe came to the U.S. from South Africa with his family in 2019 as a child and is included in his father's asylum application. Marc Christopher, the Milwaukee immigration attorney who will represent him in his removal case, said the family fled rural South Africa amid a rise in attacks on farmers and has waited half a decade for an asylum interview.
His pending status kept him out of the military. With a work permit valid through 2030, he joined the State Patrol last year and has worked from its Tomah post for nearly a year.
Christopher said he knows of no prior criminal history that would explain the arrest. Although immigration authorities can detain someone solely over a pending asylum application, he said he has never seen a comparable case and believes the goal is to make living and traveling in the U.S. as onerous as possible for noncitizens.
Putting a Wisconsin State Trooper behind bars while his asylum case sits unresolved does not make our communities safer,
Marc Christopher, attorney for Carel Aaron Van der Merwe
The Wisconsin Department of Transportation, which oversees the State Patrol, said it is aware of the arrest but did not say whether Van der Merwe is on paid leave while in custody. The Wisconsin Troopers Association, his union, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
