Trump’s Deportation Machine Just Took a Father of Four—at His Citizenship Interview
I want you to sit with this one for a minute.
Kasper Eriksen has lived in the U.S. legally since 2013. He’s a Danish immigrant. A father of four. His wife Savannah is pregnant with their fifth. They live in Mississippi, run a small business, coach Little League. He followed every rule laid out in the immigration playbook.
And last month, at what was supposed to be his final citizenship interview in Memphis, Kasper was detained by ICE. No goodbye to his wife. No time to hug his kids. He was thrown in a van and shipped to one of the worst private immigration facilities in the country, run by GEO Group in Jena, Louisiana.
His crime? A missed form from 2015. A bureaucratic slip that happened while he and Savannah were grieving the stillbirth of their first child.
You read that right. A grieving couple missed an immigration form during the worst moment of their lives, and ten years later, the Trump administration used that to detain him like a fugitive.
Let me say this clearly: Kasper has no criminal record. He’s lived here over a decade. He’s a dad, a business owner, a neighbor, a husband. This wasn’t about “illegal immigration.” This was about cruelty. And it was deliberate.
ICE locked him in a facility infested with cockroaches, where detained immigrants report being denied medical care and sleep. GEO Group, the private prison company that runs it, is making a fortune. And Savannah, six months pregnant, is home with four kids, launching a GoFundMe just to survive while begging the courts for her husband’s release.
This is what Trump’s America looks like. A place where your humanity doesn’t matter. Where doing everything “the right way” can still land you in a cage.
They don’t just want to target so-called “illegals.” They want to make life hell for anyone who doesn’t fit their idea of what an American should look like.
Kasper has a court date on May 27. But even if he’s released, the message has already been sent: this system was built to break people. And it’s working exactly as intended.
If you think this is just one man’s story, you’re missing the bigger picture. This is the future they’re trying to normalize. Bureaucratic cruelty. Family separation as policy. Authoritarianism wrapped in paperwork.
And I’m going to keep sounding the alarm.
Because they want us exhausted. They want us overwhelmed. They want us to scroll past stories like this and forget. But we don’t forget. We organize. We fight. And we refuse to look away.
—Judith
Sources:
https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-imprisons-danish-dad-of-4-at-citizenship-interview/
https://mississippitoday.org/2025/05/20/ice-detained-danish-mississippi/
