Elvira Benitez Suarez stepped out of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office in downtown Milwaukee on Monday to cheers from a crowd of supporters — her first time leaving the building without handcuffs.
The 51-year-old Sheboygan Falls woman left U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody last week on bond; her daughter picked her up outside the northern Kentucky detention facility where she had spent the previous two months.
“I didn’t see daylight for 17 days, so I was very, very heartened and excited that I saw my family,” she said.
The Monday morning check-in in Milwaukee was her first interaction with immigration authorities since returning to Wisconsin. She arrived with her family, attorney and two members of the Milwaukee Common Council in tow.
Nearly a dozen other immigrants wove through the crowd to line up behind Benitez for their own check-ins; some picked up contact information from her attorney while they waited to enter the building.
Benitez’s time in Kentucky was her second stint in ICE custody in the past year. Benitez, who emigrated from Mexico as a teenager and lived without legal status for over three decades, first landed in detention after a wrong turn on a family road trip took her across the Canadian border in July 2025. U.S. immigration authorities arrested her when she reentered the country. Benitez had no prior interactions with law enforcement or the federal immigration court system.
In her absence, Benitez’s two adult daughters, both U.S.-born, took in their school-age siblings and helped manage their parents’ painting and cleaning business.
A federal district court judge in Ohio ruled last fall that Benitez is eligible for a green card, citing — among other factors — the hardships her children experienced in her absence. After waiting a month for immigration authorities to complete her background check, Benitez returned to Wisconsin in December, only to be arrested again during a check-in at the Milwaukee DHS office in March while the agency appealed the judge’s ruling.
“We checked in, everything went fine, and we were actually walking out the door when they stopped us,” recalled her attorney, Marc Christopher.
After stops in Chicago and Indianapolis, Benitez landed in a cell at the Campbell County Detention Center, a northern Kentucky jail that contracts with ICE to hold immigrants facing deportation proceedings. Benitez recounted finding fellow Wisconsinites in her unit; nearly two dozen other immigrants detained in Wisconsin have passed through Campbell County within the last year.
But a recent decision by an Ohio-based federal appeals court opened a door for Benitez to again return to Wisconsin. The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last month that a year-old Trump administration policy requiring detention for most immigrants in deportation proceedings amounts to a violation of due process rights, joining federal appellate courts in New York and Georgia. Appellate courts in Louisiana and Missouri have sided with the Trump administration, and the appellate court based in Chicago remains divided on the issue.
The 6th Circuit holds jurisdiction over Kentucky, and its ruling allowed Benitez to file a bond motion in immigration court — an option once available to most immigrant detainees that largely vanished after the Trump administration introduced its mandatory detention policy last year. An immigration court judge in Memphis granted her bond motion on May 21, setting her bond amount at the minimum allowed under court rules: $1,500.
As a condition of her bond, Benitez will continue checking in at the Milwaukee DHS office.
Elvira Benitez Suarez leaves the U.S. Department of Homeland Security office in downtown Milwaukee on June 1, 2026, accompanied by Milwaukee Common Council members Alex Brower, left, and JoCasta Zamarripa and attorney Marc Christopher, right. (Paul Kiefer / Wisconsin Watch)
Benitez’s Monday morning check-in was brief and straightforward. Like other immigrants granted bond, she was directed by immigration officers to download a tracking app that will prompt her to take a photograph of her face once a week to compare against booking photos.
DHS is still appealing last year’s ruling that set Benitez on track to secure legal permanent residency. That appeal, currently in the hands of the federal Board of Immigration Appeals, is still pending.
“I would never put anything past the Board of Immigration Appeals,” Christopher said during a press conference on Monday, alluding to the board’s recent tendency to side with the Trump administration on immigration court rule changes. Nevertheless, Christopher added that he believes Benitez’s case is strong enough to defy the odds.
Benitez herself is still recovering. “I can’t sleep,” she said, recounting the grim details of her latest stint in custody — fellow detainees whose pregnancies ended in miscarriages, late-night bus trips with erratic drivers and no seat belts, and harassment from nonimmigrant inmates with whom she shared a cell in Kentucky. Benitez noted that she is in contact with the families of several fellow detainees who remain in Kentucky.
Her eldest daughter, Crystal Aguilar, also needs time to bounce back. In her mother’s absence, “my life was on hold,” she said. A return to normality still seems far away, she added.
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In 2018, Griselda Solis de Drucker was dealing with the end of her 30-year marriage and decided to get away from her native Argentina to visit an uncle living in the Madison area.
She had planned on saving up some money and returning to Argentina. But something unexpected happened: she fell in love.
“We were both broken,” Solis de Drucker said through a translator. “We found each other and we were then the perfect pair.”
The two were married in 2020 and began to settle into their new life together, intermingling their families. Solis de Drucker found work as a school custodian in Middleton. But there was just one problem — Solis de Drucker wasn’t an American citizen, living with the uncertainty of where to call home.
So in 2023, she began the process of becoming a United States citizen.
Years of hard study and patience paid off in March, when Solis de Drucker joined 40 other people to become some of the country’s newest citizens in a ceremony in Madison. They came from 20 different countries, including Algeria, Canada, China, Ecuador, India, Iraq, Russia and Thailand.
Griselda Solis de Drucker< fourth from right, holding flag, poses with friends and family after becoming a citizen in March 2026. (Joe Tarr / WPR)
Under President Donald Trump, delays and denials for citizenship applications are growing, according to NPR and the American Immigration Council.
Naturalization ceremonies are held in Milwaukee and, more recently, Madison, a few times a year. Despite the gloomy weather, the Madison ceremony in March was a joyous occasion, as friends and family packed the courthouse to watch their loved ones take the next step.
For Solis de Drucker, citizenship is an answer to a prayer.
“I’ve always been Christian, going to Christian church, and I like to help the young people,” she said. “And so I asked God, if it was safe, I would stay, and if not, I’d go away.”
‘Tremulous time’
U.S. District Judge William Conley, who administered the oath for the new citizens, acknowledged in opening remarks from the bench that it’s a precarious time for immigrants living in the U.S. as the federal government works to deport people living here illegally.
“This is a tremulous time in our history when some seem to be forgetting that immigrants are the very lifeblood of our country, far away benefiting,” he said, prompting a round of applause.
He joked he doesn’t usually allow applause in his courtroom, before adding: “Immigrants, far and away, benefit our country more than any cost some may impose. The economics of this is really beyond dispute.”
After Conley’s remarks, the new citizens swore an oath of allegiance to the United States, promising to defend the Constitution and the country’s laws, serve in the military if required and “perform work of national importance” when required.
The ceremony lasted a little over 20 minutes. Afterwards, the new citizens took photos with their families in front of the judge’s bench and next to a flag.
Among them is Jeanne d’Arc Wydeven, who immigrated to the United States in 2013 from Rwanda. She said the process of becoming a citizen was difficult because of all the paperwork.
“You have to make sure there are no mistakes. If there is a mistake, it may cause delays,” she said. “You have to be really careful not to miss anything, because your application may be rejected.”
Until this day in March, there was always an uncertainty hanging over her life, she said.
Stephen Drucker and Griselda Solis de Drucker, center, left and right, celebrating with friends and family at Toro Y Pampa in Middleton, Wis. after her citizenship ceremony. (Joe Tarr / WPR)
“It can be stressful not knowing where you stand,” she said. “You cannot travel. There is some work you cannot do because you are not a citizen. So it means to me, like freedom to do what I want to do and focus on achieving the dream.”
With her citizenship secured, she is especially looking forward to one new power: voting.
“That is exciting,” d’Arc Wydeven said. “And also being able to serve as a citizen if I’m needed. That is also exciting, because sometimes, you want to help, but you can’t, because you are not a citizen.”
Responsibility and freedom
Solis de Drucker has her own definition of what it means to be a good American.
“Be a respectful person, helping in any way you can,” she said through a translator with the Literacy Network, where she took English classes. “The first thing that will help everyone is God. This is the direction and the way to become a good citizen.”
She said she feels both a sense of relief and responsibility that comes with her new status. She’s looking forward to voting and doing more work with her church, perhaps traveling to other countries on missionary trips.
Her citizenship could also make it easier for her children to obtain a visa to come visit — and potentially pave the way for them to become legal citizens.
She talks to her adult children every day on the phone, and she said the hardest part of living in America for her is that separation.
“It’s hard not to see your kids grow,” she said.
With the blending of her American and Argentine families, she feels deep ties to both countries and could see herself living in either place. After becoming a citizen, she celebrated with her family and friends at Toro Y Pampa, an Argentine restaurant in Middleton.
But when asked if she will call her children later in the day, she says the celebratory call will have to wait. Another American custom comes first.
Los Angeles International Airport customs officers took Everlee Wihongi aside for questioning in April. Her family hasn’t seen her since.
Wihongi, a longtime resident of Hortonville, Wisconsin, was passing through Los Angeles during a return trip from her native New Zealand. The 37-year-old green card holder had made the same trip at least a half-dozen times, even after pleading no contest to a felony marijuana possession charge in Fond du Lac County in her mid-20s.
But with the White House’s nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown in full swing, customs officers took a new approach to the felony on her record. After a few uneasy hours in a secluded screening room, Wihongi left the airport in shackles en route to an immigration detention center in a desert valley northeast of Los Angeles.
Wihongi is one of hundreds of legal permanent residents federal immigration authorities have detained since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, often while they passed through airports and other ports of entry. Most — like Wihongi — had prior criminal convictions.
Those convictions generally make immigrants “inadmissible,” meaning they cannot freely re-enter the U.S.
Customs officers have “a lot of discretion at the port of entry” when deciding whether to allow green card holders with convictions like Wihongi’s to re-enter the country, Madison-based immigration attorney Aissa Olivarez said. “They have given none lately.”
“Possessing a green card is a privilege, not a right,” a U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson wrote in an email to Wisconsin Watch. “Our government has the authority to revoke a green card if our laws are broken and abused,” the spokesperson added, and to detain legal permanent residents while they await a decision in their removal case.
The sharp increase in arrests of green card holders doesn’t stem from a policy change, but immigration attorneys say cases like Wihongi’s are yet another sign that federal immigration authorities are reshuffling their priorities.
Old conviction is grounds for detention
Wihongi has held a green card since childhood, when her father’s career as a locomotive engineer brought the family to northeast Wisconsin. “As the years went by, it was just cheaper to renew (her) green card,” her mother, Betty Wihongi, recalled.
Her 2014 conviction was not grounds for deportation, said Marc Christopher, a Milwaukee immigration attorney representing Wihongi. “She can remain here and become a U.S. citizen,” he said, “but once she crosses the border, she’s governed by the rules of admissibility.”
But family vacations to New Zealand passed without incident over the decade following Wihongi’s conviction. “Normally, they will just look at, look at your passport, look at your green card, you know, ask you, where you’ve been?” her mother said. “And usually it’s like two, three minutes, not even that.”
“I just don’t think they made an issue of it” in the past, Christopher added. “They weren’t going to detain her for two to three months,” he said, in part because detaining and prosecuting a green card holder is an expensive undertaking. As of May 2025, DHS reported that the average cost to arrest, detain and deport an immigrant was roughly $17,000, though costs vary widely from case to case.
DHS detention records point to a sudden shift in practice after the Trump administration resumed control of immigration enforcement operations last year. Immigration authorities detained an average of at least 100 legal permanent residents each month between January 2025 and February 2026 — five times the monthly average in the final two years of the Biden administration, the only portion of his term for which data is available.
At least 75% of legal permanent residents detained during the latter half of the Biden administration had prior criminal convictions, compared with at least 66% of those detained since Trump returned to office.
Only a tiny fraction of detainees’ records from either period list marijuana possession as their most serious criminal charge, though immigration enforcement officers arrested more legal permanent residents with prior marijuana possession convictions in the first year of the Trump administration than in the previous two years combined.
Wihongi is the second Wisconsin green card holder in ICE custody to join Christopher’s caseload since January 2025. His previous client, also blocked from re-entering the country because of a prior marijuana possession conviction, spent five months in detention before Christopher secured his release.
Olivarez, the Madison-based immigration attorney, offered another recent example from her own caseload: a legal permanent resident and longtime Milwaukeean detained while returning from his wife’s funeral in Egypt because of a prior felony. That client eventually accepted a deportation order to avoid a lengthy stint in custody.
A stricter standard
The growing cohort of green card holders in ICE custody is still vastly outnumbered by the tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants detained alongside them.
Federal immigration authorities have arrested more than 400,000 people since January 2025, including roughly 1,700 in Wisconsin.
Just over half of all immigrants arrested by ICE in Wisconsin during the second Trump administration had prior criminal convictions, as was the case in the latter years of the Biden administration. But the criminal histories of more recent arrestees suggest that the stricter standards that landed Wihongi in custody are reshaping other corners of the immigration enforcement apparatus.
ICE officers in Wisconsin arrested 82 immigrants with prior traffic offense convictions in the first full year after Trump returned to office, up from 19 in the last full year of the Biden administration.
In years past, Christopher said, federal immigration authorities were less inclined to begin removal proceedings solely based on traffic offenses like driving without a license, instead prioritizing immigrants convicted of more serious offenses.
Immigrants who come into contact with Wisconsin courts after a traffic offense now face a far higher risk of landing in federal custody, Christopher added.
He attributes the shift in part to dramatic additions to DHS’ budget in the past year and a half. Those funding boosts, including a $170 billion increase last year, lowered the financial barriers that previously made federal immigration prosecutors wary of spending resources on immigrants with lower-priority criminal histories, Christopher argued.
Wihongi was the only legal permanent resident in the 46-person cell in Adelanto, California, where she spent her first month in detention, her mother told Wisconsin Watch.
Her visa doesn’t spare her from the unpredictability of the federal immigration detention system. When money disappeared without notice from her commissary account on a Friday in early May, Wihongi called her mother in a panic. “Inmates all know that if that happens to your commissary,” her mother explained, “that means they’re getting ready to transfer you.”
She resurfaced that Sunday in a detention camp outside El Paso, Texas, reaching her family by phone that evening to recount two mostly sleepless days of travel, including hours spent in shackles.
Wihongi has since transferred again to a federal contract facility in Eloy, Arizona. An internet outage Thursday pushed her first scheduled court appearance back a week. Meanwhile, Christopher has filed a motion in Fond du Lac County to vacate her 2014 conviction.
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An immigration court judge in Tennessee granted a $1,500 bond for Elvira Benitez Suarez on Thursday morning. Benitez will remain in custody at the Campbell County Detention Center during the 30-day window in which the U.S. Department of Homeland Security attorneys can file an appeal.
Thursday’s bond hearing came just over a week after the Ohio-based 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Trump administration’s year-old policy requiring mandatory detention for most immigrants facing removal. Benitez’s attorney, Milwaukee-based Marc Christopher, told Wisconsin Watch that the short turnaround reflected agreement among Benitez’s legal team, a federal district court judge and DHS itself that her case merited speedy consideration.
Original story, May 12, 2026:
A Sheboygan Falls woman is poised to test a new federal ruling reopening the door for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees to seek release on bond.
An Ohio-based federal appeals court ruled Monday against the Trump administration policy requiring mandatory detention for most ICE detainees, the latest blow to a rule adopted last summer amid an escalating nationwide immigration enforcement crackdown.
Detainees “should have a forum to explain that their backgrounds and connections to their communities justify release on bond while they undergo their removal proceedings,” 6th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Eric Clay wrote in the panel’s majority decision. Denying bond hearings, he added, amounts to a violation of their due process rights.
The court’s ruling sent Wisconsin immigration attorneys scrambling to file bond motions for their clients detained in Ohio, Michigan and Kentucky — all under the 6th Circuit. Among those now able to seek bond: Elvira Benitez Suarez, currently detained at the Campbell County Detention Center in northern Kentucky.
She fled an abusive household in Mexico at 15, crossing the border with a younger sibling and settling in the Midwest. Though she remained undocumented for decades, she had no run-ins with law enforcement or immigration authorities until a GPS error on a family road trip through Michigan in July 2025 led her across the Canadian border.
The incident landed her in an Ohio immigration detention facility for six months. In her absence, her two adult daughters — both U.S. citizens — took in their school-age siblings.
A major shift in federal immigration court policy last year left Benitez unable to post bond.
Since 1996, federal law has required immigration authorities to detain — without bond — anyone found crossing the U.S. border without authorization. Prior administrations applied that rule relatively narrowly, meaning immigrants arrested in the interior of the U.S. could often seek a bond hearing in immigration court.
The Trump administration cast that precedent aside in July 2025, when ICE Director Todd Lyons issued a new interpretation subjecting anyone in deportation proceedings to mandatory detention without the possibility of bond. The Board of Immigration Appeals, a panel of judges who set the rules for the federal immigration court system, signed off on the interpretation in September.
The board has more frequently sided with the Department of Homeland Security than immigrants facing deportation for at least a decade, but the distribution of decisions is more lopsided than ever: The body has favored DHS’s position in more than 90% of decisions issued since President Trump returned to office last year, a recent NPR analysis found.
The rule change triggered an ongoing legal battle over the validity of the Trump administration’s interpretation; more than 400 federal district court judges have ruled against the White House’s position, while roughly 50 have backed the new policy. Judges in Wisconsin’s Western District Court have uniformly ruled against the mandatory detention rule, while those in Wisconsin’s Eastern District are divided.
Federal appellate courts are also split: Aside from the 6th Circuit’s Monday decision, the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals and the Georgia-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled against the mandatory detention policy, whereas the Louisiana-based 5th Circuit and the Missouri-based 8th Circuit have sided with the Trump administration.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in Illinois and with jurisdiction over Wisconsin, remains divided.
With bond off the table, thousands of immigrants in ICE custody have turned to a backup option: habeas corpus petitions, filed in federal district courts — administered separately from the federal immigration court system — to challenge their detention.
When a federal district court approves a habeas petition, the court generally orders an immigration court judge to hold a bond hearing.
Benitez’s first habeas petition produced a more unusual victory: Judge Richard Drucker of the Cleveland immigration court, citing the emotional toll on her younger children, canceled her deportation and set her on the path to legal residency, though a delayed background check added more than a month to Benitez’s initial stay in a detention facility.
Elvira Benitez is shown at a birthday party. (Courtesy of Crystal Aguilar)
Released in late December, Benitez reunited with her family in Wisconsin while DHS appealed Drucker’s order. She continued attending mandatory check-ins at the agency’s field office in downtown Milwaukee, where ICE agents re-arrested her on March 10. After a stop at an ICE detention facility outside Chicago, the agency transferred Benitez to Campbell County, where nearly two dozen immigrants detained in Wisconsin have spent time within the last year.
Marc Christopher, a Milwaukee immigration attorney who represented Benitez during her first detention, told Wisconsin Watch in March that no statute required DHS to detain her while awaiting the outcome of its appeal. Her arrest, Christopher wrote, served “no legitimate public safety purpose.”
“It separates a mother from her vulnerable U.S. citizen children despite a federal immigration judge already recognizing the extreme hardship her removal would cause them,” he added.
Following the March arrest, an ICE spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that “being in detention is a choice,” arguing that Benitez could leave custody by agreeing to self-deport.
Benitez’s new Ohio-based attorney filed a habeas petition on her behalf with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Kentucky in March. Judge Chad Meredith, a Trump appointee, joined the court’s bench last fall. He has received more than 80 habeas cases involving immigrants in ICE custody since his confirmation, most of which are still active; he has yet to side with an immigrant detainee, but he has denied a half-dozen habeas petitions outright.
The 6th Circuit’s latest ruling could give Benitez a shorter route out of custody. Christopher filed a bond motion for Benitez “the minute (the ruling) came out,” he told Wisconsin Watch. “Given the unusual circumstances of her case,” Christopher added, he plans to ask Meredith to order a bond hearing on a short turnaround, rather than waiting more than a week. DHS can appeal bond decisions.
Christopher isn’t alone in his haste. Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Madison-based Community Immigration Law Center, filed a bond motion for another client held at the Campbell County Detention Center just after the news broke — a first since the Board of Immigration Appeals approved the mandatory detention rule last September.
“We are now working to identify other people who have reached out in the past,” she added, “to see who might be eligible for bond now.”
Olivarez and other immigration attorneys are still awaiting a decision from the 7th Circuit; the U.S. Department of Justice filed a motion requesting expedited oral argument on Monday.
The issue may reach the U.S. Supreme Court.
“It’s up to the justices whether they want to take the case,” Christopher said, “but traditionally on cases involving immigration, cases where there’s been a clear circuit split, and where it affects literally tens of thousands of people, I think it’s going to be near the top of the issues they want to resolve.”
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Wisconsin Watch is testing a new approach to data storytelling: news applications. As a first step, we’re launching a tool to track activities in federal immigration courts nationwide, designed with local and state-level interests in mind.
Nearly 5 million people entered the federal immigration court system between 2020 and 2025.
Many were new arrivals handed notices to appear in court shortly after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. Others spent years in the U.S. before landing in deportation proceedings. Nearly 40,000 listed addresses in Wisconsin.
The courts primarily hear deportation cases, though immigrants can also seek asylum and other forms of relief through the court system, albeit only as a defense against deportation.
Wisconsin Watch frequently relies on federal immigration court data to shape our reporting, but navigating the data is no small task. The DOJ’s Executive Office for Immigration Review updates a vast public dataset of immigration court records monthly — the result of repeated public records requests from the nonprofit data analytics organization Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
While other tools to explore that data exist, we have learned through trial and error that extracting local- or state-level insights is easiest when we do it ourselves.
We want to make those insights accessible to you.
Our immigration court tracker provides national, state, county and court-level summary details about the millions of immigrants placed in deportation proceedings over the past five years. It tracks the nationalities of immigrants with cases before the courts, the volume of new and active cases and the share of immigrants with legal representation, among other metrics, all summarized in brief “explainers” available through the dashboard.
The underlying data is an important counterpart to our recent reporting on the past year’s worth of ICE activity in Wisconsin. Wisconsin-level data often parallels our past coverage, and it will continue to inform our approach to covering immigration.
This is a living project, and we welcome your suggestions. If you find a way to use the dashboard — as a reporter, student or otherwise — please tell us how. The records offer far more detail than this dashboard currently provides, but we can update and upgrade our offerings in response to feedback.
It won’t be our last news application. We want to make public data as accessible as we can, so we will roll out more tools for you to explore.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
A loosely formed coalition of about 60 federal litigators is working with immigration attorneys in Wisconsin who represent clients being detained and facing deportation.
Gabriela Parra, an immigration attorney and partner at Layde & Parra S.C. in Milwaukee, said immigration policies are constantly changing, which adds new challenges.
Many cases now involve both immigration proceedings and federal civil rights issues, she said.
“If you haven’t done this, it’s a learning curve,” Parra said.
Federal litigators and immigration attorneys are working together to help meet this demand in Wisconsin.
Surge in overall need
The need for legal representation has grown as immigration enforcement has expanded.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement held an average of 69,600 people per day in detention in December 2025 – a 78% increase compared with the year before, according to an analysis by the Vera Institute of Justice, a national nonprofit working on issues related to mass incarceration and immigration.
“There is a due process crisis right now happening in our immigration system,” said Elizabeth Kenney, associate director of Vera’s Advancing Universal Representation Initiative.
While people have the right to obtain an immigration attorney, the government does not have to provide one, said Timothy Muth, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin.
Kenney said not having legal representation has major consequences.
People who have attorneys are up to 10 and a half times more likely to get successful outcomes, Kenney said.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office at 310 E. Knapp St. in Milwaukee. (Jonathan Aguilar / Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service / CatchLight Local)
More complex cases
Parra said policy changes have added a federal civil rights dimension to many cases – changes that include how the Board of Immigration Appeals has interpreted immigration law.
The board sets binding rules for immigration judges and has authority over appeals in immigration cases.
Parra said there have been more than 80 decisions by the board since January 2025 that have affected immigration policy.
One Board of Immigration Appeals decision, known as Yajure Hurtado, requires immigration judges to treat many as subject to mandatory detention. The decision has significantly limited people’s access to bonds.
“Now you have individuals in detention unless you can file a habeas petition in federal court,” Parra said.
A habeas petition is used to argue that a person’s detention is unlawful.
Habeas petitions vary widely depending on a person’s situation, said Elisabeth Lambert, a federal civil rights attorney working with the network.
Some involve people who have lived in the United States for years and seek release on bond while their cases proceed. Others involve people who entered through legal processes but are later detained and denied bond.
There also are other barriers that make it harder for people to defend themselves, requiring different support in federal court.
For example, Lambert said, immigrants facing deportation don’t have a right to discovery. This means that the only way to get the records is through a specific type of federal records request.
A right of discovery allows defendants to access information that could be used against them from a prosecutor ahead of trial.
Lambert said records can face various delays and other barriers and may arrive after the deportation proceeding has already happened.
Why federal court is different
Lambert said the two court systems – immigration court and federal court – operate very differently.
Each of these legal spaces has its own sets of rules, norms and procedures, she said.
“It’s just a lot to learn very quickly in a very high-stakes situation,” Lambert said.
It works the other way, too.
“I couldn’t go into immigration court,” she said. “I don’t have the knowledge or the experience.”
In one case Lambert and Parra worked on together, a judge issued a restraining order barring ICE from moving ahead with a client’s removal proceeding until a Freedom of Information Act issue was resolved, she said.
Lambert anticipates similar litigation in the future.
“We think that this is going to be a pretty common issue – of the government withholding people’s immigration records as part of this effort to stack the deportation process against people who are seeking immigration relief.”
Jonathan Aguilar is a visual journalist at Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service who is supported through a partnership between CatchLight Local and Report for America.
The president of Wisconsin’s largest mosque was detained by federal immigration agents, drawing accusations Thursday from local officials and religious leaders that the arrest was motivated by his criticism of Israel.
Salah Sarsour, a Palestinian-born legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody by nearly a dozen U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who surrounded his car on Monday in Milwaukee after he left his home, according to the Islamic Society of Milwaukee.
Supporters called Thursday for his immediate release. His attorneys said he was detained on the grounds that he is a foreign policy threat, a claim they say has no merit.
Instead, they believe Sarsour, 53, was targeted for speaking out against Israel and for a conviction as a minor by Israeli military courts, which have faced scrutiny over allegations of limited due process and high conviction rates of Palestinians. Israel rejects those claims. The offenses included allegedly throwing rocks at Israeli officers, according to attorney Munjed Ahmad.
“Our government should not be doing the bidding of a foreign government,” Ahmad said of Israel. “There’s no question in my mind is that this is to stifle the discourse on the Palestinian narrative.”
Attorneys said Sarsour, born in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has no criminal record in the U.S., where he has lived for more than 30 years. They said the U.S. government has known about Sarsour’s conviction in Israel since he came to the U.S. in 1993.
Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee. (Courtesy of Islamic Society of Milwaukee)
An email message left Thursday for ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security was not immediately returned.
Sarsour’s attorneys have likened the case to that of Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University graduate student activist who faces deportation because the federal government said he was a foreign policy threat.
Sarsour has been the board president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee, the largest Islamic organization in the state, for five years. His attorneys say he holds a green card and lives just outside Milwaukee. His wife and four adult children are U.S. citizens.
At a crowded news conference, boisterous supporters chanted to free Sarsour, recounting his advocacy for those in need. Several recalled Sarsour’s stories about his childhood, including allegations of inhumane treatment while being detained by Israelis.
“He was targeted because of one thing, because he dared stand up to the Israeli army,” Othman Atta, one of Sarsour’s attorneys, told the crowd. “And he was not a U.S. citizen.”
A diverse group of religious leaders in a attendance called Sarsour a valuable community member.
“This appears to be just the latest example of how this administration seeks to silence opposition and intimidate those who speak and act differently,” said the Rev. Paul D. Erickson, bishop of the Greater Milwaukee Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.
Sarsour’s arrest also prompted outcry from elected officials, including Milwaukee Mayor Cavalier Johnson, who called it “an outrage.”
“He is a legal permanent resident. There is no substantive evidence he has done anything wrong,” Johnson said Thursday in a post on X. “This is another example of overreach and harm from the U.S. immigration authorities.”
Sarsour is being held at a county jail in Indiana. His attorneys have filed a petition seeking his release.
“He is ready to fight tooth and nail to make sure that he’s not drug through the mud,” Ahmad said. “He wants to stay in this country.”
Taylor’s opposition, while a Democratic state lawmaker, to the Republican-backed 2011 state law requiring identification to vote.
Her introduction of a 2017 bill, which did not become law. It would have provided driver’s licenses to unauthorized residents, but the licenses would have been labeled: “Not valid for voting purposes.”
Taylor’s opinion, in a 2024 appeals court ruling, which said absentee ballots count even if voters’ witnesses fail to give election clerks their full address. Citizenship is required to vote in Wisconsin, but Wisconsin election officials generally do not verify citizenship when a person registers.
This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.
We’ve written more extensively about this topic in a different article. You can read more about it here.
International migration to Wisconsin has dropped sharply since President Donald Trump’s return to office, mirroring a national slowdown as visa issuances and border crossings decline.
New U.S. Census Bureau data shows Wisconsin gained just over 7,200 residents through international migration between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, down from more than 22,000 over the previous year — a 67% decline.
Overall, Wisconsin added about 16,000 new residents in that period, increasing the state’s overall population by roughly 0.2%.
Nearly every Wisconsin county saw net international migration fall by double-digit percentages. Several counties lost more residents to international migration than they gained.
The few Wisconsin counties that saw net increases added only small numbers of new arrivals from outside the U.S. Shawano County, for instance, received 29 international migrants in fiscal year 2025, up from 24 the year before.
Not all international migration is immigration. The Census Bureau counts movements in and out of the country by citizens and noncitizens as international migration. That includes members of the armed forces and people moving between Puerto Rico and the rest of the U.S.
Federal immigration court records show a similar pattern. Only 198 immigrants with Wisconsin addresses made their first appearance in immigration court in February, down from a monthly peak of about 2,400 in March 2024.
Federal immigration courts, run by the U.S. Department of Justice, handle deportation cases and immigrants’ requests for asylum and other forms of relief.
More than 43,000 immigrants who entered the court system over the past decade listed addresses in Wisconsin.Three-quarters still await final rulings. New arrivals and removal cases slowed to a trickle after President Trump’s inauguration in January 2025. Many immigrants detained in Wisconsin over the past year first entered the court system before Trump returned to office.
Even so, international migration accounted for nearly half of Wisconsin’s overall population growth between fiscal years 2024 and 2025, and a similar share over the past decade.
Nearly two dozen counties lost population last year, and another seven would have lost population without international migration.
In Milwaukee County, a scenario with no international migration in 2025 would have meant a net loss of more than 2,000 residents. Instead, the county shrunk by just over 100 residents. Natural growth outpaced international migration, but the county lost nearly 5,000 residents to domestic migration.
Even as international migration sharply declines, Republican voters in the state continue to express strong concern about immigration. In aMarquette University Law School poll conducted this month, 77% of Republicans said they were very concerned about illegal immigration and border security, compared with 54% who said the same about inflation and the cost of living — the top issue for Democrats and independents.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Editor’s note: This story was updated March 13 to include a comment from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested a Sheboygan Falls woman during a routine check-in this week, taking her back into custody just months after an immigration court judge canceled her deportation order and began the process of securing her a green card.
Elvira Benitez, 51, spent six months in ICE custody last year after accidentally crossing the Canadian border during a family road trip in Michigan. Benitez fled an abusive home in Michoacán, Mexico, as a teenager and lived without legal status for 35 years, her family said. She first entered the immigration court system after last year’s arrest.
She was among more than 25,000 people arrested by ICE in July 2025 alone. Roughly a third of immigrants arrested by the agency nationally between January and mid-October 2025 had neither a prior criminal history nor pending criminal charges, including Benitez.
In her absence, her two adult daughters — both U.S. citizens — took in their school-age siblings. Judge Richard Drucker of the Cleveland immigration court cited her younger children’s struggles during Benitez’s initial detention as a reason to cancel her deportation and set her on the path to legal residency.
Elvira Benitez, a Sheboygan Falls resident, waited over a month in custody for federal immigration authorities to complete a biometric background check, extending her time in detention as she awaited a possible green card. Months after her release, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers re-arrested her during a routine check-in. She is shown at a birthday party. (Courtesy of Crystal Aguilar)
Drucker initially signaled a willingness to grant Benitez relief in early November, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) delayed her background check — necessary for her path to a green card — for over a month, eventually releasing her in mid-December.
The agency soon appealed Drucker’s order, stalling Benitez’s green card process. She continued attending mandatory check-ins at the Milwaukee DHS office, where ICE agents arrested her Tuesday morning before transferring her to a holding facility outside Chicago.
ICE arrested at least 107 people at the DHS office in downtown Milwaukee between January and mid-October 2025 — more than at any other Wisconsin site named in ICE arrest records. Three-quarters of those immigrants had no pending criminal charges or past convictions, compared with just 17% of all immigrants arrested by ICE in Wisconsin during the same period.
Benitez had no other run-ins with law enforcement that could have triggered her recent arrest, said Crystal Aguilar, her eldest daughter. In Aguilar’s view, the arrest calls into question “whether families who follow the rules can rely on the decisions made in immigration court,” she added.
She complied with all requirements following her initial release, including attending every ICE supervision appointment, according to her attorney, Marc Christopher. DHS was not legally required to arrest her while its appeal is pending, he added.
Benitez’s detention serves “no legitimate public safety purpose,” Christopher wrote in a Tuesday press release. “It separates a mother from her vulnerable U.S. citizen children despite a federal immigration judge already recognizing the extreme hardship her removal would cause them.”
An ICE spokesperson told Wisconsin Watch that Benitez will remain in custody “pending further immigration proceedings.”
“Being in detention is a choice,” they added, suggesting that undocumented immigrants should self-deport or face arrest and a permanent ban on re-entering the U.S.
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After a federal appeals board barred most detained immigrants from seeking bond, court filings challenging their confinement have surged in Wisconsin and nationwide.
Over the past six months, dozens of immigrants held in Wisconsin jails awaiting deportation have asked federal judges to review the legality of their detention — a legal strategy rarely used here in recent years. Judges have ruled in their favor in more than half the cases.
Two forces are driving the influx: an ICE enforcement surge in neighboring Minnesota and a ruling that makes nearly all unauthorized immigrants in ICE custody ineligible for bond.
A federal judge in California has since invalidated that bond restriction everywhere except Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi — states in the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the rule. Immigration attorneys are now working to keep clients’ cases in Midwestern courts and out of the South, home to some of ICE’s largest detention facilities.
Update: March 9, 2026:
A panel of judges in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday paused a federal judge’s February order overturning the Trump administration’s mandatory detention policy in most of the country.
The Trump administration is appealing Central District of California Judge Sunshine Sykes’ order, and the pause applies while the appeal is pending. Multiple federal appellate courts are considering challenges to the administration’s policy, which bars detained immigrants from seeking bond; the 7th Circuit, which includes Wisconsin, heard arguments in a related case last month.
Wisconsin immigration attorneys who hurried to file bond motions for their detained clients last month are now in a holding pattern.
Original story, March 6, 2026
Over the past six months, dozens of immigrants held in Wisconsin jails awaiting deportation have challenged their detention in federal court. Judges ruled in their favor in more than half the cases, pushing back on new federal immigration enforcement practices.
Wisconsin’s federal courts have not seen comparable volumes of immigration-related habeas corpus petitions, which challenge the legality of a person’s detention, in at least a decade. More than a third of the petitions heard in Wisconsin since 2016 were filed in the past six months.
Two forces are driving the influx: the Trump administration’s effort to halt bond for virtually all detainees and its enforcement surge in neighboring Minnesota.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s Board of Immigration Appeals ruled last September that all unauthorized immigrants in ICE custody are ineligible for bond, meaning they must remain in custody while their case plays out.
The ruling reversed a long-standing practice that previously enabled many immigrants to continue their cases while out on bond. In its wake, habeas petitions became one of few remaining paths to an exit.
Soon after the board’s ruling, the Trump administration targeted Minnesota in its immigration crackdown, deploying thousands of federal agents to patrol the Twin Cities and nearby rural communities. The White House claimed in early February that the campaign resulted in the arrests of more than 4,000 immigrants.
Since January 2025, ICE has transferred at least 108 immigrants from Minnesota to the Douglas County jail in Superior, Wisconsin. The sheriff’s office contracts with ICE for detainee housing, as do three other Wisconsin counties.
ICE transferred at least 108 immigrant detainees from Minneapolis to the Douglas County Jail in Superior, Wisconsin, between January and October 2025
Source: Wisconsin Watch data analysis
At least 15 immigrants held in Douglas County have filed habeas petitions in Wisconsin’s Western District Court since September 2025. Judges have thus far sided with immigrants four times, including two Ecuadorian men arrested in a raid on a construction site in a Minneapolis suburb. Five of the cases remain pending.
Those detained in the Douglas County jail made up two-thirds of the Western District’s immigration-related habeas petitions between September 2025 and February 2026.
While arrest locations were not available for every case, available data indicates that 60% of immigrants who passed through the Douglas County jail between January and October 2025 were arrested in Minnesota.
The Madison-based court had not previously handled an immigration-related habeas case in over a decade.
Habeas petitions in the recent past were a “hodgepodge,” said Milwaukee immigration attorney Benjamin Crouse, and were often dismissed or denied by judges in Wisconsin’s Eastern District.
Prior to last September, many habeas petitions challenged the legality of detaining immigrants for months at a time without a clear end date. A Colombian man transferred into ICE custody after a drug arrest in 2014 filed a habeas petition after spending more than 20 months at the Dodge County Detention Facility in Juneau, arguing his detention had stretched beyond reasonable time limits.
Judge William Griesbach denied the man’s petition in 2016. Griesbach has ruled on 17 habeas petitions in the past decade, granting only one: a 2018 petition filed by a Mexican asylum seeker who spent more than two and a half years in the Kenosha County Detention Center without a bond hearing.
In some cases, Griesbach and other federal judges had no choice but to deny or dismiss habeas petitions: In at least 10 cases filed in Wisconsin’s Eastern District Court since 2016, federal immigration officials deported immigrants before the court could fully consider their petitions.
Nearly as many immigrants left ICE custody through other routes, including community supervision and asylum, before a judge could rule on their habeas petitions.
Despite the influx of new cases in the Western District, the Eastern District has still heard roughly two-thirds of the immigration-related habeas petitions filed since September.
Most federal district court judges who have considered habeas petitions since September have ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ decision prohibiting bond hearings for detained immigrants.
Wisconsin’s Eastern District judges are split. Griesbach called the board’s position “persuasive” in December, rejecting a habeas petition filed by a Venezuelan man arrested alongside his wife during a routine check-in at the Department of Homeland Security’s downtown Milwaukee office earlier that year. That man, Diego Ugarte-Arenas, left ICE custody after receiving asylum in January.
Judge Brett Ludwig also sided with the Trump administration’s position on detaining immigrants without bond. Trump appointed Ludwig to the Eastern District bench in 2020; then-President George W. Bush appointed Griesbach to the court in 2002.
Eastern District judges Byron Conway, a Biden appointee, and Lynn Adelman, a Clinton appointee, have both criticized the board’s ruling. “Courts have nearly universally rejected the conclusion of the Board,” Conway wrote in an October order granting the habeas petition of a Nicaraguan man arrested during an incidental run-in with ICE agents.
Western District judges have uniformly ruled against the Board of Immigration Appeals’ bond decisions.
Keeping cases in courts like Wisconsin’s Western District is a high priority for attorneys representing detained immigrants.
“It’s less about jurisdictions where you’re successful and more about avoiding jurisdictions where it’s more problematic,” said St. Paul immigration attorney Solomon Steen, who has represented two clients detained in the Douglas County jail.
When a client arrested in Minnesota lands in a Wisconsin jail, Steen said, attorneys can find them within “hours or days.” Tracking clients’ locations becomes tougher once they are transferred to larger detention facilities elsewhere, he added.
With thousands of immigrants now bouncing between distant detention centers, Steen said many face pressure to give up on their legal cases. “You won’t know if you’ll be able to contact a lawyer if you get detained,” he said. “So wouldn’t it be easier to just take a voluntary departure or take a removal order in immigration court just so that you will know where you are and what’s happening?”
Steen and other attorneys are now working to keep clients’ cases in Midwestern courts — and out of the 5th Circuit’s jurisdiction — even when their whereabouts are unclear, preserving their chances of a successful habeas petition.
Even before the Board of Immigration Appeals blocked most detainees from seeking bond, voluntary departures — wherein an immigrant leaves the U.S. to avoid a deportation on their record — increased 21-fold between January and September of last year.
Meanwhile, an order from a federal district court judge in California has opened the door for many of Wisconsin’s current ICE detainees to request bond for the first time in months.
Judge Sunshine Sykes of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California initially ruled in November that the Department of Homeland Security’s practice of denying bond hearings to most immigrant detainees ran afoul of federal law.
DHS didn’t budge, maintaining that the Board of Immigration Appeals’ rulemaking authority takes precedence over a ruling in federal district court. Chief Immigration Court Judge Teresa Riley, a Department of Justice employee, later directed judges in immigration courts nationwide to continue denying detained immigrants’ requests for bond hearings.
Sykes doubled down last week, rebuking DHS for ignoring her earlier order.
“It is not the executive department’s province and duty to say what the law is,” she wrote.
Sykes vacated Board of Immigration Appeals bond rules in all states outside of the 5th Circuit, which still leaves most immigrants in ICE’s largest detention centers unable to request bond hearings.
Crouse recently observed one Chicago immigration court judge notify immigrants about Sykes’ latest order.
“They’re taking this a little more seriously now, but we still don’t know exactly what this looks like,” he said. He and other Milwaukee-area immigration attorneys are again filing bond motions for their clients. “We’re getting hearings,” he added.
Aissa Olivarez, an attorney with the Community Immigration Law Center in Madison, confirmed that immigrants detained in Dodge County are receiving notice that they are eligible for bond. So far, she said, there is no indication federal immigration authorities are rushing to move Wisconsin detainees to holding facilities farther south.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup.
Rep. Derrick Van Orden stands out among vulnerable House Republicans: He has not softened his rhetoric on President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement tactics, despite public outcry over the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minnesota.
The Wisconsin Republican, whose seat is one of Democrats’ targets in the 2026 midterms, supported an investigation into Alex Pretti’s killing, but said his “support for federal law enforcement” would remain “unwavering.”
Van Orden told NOTUS he is holding firm in his support for the Trump administration’s deportation efforts because of the crime committed by unauthorized immigrants.
He cited a video posted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement last week alongside the caption, “American citizens raped and murdered by those who have no right to be in our country.”
“That’s why I back ICE,” Van Orden said. “Watch that video, and then you would never ask me that question again.”
“If you can look at that thing and see all these people that have been brutally murdered and the families that have been destroyed because of these criminal, illegal aliens, and you’re willing to turn your back to it, that means you have an alternative purpose or an alternative objective,” Van Orden said.
Van Orden’s hard-line position in support of the president’s mass deportation agenda in one of this year’s most competitive races will test the Trump agenda in the very part of the country that helped secure the president a second term in the White House.
His district includes the farmland and exurbs of Minnesota’s Twin Cities, spanning Wisconsin’s border with Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois. Van Orden won by a margin of 2.8 percentage points in 2024. Trump won the district by more than 7 percentage points. In a midterm cycle that favors Democrats, and at a time voters are losing trust in Republicans’ immigration agenda, the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the race as a “toss up.”
“We’re not a border state. It’s not something that was on the agenda prior to Trump. And obviously, people like Derrick Van Orden have taken the most extreme possible positions on an issue that I’m not sure was top of mind for most Wisconsin voters,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative political commentator and Wisconsin resident.
Van Orden has shown his MAGA bona fides through issues like immigration and trade, where he has defended the president’s actions.
He followed the administration’s lead, expressing support for body cameras on immigration officers, a reform that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she would implement after Pretti was killed. Democrats want to standardize that policy in a DHS funding bill.
“It allows good cops to be good cops, and it holds police officers that may not be doing what they should do accountable publicly,” Van Orden said. “And that makes the force better, that makes the American population trust law enforcement more.”
He said he will await the results of a full investigation into Pretti’s death, but has laid the blame for the rise of political violence squarely with Democrats, as many in the administration and Trump’s circle have done.
“This is unfortunately true for many Democrats. They’re willing to put those American lives, throw them into the garbage can for political power, which means they have no business being in power,” Van Orden said.
There are issues where Van Orden has broken with the conservative mainstream. In January, he voted to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to prevent coverage loss, though he is opposed to the program. He has advocated for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which he used as a child, though he voted for cuts to the program in the budget reconciliation bill.
Faced with a frustrated agricultural industry, Van Orden introduced a bill to create a path to temporary worker status for immigrant agricultural workers who self-deport and pay a fine. Wisconsin farms employ a large immigrant labor force.
“He has this interesting dichotomy of picking some of those softer issues that might appeal to independents and some others, versus his very strong pro-Trump issues where, obviously that’s going to settle well with the MAGA voters and the pro-Trump Republicans,” said independent political strategist Brandon Scholz, who formerly ran the Wisconsin Republican Party.
In contrast, other House Republicans facing heated reelection bids this year have moderated their positions on immigration enforcement, calling for a reassessment of the country’s immigration policy.
“Congress and the president need to embrace a new comprehensive national immigration policy that acknowledges Americans’ many legitimate concerns about how the government has conducted immigration policy,” Rep. Mike Lawler wrote for The New York Times.
Van Orden declined to comment on other Democratic demands for DHS reforms, which include a ban on masks and identification requirements for immigration agents, until the party funds the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Secret Service and the U.S. Coast Guard.
It is these nonimmigration agencies within DHS that Van Orden’s constituents are affected by during the partial government shutdown, which has left some without paychecks and blocked others from receiving their boating licenses to go out on the district’s many lakes, he said.
That message may work with his constituents, Scholz said. While Republican voters in Wisconsin may be concerned about immigration, the issue has not historically been top of mind for them.
“There are other issues for them that may be more critical to making a decision on what they’re going to do, i.e. economic issues,” Scholz said.
This story was produced andoriginally published by Wisconsin Watch and NOTUS, a publication from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute.
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