A 23-year-old Swiss woman who is married to a United States citizen and has a green card application pending has been arrested by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at Dallas airport in Texas and is being held in detention facing deportation, Switzerland's Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) has confirmed.
Source: Keystone-ATS / Swissinfo, November 5, 2026
The woman, from Zurich, was arrested last Friday, October 30, while travelling to a family event, the Swiss news portal Watson reported. Three ICE officers took her into custody at the airport in Dallas. The FDFA confirmed the case to the Keystone-ATS news agency, and Swissinfo published the confirmed details on Thursday, November 5.
What Switzerland has confirmed — and what it says it cannot do
The Swiss Consulate-General in Atlanta is in contact with the relevant U.S. authorities and with the woman's family, the FDFA said. But the department was clear about the limits of consular help: it cannot secure her release or intervene in the U.S. legal proceedings, because Switzerland respects the U.S. legal system. For reasons of data protection and privacy, the FDFA is providing no further information, and the woman has not been named.
That official confirmation matters because most of the personal detail in this case comes from the family, speaking through Watson. According to her family, she first came to the United States in 2023 as an au pair and met her current husband during that stay. They married in mid-2025, and she then applied for permanent residence — a green card. Because that process was ongoing, she could not leave the United States; her family says her residence permit expired in November.
The family's account of her detention
Relatives told Watson that after her arrest she was first transferred to a detention centre for deportation and was subsequently moved to a prison in the state of Oklahoma. There, the family alleges, she was treated 'like a dangerous criminal', with restraints on her hands and feet. Those claims are the family's account, reported by Watson; ICE has not been quoted responding to them in the Swiss reporting.
She is currently believed to be back in a deportation detention centre near Dallas, where, according to the family, she shares a room with 70 other women. Her family is preparing for her imminent deportation to Switzerland.
A pending green card application — including for spouses of U.S. citizens — does not by itself stop ICE from detaining a person it considers removable. Families in the Punjabi diaspora going through marriage-based green card cases in the U.S. face the same legal gap this Swiss case exposes: the application is pending, but detention can still happen first and the court fight comes after.
Background: arrests while a green card case is pending
A U.S. lawyer specialising in immigration law, interviewed by Watson, said arrests of this kind — while a green card application is still pending — only became standard practice from President Donald Trump's second term onwards. The lawyer described the approach as a political manoeuvre and an attempt by the government to bring immigration to the United States 'to zero'. That is the lawyer's stated opinion, reported by Watson, not a finding by any court.
According to lawyers cited in the Swiss reporting, the woman will probably have no choice but to leave the country voluntarily — a route that would still result in a ban on re-entering the United States for several years. That prospect is what her family says it is now preparing for: a return to Switzerland, and a marriage suddenly split across the Atlantic by an arrest at an airport check-in.
What happens next
On the Swiss account, deportation to Switzerland is expected imminently, and the Swiss Consulate-General in Atlanta remains in contact with U.S. authorities and the family. No U.S. court date for the woman was reported in the Swiss coverage, and ICE had not published its own account of the Dallas airport arrest as of Thursday. Awaaz Punjab will update this story if ICE or a U.S. court filing adds the government's version of why she was detained.