A serving Wisconsin State Patrol trooper was handcuffed and shackled by federal immigration agents inside Dane County Regional Airport in Madison on Thursday, November 5, held overnight at the Dodge County Detention Facility in Juneau, and released the following day under an order of supervision — a case that has put the gap between a federal work permit and lawful immigration status at the centre of the national enforcement debate. The trooper, Carel Aaron Van Der Merwe, 21, was waiting to board a domestic flight to visit his parents in New Mexico when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents approached him just after he cleared security, according to his law firm, Christopher & De León.
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
His attorney, Marc Christopher, said Van Der Merwe showed the agents his federal work authorization and explained that his family's asylum application was pending — and that the agents detained him anyway, shackling his legs for transport to Dodge County. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed the arrest and described it as a targeted enforcement operation. He was held for roughly 24 hours before the release his firm announced on Friday, November 6.
DHS defended the detention in a statement reported by Wisconsin Public Radio and other outlets. The department said Van Der Merwe entered the United States in March 2019 with permission to stay until September 2019 and remained past that date, and it stressed the position his lawyers dispute in practical terms: a pending application and a work permit do not confer lawful status. On that reading, the asylum filing his family made in 2019 — still undecided seven years later — did not protect him from arrest.
Source: Wisconsin Public Radio (WPR)
A trooper since July 2025, on the job out of Tomah
The Wisconsin Department of Transportation, which oversees the State Patrol, confirmed that Van Der Merwe has worked for the patrol since July 13, 2025. He serves out of the Tomah post in western Wisconsin and lives in Onalaska, and the State Patrol confirmed that noncitizens holding valid federal work authorization can serve as troopers. When the patrol announced its 2025 recruit class, Van Der Merwe was listed among 27 new officers, with his hometown given as Sutherland, South Africa. His attorneys say he has no criminal record.
His personal timeline is the heart of the case. He immigrated with his family at age 14, arriving legally in March 2019. The family applied for asylum that year, and he is listed on his father's application. That case has now been waiting seven years for an interview or decision — a backlog familiar to hundreds of thousands of asylum families — while a different arm of the same federal government, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, issued him employment authorization valid through 2030, the document that allowed a state police agency to hire, train and swear him in.
Christopher called the detention brazen and a waste of resources, arguing that his client presented no flight risk and no criminal history and had followed every legal step available to him. The law firm's position is that a man the state trusted with a badge, a patrol car and arrest powers over Wisconsin drivers was treated at the airport as though his paperwork did not exist. DHS, for its part, did not argue that he lacked a work permit; it argued that the permit was never the same thing as status.
A congressman's call to the DHS secretary, then a release
The release followed intervention from Capitol Hill. U.S. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin told Wisconsin Public Radio that he had contacted DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin about the case, and his office said the trooper would be released and would work with the appropriate authorities to resolve his outstanding immigration paperwork and legal status. On Friday, Christopher confirmed to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that Van Der Merwe had been released from the Dodge County jail under an order of supervision.
Supervision is not freedom from the case. The order requires him to check in regularly with ICE, and his attorney said he will likely be monitored electronically — possibly through an app on his phone rather than an ankle bracelet. DHS did not explain what prompted the release, and the agency did not immediately respond to inquiries about it, the Guardian reported. The removal proceedings against him remain open.
It is a conditional release, not a dismissal. The person lives at home and can work, but must report to ICE on schedule, comply with monitoring, and can be re-detained. The underlying removal case continues until an immigration judge decides it.
Why this case reaches far beyond one airport
The legal collision in Madison is one immigrant families across the United States — including Punjabi and other South Asian families in the Midwest, many of them with relatives in trucking, farming and small business — will recognise immediately. A pending asylum case and a valid work permit let a person live, work, pay taxes and even serve in uniform, yet, in DHS's stated position, they do not by themselves stop an enforcement arrest years into that life. The case also arrived amid a wider pattern of enforcement at domestic airports, where travellers whose status is in process have been stopped between security and the gate.
There is a second, quieter question the case raises for employers and state agencies: Wisconsin's own patrol vetted and hired him under the federal work-authorization system the government itself runs. Nothing in the reporting suggests the State Patrol broke any rule — it confirmed noncitizens with valid work authorization may serve. What changed was not his job or his record, but an enforcement decision to act on a 2019 overstay that the same government had been processing, unresolved, for seven years.
What happens next
Van Der Merwe still has to defend his immigration case before an immigration judge, his lawyers said, and the family's 2019 asylum claim is still waiting for a decision. "His release is welcome news. But our fight is not over. Carel will still have to defend his immigration case before an immigration judge," the law firm wrote in its Friday update. His attorneys are also pursuing the case through congressional oversight channels opened by Representative Van Orden's intervention. No hearing date has been publicly announced. Awaaz Punjab will update this story when a court date is set or DHS comments further on why he was released.