I Do Not Buy Kasper Eriksen's White Immigrant Fairy Story
You can tell you’re living through a Republican administration when the press starts sharing sympathetic stories about migrants. Kasper Eriksen’s story was first reported by the Mississippi Free Press on May 21st. Eriksen is a Denmark-born Mississippi resident who has lived in the US since 2013. He was detained by ICE in April when he went to attend an interview with USCIS regarding his application to become a naturalized US citizen. He's a married father of four, his wife is pregnant, and his work as a welding foreman supports the family. His only mistake, so we are told, is missing 1 piece of paperwork 10 years ago. We got a side of FAFO as internet sleuths found his pro-Trump social media account.
And Kasper Eriksen’s story doesn't quite make sense. The immigration details don't make sense, and the media framing of it makes even less sense.
First, look between the lines in the Mississippi Free Press article that broke Eriksen's story. The article walks us through Eriksen's many virtues. He has a steady job, he has a driver's license, he pays taxes.
As an immigrant, I was immediately struck by the words they were not using: permanent resident, or green card holder. Why are those words not used? It’s most likely because he isn't one.
There's another word that is also conspicuously not used: undocumented. Why is that word not used? Because Eriksen certainly was, and quite likely still is, undocumented, and the Mississippi Free Press absolutely do not want you to think of this guy when you hear the word undocumented, even though his story is a very common one among undocumented migrants.
An asterisk: Eriksen's wife claimed in a GFM posted that he is a green card holder, and some articles quote his father saying that he entered the US on a green card. The reason MFP (and other papers that covered the story, such as Mississippi Today) did not repeat these claims is that they are probably not true. You don't apply for a green card from outside the US; it's a long process with many steps. The step that moves you from a conditional, 2-year card to unconditional permanent residence is the I-751, the document which Eriksen failed to submit. That failure rendered him undocumented in 2015 or 2016.
It isn’t completely impossible that he regained status at a later time, but after missing the I-751 deadline, Kasper Eriksen was definitely undocumented. It's that simple. Like 40% of undocumented people in the US, he entered on a valid visa then overstayed after it expired, because the substance of his life — his family, his home, his work — didn't end when his 2-year conditional residency expired. It's possible his relatives did not realise he was undocumented; I do not think it is possible that he could have been unaware of it himself. Your position in the immigration process, and what you have to do next to maintain it, is not something you can forget. US immigration is like an endless runner game where you have to file forms and pay fees to dodge each obstacle as it comes at you. Missing the filing deadline for an I-751 is typically game over. The MFP article presents this as a small and unfortunate paperwork error. I would describe it as an existential immigration disaster.
I have a lot of bottled-up feelings about this, because it’s likely that Eriksen started out on the same immigration process that I used, and the I-751 was the worst part of it for me. Per media reports, he first visited the US on a high school exchange student visa and returned a few years later to marry the girl he'd fallen in love with; this implies that Eriksen immigated on a K-1 fiance/e visa. The K-1 application is an intrusive, uncomfortable process. You have to pay $675 and submit proof that you and your fiance/e are in a relationship; records of the time you spent together, photos, awkward written statements of your romantic intentions. I used to keep the stubs from airplane boarding passes to prove when and where me and my partner had been together. On top of that, your sponsors in the US — typically in-laws-to-be who barely know you — have to prove that they have enough income to support you if necessary.
The K-1 is valid for 90 days after you enter the US, and in that time, you have to get married. After that, the next step is to apply for a conditional green card. This application costs almost $1,500, takes 6-12 months, and you don't get a work permit until it's granted.
Eriksen got through this second step, and took a job as a welder. The timeline here is a little murky; some of the news stories, such as this one in Mississippi Today, say that Eriksen has been working as a welder in Mississippi since 2013, others since 2014. It's possible that he first picked up this work before he had a work visa. There are millions of undocumented construction and trades workers in the US. These workers built the house or office block where you are sitting right now. For the life of me, I can't figure out why it's a good idea to have a society where it can be illegal to work. (It means you get an underclass of workers with no rights, but personally I wouldn't call that a good idea).
But in 2014, Eriksen was on track; he was granted his 2-year conditional green card. At the end of that 2 year period, he had to file an I-751 to adjust his status and become a permanent resident.
To file an I-751, you have to pay $750. It must be filed while you have no more than 90 days left on your conditional green card. USCIS will take at no less than 6 months to process your application (mine took much longer). Along with the form and the fee, you also have to send proof that you are still married and living with your spouse. (Yes, there is an exception for domestic violence, in which case you can send USCIS photographs of your wounds instead. I am not making this up).
USCIS have a checklist of documents they will accept as proof that you are really married. None of them were things that my spouse or I could afford. Mortgages, birth certificates for children, joint savings accounts. I had nothing to send except a lease and our renter's insurance. In response to my meagre packet, USCIS provided a letter extending my conditional resident status by 1 year. (This is an absolutely bananapants form of ID addendum, and after my sister’s wedding I almost missed a flight because the airport staff had to track down the only supervisor who had seen one before and knew it was valid as an extension of the expiry date on my ID). A few months later, USCIS sent me an RFI: a request for further information to support my I-751 application, because what I'd provided wasn't sufficient to prove to them that we were really a married couple. I had already sent them everything we had.
We collected petition statements from friends and relatives attesting that we were married. We moved apartments, which created another joint lease we could use as evidence. I felt crushed as we sent in another package while we finalizing our move to Boston with no certainty of a future ahead of us. USCIS granted my I-751 after 15 months of delay, and I got my green card in the mail 5 days before my extended conditional resident status was due to expire.
Kasper Eriksen’s wife, Savannah, suffered a stillbirth during their 90-day window, and Kasper did not submit his I-751.
I do not, for a single moment, think he 'forgot' that he had not sent it, or that it was a 'miscommunication' as Savannah claims on her GFM. I think that the immigration system is designed to weed out people who are poor, people who have medical crises, people who have lives that don't match the picture-perfect USCIS checklist. How could they respond to the USCIS request for birth certificates of their children when they had just had a stillborn child?
After missing the vital I-751, Eriksen’s conditional resident status expired and his presence became unlawful. He was supposed to leave the US. He could have then applied to rejoin his family in Mississippi, which may have taken several years. (The father of one of my friends left the US to pursue this process last year, having exhausted all other options.) Instead, Eriksen did what millions of visa overstayers have done; he became an undocumented immigrant and kept working at his welding job after his conditional residence expired. He stayed with the same employer, so his work authorization would not have been checked; in any case, trade jobs typically pay 1099 contractor income. His lack of a work permit would only be picked up if he'd wanted to move to a new W-2 payroll job, a rarity for a welder. Mississippi allows undocumented people to have a driver's license provided they can present proof that they are MS residents. (This is another telling silence in the articles about him; they make a point that he has a driver's license, but do not explain the process by which he renewed it after losing his documented status. In most states, an immigrant’s driver’s license or state ID can’t be dated past the expiry of their immigration status, and I think he must have renewed it at least once while he didn’t have a lawful status).
Given his circumstances, Eriksen's everyday life wouldn't have been overly affected by becoming undocumented. But he was definitely aware of it. It’s been reported that Eriksen was issued a removal order in 2019, but he claims to have not received it. That means he didn’t successfully regain his status between 2016 and 2019.
But at some point more recently, he clearly made attempts to rectify his immigration status. Per his GoFundMe, Eriksen had some USCIS interviews and appointments in recent years. USCIS appointments are not normal for permanent residents who are on the path to applying for citizenship - I had zero contact with USCIS between receiving that green card in the mail and submitting my N-400 naturalization application 10 years later.
There’s a couple of paths he could have tried: either making a late submission of the I-751 with an explanation of why they missed the deadline, or backtracking to the previous step and having his wife petition to let him start his conditional 2-year card over. Either of these would be at risk of being denied, and both entail being fully aware that you missed your I-751 deadline.
The most baffling part of the story is that Savannah Eriksen denies that USCIS ever made them aware of the missed I-751. If that was true, what was Kasper going to USCIS appointments for? Why does she call this a ‘miscommunication’ rather than admit that missing the deadline amounted to her husband becoming an undocumented immigrant? The question answers itself.
Whatever details are missing in these middle years, it’s clear that Eriksen submitted an N-400 application for naturalized citizenship in 2024. How did he determine he had become eligible to apply for citizenship? As he was married to a US citizen, he would have had to have an unconditional green card with an issue date no later than 2021 in order to have applied for citizenship during 2024. That’s 2 years after his removal order. If he’d had to backtrack and start the conditional resident process again (which I think is the more likely of the two options), that timeline would require that he received a new conditional card in 2018 or 2019, at about the same time as USCIS ordered his removal from the US. If something like that happened, it’s very strange that it’s not mentioned in the MFP story — which, I’ll note again, pointedly chose not to describe Eriksen as a permanent resident or green card holder.
Let me speculate here: Maybe Eriksen was never a US permanent resident. Maybe filing for naturalization years after his status expired was a hail mary attempt to resolve his situation, one that was doomed to fail.
Kasper Eriksen, his family, and the media, refuse to state the painfully obvious truth that he was undocumented, because they see him as white. He does not think of himself as an undocumented construction worker like all the other undocumented construction workers. His family were not capable of seeing him as an undocumented immigrant. They thought he was white. They thought that if he filed for citizenship, even though he quite possibly had no valid work visa at all, his situation would be resolved via sheer whiteness and love of America. MFP describe him as being 'on the verge of becoming a US citizen' even though there is absolutely no reason to believe that his application would have been granted. I don't know how much denial he and his white evangelical family were under about his status, but their denial doesn't excuse the framing used by MFP reporter or others who have covered his case; MFP and Mississippi Today did their fact checking and chose not to describe him as a green card holder, but refuse to use the word that best describes him. Kasper Eriksen’s story is the story of an undocumented visa-overstayer, like so many construction and trades workers in the US.
Does Kasper Eriksen deserve to be torn from his family, detained, and deported to a country he's not seen in 12 years? No. Neither do any of the undocumented workers in your town. So talk to them, talk to their family members, write stories about them that show this kind of empathy for their struggles under the absurd and arcane process of US immigration. Have solidarity with them even after this nightmare administration ends. Quit falling for this model white immigrant bullshit, because Kasper Eriksen is no different from any of the undocumented people who live and work alongside you.