Sheboygan woman’s ICE detention highlights immigration ordeal

Elvira Benitez-Suarez was napping in her passenger seat when she heard a noise and woke up. What she saw on the GPS alarmed her.

“What are we doing in Canada?” she asked her husband, Ricardo, who was driving. They were way off course. Instead of heading to Niagara Falls through the U.S., they were in line at a border tollbooth. There was no time to think and nowhere to turn around.

Elvira and her husband did not have legal status in the U.S., despite many attempts to become legal residents. But they had lived in the country for 35 years, first in Illinois, and for the last decade in Wisconsin. They owned a business in Sheboygan and had no criminal record. Elvira had four U.S. citizen children.

None of that was enough. What followed would be a nearly yearlong ordeal in and out of federal immigration detention. Elvira would spend nine of the next 12 months in jails she described as filthy and loud. Her attorney would call her case one of the most egregious he’d seen in his 16-year career. She and her two youngest children are still trying to emerge from the experience.

“My whole life collapsed,” she said, speaking from her crisply decorated Sheboygan home July 2, exactly one year after she and her husband were initially detained.

“I lost my peace. Many days I couldn’t understand how a human being was able to survive in this kind of environment,” she said. “To me, it was horrific.”

Time and again during her years in the U.S., immigration policies shifted and seemed to catch Elvira in the crossfire. President Donald Trump’s second term has brought a sense of whiplash with so many new directives accompanying his mass deportation agenda. Her case illustrates the grim circumstances numerous detainees have described about being in custody of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Earlier this year, the U.S. was detaining more immigrants than ever before.

A spokesperson for ICE said any claim of poor conditions in detention centers is “FALSE,” capitalizing the word for emphasis. “All detainees are provided with proper meals, quality water, blankets, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The statement went on to say: “This is the best healthcare many aliens have received in their entire lives. Meals are certified by dieticians. Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE.”

Elvira, 51, said she is speaking out now to call attention to what happened to her, and the women she met in detention.

“I’m not afraid because I’m not lying,” she said. “Sometimes you’ve got to say something.”

What Elvira has to say is a harsh critique of ICE and Trump administration policies that tear families like hers apart, a consequence she labeled “immoral and a violation of human dignity.”

She wrote her thoughts out and read them aloud at the end of a Journal Sentinel interview.

“We are immigrants who have come to work to serve this great nation and to contribute to the economy every day,” she said. “What is the reason for such cruelty? What is the point of hurting mothers and fathers in such a cruel way? What is the point of hurting entire families?”

In seeking legal residency, Elvira largely at mercy of convoluted system

Elvira grew up poor in Michoacán, Mexico. She rarely had shoes and often went to bed hungry. The soles of her feet burned in the heat. When she was 12, her mother died, and her alcoholic father turned his physical abuse onto her, she said.

She crossed the border into the U.S. at age 15, taking her 6-year-old sister along.

“I was just trying to escape from the life that I was having,” she said. “I wanted to find a better life for me – a safe home, a safe place.”

She didn’t realize at the time she was breaking the law, she said.

Elvira and her sister made it to Elgin, Illinois, and she began building a life, working mostly in restaurants. She became a mother and a wife. All along, she tried to get legal status – hiring lawyers, trying different avenues, she said.

At first, she hoped Ricardo could get a green card through his father, who is a U.S. citizen. Ricardo applied in 1990 and waited for years, then decades. It never panned out.

Elvira figured she’d wait for her two oldest daughters – who are now adults – to turn 21 and petition on her behalf. But because she was present in the U.S. without authorization, she’d have to leave the country, and would be barred from returning for 10 years. Returning to the place she was abused, and being away from her kids, was out of the question, she said.

In 2019, Elvira’s father-in-law again petitioned for her husband to become a permanent resident. Two years later, the government granted Ricardo a green card – but mailed it to an old address. By the time the couple discovered the mistake and called for a new one to be mailed out, they were told they would have to resubmit their paperwork and go through the process again.

Bureaucratic mistakes are typical for immigration agencies, said her current attorney, Marc Christopher of South Milwaukee. He’s gone to immigration hearings, waited, and later been told they’ve been canceled. He’ll get the cancellation notice two days later. Or he’ll get a notice that a hearing date was changed – after the new date has already passed.

If Ricardo had received that green card in the mail around 2021, he and Elvira likely never would have been detained last year at the border, Christopher said. They both could have been legal residents by 2022 or ’23, Christopher said.

Wait for green card continues after detention

After the mailing mixup, Elvira and Ricardo continued life in the shadows.

But that’s not to say they were hiding. They ran a professional painting and cleaning business. They were involved in their Mequon church.

“We try to live a life abiding by the laws. We try to enrich our communities, our churches,” she said. “Every immigrant is hoping that one day the law changes and they give us the opportunity” to become legal residents.

Christopher said he hears from people who say: Elvira has been here so long. Why didn’t she get a green card?

“People just simply don’t understand the process,” Christopher said. “They don’t know how long it takes, they don’t know how much it costs, they don’t know the bureaucratic process. And for the vast majority of people, there is no avenue for them. It’s a cruel, messed-up system that needs to be overhauled.”

Detained at the U.S. border, Sheboygan woman incredulous at conditions

In summer 2025, Elvira, Ricardo and their two children, Natalie, then 12, and Kevin, then 10, began a road trip to Niagara Falls to celebrate their 19th wedding anniversary and the Fourth of July. The family loved exploring America by car.

The GPS mistake led them to the border tollbooth at Port Huron, Michigan, 60 miles north of Detroit. When they explained their situation, Canadian border agents raised the option of asylum, Elvira said. She declined.

“My whole life has been here,” she said. In addition to her husband and children, Elvira has four grandchildren in the Sheboygan area, as well as relatives in Illinois.

Ricardo swung the car around and approached the U.S. border entry. Elvira held onto a little hope agents would let them through. They didn’t.

U.S. border agents had Elvira call her niece, who was behind them on the same road trip in another car, to pick up Kevin and Natalie. Elvira and her husband were placed in separate cells inside the border checkpoint building.

Elvira’s cell was tiny, with no windows, and she shared it with two other women. She began feeling claustrophobic and, she said, had a panic attack. She was hospitalized overnight, then returned to the cell, where she spent seven days.

Is this really how people are kept, she wondered. Is this the water they drink? Is this how it smells?

Elvira and the other women were given foam gym mats to sleep on a dirty floor. She refused to eat much because she suffers from diverticulitis, an inflammatory digestive system condition, and processed foods make her sick.

Her initial detention on July 2 could not have come at a worse time. On July 8, the Trump administration revoked the ability of immigrants to post bond and leave detention if they proved they weren’t a public safety threat or flight risk.

The border agents hadn’t put Elvira in the online detainee locator system before that new policy came down, she said. If she had been, her attorney could’ve requested a bond hearing.

Making most immigrant detainees ineligible for bond has been the single most consequential recent change in policy for his clients, Christopher said. Keeping people in custody while they wait months for a decision makes it harder for attorneys to meet with them, prepare them for hearings and access personal records crucial to their case.

Inside Ohio jail, Elvira’s health declines sharply

Elvira’s first day at a detention center in rural northwest Ohio, July 9, was nightmarish.

For the first 24 hours, she sat alone in a cell with feces and blood smeared on the walls, she said.

“It was the worst place that I have seen. I have never imagined how dirty a place can be with a human being inside,” she said.

Days earlier, she’d been with her children and her husband on vacation about to celebrate their marriage and America’s birthday.

“I couldn’t comprehend what I was doing there,” she recalled. “I questioned God many times.”

Her second day in Ohio, she spoke to her oldest daughter on the phone for the first time since being detained. Elvira mostly just cried.

After moving to a large room holding 54 women – a mix of ICE detainees and federal inmates – Elvira barely slept. At the border jail, guards had woken her up at 6 a.m. But at the Corrections Center of Northwest Ohio, breakfast was served at 4:30 a.m.

The noises throughout the night and into the morning – heavy doors slamming shut, toilets flushing, people shouting – triggered her anxiety. She’d wake up shaking from a sound, then be unable to calm down and rest.

Her mental and physical health declined.

Elvira, who attends a Pentecostal church, spent much of her time leading Bible studies for other detainees. She requested a Spanish-language church service, and the center brought in a minister to lead it. She invited more women to join her there. They formed a “strong team of ladies,” she said.

“Sharing my faith gave me a lot of strength to survive, with the hope that I was not going to be there a long time, that I was going to leave that place one day,” she said.

Elvira pushes back as background check issue delays release

In early November 2025, four months after the border detention, an immigration judge in Ohio ruled in Elvira’s favor and said her children would experience “extreme hardship” if she were deported. Her youngest daughter suffered serious mental health consequences while Elvira was detained, her attorneys said in court.

The judge said she could be granted a green card. But then she was kept in detention another month and a half because the ICE attorneys said they were waiting for local officials to run her fingerprints through a background check.

The border agents at Port Huron had already taken her fingerprints and put them into the shared federal system. Officials claimed they didn’t have time to run her background check and resolve the matter, but that was “absurd,” Christopher said.

“You already have it. All you have to do is look it up and punch it in, and you get it back instantly,” he said.

Elvira was desperate. She’d seen other detainees go to court and be released days later. All she wanted was to go home to her family.

Eventually, an Ohio immigrant advocacy group publicly called attention to the delay with a news conference. At a local county commissioner’s urging, members of the detention center’s board arranged for the background check to be completed.

Days later, on Dec. 19 – more than five months after the border arrest – authorities released her. She would have about three months at home, recovering with her children.

Then the nightmare started anew.

At ICE appointment in Milwaukee, Elvira unexpectedly detained

The federal government had 30 days to file an appeal of the judge’s decision. Once the last day passed, Christopher called Elvira and told her the good news. She could get the green card the judge had permitted.

But days later, Christopher received a letter in the mail, back-dated to that last possible day. The government was appealing. Her green card was on hold.

Christopher reassured her it was fairly typical, and she wasn’t too worried.

Elvira and her family had just begun returning to a sense of normalcy, “trying to recover all those months that we were separated,” she said. When she left the house for an errand, she had to reassure her two youngest children she was coming back.

In early March, ICE asked Elvira to go to two appointments at its Milwaukee office. The first, March 6, was simple. Agents took her picture for a new work permit.

Then, on March 10, she expected ICE to confirm her contact information in a short appointment and be done with her. Christopher went with her, just in case.

Nothing seemed amiss, and she was told to return in August for another check-in. Then, as Elvira and Christopher were heading out, an ICE officer called her back. Christopher was running late for an appointment and had to leave; the officer said he just needed her for two minutes.

Separated in that moment from her attorney, the officer led her into a garage-like area where several other immigrant detainees were waiting.

Her stomach dropped. Am I losing my freedom again, she thought, panic rising.

She was scared, furious and “in total disbelief.”

As the officer questioned her, she pushed back: You don’t have a warrant for my arrest. The judge already granted me my residency. Why am I being held?

He disregarded her concerns, she said, and put her in holding. A few hours later, the officer returned – with an arrest warrant.

“My soul left my body,” she said.

She thought of her kids, and how she had promised she’d return home after the appointment. She thought of the claustrophobia and grime likely awaiting her in another jail cell. Lost in her alarm, she eventually didn’t even register what the officer was saying to her.

By late afternoon, the ICE staff was rushing to get Elvira and about 26 others onto a bus and out of the Milwaukee office, which doesn’t typically hold people overnight. Shackled at their hands and feet, the detainees sat on metal seats with no seatbelts, she said.

The first bus took the group to ICE’s Broadview facility near Chicago. The driver was reckless, she said, speeding on the highway’s right shoulder over rumble strips and twice narrowly avoiding crashes. Elvira spoke up: Are you trying to kill us? You have to be more careful.

A second bus took her to a sheriff’s office somewhere in Indiana, arriving after midnight.

Held in Kentucky, Elvira and attorney call attention to her case

Elvira ultimately landed in the Campbell County Detention Center in Kentucky, just south of Cincinnati.

At first, she was in a cell with nine people. The showers were private, and she had some peace.

Then plumbing issues forced the women into one large barracks-style room that slept 80. Everyone shared four showers and 10 toilets. The showers were moldy, and bugs climbed out of the drain and flew around the area, she said. The toilets were out in the open. To use them, she had to undo her orange jumpsuit in front of other detainees – and any male guard in the room.

Still, she kept speaking up. She asked jail staff to fix the water temperature, which she considered too hot. She pushed for access to food she could eat, given her health condition.

In Milwaukee, Christopher began calling attention to her case.

“What purpose does this really serve?” he asked at a news conference. “What are we accomplishing by keeping this mother of four separated from her children at our own taxpayer expense? What does it say about us as a country and us as a society?”

In Kentucky, Elvira’s attorney asked a federal judge to rule her detention was illegal and release her. That type of request, known as a habeas corpus petition, has spiked in recent months as many immigrants stay for long periods in detention without the chance for bond.

In May, a federal appeals court handed down a ruling that made Elvira, and other immigrants who’d lived in the U.S. a long time, eligible for bond.

On May 21, a judge set her bond at the lowest possible amount, $1,500. On May 26, nearly three months into her second detention, she paid it, and walked out of the center.

Her phone battery was dead, and it was raining. Jail staff said she could walk to a nearby White Castle and wait for someone to pick her up. Inside, she used a stranger’s phone to call her husband and daughter.

That night in a hotel, she showered in a clean bathroom and lay in a clean bed. She felt safe – and free.

Renewing the quest for citizenship

Once Ricardo was home, having spent six months in ICE custody himself, he tried again to apply for a green card. He called several times to confirm his current address, but again, the agency mailed the green card to the old address. This time, their former landlord picked it up from current tenants, and Ricardo finally received it.

Today, Elvira’s status remains in limbo because ICE appealed the Ohio immigration judge’s decision to grant her a green card. The federal board that rules on those appeals could take two years to return a verdict.

“This is how immigration works,” she said.

If Elvira loses that appeal, Christopher’s backup plan is to have Elvira’s daughter petition for a green card for her mother. Elvira would have to return to Mexico briefly, instead of being barred for 10 years, and she’d reenter the U.S. as a legal resident. That route is possible now that Ricardo has a green card. She would have to prove her spouse would face “extreme” hardship without her.

Elvira tries to make sense of her ordeal

Elvira thinks about how the Trump administration said its deportation effort would target criminals. But the vast majority of the women she met were just mothers, she said. Some told her they were still breastfeeding infants when they were separated; others told her they had to leave children with disabilities.

“Do they understand the harm that they do to our family? Especially for my kids? My kids are the future of America,” she said.

Returning to church, people asked questions. Many seemed surprised ICE wasn’t just arresting people with criminal records.

Elvira has tried to make sense of her detention through the lens of her faith. There had to be a reason she was there at that time, getting to know those women, she said. Maybe God had a purpose for her. Every time she eats a meal, she thinks of the food detainees ate; every time she goes to bed, she thinks of the bunks they slept in.

Still, she can’t exactly square the experience with the trauma it inflicted on her and her family. As much as she wants to will herself forward, her body hasn’t caught up. She hears noises in the night, and they take her mind back to the detention center.

Unable to sleep, she gets up, checks on her children, prays to God: Heal me.