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.
The U.S. Senate is currently considering an additional $72 billion in new funding for DHS.
Transferred without warning
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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