ICE detained Colombian asylum-seeker Diana Socha Torres and her 8-year-old son at their Wisconsin Dells home, transferring them to a Texas facility

On the morning of June 23, 2026, ICE agents detained Diana Socha Torres, a 43-year-old asylum-seeker from Colombia, and her 8-year-old son at their home in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. According to her family and advocates, agents had told the household they were coming to change Socha Torres's ICE-issued ankle monitor; instead, the mother and child were taken into custody and driven to ICE's processing office in downtown Milwaukee. By the following morning, ICE's online detainee locator showed Socha Torres held at the Dilley immigration processing center in Texas, more than a thousand miles away.

Socha Torres and her partner of twenty years moved to Wisconsin Dells about three years ago after fleeing violence, and applied for asylum shortly after arriving. An immigration judge issued a final order of removal on April 27, 2026 after she missed a mandatory hearing, but she and her partner say they never received notice of the hearing date. Her family says an attorney had filed an appeal the previous month, and ICE told them it had no record of any appeal in its system; her immigration attorney has since moved to reopen the removal proceedings so the deportation order can be reconsidered.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, executive director of the immigrant-rights group Voces de la Frontera, said the family should not be jailed while contesting the order: "A mom and a small child should not be incarcerated... any kind of challenge to her deportation can happen outside of a jail. She has no criminal record. On the contrary, she's someone who's fleeing violence, seeking asylum, that is her legal right." ICE has said Socha Torres entered the United States at the southern border in August 2024.