A federal judge on September 29 blocked the government from deporting Ann Lawani while her habeas case moves forward and refused to send the fight over her detention to Louisiana. The ruling keeps the 39-year-old nurse and University of San Francisco professor from being removed while her case is still pending.
That matters now because Lawani has been out of sight since ICE agents took her from her Lodi home eight weeks ago. Her family says she briefly called from a nearby holding facility, then vanished from the public database used to locate people in ICE custody, leaving them without a clear answer for three days until they learned she was being held in Louisiana.
Her lawyer, Natalia Vieira Santanna, filed the habeas corpus petition in the Eastern District of California on September 18 using Lawani’s last known location. On September 29, the judge rejected the government’s request to transfer the case to Louisiana and ordered DHS to explain why Lawani should not be released. The order does not end the detention fight, but it prevents the government from moving the case into a new court system where a new lawyer would have to start over.
Lawani’s colleagues said ICE moved her from Stockton to El Paso, Texas, before transferring her to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center. That trail is part of what made the case hard to follow, and it helps explain why her family and attorney had trouble finding her after the arrest. Josh Harder has also pressed DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin in a letter demanding her immediate return to California, saying ICE is pursuing her removal to an undisclosed country without giving her or her attorney the documents they need.
The government says Lawani was detained because of a 2013 deportation order. But the record also shows that an immigration judge found that she would likely face persecution if returned to Nigeria, and the article says she has maintained a valid work permit through 2029. Those facts sit uneasily beside each other: one points to an old removal order, the other to later protection and a still-valid authorization to work.
Lawani, a Nigerian native, has lived in the United States for 21 years. She left behind her 83-year-old father, who has cancer, while her family and colleagues try to keep her case alive from California. For now, the judge’s order means DHS must justify why she should not be released, and it cannot deport her while the habeas case remains open.
