Federal agents took Dr. Ann Lawani from her home in Lodi, California, on Sept. 16. Eight weeks later she is still in ICE custody in Louisiana, and the government that holds her wants to send her somewhere an immigration judge never ruled on.
Lawani, 39, is Nigerian. She directs the master’s-entry nursing program at the University of San Francisco, oversees about 230 students, and works as a nurse at John Muir Health in Concord. She has no criminal record. Her work permit is valid through 2029. For 13 years she has lived in Lodi, where she cares for her 83-year-old father.
She is also the kind of Black immigrant the enforcement system rarely pictures: a nurse, an educator, a daughter. She trains the next generation of nurses, and the people who rely on them are now missing their program director.
A protection that did not protect her
Lawani came to the United States in 2007 on a visitor visa and stayed past its expiration. In 2013 an immigration judge denied her asylum claim but found she would face persecution in Nigeria, and granted her withholding of removal. That ruling bars the government from deporting her there. It also left in place a final order of removal, and that order is what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cites for the arrest.
ICE has reportedly moved to deport her instead to an undisclosed third country. In an Oct. 20 letter to DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Rep. Josh Harder, a Democrat who represents Lodi, wrote that ICE “has also reportedly pursued her removal to an undisclosed third country without providing her or her attorney with the relevant documentation.”
Her family spent three days unable to find her. ICE stopped listing some detainees in its public locator on Sept. 15, a day before her arrest, and immigrant-rights groups have sued over the practice. Lawani was moved from Stockton to Bakersfield to El Paso before reaching Louisiana, according to her attorney.
What DHS says
DHS has pointed to the 2013 order and said that “work authorization does not confer legal status in the U.S.” That is accurate as far as it goes. It does not explain why a woman the government has let work for years, with no record and a judge’s finding that she is in danger at home, is being held at all.
Harder has asked the same. He wrote that her detention has “no apparent public safety justification,” and said: “Our immigration enforcement system should focus on protecting communities from danger, not removing individuals who dedicate their lives to serving them.”
The dean of USF’s nursing school has called for her release. Students lost their program director mid-semester.
A woman with a federal finding that she cannot safely go home should not be sitting in a Louisiana cell while the government shops for a country that will take her. She should be released to her father and her students, and DHS should hand her attorney the third-country paperwork it has so far withheld.
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