They’ve won in court, but ICE is still detaining and trying to deport them

When a 41-year-old Nigerian mother of two appeared before an immigration judge in New Jersey in January, she was ready with her life story. 

Laura, as her friends call her, arrived in the United States on a tourist visa in 2020. She was fleeing domestic violence and in-laws who she believed would kill her because she refused to let them subject her daughter to female genital mutilation—a practice she herself underwent at 6. Her daughter and son, now 10 and 12, respectively, flew in on the same visa a few months later in 2021. Laura filed for asylum later that year after her visa had expired, and she was served a notice to appear in immigration court.

“I came to this country to protect my children—and to have a good life, to work,” says Laura, who asked to use a pseudonym because she fears retaliation.

Their life in New Jersey offered a new beginning, but not an easy one. The family relied on charity from a local church while Laura waited on work authorization. When it came through, she took on long shifts as a home care worker, while carving out time to help her kids with schoolwork and cook them traditional foods like jollof rice and okra stew, as well as new American favorites like boxed mac ’n’ cheese. She indulged them with ice cream and Dunkin’ donuts when she could.

But in February 2024, Laura was jailed after being present at an altercation between two women, one of whom was her friend. A judge ordered her released on bond the next day pending trial, signaling that he did not see her as a public threat or flight risk. But before she left the jail, Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked her up. She was transferred to ICE’s Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania, where Temple University lawyers have documented “punitive, inhumane, and dangerous conditions,” including rampant use of solitary confinement, physical and mental abuse, and racial discrimination. Upon arrival, Laura was strip searched on camera, “an egregious and unnecessary violation of her bodily autonomy,” as her lawyers later wrote in her habeas petition. ICE placed her on suicide watch for three days, where she shouted, cried, beat the door, and incoherently mumbled to herself in isolation, according to agency watchlogs.

When her rescheduled asylum hearing came in January 2025, just 10 days before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Laura already had spent around a year in detention. In court, the judge conferred with her lawyer at the time and, instead of asylum, offered her “withholding of removal,” meaning that Laura had demonstrated that she would be “more likely than not” to face harm back in Nigeria and could not be deported there. When her then-lawyer told her that she would soon be released from detention and able to see her kids, she felt happy. 

But under Trump, that never happened. Even though ICE didn’t bother appealing the judge’s January ruling, the agency refused to let Laura out, despite repeated requests by her lawyers in and out of court. An independent psychologist evaluated Laura in June and found her symptoms “far exceed[ed] the threshold” for depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder and had “worsened considerably” over her year and a half in detention. Health records show that Laura’s chronic conditions—high blood pressure and a preexisting gastric ulcer—were inadequately treated. ICE treats you like a “living ghost,” she says from detention. “They don’t care if you die.” She cries frequently, during almost every phone conversation. She worries about the future for her children, currently in the care of a family friend, and how her prolonged detention has put immense financial strain on her sister in Canada. “It just goes on and on,” she says.

In the time Laura’s been in custody, the legal landscape detainees like her face has transformed, as the Trump administration not only has made getting released from detention harder, but also, with the blessing of the Supreme Court in June, dramatically expanded ICE’s ability to deport people to countries where they may have no connection. In the past, immigrants in Laura’s situation—with a ruling from an immigration judge saying they can’t be deported home—had a real chance of securing release into the US, partially out of practicality. But as ICE has further opened the door to sending people to other countries, the agency now routinely prolongs detention, taking advantage of the appeals process and a loophole that allows imprisonment if ICE says a third-country deportation is likely. The main goal of the delays, lawyers and advocates say, is to wear detainees down and get them to give up their fight to stay in the US.

In late July, a Pennsylvania judge denied Laura’s emergency petition for release. During the proceedings, ICE argued that her removal to somewhere was “imminent” and said it had requested Japan, Brazil, France, Spain, and Jamaica accept her—a list that read “more like a vacation bucket list than a good-faith effort to find a third country,” says Evan Benz, a senior attorney at the Washington, DC-based Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, who is representing Laura in court. 

Lawyers and advocates nationwide say the practice of keeping people in detention after they win in court has become much more entrenched in recent months. “ICE officers are no longer using their discretion, but just applying this blanket policy of, ‘We’re just not going to release you at all unless, basically, a court tells us that we have to,’” Benz says.

When a migrant wins a claim for protection from removal to their home country, ICE usually has 90 days to try to find an alternative destination. Before Trump, as Laura’s lawyers noted in her habeas petition, such third-country removals had been “exceedingly rare”—ICE followed through in only a couple of cases between 2020 and 2024. But ICE regulations technically allow further detention if the agency can argue that deportation to some country will take place in the “reasonably foreseeable future.”

The law allows it, but “historically, it hasn’t been used in this kind of abusive way,” says Jennifer Norris of Immigrant Defenders Law Center, who has an older female client with mental disabilities who won the right not to be deported to Mexico under an anti-torture convention, but remains in detention in Washington state.

Past ICE directives, most recently reiterated in 2021, say the agency should “favor release” of people who have won asylum or other protections “absent exceptional concerns,” even if the government appeals that ruling. Today, ICE appears either to be ignoring these policies or to have overridden them with new ones that keep people detained. Per a June 24 memo the agency shared in court, ICE officials instructed that “field offices no longer have the option to discretionarily release aliens.” Multiple sources in communication with ICE employees say they’ve been informed that all releases of detainees who have won some relief in court must be personally approved by Todd Lyons, the agency’s acting director; deportation officers have been told not to release such detainees and to make at least three attempts to send them to a third country. 

For many detainees, the cumulative effect of the new policies is mandatory, indefinite detention, even after they’ve won in court. This is strategic, lawyers say. “ICE uses incarceration as a litigation strategy,” says Marty Rosenbluth, a Georgia-based immigration lawyer who represents several clients who remain detained after winning relief. The agency is hoping to wear down the people it imprisons until they “just give up and want to get sent back, rather than remain in these god-awful hellholes.”

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security did not respond to specific questions, but in a statement, Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, wrote that people like Laura who have won in court “even if on appeal, can still be detained and removed to a third country willing to accept them,” adding that they “are not automatically released into American communities.” She wrote that people who want to “take control” of their departure should self-deport using the government’s self-deportation app. 

Over the summer, I tallied at least 34 cases in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Louisiana, New York, Texas, California, and Washington in which people who have won protection remain stuck in detention. Among them is Roman, a 23-year-old Russian man who fled conscription into the war against Ukraine in January 2024. He won asylum in November in Georgia, without legal representation and despite the low rates of success there. But ICE appealed the ruling and has kept him detained since he entered the country. Roman, whose name has been changed because he fears retaliation, said over the phone that life in the medium-security facility is full of anxiety, recounting a recent incident in which he said he was sexually assaulted by a mentally ill inmate. “You don’t know what’s gonna happen next,” he says. “It feels like [they] don’t want to let you go. They don’t want to see you free.”

Typically, Roman, who has no criminal record, would be released per ICE’s own prior policies—free to start a life in the US alongside his wife, who has also won asylum but has been released. Instead, he remains detained in what is “functionally a prison,” says his lawyer, Alizeh Sheikh of the Georgia Asylum and Immigration Network. In an April email, detention officials told her that her client “will not be released until a final decision is made in his case.” When a Republican member of Congress pushed to get Roman out, ICE officials wrote in an email reviewed by Mother Jones that the asylum grantee’s continued detention fell “within the current priorities” set by the president.

These responses struck Roman’s lawyers, especially because their client had already proven to an immigration judge that he had a “well-founded fear” of persecution. “I mean, if you’re not going to release him, who are you going to release?” Sheikh said.  

Frances Kelley of Louisiana Advocates of Immigrants in Detention said her organization has been in contact with least 10 people in the region who remained detained after winning two kinds of relief against being deported to their home country—a withholding from removal order and protection under the anti-torture convention, both of which have higher burdens of proof than asylum. One person was detained for eight months after their ruling. This indefinite detention and uncertainty about whether detainees can even remain in the country contributes “to the psychological torture of ICE detention,” Kelley says. “You don’t know the way out.”

Trump has been working on crafting a new one. Shortly after taking office, his administration started deporting swaths of people to countries where they had no ties, like Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Eswatini, and—even after a Supreme Court battle—South Sudan, a country in the midst of conflict. The court’s June ruling okaying the South Sudan deportations was a “disaster,” says Norris of Immigrant Defenders—it rendered immigration court decisions providing protection from deportation “meaningless” if migrants could nonetheless be shipped “off to some far-flung, war-torn country.” 

After the court ruling, ICE released guidance instructing its agents that migrants destined for a third country need to be given only 24 hours’ notice—and as little as six hours in “exigent circumstances.” The guidance also reiterates that if the US believes the country’s “credible” assurances that the person officials want to deport will not be persecuted or tortured, they can remove the person “without the need for further procedures.” Attorneys argue that the guidance gives ICE leeway to abruptly export their vulnerable clients to countries where they will face danger. 

It almost happened to Adriana Quiroz Zapata, a 53-year-old former florist, who was granted protection from being sent back to Colombia after she proved it was likely she would be tortured there. Zapata reentered the US in 2022, fleeing rape and physical abuse inflicted by a former partner and his police officer friends. A Texas immigration judge ruled in February that these attacks took place with “the Colombian government’s willful acquiescence.” Despite the court ruling, ICE drove her to Mexico and tried to hand her off to authorities there, who, as the Bulwark first reported, refused to take her. ICE is still holding Zapata in El Paso, saying it is trying to find a country to take her rather than release her to her family in New Jersey.  

“Why did we bother to do a trial and win if you just were going to abandon her as an ‘illegal alien’ in another place?” says Zapata’s lawyer Lauren O’Neal.

Laura, too, was almost sent away. At around 3 a.m. August 27, she was woken up in her Pennsylvania cell and told she had a few minutes to pack her things. She was shackled, loaded onto a bus with a group of other African detainees, and transferred to an ICE facility in Louisiana. Other detainees flown with her, including some Nigerians who had also won relief, were told that they were going to be sent to Ghana or Uganda. But she heard nothing certain for the next few days. On September 4, an ICE official told Laura that she would be deported that night. “I am scared,” she said in a phone call she made using another detainee’s account, as ICE provided her no way to make one herself. “I don’t know what to do now.”

Within hours, ICE put Laura on a bus to the airport for a flight the next morning. Before she arrived, a federal judge in Pennsylvania granted Laura’s attorney’s emergency request to temporarily block her deportation, and ICE officials pulled her off the bus. She returned to her Louisiana cell and a few days later was flown back to Pennsylvania. 

Others on the flight Laura had been slated to take had worse luck. It landed in Ghana, where at least one deportee was swiftly transferred by the government to his home country of Gambia—the very place US courts had found he would face danger. These deportations likely circumvented the law, a DC district judge noted, describing them as “an end run” around the sort of legal protections Laura and others had won in immigration court. 

In Laura’s case, ICE later confirmed to the court that it had hoped to send her to Ghana but made no mention of whether it had received assurance from its government that she wouldn’t come to harm there or be sent on to Nigeria. ICE is not “even following the threadbare procedures they invented” for third-country deportations, says her lawyer, Benz. On September 19, a judge declined to extend the emergency order blocking Laura’s deportation. It is “unclear where they might deport her,” Benz wrote in an email. “She is very tired of detention (so-called detention fatigue) and it’s not clear that she will want to fight another threatened deportation.”