An asylum seeker arrested by immigration officials outside a courtroom in Portland last month after a judge and attorney promised the government wouldn’t seek to deport her must be released immediately, a federal judge ordered Monday.
U.S. District Court Judge Amy Baggio on Monday ordered the immediate release of a 24-year-old Mexican woman identified in court documents as O-J-M, who was arrested June 2 at the Edith Green–Wendell Wyatt Federal Building following an asylum hearing meant to determine if she could stay in the U.S.
The four Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents who arrested her were masked, did not present any charges at the time of the arrest and refused to engage with an attorney trying to talk to them. O-J-M has spent more than 40 days in solitary confinement at a Washington detention center.
Baggio determined that the government’s basis for arresting and detaining O-J-M following her hearing on June 2 was unlawful, and that the Department of Homeland Security may have deliberately tricked her into agreeing to conditions during that hearing that allowed them to attempt to expedite her deportation immediately after. Baggio also accused the government of shifting the basis for the arrest and detention after O-J-M obtained legal counsel.
“The government here failed to follow its own rules,” Baggio said when issuing her order for O-J-M’s release Monday at the Mark O. Hatfield federal courthouse in Portland.
The government, “arrested first and sought to justify later. Then they changed the alleged basis for the arrest and detention. There is a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this, and the government unquestionably went about the arrest and detention of O-J-M on June 2, 2025, in the wrong way.”
