A “no trespassing” sign outside of Northwest ICE Processing Center, also known as Northwest Detention Center. An asylum seeker known as O-J-M in court documents will be released from the center Monday following 40 days of unlawful detainment, according to a federal judge’s ruling Monday. (Photo by Grace Deng/Washington State Standard)

The Mexican asylum seeker will be released following 40 days in solitary confinement at an ICE detention center in Tacoma

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.”

Detained in Tacoma

Following her arrest, federal officials transported O-J-M to the men’s facility at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, Washington. O-J-M, who is a transgender woman, requested solitary confinement for her own safety.

Her lawyer Jordan Cunnings, with the Innovation Law Lab, a nonprofit law firm in Portland that provides free legal representation to asylum seekers, said they’re grateful this is her last day in isolated detention and that it has been particularly brutal for her.

“As a transgender woman being held by a government that denies the existence of transgender people, she’s been in solitary for, I believe, over 40 days. So we’re extremely relieved,” she said following the decision Monday. “She suffered horrific sexual violence in Mexico. That’s why she fled and sought asylum here. And so her arrest was really re-traumatizing for her, having been a victim of assault, and then having to be held in solitary, that’s obviously no joke.”

Seeking asylum

O-J-M first came to the U.S. to seek asylum in 2023, claiming she was targeted by a Mexican drug cartel called the Knights Templar because of her gender identity and sexuality, and that members of the gang abducted and raped her. She was released on conditions that she check in regularly at ICE offices in Medford, where she went to stay with family soon after arrival, and later in Portland, where her asylum case would eventually be heard.

During that June 2 hearing in Portland, O-J-M, who had no lawyer at the time and represented herself, was told by an immigration judge that the Department of Homeland Security would not attempt to deport her if she agreed to dismiss her case.

It’s a tactic that the U.S. Justice Department under President Donald Trump has been using to get asylum seekers to inadvertently end their pursuit of asylum protections so the government can then immediately arrest and deport them.

“They won’t be seeking to deport you if you agree to this dismissal,” the judge told O-J-M, after confirming with the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security, according to a rough transcript of the June 2 hearing that Baggio read from Monday.

O-J-M agreed to the dismissal, according to the transcript. After the hearing wrapped, ICE agents  arrested her outside the court room and took her away via freight elevator.

Ariana Garousi, the lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday said she believed the government’s attorney at the June 2 hearing knew ICE agents were waiting outside to arrest O-J-M, despite the attorney and judge affirming she would not be deported just minutes before.

Baggio said that line from the immigration judge that O-J-M would not be deported if she agreed to the dismissal is, “seared into my memory.”

Within hours of being arrested, Innovation Law Lab attorneys filed a petition on O-J-M’s behalf, alleging that her arrest violated the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that the government cannot deprive anyone of life, liberty or property without due process.

Since being detained in Tacoma, federal officials have also sought to have O-J-M sign paperwork written in English without her lawyers present, the lawyers claim. ICE did this despite knowing O-J-M has legal representation, is illiterate and has limited English proficiency, the lawyers alleged.

Baggio said this “smacks of more unfairness” and that it is among “all facts that cause the court grave concern about the rule of law and due process in O-J-M’s case.”

O-J-M is among five asylum seekers who have been arrested by ICE agents outside the federal immigration court in Portland since early June. She is the last of those five to still be detained. All are being represented by the Innovation Law Lab.