Lodi, California: Nurse and Professor Ann Lawani Held by ICE in Louisiana as Students and Family Call for Her Release

LODI, California (Orbit Post) For nearly two months, the family, students and colleagues of Ann Lawani did not know where she was. Lawani, a nurse and a professor at the University of San Francisco, was arrested by immigration agents at her home in Lodi on September 16 and sent across the country to a detention facility in Louisiana, USA Today reported on Wednesday, November 11.

Lawani is a Nigerian immigrant who has lived in Lodi, about 35 miles south of Sacramento, for nearly 13 years. She worked as a nurse at John Muir Health and cared for her 83-year-old father. At the University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions, she oversaw 230 nursing students and managed partnerships with 38 clinical sites, USA Today reported.

A transfer chain that ended in Louisiana

According to ABC 10 reporting cited by USA Today, agents arrested Lawani at her Lodi home on September 16, and she was then moved through law enforcement facilities in Stockton, Bakersfield and El Paso before reaching the detention facility in Louisiana.

After the transfer, people close to Lawani said she did not appear in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainee database. The New York Times reported that the Department of Homeland Security had changed its policy so that detainees with final deportation orders no longer appear on the public database, according to USA Today.

Her brother, Samuel Lawani, said the arrest and the decision to send her across the country devastated the family and the community she serves as a nurse, educator and caregiver.

Two orders from the same year

The legal fight turns on two decisions from 2013. The Department of Homeland Security said Lawani overstayed a visitor visa after entering the United States in 2007, that an immigration judge denied her asylum request and issued a final order of removal on August 6, 2013, and that she will remain in ICE custody pending removal.

Her attorney, Natalia Vieira Santana, told ABC 10 that the judge also issued an order withholding her removal on the same day, because she was believed likely to face persecution in Nigeria, and that Lawani held work authorization through 2029.

Representative Josh Harder raised the same point in an October 20 letter to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Harder wrote that Lawani has no criminal history, argued that the government violated the withholding order, and urged ICE to release her under an order of supervision and return her to California while her legal case continues.

A school counts the cost of an empty chair

Eileen K. Fry-Bowers, dean of the School of Nursing and Health Professions, said Lawani's continued absence has caused real and mounting harm to students and faculty who depend on her work. Fry-Bowers started a petition calling for her release, and by November 11 it had drawn more than 9,800 signatures, USA Today reported.

No release decision had been announced by Wednesday evening. For her students in San Francisco, her patients and her father in Lodi, the case is now a wait for a federal answer: whether a nurse with a withholding order from 2013 and a work permit running to 2029 stays in a Louisiana detention facility or comes home while the courts sort out which 2013 order controls.