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In a federal legal filing, lawyers say U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a woman from Mexico outside her asylum hearing Monday morning in downtown Portland.
The lawyers say the woman, who is transgender, was seeking asylum in the U.S. several years after being abducted and raped by members of the Knights Templar drug cartel in Michoacán state. She was living in Vancouver, Wash., at the time of her arrest.
The petition for a writ of habeas corpus, filed by the woman’s attorneys Monday afternoon in U.S District Court, says she came to the U.S. in 2023, applied for asylum earlier this year, and appeared Monday morning at the U.S. Immigration Court in the Edith Green–Wendell Wyatt Federal Building. The federal government moved to dismiss her case, the motion says, and the court did so. But ICE agents were waiting in the lobby, her attorneys write.
“After exiting the courtroom and while in the courtroom lobby, several ICE agents arrested Petitioner,” the motion, filed by a group of lawyers with the firm Innovation Law Lab, says. “They did not provide her any process or, even though a pro bono lawyer was available at the immigration court, access to counsel. The ICE agents did not offer her any opportunity to be heard prior to arresting and detaining her.”
The local office of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WW.
The alleged arrest would represent the first documented incident of ICE agents appearing at an Immigration Court hearing in Portland, but it matches a widely reported tactic of federal agents making arrests at courthouses across the country as President Donald Trump’s administration seeks to crack down on immigration. In their filing, the woman’s attorneys alleged that the arrest was triggered by a change in federal policy: “The Trump administration…has outlined sweeping, executive branch-led changes to immigration enforcement policy, establishing a formal framework for mass deportation.”
The petition names the woman only by her initials, O-J-M, saying she “will be seeking to proceed under pseudonym given her vulnerabilities as a transgender woman and an asylum seeker.” It says she was born in Mexico in 2001, and began identifying as a woman while living in Michoacán. It says armed members of the Knights Templar cartel (a drug trafficking operation that reached its peak in Michoacán a decade ago) took her by force in 2021, after which “various men raped her repeatedly because she is transgender and gay.”
The petition says she arrived in 2023 in California, where she was arrested and released on recognizance. The petition states the woman was living in Vancouver but was “present within the state of Oregon” when she was arrested. She applied for asylum in February, her attorneys write. They allege that the federal government initiated removal proceedings against her this April and scheduled her for a Portland immigration hearing on June 2.
“O-J-M- asks this Court to find that Respondents’ attempts to detain, transfer, and deport her are arbitrary and capricious and in violation of the law, and to immediately issue an order preventing her transfer out of this district,” her attorneys wrote.
The filing said O-J-M has committed no crimes.
Correction: This story incorrectly said the filing did not indicate if O-J-M had committed any crimes. In fact, it said she had not.
Sophie Peel contributed reporting to this story.