A banner that reads "Save OJM" outside the ICE facility on SW Macadam Ave in Portland. A woman, known in court documents as "O-J-M" was arrested outside of Portland Immigration Court earlier this week.
Alex Zielinski / OPB
A federal judge in Oregon ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement to release an asylum seeker from Mexico known as O-J-M after finding the government violated her rights.
“I order her immediate release,” U.S. District Court Judge Amy Baggio said Monday afternoon, after more than an hour of questioning the events that led to O-J-M’s arrest June 2, outside Portland Immigration Court.
O-J-M arrived in the United States in 2023 after she said she was persecuted because she is transgender. In a sworn statement, O-J-M added that she was also kidnapped by members of a drug cartel, who sexually assaulted her.
O-J-M attended a required June 2 hearing in her asylum case. While there, attorneys for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security moved to dismiss her case. After O-J-M left the courtroom, several ICE agents arrested her. She’s been held at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma for 43 days.
During the hearing, Baggio methodically walked through the nearly two years O-J-M had been in the United States prior to her arrest. O-J-M complied with the terms of her release, including regular check-ins with ICE officials in Oregon.
Jordan Cunnings of the Innovation Law Lab, center, speaks to reporters in Portland, Ore., where a judge determined that an asylum seeker known as O-J-M’s rights were violated by the government, July 14, 2025. The judge ordered O-J-M’s immediate release by the U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement.
Conrad Wilson / OPB
Ultimately, Baggio said the federal immigration officials engaged in a number of procedural errors. The judge described the federal government’s legal positions to justify O-J-M’s arrest and ongoing detention as “shifting sands.”
Baggio acknowledged the federal government’s significant authority over immigration, at one point during the hearing going so far as to hold up two legal textbooks from her bench as a demonstration of the extent of the government’s powers.
“The problem here,” Baggio said, “the government failed to follow its own rules. They sought to arrest first and justify later and then they changed the alleged basis for the detention.”
During Monday’s hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Ariana Garousi, who represented ICE, found herself on the receiving end of Baggio’s grilling.
Attorneys for O-J-M said they expect their client to be released from the Tacoma facility Monday.
“Detention’s horrible for everyone,” Jordan Cunnings, one of O-J-M’s attorneys, said after Monday’s hearing. “But as a transgender woman being held by a government that denies the existence of transgender people – she’s been in solitary."
O-J-M is one of at least six people ICE detained outside or near Portland Immigration Court. At least five of those people arrested have since been released after they filed petitions for habeas corpus.
