Editor’s note: This article contains descriptions of sexual assault.
Several weeks have passed since O-J-M, a 24-year-old asylum seeker, became the first known person during the second Trump administration to be arrested by federal immigration officers outside a courtroom in Portland.
Since then, she’s filed a first-hand account in federal court of what drove her to seek protection in the United States and the circumstances surrounding her arrest.
O-J-M first arrived in the United States in 2023, after she said she was persecuted because of her gender identity, kidnapped by members of a Mexican drug cartel who sexually assaulted her.
“While being held against my will, several armed men raped me and threatened to kill me because I identify as a trans woman,” O-J-M said in her sworn statement. “It is really hard for me to speak about the severe abuse and violence I experienced in Mexico, especially because I am afraid people will dismiss me because of my gender identity.”
Following her June 2 arrest, O-J-M was sent by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma, where she’s being held.
“I cannot believe this is happening to me,” she said. “I came to the United States to be safe and free.”
O-J-M’s detention comes as the Trump administration has sought to ramp up deportations, particularly in Democratic cities. Those efforts have included the increased presence of federal officers at immigration courts nationwide. According to NPR, this latest enforcement approach was outlined in a May 30 email to immigration judges, whose court operates under the U.S. Department of Justice.
O-J-M is one of at least four asylum seekers to be arrested by ICE officers outside Portland Immigration Court this month. The asylum seekers, from Mexico, Ecuador and Venezuela, all have shown up for required hearings, which, if skipped, could result in an immigration judge ordering them to be deported.
In all four cases, attorneys representing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have moved to dismiss the cases during the hearings. Immediately after court concluded, and the asylum seekers began to leave, ICE officers arrested them.
“The facts of this case demonstrate that, at the time of [O-J-M’s] detention, she was subject to expedited removal,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua Keller said in court documents.
“We haven’t seen the government do this before,” said Juliet Stumpf, an immigration law professor at Lewis and Clark Law School and board member of Innovation Law Lab, the nonprofit representing O-J-M and other asylum seekers recently arrested at court. She is not directly involved in any of the cases.
What Homeland Security is doing, Stumpf said, is effectively moving people from the traditional asylum process that has far more protections, into expedited removal proceedings. That allows low-level immigration officers to quickly remove people without involving immigration court.
“In a situation where there’s an ongoing removal proceeding — she’s already in the midst of a court proceeding — the immigration court has been dealing with her case,” Stumpf said. “That’s a completely different situation from what was contemplated by Congress when they passed expedited removal.”
The intent was to give immigration officials working along the border the tools to act quickly in cases where migrants did not have any documents or their claims were clearly fraudulent, Stumpf said.
O-J-M’s arrest
After O-J-M arrived in the United States and was released, she moved to Southern Oregon, where she has family. As part of her release, she was required to report to the ICE office in Medford and was told she had an immigration court date at the Portland court in 2025.
“I was living in southern Oregon with family and moved to be closer to Portland because of family and resources for the trans community,” O-J-M said in her sworn statement. She eventually landed in Vancouver, Washington. As part of her release, she said she complied with several required ICE check-ins and ultimately filed her formal application for asylum Feb. 6, 2025.
In May, O-J-M received a notice to attend her first immigration court hearing, set for the morning of June 2, in Portland Immigration Court.
O-J-M did not have an immigration attorney, so she represented herself during the proceeding. The judge told O-J-M that attorneys for the Department of Homeland Security were moving to dismiss the removal proceeding against her, and no longer sought her removal from the U.S. in court, according to a transcript filed in federal court records. The judge then asked O-J-M if she wanted to accept the dismissal.
“If you don’t accept it, we’re going to go forward and you may be removed by a court order,” the immigration judge said.
“So it’s better if I accept it then, right?” O-J-M asked.
“Well that’s your decision,” the immigration judge responded. “I can’t advise you what to do.”
The judge did tell O-J-M that most people accept the dismissals because they don’t want to be in removal proceedings. O-J-M responded that she did not want to be deported.
“The department won’t be seeking to remove you back to your home country if you accept the dismissal,” the immigration judge explained again. “Do you want to accept the dismissal so you’re not in removal proceedings?”
“Yes,” O-J-M said.
With that the judge closed out the case, and ended the hearing.
O-J-M was relieved, she said in her sworn statement.
“I thought the government was no longer going to deport me,” she said.
That ease was short-lived.
On her way to the elevators, several men approached O-J-M, she said. The men, whose faces were covered, surrounded her and then grabbed her, she said in her declaration.
“Immediately, I was reminded of when armed men kidnapped me in Mexico, and I felt incredibly afraid,” O-J-M said. “The men stated that they were immigration agents and put me in handcuffs and I understood I was being arrested.”
Attorneys who attempted to meet with O-J-M immediately after she was taken to the Portland ICE office were delayed by Department of Homeland Security staff for several hours. Once they were finally allowed to meet with O-J-M, an officer refused to release her with a GPS monitor.
Later that day, O-J-M was taken from Portland to ICE’s Tacoma facility, where her attorneys say she remains.
Legal questions and ‘deprivation of rights’
The arrests outside courts come amid growing tensions over immigration enforcement. Protests against immigration sweeps have fueled protests across the country, including Portland and Seattle. The aggressive tactic that ensnared O-J-M and other asylum seekers follows executive orders signed by President Donald Trump instructing federal immigration officers to ramp up expedited removals.
Anand Balakrishnan, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrant Rights Project, said they don’t have an exact number, but estimated hundreds if not thousands of people have been detained this way. As for whether it’s legal, Balakrishnan said expanding expedited removal outside the border violates the U.S. Constitution.
“It deprives people who are in the country, who have already entered the country, of basic due process rights,” he said. “They’re weaponizing due process against people, and creating an impossible situation where compliance with the law is met with a deprivation of rights.”
With O-J-M arrested and placed in expedited removal proceedings, DHS has put her in a situation where she has far fewer due process protections, Prof. Stumpf said. “Almost none, actually.”
“I think for O-J-M it felt very much like a bait-and-switch,” Stumpf said. “She was required to come to this court hearing. She was told it was being dismissed. It sounded like a favorable outcome for her, and then all of a sudden she was arrested and put into a much worse position, procedurally.”
Attorneys for O-J-M say Homeland Security officials “manipulated the immigration system” to detain O-J-M and then tried to rapidly deport her without due process. O-J-M’s attorneys have asked for her release from detention.
Attorneys for ICE argued in a federal court filing that not only is O-J-M subject to expedited removal proceedings, mandating her detention. They say ICE did not violate O-J-M’s due process rights.
Keller, the Assistant U.S. Attorney, argued that immigration laws passed by Congress “provides the executive branch with a comprehensive scheme to administer the immigration system.”
Chatham McCutcheon, ICE’s supervisory detention and deportation officer in Portland, said in a sworn statement in federal court that even though O-J-M was being detained in Tacoma, the agency paused expedited removal proceedings after she “claimed fear of return to Mexico during processing.”
McCutcheon stated that O-J-M’s filed was “promptly referred” to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for a credible fear interview to determine whether she has “credible fear of persecution or torture.”
If an immigration judge find O-J-M’s fear credible, she’ll get a notice to return back to immigration court, effectively starting her asylum case over once more. Otherwise, O-J-M will be deported, McCutcheon stated.
The ACLU’s Balakrishnan said among his concerns is that there’s no guaranteed right to an attorney or another party for credible fear interviews that take place as part of expedited removals.
“To trigger the credible fear interview, you have to claim a fear,” Balakrishnan explained. “People may not know that they should claim the fear. Beyond that, even if you claim the fear, there’s no guarantee or oversight of whether that claim is honored and you’re actually put into the credible fear process at all.”
After arriving at the Tacoma detention facility, O-J-M asked to be held in solitary confinement because “they told me that they were going to put me in a unit with male detainees and I was too afraid of what would happen to me,” her declaration said.
O-J-M said she very much wants to stay in the country, and her attorneys believe she has a strong case to do so.
“I am scared that if I am deported, I will be killed and it would not matter because I am a trans woman and society does not care about people like me,” O-J-M stated.
Oregon, O-J-M explained in her sworn statement, was the first place she felt she belonged, having never lived in a place with resources that support the trans community.
“Especially after moving to the Portland area, I saw people from different places walking freely and unafraid,” O-J-M said. “I want to go back to that, to where I felt safe to be myself for the first time in my life.”
OPB’s Michelle Wiley contributed reporting.
