BATON ROUGE, LA – Chained in the back of an ICE vehicle in July, Ibrahim Mohammed tried again and again to explain to the agents that they were violating a court order by arresting him. But they weren’t listening.
ICE had already unlawfully detained Mohammed, a Maryland resident, twice.
Twice — in February and again in March — a federal judge in Louisiana had ordered his release.
But last month, Vernon Liggins, then ICE’s deputy field office director for Baltimore, told his agents to again pick up Mohammed, violating the court order one more time.
Now Liggins faces contempt charges in the judge’s court in Baton Rouge.
If the judge hands down a positive ruling on Wednesday, it would appear to be the first time ICE leadership has been held in contempt.
Ignoring court orders
Mohammed, 44, lawfully immigrated from Ethiopia to the U.S. in 2014 and was granted asylum. He lost asylum status after a criminal charge in Maryland, but successfully won protection from deportation in 2024, after an immigration judge determined he would face torture and persecution if deported to Ethiopia.
In 2017, Mohammed pled guilty to one count of sexual abuse of a 12-year-old child who stayed within his home.
ICE has pointed to Mohammed’s criminal conviction as the reason for his deportation. That’s in line with the Trump administration’s typical explanation for bypassing important parts of immigration law: they are only targeting people with grim criminal convictions, like Mohammed. Due process is disregarded, as a result. The president himself has said, “You can’t have a trial for all of these people.”
But due process rights are guaranteed to everyone on U.S. soil, regardless of immigration status or criminal history. That means ICE agents were acting unlawfully last month when they scooped up Mohammed for the third time.
On July 28, his landlady called and woke him up just after sunrise. ICE agents were outside their Baltimore apartment building, looking for him, she told him.
Ten agents were outside. Two knocked on his door. They told him his ankle monitor was faulty — a lie — and demanded he let them in.
With his attorney on speakerphone, he complied and opened the door. The officers handcuffed him. Agents told his lawyer that Mohammed had failed to check-in with ICE and that his ankle monitor wasn’t working. Neither was true, Mohammed insisted. His lawyer later checked his assertions and found that the agents had lied on both counts.
“My attorney kept asking why I was being detained, but then the ICE officer told her that he didn’t have to give her a reason, and the officer holding my phone hung up the call,” reads Mohammed’s declaration, which also notes that, though Mohammed was cooperating, agents were aggressive, shoving his head into a car multiple times during his unlawful arrest.
ICE agents drove Mohammed to an empty parking lot, put him in waist and ankle chains and took him to their Baltimore office.
At the office, Mohammed again tried to explain to officers that they were violating court orders. But an ICE officer told Mohammed that headquarters had ordered them to arrest him. An agent also handed him papers that included a page printed with the words Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic and Eswatini. That sent Mohammed, who speaks only limited English, into a panic, because ICE had tried after his second arrest to put him on a plane and swiftly deport him to Eswatini, a country he has no connection to.
The federal judge in Louisiana granted an emergency motion to enforce his previous order, ordering ICE to “immediately release” Mohammed. He made it home later that day.
Baltimore ICE field director ordered his agents to re-detain Mohammed
When Mohammed won withholding of removal in 2024, he was released under an order of supervision (OSUP), which requires regular check-ins with ICE.
But last summer, ICE unilaterally revoked that OSUP, arresting him without reason or warning. Months later, in February, U.S. District Judge John W. deGravelles in Louisiana found that the agency had violated Mohammed’s due process rights.
The judge ordered ICE to release Mohammed from its immigration unit in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. ICE flew Mohammed back to Baltimore, fitted him with an ankle monitor and released him.
If ICE ever arrested Mohammed again, deGravelles told the agency, it must provide advance notice and a reason for the revocation of his OSUP.
In March, when Mohammed was rearrested, deGravelles again ordered ICE to release him, again with strict orders to ICE not to re-detain him without due process. If ICE tried to deport Mohammed to a third country, the judge wrote, the agency needed to give Mohammed a hearing before an immigration judge and a chance to express any fears for his safety within that country.
Yet in July, Liggins, testified in court that he personally instructed staff to take Mohammed back into custody.
“It is my intent to remove all criminals that reside within my jurisdiction,” said Liggins, who now works out of ICE headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he is the acting deputy assistant director for ICE field operations east, overseeing 10 offices along the East Coast.
His agents were too busy detaining people, Liggins testified, to give Mohammed timely notice that his OSUP had been revoked, in violation of the judge’s order. “We try to get all detainees served as quickly as possible, but we’re arresting a lot of people nowadays,” he told the court at the contempt hearing on August 5.
In the hearing, as Mohammed’s counsel outlined that the sanctions they’re requesting include $180 compensation, Judge deGravelles noted: “We’re compensating him for his time away from his life.”
Mohammed’s repeated arrests and releases are part of a larger trend, where ICE agents seem to be willfully violating court orders, said Bridget Pranzatelli of the National Immigration Project, one of Mohammed’s attorneys.
“It’s beyond alarming that the executive branch is so brazenly disregarding the judicial branch here,” said Pranzatelli in a statement. “Our client served his time, won his immigration case, and ICE itself determined he wasn’t a danger.”
Mohammed’s case parallels ICE’s recent unlawful re-arrest of Akram Omar, who was also held in Angola for months, released on a Louisiana judge’s order, re-detained soon after, and again ordered released. In that case, too, ICE attempted to deport Omar to a third country, in violation of a court order.
ICE did not respond to requests for comment.
Handcuffed and caged unlawfully, again and again
ICE has said that Mohammed is being targeted for deportation because of his criminal record. In 2017, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, after being charged with the sexual abuse of a child, Mohammed entered what’s known as an Alford plea, which allows defendants to maintain innocence while pleading to charges to avoid a trial.
Given the nature of that plea, ICE is mischaracterizing Mohammed’s criminal history, said Pranzatelli.
After his plea, Mohammed served six years in prison, lost his asylum status and then was kept in immigration detention for two years. But in 2024, he won protection from removal to Ethiopia under the Convention Against Torture act. He was released in November 2024, after ICE determined that Mohammed was not a violent person, would remain nonviolent, and was not a threat to society.
Just eight months later, in July 2025, he arrived home to find nearly a dozen ICE agents waiting for him, despite following all the conditions required by his Order of Supervision. When he asked why he was being taken into custody, the explanation the ICE agents reportedly gave was simply, “Trump is President now.”
ICE placed Mohammed in Camp 57, the new immigration detention wing in Louisiana State Penitentiary’s notorious former solitary unit, where he spent seven months. Mohammed was denied halal meals, suffered acute depression and hypertension, and received his medication inconsistently, “causing him to suffer significant psychological anguish,” per a December filing.
In February, deGravelles, who sits in the Middle District of Louisiana court in Baton Rouge, found that Mohammed’s detention was unlawful and ordered ICE to release him. ICE returned him home to Maryland.
But weeks later, ICE re-detained him, whisked him to Arizona, and tried to deport him. He cannot be deported back to Ethiopia, because he faces a credible fear of torture or death there. So ICE agents tried to hurry him onto a flight to Eswatini — a tiny monarchy in southern Africa. To deport people there, the United States paid $5.1 million to Eswatini, whose government has kept earlier third-country deportees in a maximum-security prison without charges or due process.
Less than a day before the flight left, Mohammed managed to call his attorney and tell her he was somewhere in Arizona. But the call dropped after just a few seconds.
His attorneys rushed to ask the court to enforce its order, and deGravelles granted an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order for Mohammad, describing him as “apparently en route to the airport.” The next month, deGravelles found that, by denying Mohammed due process, ICE had “failed to comply” with the court’s order. Again, he ordered ICE not to re-detain Mohammed without notice.
After the July 28 arrest, deGravelles again ordered ICE to immediately release Mohammed. ICE’s own counsel concedes that this newest arrest was a violation of court orders, wrote deGravelles.
Now deGravelles is weighing whether to hold ICE in contempt.
During an August 5 hearing, deGravelles asked the government to show why he should not hold in contempt “those specific decisionmakers who are responsible for this redetention,” presumably referring to Liggins, who testified at the hearing.
The judge will render his decision on the contempt charges and any other appropriate sanctions on Wednesday.
Findings of contempt against ICE agents have so far been rare.
More commonly, judges have threatened to hold agents in contempt. In February, judges in Minnesota found that ICE had violated dozens of orders, prompting a chief federal judge there to write, “The Court is not aware of another occasion in the history of the United States in which a federal court has had to threaten contempt — again and again and again — to force the United States government to comply with court orders.”
Danny Zawodny of the Baltimore Banner provided research for this story.
