ICE took her from her children. Here's how lawyers raced to free her
In May, an asylum seeker from Mexico left her Santa Rosa home before sunrise with her three children to attend her U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in.
For days, the single mom hadn't been able to sleep, certain she'd be arrested.
The woman, who fled the violence in the drug cartel-ridden state of Michoacan in 2019, arrived early to the appointment. When an officer told her to follow him, she knew she wasn't coming back.
She managed to text a volunteer from the nonprofit Faith in Action who had accompanied her to court. She also texted her 19-year-old daughter to tell her to bring home the younger children, ages 2 and 13.
"I felt like the world was crashing down on me," the woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of immigration repercussions, told the Chronicle in Spanish through an interpreter. "My main concern is that they separate me from my children or send me back to my country. My children depend on me."
After hours waiting in a freezing cell with little food, the officers loaded her into a van and drove her away from San Francisco toward a detention center.
But after a few hours, the van turned around. When she saw the San Francisco lights glimmering in the dark, she realized the plan had worked.
Attorneys from the newly created Bay Area Habeas Network, which began operating May 1, had worked furiously over the day to free her before she was transferred.
A federal judge ruled that she should be released temporarily, while her habeas petition is decided in court, because her detention was likely illegal and unconstitutional.
The habeas network launched in response to the Trump administration's new practice of detaining immigrants when they showed up for their immigration hearings, ICE check-ins and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services interviews, part of President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda.
Currently funded by $930,000 philanthropic donations and in the process of finalizing a $200,000 funding agreement from Santa Clara County, the network aims to file a habeas petition for every person illegally arrested by ICE in the nine-county Bay Area. The Bay Area Habeas Network has secured the release of 19 people who were illegally detained by ICE.
ICE is no longer arresting people in court, backpedaling the policy that began in May 2025, though it continues to arrest people at check-ins, through targeted enforcement actions and in "collateral arrests," where people who aren't the intended target are swept up in raids. The Department of Justice, which had been tasked with defending ICE's arrests in courthouses, has since acknowledged it had been "mistaken" in claiming that a 2025 ICE memo allowed arrests in or near courthouses when it did not. In June, a federal judge in California also barred immigration authorities nationwide from arresting people in court, stating that it violated laws around administrative procedures.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment. A Department of Homeland security spokesperson said that arresting "criminal illegal aliens" in courthouses was "common sense" because it conserved law enforcement resources and ensured people were screened to not have any weapons.
"Under President Trump and Secretary Mullin, ICE is using every lawful tool available to fulfill the American people's mandate to remove dangerous criminal illegal aliens from the U.S," the DHS spokesperson said.
Attorneys nationwide have successfully used the legal procedure of habeas corpus to challenge the legality of ICE's detention of certain immigrants, although habeas petitions do not directly contest someone's deportation order.
These immigrants include people who have been granted protections from deportation, who've lived for decades in the U.S. and were in legal proceedings to obtain lawful status. They also include, significantly, people who had been previously detained by ICE when they crossed the U.S.-Mexico border and released at the time on the grounds that they did not pose a public safety threat or flight risk.
If their circumstances have not changed, habeas attorneys have successfully argued that the government cannot rearrest these individuals. (The American Civil Liberties Union won a ruling in December that barred ICE from arresting people who fell into this category in Northern California.)
The brainchild of Jordan Weiner, nonprofit La Raza Centro Legal's interim executive director, and former immigration judge Shira Levine, the Bay Area network is currently staffed by attorneys from five participating nonprofits.
Every weekday, one staff attorney is on call to file a habeas petition if a person is illegally detained in the Bay Area that day.
In San Francisco, the city's Rapid Response Network received reports of more than 80 people arrested at their immigration hearings last year but does not have data for this year.
"This is the first such project in the country and leading the way to what resistance looks like from the legal community," said Weiner, who needs to raise another $710,000 to cover the remainder of the fiscal year.
Weiner was inspired to learn how to file habeas petitions for immigrants detained at their court hearings after the Oakland nonprofit Centro Legal de la Raza successfully won release through a habeas petition for a Peruvian asylum seeker who was arrested at her court hearing in San Francisco. The July 2025 release marked one of the first habeas petitions filed for immigrants arrested by ICE at a courthouse in Northern California.
Three weeks later, Weiner filed a habeas corpus petition for a Peruvian man who'd been arrested and was suffering stroke-like symptoms.
"It was exhilarating," she said. "I realized, this works. We can do this."
Soon, Weiner was filing habeas corpus petitions regularly. Local rapid response networks would inform her if someone was detained. To maximize efficiency, Weiner began grouping everyone arrested in one day into a single petition. From July to November, before the network was started, Weiner obtained the release of 28 people, filing about a fifth of all habeas petitions for people detained by ICE in Northern California during that time period.
However, her work was entirely pro bono, because her nonprofit was only funded to provide services to San Francisco residents and none of her habeas clients lived in the city.
She was overwhelmed and exhausted. For the first time, she was getting panic attacks.
"It weighed on me a lot," she said.
She felt she needed a more sustainable solution.
Levine, who served as an immigration judge for five years, had a view from the other side of the bench. After being fired alongside most of her fellow San Francisco judges in what she called a "politically targeted" act, she approached Weiner with an idea to start a network to file habeas petitions for people arrested.
A few weeks into her new job as an habeas attorney for the Bay Area network, hired through the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, Elizabeth Knowles got a call that a man who'd entered the U.S. on a valid visa had been arrested in the middle of his asylum interview. For seven years, he had dutifully complied with his immigration appointments. Now, he was going to be taken to a detention center near Bakersfield, separated from his American spouse and U.S.-born children.
She leapt into action. After sending an email to the court just after midnight requesting an urgent decision, she fell asleep on her couch.
Five hours later, she woke up to check her email. She was shaking from exhaustion and adrenaline as she clicked the link to the judge's order. The judge had ordered him released immediately. She was elated.
"It was a moment," she said, "in this climate of chaos, that the justice system was working."
The Mexican woman who was detained at her immigration appointment in May still has nightmares of the ordeal.
"I feel like I have no peace," she said. "But I have faith and know that there are good people who will help us."
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This story was originally published July 13, 2026 at 10:51 AM.