Virgil Ovid Hawkins

For anyone who hasn't heard about this yet: ICE showed up at the front door of Dr. Ann Lawani in Lodi, California, while she was still in her pajamas, shackled her at the wrists, waist, and ankles, and shipped her all the way to a detention center in Louisiana. She’s a frontline nurse who worked through the worst of COVID, directs the master's nursing program at the University of San Francisco (overseeing 230+ nursing students), and takes care of her 83-year-old dad. When her family and lawyer tried to find out where she was taken, ICE’s online locator came back with "0 results." It turns out ICE quietly changed its policy the day before her arrest to stop listing thousands of detainees in the public database, so her family had no idea where she was for days while she was bounced from Stockton to Bakersfield to El Paso to Louisiana. DHS put out a statement claiming she had a 2013 removal order, but they conveniently left out that on the *exact same day* in 2013, an immigration judge granted her Withholding of Removal blocking her deportation to Nigeria because she faced persecution there. She has zero criminal record, has checked in with ICE for 13 years, and has a valid federal work permit through 2029. Because they legally can't send her to Nigeria, Rep. Josh Harder says ICE has been trying to quietly deport her to an undisclosed third country behind her lawyer's back. Full write-up and breakdown of what happened here: eyesonice.net/p/covid-hero-d… Support independent coverage & frontline updates: ko-fi.com/eyesonice