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| Erin E. Meyer |
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| Jonhatan A. Aragon |
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| Kayla Crowell |
Meyer came down to the reception desk and met the man, who told her that his sister, a Colombian asylum seeker, had just been detained by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as she attended a scheduled check-in inside a federal building nearby.
The woman, Paula Sofia Ramirez Clavijo, had time to text the brother that she was being deported before her phone was confiscated by ICE agents and shut off.
"He didn't know where she was, he didn't know what was happening," Meyer told Law360. "He was just desperate for help, and stumbled upon our law office and came in."
Next, Meyer launched into a breathtaking race against time to locate Ramirez Clavijo and secure her release.
Local nonprofits, already at capacity, could not help. So Meyer decided to take the matter into her own hands, enlisting Keker associate Jonhatan A. Aragon to help with drafting a habeas corpus petition, which they filed the following morning.
"At this point, we had not even spoken to our client. She had no idea we existed," Meyer said.
By midnight on July 26, less than 48 hours from the moment she was arrested, the attorneys were able to convince a federal judge to set Ramirez Clavijo free — but not before she had been flown to an ICE detention center in Honolulu, Hawaii.
"She was exhausted, she was just shell-shocked, but she was incredibly thankful to have been able to get released and be back home," Meyer said.
Ramirez Clavijo's story is hardly an outlier. Since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, scores of noncitizens have been arrested inside courthouses across the nation. These arrests are only an aspect of an aggressive, multifaceted effort by the administration to remove as many people as possible from the country, with the aim of fulfilling the president's campaign promises of mass deportation.
Judges and attorneys have said these efforts are eroding the due process rights of noncitizens, in particular those who, despite lacking authorization for being in the U.S., might have other pending proceedings — an application for asylum or adjustment of immigration status, for instance — that the U.S. government has traditionally understood as providing them some legal protection against deportation.
The breakneck speed with which Ramirez Clavijo was detained, transferred and nearly deported also underscores how swiftly attorneys must respond in order to fight a person's removal before it's too late.
Ramirez Clavijo, 33, arrived in the United States without authorization in December 2023, claiming she was fleeing persecution in Colombia. Federal agents briefly detained her, but determining that she was not a flight risk or a danger to the community, they released her on her own recognizance with a notice to appear for removal proceedings in immigration court.
From that moment on, her habeas petition says, Ramirez Clavijo "has done everything the government asked her to do," filing an application for asylum in February this year, and appearing for her scheduled hearing in immigration court months later, all without the assistance of legal representation.
At her scheduled court hearing on July 24, Immigration Judge Patrick O'Brien informed her that the government was moving to dismiss the case against her, not as an exercise of prosecutorial discretion, but as a legal maneuver to put her on fast-tracked deportation. Judge O'Brien gave the woman time to respond to the government's motion and set another hearing for Aug. 21.
But as the hearing ended, a group of four U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents arrested her before she could leave the courthouse, according to the petition.
"They did not present our client with a warrant, verify her identity, or give any reason for her arrest," Aragon said.
When Aragon first met Ramirez Clavijo inside the ICE field office at 630 Sansome St., just two blocks away from Keker's office, he found her in agony.
"She was visibly distressed, anxious, stressed, in tears, and very confused about what was going on, understanding only that imminent deportation was at stake," he said.
Less than six hours after they filed the habeas petition, U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman issued a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the woman from being shipped out of San Francisco's ICE office, or removed from the country altogether, until the habeas process played out.
But by the time the attorneys had reached out to federal authorities about that order, Ramirez Clavijo was already aboard a commercial flight to Honolulu, under the watch of two ICE agents, sitting on a plane packed with families flying to their summer vacations.
On the phone with the ICE field office in Honolulu, Aragon was able to convince the agents to release Ramirez Clavijo immediately upon landing in light of the federal court order. The agents kept their word and let her go at the airport gate, but the woman was now faced with another conundrum: How could she board a plane back to San Francisco without a federally approved driver's license or a passport?
It took some skillful negotiation by Aragon to have the ICE agents ensure she could get through the gate again, this time on the way back to her waiting family members. Ramirez Clavijo made it back on a red-eye flight that landed at San Francisco International Airport on July 26 at around 6:30 a.m.
Meyer said the case of Ramirez Clavijo shows how aggressive ICE legal tactics have turned in recent months.
ICE has ramped up what is known as "expedited removal" — a fast-tracked deportation process where noncitizens can find themselves expelled from the country in a matter of days, or even hours.
That process was designed to quickly deport unauthorized immigrants caught near the U.S. border who had been in the country for less than 14 days, but the Trump administration expanded it to cover the entire country, targeting undocumented people who have been present for less than two years. On Aug. 29, a federal court blocked Trump's expedited removal policy and an appeal is currently pending.
Although Ramirez Clavijo was able to narrowly avoid removal thanks to the quick action of Keker's attorneys and a responsive federal court, many noncitizens are unable to stave off deportation even when they have arguable legal protection, in great part due to the fact that they are unrepresented, legal experts say.
Attorneys working pro bono can step in to help when overburdened legal aid nonprofits lack the bandwidth, Meyer said.
"Time is absolutely of the essence, because ICE is grabbing people," Meyer said. "I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but to me, these are pretty basic constitutional violations, Fifth Amendment right violations that anyone who litigates cases can do."
The efforts to free Ramirez Clavijo marked the first time that Meyer, a lawyer focusing on commercial disputes, intellectual property and class action who has experience handling pro bono matters, worked to release a person from ICE custody — but it wasn't the last.
More recently, Keker helped Salam Maklad, a Syrian asylum seeker who entered the United States in 2002 without a visa, get released from an ICE detention center in Bakersfield, California, where she was detained for nearly a month, according to a statement by the firm.
Maklad had been waiting for two years for her asylum application to be heard when she was arrested on July 9 as she attended a routine ICE check-in. She was handcuffed at the wrists, ankles, and waist, loaded on a bus for five hours, and dropped off at Mesa Verde ICE Processing Center, a detention facility.
On Aug. 8, six days after Meyer and Keker associate attorney Kayla Crowell had filed a habeas petition on Maklad's behalf, U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Thurston for the Eastern District of California ordered her immediate release, finding that she was likely to succeed in showing that her detention violated her constitutional rights and caused her irreparable harm.
"In its fervor to expel as many immigrants as possible from the U.S., ICE attempts to trample constitutional protections afforded to every person in this country, regardless of immigration status," Meyer said in a statement. "We encourage every lawyer who is able to consider taking cases like these, to file a habeas petition and [temporary restraining orders] to reunite people with their families. It is meaningful work that literally saves lives."
--Editing by Jay Jackson Jr.
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