A nurse and nursing professor from Lodi, in California's San Joaquin County, has become the public face of a new federal practice that lawyers say is making immigration detainees disappear from the government's own public locator system. Dr. Ann Lawani, 39, a Nigerian-born nurse who oversees 230 nursing students at the University of San Francisco and works at John Muir Health, was taken from her Lodi home by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents on September 16, 2026, and was later found — by her family, not by ICE — at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, Louisiana, The New York Times reported on November 11.
Source: The New York Times
On November 11, two California lawmakers from her own region publicly demanded her return. State Senator Jerry McNerney, whose 5th Senate District covers all of San Joaquin County including Lodi, condemned ICE for, in his words, disappearing Professor Lawani from her home and sending her to Louisiana without notifying her family or the public. Representative Josh Harder (CA-09) said he had written to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin demanding Dr. Lawani's immediate return to California for any further legal proceedings.
What happened at the Lodi home on September 16
According to the Times account cited by both lawmakers, Lawani was still in her pajamas when federal agents detained her at her home in Lodi on September 16. Senator McNerney said she was shackled at the ankles, waist and hands. She was able to place one call that day to family from a nearby holding facility. After that call, her siblings and her lawyer could not find her in ICE's public online detainee locator — the database families and attorneys use to learn where a detainee is held — and ICE gave them no answers, the Times reported.
When the family heard from her again three days later, Lawani was at a detention centre in Louisiana, more than 2,000 miles from Lodi. Supporters have said she was first held in the Stockton area and moved through El Paso, Texas, before the transfer to the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, where she remained this week. As of Monday, November 9, she was still missing from the detainee locator, the Times reported.
For families and lawyers, the ICE detainee locator is often the only way to file a habeas petition in the right court, visit a client, or stop a deportation in time. When a name vanishes from it, the legal clock keeps running while the family does not know where the person is.
A policy change the day before her arrest
Her disappearance was not an accident, according to the reporting. Lawani was arrested the day after the Department of Homeland Security conveyed that most detainees with final deportation orders — tens of thousands of immigrants — would no longer appear on the public database. A document announcing the change, obtained by the Times, provided a script for contractors to use with callers looking for immigrants, explaining that the information was not public. The decision to hide detainees' locations was first reported by the Associated Press.
About 30 percent of all detainees — more than 20,000 people — have disappeared from the database, according to a lawsuit filed last month in federal court in Boston by the National Immigration Law Center and several other groups, which say the change is unlawful. Senator McNerney used a similar figure in his November 11 statement, saying ICE has, in his words, disappeared an estimated 20,000 people nationwide. The groups argue that many immigrants with deportation orders still have legal avenues to seek release and win the right to remain in the United States, but those motions must be filed before ICE deports them. As of March 2026, about 1.5 million immigrants in the United States had final orders of removal and were not detained, according to government figures cited in the reporting.
Her legal fight — and the venue battle
Lawani's family wanted to file a habeas petition to secure her release and try to block her deportation. Her attorney, identified in the reporting by the surname Vieira, filed the petition in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California — her last known location — on September 18. A few days later, the Department of Homeland Security asked the court to transfer the petition to Louisiana, which would have required Lawani to find new representation and restart her case. On September 29, the judge rejected the government's request to change venue, finding that, in the judge's words, no diligent attorney could have known Lawani was in Louisiana.
Representative Harder's office says Lawani is a 13-year resident of Lodi living in the United States legally under judicial protection, with a valid federal work permit and no criminal history. Senator McNerney likewise said she has a valid federal work permit to stay in the U.S. Harder's letter demanded that ICE release her under an order of supervision, facilitate her immediate return to California, and provide her and her attorney with the proposed country of removal, the supporting travel documentation, and an explanation of the basis for her continued detention — a demand that indicates, on Harder's account, that ICE has pursued removal to a country that has not been disclosed to her or her lawyer.
The community she was taken from
Lawani lives in Lodi with, and cares for, her 83-year-old father, who is currently hospitalised, according to the University of San Francisco. At USF she oversees the education of 230 nursing students, and she practices as a nurse at John Muir Health. She previously worked as a nurse at Sharp Coronado Hospital near San Diego during the coronavirus pandemic. Her brother Samuel Lawani said her absence has cost lives in palliative care, where she is a recognised expert, and called her transfer across the country evil and consequential. USF nursing dean Eileen K. Fry-Bowers said her continued absence causes real and mounting harm to students, faculty, the university's accreditation-mandated curriculum work, and the safety-net partnerships she built.
Given her longstanding compliance, lack of criminal history, and substantial community ties, there is no apparent public safety justification for keeping Dr. Lawani detained thousands of miles from home while her case proceeds, Harder wrote to Secretary Mullin. Our immigration enforcement system should focus on protecting communities from danger, not removing the individuals who dedicate their lives to serving them.
What happens next
No ICE or DHS public response to the November 11 letters had been reported by publication time; one local report on November 11 said the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The immediate questions are whether DHS answers Harder's letter, whether Lawani is returned to California or released under supervision, and how the Boston locator lawsuit proceeds — a case that could decide whether the policy that removed her name, and the names of more than 20,000 other detainees, from the public database can stand. For Punjabi and other immigrant families in the Central Valley — in Lodi, Stockton, Fresno and Sacramento — the case is a practical warning: a detained relative may not appear in the locator at all, and families may need a lawyer and a habeas filing in the district where the person was last known to be, exactly as Lawani's family did.