A throng of supporters and family members cheered the release of home-health aide Aissatou Diallo, who was set free by a federal judge after a charged habeas corpus hearing Friday morning.
ICE agents had detained the aunt of Adama Bah, founder of the Harlem based nonprofit Afrikana, from a line to board a plane at Laguardia Airport to visit her adult son in Texas two days before Thanksgiving. The agents questioned and then arrested Diallo, who’d immigrated to the U.S. from Guinea in 2001, swiftly shipping her to a detention center in Louisiana.
Bah, who came to the U.S. on a tourist visa at the age of two in 1990 and had her own deportation fight before eventually becoming a citizen in 2022, recounted on Friday how Diallo had taught her to cook, coached her through post-partum struggles, helped her with care and raise her young kids in the family.
The two talked every day before her aunt’s arrest, Bah said. “Sometimes we’re just on the phone listening to each other breathe.”
When Diallo didn’t arrive in Texas and wasn’t answering the family’s calls, Bah began reaching out to Congress members and nonprofits she had connections to.
“I’m doing this work and I can’t even protect my own family,” Bah said on Friday, as she waited for Diallo to be released after the judge make his ruling. “We thought we would never hit home like this, so it’s a wake-up call.”
Rebecca Press, a co-founder and co-director of Co-Counsel NYC, which works to help meet the legal needs of immigrant communities, agreed to take Diallo’s case and filed a habeas corpus writ on Diallo’s behalf on Nov. 26.
That led to Southern District Judge Arun Subramanan’s hearing to decide on whether Diallo should remain in ICE detention.
A spokesperson for ICE didn’t return THE CITY’s request for comment on Diallo’s release right away.
‘I Don’t Know, Your Honor’
Diallo’s case came to a head Friday morning as dozens of friends, family members and supporters packed Judge Subramanan courtroom in lower Manhattan as Diallo, in an orange jumpsuit and wearing a black-and-white striped hijab, was led in with her feet shackled together.
Subramanan quickly ordered her unchained.
Diallo, who’d come from Guinea in 2001 received a removal order in 2012 while at the same time granting her withholding of removal to Guinea, as she feared persecution if she was to be deported there. But US Attorney Rachael Lightfoot Doud, arguing on behalf of the Trump administration Friday said that while Diallo wouldn’t be deported to Guinea, they had a right to send her anywhere else.
“Ms. Diallo was detained because the government intends to remove her to a third country,” Doud said.
In more than half an hour of intense questioning, Judge Subramanan pressed Doud about why Diallo had been detained, and whether the agency had a warrant at the time of her arrest.
In a series of back and forths, Doud admitted the ICE didn’t have a warrant when they pulled Diallo from the boarding line after confirming her identity through a database check and then issuing an administrative warrant before she was technically arrested.
“It was not a warrantless arrest because she was not taken into custody until there was a warrant,” Doud argued.
Diallo’s lawyer Rebecca Press pushed back, arguing Diallo lost her liberty the moment she was pulled from the line and thus was arrested without a warrant.
“She was not free to leave after she was taken from the security line,” Press said.
Subramanan asked Doud point blank, “how did ICE decide to detain Ms. Diallo?”
“I don’t know, Your Honor” Doud replied to that, and to a string of probing questions from the skeptical judge about Diallo’s arrest and detention.
Also at issue was whether the government had a right to keep Diallo in detention at all, more than a decade since her removal order in 2012. The government typically has a 90-day window to take action on a removal order, and Diallo’s window came and went without her being arrested or required her to periodically check-in with ICE.
Doud argued that the government had the right, under federal regulations, to detain her, even though the 90-day window was long over, an argument that was swiftly rebuked by Judge Subramanan.
“I guess if you’re just picking words out of the statute and putting them together?” he said. “I have the statute. Do you want my copy?”
Judge Subramanan took a break for a few minutes, as members of the crowd waited expectantly. He then re-emerged from his chambers and declared, “the petition for release from detention is granted,” as the crowd erupted into cheers.
“Ms. Diallo will be released immediately,” he went on.
While Subramanan’s ruled that Diallo’s arrest was unlawful, he said the court was still considering whether or not the government had a right to detain her in the future, though ICE was barred from re-arresting her while that matter was pending.
“Ms. Diallo, I know that you did not have the opportunity to have a Thanksgiving,” Subramanan said, addressing Diallo directly. “I wish you luck.”
“Thank you so much,” she replied.
‘No One Should Have To Go Through This’
Outside the courthouse, supporters gathered waiting for Diallo to emerge.
“To think what she had gone through in the past two weeks, to walk into this courtroom shackled,” said Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who’d sat in on the proceedings. “These stories are getting crazier and crazier. We are literally just going after people who are living lives productively.”
Bah told the crowd that her aunt’s freedom had been won in part due to her own wide network of connections. So many others, she said, can’t get access to legal support and languish in detention for months or face deportation to countries where they could be killed or barely know.
“It took three congressional members and 12 nonprofit organizations to get my aunt free,” she said. “No one should have to have gone through this.”
Bah said Diallo would call while she was detained, and gave Bah information about other immigrants locked up with her who also needed help.
“I hate to say it, like everything happens for a reason, and God put my aunt in this situation to kind of give me more information,” she said.
On a frigid Friday afternoon, the crowd dispersed while Bah, her siblings and mother stayed on waiting for Diallo to be cleared for release. She finally emerged several hours later wrapped in blankets.
“I’m feeling happy,” she said, eyes damp with tears. “But you know, I don’t know. I don’t know.”
