The University of San Francisco is stepping up calls for the release of nursing professor Ann Lawani, who has spent nearly two months in immigration custody after agents arrested her at her home in Lodi, California, The Guardian reports.

Lawani, 39, was detained in September and has since been transferred between detention centres in California, Texas and Louisiana. Her lawyer is challenging the legality of her detention through a habeas petition that remains pending in California’s eastern district court.

“She needs to come home,” Eileen Fry-Bowers, dean of the university’s nursing school, told The Guardian’s Uwa Ede-Osifo.

Lawani came to the United States in 2007 and earned master’s and doctoral degrees in nursing before entering academia. She leads two university programs: a master’s entry program for students without nursing backgrounds and a bachelor’s program for students seeking careers in public health safety-net institutions. Fry-Bowers said she regularly engages with almost 300 students.

Federal officials and Lawani’s lawyer offered different accounts of the legal circumstances behind her continued presence in the country.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told The Guardian that Lawani entered on a visitor’s visa, overstayed it and received a final removal order in August 2013.

Her lawyer, Natalia Santanna, confirmed that order but called the department’s account incomplete. Santanna said Lawani applied for asylum within a year of arriving and that the same immigration ruling granted withholding of removal after a judge found she would more likely than not face persecution in Nigeria.

“That is not a temporary stay. It is a continuing bar to removal to Nigeria,” Santanna said.

The university helped arrange legal representation and contacted the area’s congressional delegation after learning of the arrest from Lawani and her family.

In a late-October letter to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, Representative Josh Harder raised concerns about the lack of notice before her arrest and transfers not being reflected in an online detainee database. Citing her compliance, community ties and lack of criminal history, he questioned the public-safety justification for keeping her detained far from home.

Students are also pressing for her return. Nursing science graduate student Casey Murray described an educator who remembered students’ full names long after orientation.

“We want her at our graduation, and we want her home with her family,” Murray told The Guardian.

Sources