ICE officials to face contempt hearing over repeated arrests of Baltimore resident

Federal immigration officials who repeatedly locked up a Baltimore man in defiance of a judge’s orders could be held in contempt of court at a hearing scheduled for this week.

U.S. Immigration and Customs officials are slated to appear virtually on Wednesday before U.S. District Judge John deGravelles, who in July admonished those involved in the rearrest of Ibrahim Mohammed, a Baltimore-area resident from Ethiopia.

In February, deGravelles ordered officials to release Mohammed, who had been held by ICE for seven months. After his release from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, however, ICE has arrested him two more times earlier this year, citing a prior conviction for child sexual abuse.

With each arrest, the judge found, ICE did so in violation of his constitutional protections because Mohammed had already been granted protection from deportation to his native country and the agency hadn’t followed its own procedures for sending him elsewhere. It remains unclear whether he is still in ICE custody or not.

“Respondents shall SHOW CAUSE why the Court should not find those specific decisionmakers who are responsible for this redetention in contempt of the Court’s orders,” deGravelles wrote July 28.

Mohammed was detained each time through the Baltimore ICE field office, according to court records. The case, however, is based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the state where Mohammed was held in detention for a period of time.

It wasn’t immediately clear which federal officials could be held responsible if deGravelles, a district judge for the Middle District of Louisiana, finds they are in contempt of his orders.

A finding of contempt of court would be a rare type of ruling against the government and could result in fines or other sanctions.

News of the contempt hearing was first reported earlier Tuesday by The Lens, a New Orleans-based nonprofit news site. In its story, the Lens reported that a former Baltimore ICE official was apparently responsible for the rearrests in a possible violation of the judge’s orders.

ICE officials were not immediately available for comment.

In an emailed statement, Mohammed’s immigration attorney Bridget Pranzatelli wrote that what’s at stake is “whether ICE can ignore due process, ignore federal courts, and act as vigilantes in our streets without consequence.”

“Mr. Mohammed entered an Alford plea a decade ago and served the sentence that came with it. It is ICE — not Mr. Mohammed — who is violating the law now. It is ICE who is ignoring a federal judge’s orders, ignoring the constitution itself, and repeatedly re-detaining Mr. Mohammed without following the law,” Pranzatelli wrote.

Tricia McLaughlin, who had been serving as assistant secretary for homeland security, called Mohammed’s release “inexcusably reckless” in a February news release that referred to deGravelles as an “activist judge.”

In 2017, Mohammed was convicted on one count of child sexual abuse in Prince George’s County. Court records indicate that he took an Alford plea, which means he maintained his innocence but recognized that the court had enough evidence to find him guilty.

He was sentenced to 10 years in prison but did not serve the full term, according to state court records. It wasn’t immediately clear when he was released from state custody, but he was then detained by ICE.

During deportation proceedings in 2024, an immigration judge ruled that Mohammed could not be sent back to Ethiopia because doing so would likely result in his torture or persecution, in violation of an international agreement known as the Convention Against Torture, court records show. Available court records reviewed by the Banner do not explain the specific nature of the threat Mohammed said he would have faced.

That ruling, however, does not bar ICE from deporting him to a country other than Ethiopia.

Third-country removals can take a long time. They require assurances that the host country won’t send the individual back to their native country, and an immigration judge must approve the specific third country that’s been designated. Individuals are also given the opportunity to assert whether they fear persecution in that third country.

ICE made attempts to remove Mohammed to a series of countries in 2024 but was not successful. The agency later released him that November under an order of supervision, meaning he would periodically have to check in at ICE’s Baltimore field office. That required ICE to determine he was not a public safety threat or a flight risk.

But in July 2025, ICE agents arrested him at his Baltimore apartment, telling him that his supervision order was being revoked.

In September, he was transferred to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, a notorious maximum-security prison that agreed to hold certain ICE detainees with prior criminal convictions. He remained there for several months until deGravelles ordered his release in February of this year.

The judge wrote in his order that the criminal histories of Mohammed and three other men named in the lawsuit were not the issue in the case before him. Each had served a sentence, deGravelles wrote, “and then ICE itself determined that each should be released into regular, free civilian life.”

What was problematic was ICE’s inability to follow due process for their removal, according to the judge.

ICE cannot “continue unlawfully detaining people in anticipation that they may someday do so lawfully,” deGravelles wrote.