Federal judge holds ICE official in contempt over unlawful Baltimore-area arrest

A federal judge held a senior federal immigration official who served in Maryland in civil contempt Wednesday after he directed agents to rearrest a Baltimore-area resident in defiance of multiple court orders.

U.S. District Judge John deGravelles awarded modest compensatory damages in addition to attorneys’ fees to Ibrahim Mohammed, an Ethiopian man who has spent the last 13 months in and out of ICE custody. DeGravelles, who is based in Louisiana where Mohammed had been held, said harsher sanctions would be warranted if his orders continued to go ignored.

Vernon Liggins, who served at the time as the deputy director of ICE’s Baltimore field office, committed a “clear violation” of two previous court orders when he directed agents to rearrest Mohammed at his home July 28, deGravelles ruled Wednesday.

The finding is the latest clash between the judicial branch and President Donald Trump’s administration over its deportation campaign, and it is a strong rebuke of the federal agency’s aggressive approach to deporting immigrants who cannot be sent to their home countries.

A representative for ICE, as well as the Department of Homeland Security, could not immediately be reached for comment.

“Today’s decision makes it clear that ICE, like all law enforcement agencies, must follow the law,” Mohammed’s attorney Bridget Pranzatelli wrote in a text message Wednesday evening.

“Though Mr. Mohammed will never get back the time he lost to repeated, unlawful detentions, the compensation the court ordered today is important recognition of the very real harm he suffered.”

The legal saga began last year after ICE arrested Mohammed and held him in custody for months in a maximum-security prison in Louisiana that reached a detention agreement with ICE last year. He and three other men held in that facility together filed a writ of habeas corpus arguing their detention was unlawful.

DeGravelles, who was appointed to the bench in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama, ordered their release Feb. 6, finding that ICE violated their constitutional rights by detaining them without a clear plan to deport them.

At the time, DHS officials blasted the ruling as reckless because each of the men, including Mohammed, had prior criminal convictions.

DeGravelles’ February ruling, however, found whether the men were criminals or not, ICE needed to follow its own rules to deport them.

In 2017, Mohammed was convicted in Prince George’s County of sexually abusing a child living in his home. He served a jail sentence and went into deportation proceedings upon his release. An immigration judge ruled Mohammed would likely face torture or persecution in Ethiopia and therefore could not be sent there.

After ICE made unsuccessful attempts to find a third country willing to take him, agency officials released him on a supervision order, meaning it determined he was not a public safety threat.

DeGravelles’ February order found ICE did not properly advise Mohammed his supervision order was being revoked when it arrested him last year. He ordered ICE to release him and follow the typical process: reopening his case before an immigration judge before trying to send him to a third county.

On Aug. 5, Liggins, who was recently promoted from ICE’s Baltimore office to oversee multiple East Coast field offices, testified he directed agents to arrest Mohammed on July 28 because they were going to reopen his case.

When asked whether it was necessary to detain someone to reopen a case, Liggins conceded it was not. But he argued cases move faster when someone is detained and that Mohammed should have been detained because of his criminal history.

It’s not the first time that federal judges have held ICE or its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security, in contempt of their orders, though it may be the first time an individual field office director faces such a ruling.

This month, a California judge held DHS in contempt over a failure to produce evidence in a lawsuit regarding Los Angeles immigration raids that occurred in 2025, according to CalMatters. So did a Maryland judge over the deportation of more than 50 children who had pending applications for asylum. In Minnesota, a judge threatened ICE with contempt for violating an order to promptly return personal property to people released from custody.

Delaney Nolan, a New Orleans-based journalist for the nonprofit news site The Lens, contributed reporting to this article.