Experts slammed President Donald Trump's administration on Wednesday for detaining an Iranian woman who has lived in the United States for the last 47 years and has no criminal record.
Mandonna "Donna" Kashanian, 64, was detained by ICE agents on Sunday morning as she tended to her garden outside of her New Orleans home, NOLA.com reported. Kashanian was then taken to an ICE detention facility outside Basile, Louisiana, which is about 170 miles from New Orleans.
Kashanian came to the United States in 1978 when she was 17 on a student visa. She applied for asylum, but her claim was denied. Instead, she was granted a reprieve of stay, which allowed her to live in the country as long as she appeared at regular immigration appointments. She never missed one of those meetings, according to the report.
She was also deeply involved in her community. Kashanian volunteered for Habitat for Humanity following Hurricane Katrina, worked as a caregiver, and shared her Persian recipes on her YouTube channel.
"I mean, my god...Why detain her?" Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X.
He called it "highly" likely that Kashanian was detained because she is Iranian and that the Trump administration "wants to seem like it's cracking down on Iranians right now, given Trumps' military action."
The administration has set a quota of 3,000 detentions per day. Kashanian was detained just days after the administration bombed three nuclear facilities in Iran.
Reichlin-Melnick said ICE probably "broke the law" when it detained Kashanian.
"By law, an order of supervision can only be revoked by an ICE field office director, which likely did not happen here," he said. "She is also supposed to be given a right to challenge that decision, which seems not to have happened."
Homero López, an immigration attorney in New Orleans, also criticized Kashanian's detention.
"Those cases are low-hanging fruit as they seek to meet Trump's quotas," he told NOLA.com.
A spokesperson for the Trump administration told the outlet that ICE agents are "proactively deliver[ing] on President Trump’s mandate to secure the homeland."