The Trump administration has released a 64-year-old Iranian woman from immigration detention after a top GOP lawmaker intervened on her behalf.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise advocated for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to free Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian after she was picked up by agency officials earlier in June, the Associated Press reports.
ICE agents seized the woman, who has lived in the United States for 47 years, while she was gardening outside her home in suburban New Orleans.
“When she was picked up, we looked at it and said, ‘Are they really looking at it the right way, objectively?” Scalise, who represents Louisiana’s 1st Congressional District, which includes the New Orleans suburbs, told local press Tuesday. “And so they took a second look at it.”
The GOP added that he’d asked the Department of Homeland Security to give Kashanian “a fair shake,” with Kashanian’s attorney Ken Mayeaux telling the AP the congressman’s intervention had been “absolutely crucial” to securing her release.
It was only last month that Scalise went to bat for Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” singing the act’s praises for its anti-immigration provisions during a congressional press conference.
“One of the many great provisions in this bill that we came together to pass through the House are provisions that allow our ICE agents and our border patrol agents to get more resources, to get more support, hiring more border patrol agents and more ICE agents,” he said then.
“Frankly, it’s one of the reasons that every single Democrat voted no on the bill,” he added. “They want the chaos and the mayhem that comes with sanctuary cities and sanctuary states that we’ve been standing up against.”
Scalise’s more recent efforts on Kashanian’s case received support from Republican Louisiana state Rep. Stephanie Hilferty, who described her as a “devoted mother and wife, a caretaker, neighbor and dedicated volunteer,” adding more than 100 of the woman’s neighbors had written advocacy letters shared with the Trump administration.
“She’s just been an incredible volunteer and servant to our Lakeview community, everybody knows her because of all she gives and does,” Connie Uddo, a neighbor who leads a local tree planting project, wrote.
Kashianian, who has been married to an American citizen for 35 years and has a 32-year-old U.S. citizen daughter, first came to the country in 1978 on a student visa, going on to unsuccessfully apply for asylum after the Iranian Revolution the following year.
ICE said in a statement posted to X earlier in June she had failed to leave the country in 1992 after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld a prior deportation order against her. “She was ordered by a judge to depart the U.S. and didn’t,” the agency wrote. “Shouldn’t be a surprise we came knocking.”
Kashanian’s family and her lawyer maintain she was permitted to remain in the country provided she routinely checked in with authorities, adding she has “faithfully and fully complied with those terms” in the years since, even amid the chaos of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
“The facts of this case have not changed. Mandonna Kashanian is in this country illegally. She overstayed her visa by more than three decades,” a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security told the Daily Beast. “The Trump administration is committed to restoring the rule of law and common sense to our immigration system, and will continue to fight for the arrest, detention, and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country.”
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