On 26 March a woman held at the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center in Texas filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas. She filed it herself, without a lawyer, and paid the five dollar fee. A judge ordered the government to account for the status of her removal proceedings. The government answered. She replied on 12 August and the clerk entered her reply on 17 August. Two days later she was put on an aircraft. It landed at Monrovia, Liberia, on 20 August. Her petition has never been decided.
The petition
The case is Ferreira Dos Santos v. Mullin, number 5:26-cv-01985, in the Western District of Texas. The docket records the nature of the suit as habeas corpus, alien detainee, and the cause as 28 U.S.C. section 2241. It was assigned to Judge Orlando L. Garcia.
The petitioner is Paola Ferreira Dos Santos. The docket records her as appearing for herself, from the Karnes County Immigration Processing Center at Karnes City, Texas. The respondents are named in their official capacities: the Warden of that facility, Todd Lyons as Acting Director of United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Markwayne Mullin as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Three lawyers from the Department of Justice appeared for them.
A twenty-one year old woman in immigration detention, writing her own petition, against the Secretary of Homeland Security, the Acting Director of ICE and the warden of the building she was held in.
What the judge ordered
On 9 April Judge Garcia made an order for service. It required the respondents to answer within ten days, and it told them what the answer had to contain. The relevant part of the order, in full:
Order for service, 9 April 2026. “The response must include all relevant background information and, where possible, supporting documentation, as to the following: (a) the date Petitioner entered the United States; (b) whether Petitioner was previously apprehended and released by immigration authorities; and (c) the status of Petitioners removal proceedings.”
The third of those is the question this project exists to ask. Four months before she was flown to West Africa, a federal judge had ordered the government to tell the court the status of her removal proceedings.
The answer, the reply, and the flight
The respondents filed their response on 27 April, with two exhibits. Ferreira Dos Santos filed her reply on 12 August. The clerk entered it on the docket on 17 August.
The Department of Homeland Security has said that she was “removed to a safe third country on August 19”. The aircraft landed at Roberts International Airport outside Monrovia on 20 August, carrying roughly twenty people, none of them Liberian. The Coalition has set out what is known about that flight in Twenty were flown to Liberia on 20 August.
CBS News found her in Liberia a month later, the only woman among the Latin American group interviewed there, and reported that she did not know where she was being taken until the aircraft landed.
Paola Ferreira Dos Santos, speaking in Portuguese to CBS News. “I was the first to get off the plane, and they said, ‘Welcome to Liberia. You’re in Africa.’”
Her petition remains on the court’s docket. It has not been terminated, no ruling appears on it, and the last filing recorded is her reply.
What the docket does not say
The Coalition sets out the limits of this record as carefully as the record itself, because the gaps matter as much as the entries.
The docket does not record what protection, if any, Ferreira Dos Santos held against return to Brazil. It does not show that the respondents told the court a removal was contemplated. No application for a stay appears on it. No order was made after 9 April. Liberia is not named anywhere in it. CBS News reported that most of the people it interviewed in Liberia had won protection in American immigration courts against return to their own countries, but its report does not say what Ferreira Dos Santos personally held, and this docket does not answer that question either.
The public docket is a mirror of the court’s electronic record and is complete only so far as it has been retrieved. Entries made after 17 August may exist without yet appearing on it. What is set out above is the record as it stood on 16 September 2026. The rest is under investigation.
The Coalition has also seen assertions made on her behalf about the protection she held. They are first-hand claims, not judicial findings, and they are not published here. They will be recorded if and when they can be verified against the immigration record or the court file.
Why this case is recorded separately
Almost everything the Coalition knows about the people moved to third countries it knows after the fact, from what they say once they arrive. This is the rare instance where part of the record exists from before. A court had the question in front of it. The government had been ordered to answer it. The petitioner had filed her reply. And then she was gone, and the question the judge had asked was never answered by any ruling.
Sources
The docket entries, the parties, their capacities, the dates and the text of the order are taken from the public federal court record. The account of her arrival in Liberia and the words attributed to her are from CBS News.
- Ferreira Dos Santos v. Mullin, No. 5:26-cv-01985, United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, filed 26 March 2026. Public docket, consulted 16 September 2026.
- Camilo Montoya-Galvez, Latin American migrants deported by ICE to West Africa describe being stranded “on the other side of the world”, CBS News, 15 September 2026, reported from Monrovia.
- Camilo Montoya-Galvez, ICE deports Venezuelan father from Texas to West Africa, CBS News, 29 August 2026, for the Department of Homeland Security statement on the removal date.
A Portuguese-language account of the CBS interview was published by JSNEWS USA on 15 September 2026. It carries no reporting of its own and is noted here only so that readers who prefer Portuguese can read it: Brasileira de 21 anos é enviada pelo ICE à Libéria.
The Coalition does not publish identifying numbers, detention file references or other identifiers belonging to people named in its reports, including where those identifiers appear in a public court file. Liberia carries an Alert on this site. If someone in your family was on this flight, the route for finding a person and the legal aid index are on the Resources page. The Coalition records what courts, United Nations bodies and identified news organisations have found. It does not advise on any individual case.