A Hagerstown mother and nail salon owner was set to be deported to Vietnam as soon as Monday, her attorneys said, the latest chapter in a six-month legal battle that highlights the impacts of President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement on longtime residents and their families.

Mong Tuyen Thi Tran, a 44-year-old Vietnamese immigrant known in her adopted Western Maryland hometown as “Melissa,” arrived in the U.S. on a green card in 1993 when she was 11 years old.

For much of this year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials sought to deport her over a decades-old felony theft conviction. She was arrested by ICE in May and held for five months at a detention facility in Washington state. But in October, she was released by a judge who ruled that the government had no basis for prolonging Tran’s detention.

Tran reunited the next day with her husband and four children, ages 7 to 20. Over the past month, she gradually returned to working at the nail salon, cheering on her kids at swim meets and picking them up from school.

But at an ICE check-in Friday in Baltimore, Tran learned that Vietnam, which has traditionally refused to take back immigrants who came to the U.S. before 1995, agreed to issue her a passport. That cleared the main administrative hurdle that had stalled her deportation.

Tran was taken into custody and held over the weekend at an ICE facility in Louisiana, where she was awaiting deportation as of Monday morning.

“This case is the best example of the cruelty of this administration and the fact that our system is broken beyond explanation,” said Jennie Pasquarella, one of Tran’s attorneys. “To be so insistent on removing a person who is a pivotal force in their community and in their family, who made a mistake 25 years ago and already paid for that mistake — that’s not a just system."

In a statement, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said Tran “has a rap sheet including forgery, grand larceny by check, and fraud.”

“President Trump and Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s message is clear: criminal illegal aliens are not welcome in the United States,” McLaughlin said.

Tran was a 20-year-old college student in 2001 when she pleaded guilty to stealing money from the doctor’s office where she worked as a receptionist. She claimed in court documents that her then-boyfriend was “abusive and manipulative” and pressured her into committing the crime.

Tran served four months in prison and paid nearly $30,000 in restitution. Soon after, an immigration judge ordered her to be deported to Vietnam.

But at the time, Vietnam was not accepting immigrants from the U.S. and declined to issue Tran travel documents. Even after the two countries reached a repatriation agreement in 2008, Vietnam only agreed to take back immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after July 1995.

Though the deportation order remained in place, Tran was allowed to remain in the U.S. so long as she regularly checked in with ICE and avoided further legal issues.

Her family and friends said that over the next two decades, Tran made the most of her second chance.

She married Dung “Danny” Nguyen Hoang, a fellow Vietnamese immigrant. Together, they purchased a home in north Hagerstown, raised their children and opened a Potomac Avenue nail salon called Nail Palace and Spa.

In court documents, her attorneys wrote that for the last 21 years, Tran has attended every ICE appointment and stayed out of legal trouble.

But soon after Trump returned to office, promising the largest deportation campaign in American history, Tran was arrested during an ICE check-in in Baltimore, then sent to detention facilities in Louisiana, Arizona and Washington.

On Oct. 12, U.S. District Judge Tiffany Cartwright ordered Tran freed after 154 days in custody, finding that the government had made no progress toward obtaining travel documents to deport her to Vietnam and that Tran had “languished needlessly in detention for five months.”

A number of Vietnamese families with loved ones in immigration custody reached out to Tran after hearing her story in the news, Pasquarella said. Tran invited them to her home to offer guidance and support.

Her legal case also continued to hover over her. She looked frail and had trouble eating and sleeping, according to Bernard Semler II, an attorney and family friend.

ICE placed Tran on intensive supervision, Pasquarella said, requiring her to check in by phone and in person multiple times a week. Each time, Tran worried ICE would take her from her family again.

Tran also was ordered to wear an ankle monitor for a few days.

“It honestly felt like harassment,” Pasquarella said.

On Friday, Tran was accompanied by Semler and his wife, Tina Nash, to a 9 a.m. check-in with ICE. After an anxious wait for more than two hours, an ICE official informed Tran that she would be arrested and deported to Vietnam, an exceedingly rare outcome for someone who had arrived in the U.S. before 1995.

Tran was in shock and had difficulty moving, Semler said. Nash helped her up, and two plainclothes officers escorted Tran out of view.

Semler said Tran and her family are distraught. Tran has some distant family members in Vietnam but is not yet certain where she will live.

“There was just a lack of humanity,” Semler said. “It did not need to happen the way it did.”