Mong Tuyen Thi Tran’s voice broke as she described reuniting with her family after months in an ICE detention center 2,700 miles away from their home in Western Maryland.

“I feel overjoyed,” Tran said in a phone call with The Banner. “For a time, I didn’t think I’d get to see them again or hug them again.”

Tran was detained during a routine U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement check-in around Mother’s Day and held mostly at a facility in Tacoma, Washington. After a judge ordered her release Sunday, Tran boarded an overnight flight to Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. When she landed, she held her husband and their four children, ages 7 to 20, for the first time in months.

“To touch their face and hug them, I just felt so emotional,” Tran said. “I thank God that he answered our prayers and that he gave me a second chance to see them.”

A Vietnamese immigrant known as Melissa, the 43-year-old has lived in Hagerstown for about half her life. She and her husband own a local nail salon, and her detention prompted a wave of support — and outrage. Many in conservative Washington County back the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown but didn’t expect the policy to target nonviolent offenders like Tran.

“The community bonded to her personally because they had known her for all these years, knew what type of person she was,” said Bernard Semler II, a family friend and one of several attorneys involved in Tran’s case. “Regardless of the side of the aisle that they were on, this was more a personal issue versus a political issue.”

A federal judge in Washington state ordered Tran freed on Sunday after 154 days in custody, noting in an 11-page opinion that the government had no grounds to continue her detention and had made a series of false or misleading statements in attempting to do so.

Though Tran has returned home, a deportation order from 2003, issued after she pleaded guilty to stealing from an employer, remains in effect.

Semler said her legal team is urgently exploring ways to address any issues that continue to threaten her status in the U.S., where she has lived since age 11. Her lawyers plan to file a challenge to her deportation order in immigration court as soon as this week, Semler said.

Tran said that among the detainees in Tacoma, she seemed to receive the most mail. Many in the community who had never met her reached out.

People also wrote letters to Trump administration officials and raised money to cover the family’s legal costs and other financial shortfalls.

“Without the support that I’ve been receiving, I don’t think I [could have] gone through it,” Tran said. “It lifted me up. It gave me hope.”

Tran said she learned of her release in a message early Sunday morning from her attorney Jennie Pasquarella, who’s based in Washington. Tran jumped up and down in excitement, waking some of the other detainees.

Soon after Tran was freed, Pasquarella took her to a local Vietnamese restaurant, where Tran said she was still shaking as they enjoyed bowls of pho.

By 10 p.m. that night, she was on a flight to BWI, heading home at last.