Update, Oct. 14, 2025: Melissa Tran spoke to the Banner after returning to Maryland. She was worried that she would never see her kids again. Read more.

A Hagerstown nail salon owner and mother whose ICE detention sparked outrage in her Western Maryland community was freed Sunday afternoon after five months in custody.

Mong Tuyen Thi Tran, an immigrant from Vietnam known to clients, neighbors and friends as “Melissa,” walked out of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Tacoma, Washington, at 2:20 p.m. local time and into the embrace of one of her attorneys, family friend Tina Nash said.

Hours earlier, a federal judge in Washington state ruled that the government had no basis for prolonging Tran’s detention — and that officials made a number of false and misleading claims in attempting to do so.

The 11-page written ruling by U.S. District Judge Tiffany Cartwright ordered ICE to release Tran immediately.

The decision does not spell the end of Tran’s fight to stay in the U.S. A deportation order that an immigration judge issued in 2003, after Tran pleaded guilty to forgery and larceny charges, remains in place.

For now, though, the 43-year-old mother of four will be allowed to continue her legal battle from home. She has lived in Hagerstown for more than two decades, after starting a business and raising a family there.

Tran caught an overnight flight from Washington state and was greeted by her family at Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport early Monday morning.

Tran’s case, and the painful and prolonged legal battle that ensued, illustrates how President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign has swept up immigrants who over many decades have built their families and livelihoods in the United States.

Born in Vietnam in 1981, Tran immigrated to the U.S. on a green card in 1993, when she was 11 years old.

At age 20, she pleaded guilty in Fairfax County, Virginia, to stealing money from a physician’s office where she worked as a receptionist. She claimed to have committed the crime at the behest of an “abusive and manipulative” boyfriend who needed money, according to court documents.

Tran served four months in jail and paid full restitution. Soon after, an immigration judge ordered her to be deported. But under a longstanding policy barring the return of Vietnamese immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before July 12, 1995, Vietnam refused to accept Tran.

Since the U.S. government could not deport her, Tran was released under an order of supervision, allowing her to remain in the country on the condition that she regularly check in with ICE.

Family and friends have said that Tran made the most of her second opportunity.

She married Danny Hoang, a fellow Vietnamese immigrant she met working at a nail salon. They moved to north Hagerstown and opened a nail salon of their own.

Tran became known in community as a devoted swim team mom and beloved small-business owner. She claimed in court documents that over the last 21 years, she never missed one of her ICE check-ins or had any interactions with the criminal justice system.

Amid heightened immigration enforcement under Trump, Tran was arrested at her ICE appointment in Baltimore on May 12, the morning after Mother’s Day. She was then shuttled to federal immigration facilities in Louisiana, Arizona and eventually Washington.

In court documents, lawyers for ICE had argued that Tran’s detention should continue because her removal to Vietnam would occur “in the reasonably foreseeable future.”

But Cartwright found that in the five months since her arrest, the agency had made no progress toward deporting her.

“ICE took no further steps to obtain a travel document for Petitioner or effectuate her removal until after she filed this habeas action — while she has languished needlessly in detention for five months,” Cartwright wrote.

ICE had previously stated that Tran’s case was “under review by the Government of Vietnam,” according to court documents. Cartwright, however, ruled the claim was “not true,” noting ICE had provided no evidence it ever sent or requested documents from Vietnam.

“Because there is not a significant likelihood Vietnam will accept Petitioner in the reasonably foreseeable future, her detention is no longer permitted,” the judge wrote.

Soon after she was released Sunday afternoon, Nash said Tran called and was “screaming with happiness.” She and her Washington-based attorney, Jennie Pasquarella, then enjoyed pho at a local restaurant.