October 15, 2026
Kristin Hunt/PhillyVoice
Monica Ryadi discusses her detainment at an ICE holding center in California during a news conference outside the agency's Philadelphia field office Thursday. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, right, and Ryadi's husband and son, left, look on.
Monica Ryadi works as a registered nurse at Riddle Hospital in Middletown Township, caring for cardiac patients in the Main Line Health medical center. But for the past two weeks, she's been unable to perform CPR correctly or stand too close to an MRI machine, her lawyer says. Her ankle monitor makes it impossible.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has compelled Ryadi to wear the monitor since releasing her from a California detention center on Sept. 29. She had spent the previous two weeks at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center following her arrest at Los Angeles International Airport; she and her husband, a U.S. citizen, were planning to take their three-year-old son to Disneyland.
A court order returned Ryadi to her family, but she fears ICE may try to detain her again or deport her to another country, despite having lived in America legally since she was a child.
Ryadi's lawyer, Eric Rosenfeld, and her supporters — including U.S. Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, a Democrat representing Delaware County — gathered outside the Philadelphia ICE field office in Old City on Thursday morning ahead of her mandated check-in with authorities. Though he'd been in contact with ICE, Rosenfield said he wasn't even sure they were in the correct place. The first email he received told Ryadi to report to the field office at 8 a.m. Thursday, but a second said she should appear at a Department of Homeland Security building on Chestnut Street. Rosenfield's request for clarification went unanswered, he said.
"I would speculate that after they became aware that there would be dozens of people here and media, ICE decided this wasn't a great spot to have a check-in and in fact they would rather that Monica just go away," Rosenfield added. "... She's done the opposite, obviously. So we're here, and if they do want to do anything, they should do it right now."
Rosenfield said he was hopeful Ryadi would have the brace removed at the check-in.
As detailed in Ryadi's petition for habeas corpus, the 30-year-old emigrated from Indonesia with her parents in 2005, when she was 9 years old. They came on visas, the court documents say, and applied for asylum. In 2010, a judge denied their application but issued a withholding of removal order. This legal option protects applicants from being deported to their home countries and allows them to obtain work authorization in the United States. It does, however, leave the door open for them to be deported to another country that will accept them.
In the past, people with withholding of removal protection have typically stayed in America for years. That has shifted under the Trump administration's mass deportation policies. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran man whose case made national headlines last year, was deported despite a withholding of removal order.
Monica Ryadi shows reporters the ankle monitor ICE has forced her to wear since a judge ordered her release from detainment Sept. 29.
By Ryadi's account, recorded in her court petition, the officers who arrested her said she would "be sent to a third country but they did not name it." She received no notice of this destination while she was detained, and scant communication of any kind from officials.
"Once you're in there, you're not even human," she said Thursday. "You're just a number, you're a case to them. Anything you need, you have to ask the guard, and depending on the guard's mood, sometimes they'll let you have it, sometimes they don't. So you're literally stripped of your control, your dignity, your identity, everything."
Rosenfield said Ryadi is a victim of the "false narrative" propagated by the Trump administration that the immigrants they are targeting for deportation are violent criminals. Despite claiming to go after the "worst of the worst," ICE has mostly detained people with no such background. Federal data suggests over 70% of immigrants in ICE custody or in the midst of first-time deportation proceedings have no criminal convictions.
Scanlon, who represents Ryadi's district, argued that Trump officials are waging "a campaign of terror" to pressure immigrants into self-deportation and pushing much more than misleading narratives.
"The administration is lying to the American people about who they are picking up and what they are doing with them and what those people have done," she said.
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