African immigrant faces deportation to country she’s never been over court’s mistake

Seven years after arriving in the United States, 30-year-old Armande Rhea Namegni had made herself into a pillar of her O’Fallon, Missouri, community. She worked as a computer programer, moonlighted as a personal trainer at a local gym, and sang in her church’s choir. Now, she’s been in Immigrations and Customs Enforcement custody for the past two months—all after what was supposed to be a routine check-in with the agency went awry. 

“It usually takes 30 to 40 minutes for them to get back to me, give me a new date, and say, ‘Hey, we’ll see you on this day,’” Namegni explains of her previous interactions with ICE. Her check-in with the agency on January 23 instead “took two or three hours,” she says. “Then they called me inside. They said, ‘We’re going to detain you today.’”

Somehow a shoplifting charge had gotten onto Namegni’s record, despite her never having been arrested or charged with any such crime. The misattributed charge has since been removed from her record, but it doesn’t seem to matter. She’s stuck in the Phelps County jail, from which she spoke to SLM by phone. “Why are we denying her bond?” asks her close friend Josh Blose. “She ain’t going nowhere. She’s got 50 people saying they’ll take her in and make every appointment.” 

Namegni’s attorney didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But other experts in immigration law suggest that she’s been caught up in multiple escalating trends in immigration enforcement. 

“For the last forever, if you got detained by ICE, you got a bond hearing,” says Javad Khazaeli, whose firm Khazaeli Wyrsh specializes in immigration cases. He says the purpose of those hearings was to determine two things: Is this person a flight risk? Are they a danger to the community?

But the Department of Justice has changed its policies. Roughly one-third of immigration court judges have been fired, particularly the more lenient ones, says Khazaeli. Now, for the most part, anyone who ever came into the country illegally cannot be bonded out.

“The goal is by locking them up, they give up and just take a deportation order,” says Khazaeli.

A statement from an ICE spokesperson to SLM about Namegni’s case didn’t address the shoplifting charge but did say that agents with U.S. Border Patrol encountered her in December 2022 near the port of entry at San Ysidro, California. “As a result of the Biden administration’s border policies, she was issued a notice to appear and released,” the statement said. “Under President Trump, ICE will not ignore the rule of law. If you are in this country illegally, you can be subject to arrest and deportation.”

In 2019, Namegni entered the country by way of Brazil and then Mexico. She applied for asylum immediately. She grew up in Cameroon, a country that has for decades dealt with what’s called the “Anglophone Problem,” a political conflict between the country’s French-speaking majority and English-speaking minority. 

Namegni’s father is French, which is why she has the name Armand. Her mother is English. That’s how she has the name Rhea. But it also meant that in Cameroon she was perpetually caught in the middle. “When I was living with one of my English family members, French people said I was helping the terrorists. One thing led to another,” she says. Police accused her of being a spy. Her grandfather smuggled her out of the country, and she applied for asylum in the U.S. in 2019.

Namegni has a Master’s Degree in IT engineering from the University of Cameroon and here in the U.S. landed a job in computer programming at Attentive, a marketing platform. Blose says that Namegni once explained her job by saying that when you give a company like a health care provider your information, they send you an automated reply, and “she does the background work somehow to make all that work.” She’s also heavily involved in the First Baptist Church of O’Fallon congregation and moonlights as a personal trainer at Freedom Fitness.

But now, due to another change in DOJ policy, she faces deportation back to Uganda, a country she has zero connection to. 

Khazaeli says he now sees these sorts of deportations to seemingly random countries all the time. Someone like Namegni has a pretty good argument for asylum, given the threat of political violence looming over her back in Cameroon. But, Khazaeli explains, the federal government has signed agreements with a number of countries wherein those countries agree to take people who say they can’t be returned to their countries of origin. Many of the agreements are farcical, Khazaeli says. Ecuador, for instance, has agreed to take a few hundred people. But that agreement can be used in court as grounds to nullify thousands of asylum arguments. 

At a recent court hearing, Namegni tells SLM, “The judge granted for them to send me to Uganda. My lawyer tried to give all the explanations why Uganda wasn’t safe, but he said those were suggestions, just speculation.”

Namegni says that right now, a new attorney is working on an appeal but she doesn’t have a court date. She’s been told it might be four or five months until she’s back in court. It seems unlikely she will spend those months anywhere other than in ICE custody. 

About Namegni remaining detained going on two months, the ICE spokesperson said, “Being in detention is a choice. We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure with the CBP Home App. The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now.”

Despite all she’s gone through, Namegni remains astonishingly positive. A website created by her supporters includes testimonials from her fellow Phelps County jail detainees, who say that in Namegni they have found “a ray of sunshine” in an unlikely place. Many of the testimonials make mention of Namegni leading the other women in exercise classes. 

One letter, from detainee Jamie Holley, reads in part: “Armande wakes up early in the morning while the rest of us are still asleep. She cleans the entire pod and brings everyone their trays when it is breakfast time. When we are done eating, she takes the trays so we do not even have to leave our beds. We all go back to sleep and then wake up for lunch. She gets our trays for lunch as well. Once lunch is completed, most of us go back to sleep. But Armande stays up and, believe it or not, plans a workout for us.”

A committed Christian, Namegni has been leading Bible studies in addition to exercise classes at the Phelps County jail.

“Being in here has not been overall a negative experience, because I got to meet people that have done things they are not proud of, and I’ve been able to give them a little bit of light and hope,” she says. “At the same time, as awesome as it is to see people give their life to Christ here, I would like to get back with my family, my loved ones, my coworkers—the life I was building and want to continue.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify Namegni’s educational background.