Hannah Brown, HB Law and Advocacy

Hannah Brown is a Los Angeles native who has focused on immigration law and wrongful-conviction cases from her student days at Loyola Law School to her current practice in Wayzata.

In March of this year, Brown took a case, which ended up making headlines, involving the detention of a University of Minnesota graduate student. The student, Doğukan Günaydın, is a Turkish national who had been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after being convicted of a DWI in 2023.

Brown points out that although Günaydın had paid a fine and completed court-ordered probation for the DWI, ICE nevertheless picked him up and arrested him even though he had no other criminal history. While Günaydın sat in the Sherburne County Jail in Elk River, the Department of Homeland Security revoked his student visa and began deportation proceedings.

“There are not a lot of immigration attorneys in Minnesota who represent folks who are in jail,” Brown said. “So my phone number got to him pretty quickly. I spent the next day at the jail with him and said, ‘I want to do whatever I can to help you,’ and he said, ‘Let’s do it.’”

Brown succeeded in getting a dismissal of the deportation case in immigration court. “And yet,” Brown said, “ICE wouldn’t release him. It took going to a federal judge and filing a habeas corpus petition.”

Fifty-six days after his arrest, Günaydın was released from jail on May 22 after U.S. District Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan signed an order stating that his detention violated his due-process rights. When Günaydın was released from jail that day, he spoke to the press and gave a special shout-out to Brown and Kelsey Hines of Hines Immigration Law, who partnered with Brown for part of the case.

With the green light that the Trump administration has given to ICE for aggressive detention of immigrants, Brown expects more cases will follow.

In addition to her immigration work, Brown has extensive plaintiff-side civil-litigation experience. But she said she wants to do as many immigration cases as she can.

“It’s a tough area for young lawyers to get into because it’s not a moneymaker,” she said. “But we need a strong bar. We need a lot of people who are willing to fight.”