A Macon woman who alleges Immigration Customs and Enforcement wrongfully detained her was released Monday evening from Stewart Detention Center after spending most of 2025 locked away, according to Asian American Advancing Justice — Atlanta, the advocacy group representing her. However, legal questions about her citizenship remain.
Alma Bowman, 59, was detained by ICE on March 26 during a regularly scheduled check-in in Atlanta. ICE claimed she was in the country illegally, but Bowman, her family and her attorney, Samantha Hamilton, say she is a U.S. citizen who was held unlawfully.
She was released Monday at 7 p.m. without a court order. The court system has for months been deliberating her status as a U.S. citizen. She spent 243 days in detention, AAAJA said in a Monday news release.
“We are so thrilled that (Bowman) has been released from detention and has regained her freedom,” Hamilton said. “And we are once again inspired by Alma, who fought tirelessly for her release and for the release of dozens of other women who she has met during the last eight months that she has been in Stewart — a place she never should have been in in the first place.”
Hamilton previously told The Telegraph that Bowman, who has lived in Middle Georgia for nearly 50 years, was born in the Philippines in 1966 to an American serviceman, Lawrence Bowman, and a Filipino woman, Lolita Catarungan Bowman. Her parents married about a year before her birth.
After Bowman was born, her father submitted paperwork to the U.S. embassy in the Philippines to claim citizenship for his daughter, but the embassy never processed the request, Hamilton said. Instead, it sent a brief letter addressed to her mother casting doubt on the claim that Alma Bowman was Lawrence Bowman’s biological child. Lawrence Bowman is listed as Alma Bowman’s father on her birth certificate.
Bowman’s father made a second attempt at gaining her citizenship in 1977 as the family was preparing to come to the U.S., Hamilton said. He gave an affidavit attesting that Bowman was his blood daughter to legitimate her, but the U.S. still only considered her a lawful permanent resident, not a citizen, when she came to live in Macon that year.
Bowman’s family and her attorneys say she was unaware of the uncertainty regarding her citizenship until 2013, when she was jailed for writing bad checks amounting to about $1,200, court records show. At about the same time, Bowman pleaded guilty to three counts of possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and one count of possession of methamphetamine.
Records show Bowman was given a questionnaire to fill out regarding her guilty plea that said she was pleading guilty to a “deportable offense.” Thinking nothing of it, Bowman checked that she understood. Deportable offenses can cause lawful permanent residents — which was Bowman’s status at the time of these crimes, according to Hamilton — to be deported.
Bowman was previously detained by ICE in 2017 after a routine traffic stop in Fulton County. She was held in Irwin Detention Center and briefly in facilities in Arizona and Texas while the government attempted to deport her before Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Georgia) brought attention to her case and returned her to Georgia.
She secured humanitarian release in November 2020 due to the risks COVID-19 posed to her health. As a condition of her release, she was required to attend routine check-ins with ICE.
It was during one of those check-ins that she was detained earlier this year. As she was held in Stewart, Bowman, her attorney and her family maintained that she is a U.S. citizen.
AAAJA filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in August, arguing that Bowman’s detainment violated her constitutional rights to free speech and due process. The petition also argued that ICE broke its own rules on when it is allowed to re-detain people and when it is required to release people who provide evidence that they are U.S. citizens.
Because Bowman was released without a court order, Hamilton said, a federal judge has yet to hear the petition and make decisions about its merits.
Bowman’s adult children, John and Chris Mitchell, said they are thrilled to have their mother — who they call Moomin — home in time for the holidays.
“We are super excited that Moomin gets to come home,” John and Chris Mitchell said in AAAJA’s news release. “It would have been another sad Thanksgiving without her. The plan is to get her some good home cooking and make sure she’s comfortable while catching her up on all she’s missed. We are still worried about the status of her ongoing case, but at least she will be with family instead of locked away while in this limbo.”
This story comes to GPB through a reporting partnership with Macon Telegraph.
