Melissa Tran, a 44-year-old immigrant who built a family and a small business in Western Maryland, has been deported to Vietnam, a country she last lived in as a child.

Tran arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city, late Wednesday night local time, her close friend Tina Nash said.

Tran told Nash she flew on a nearly two-day voyage that started late Monday night at an ICE detention facility in Louisiana and made stops in Romania, India and Nepal before landing in Vietnam.

“The trip back home was extremely tiring,” Tran told Nash in a text message shared with The Banner. “We were in shackles the entire trip. ... I felt like we were less than animals.”

Tran’s arrival capped a six-month legal battle. Under President Donald Trump, a more aggressive U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency sought to deport Tran over a felony theft conviction from 2001, when she was a 20-year-old college student.

An immigration judge ordered her deported to Vietnam in 2004, soon after she pleaded guilty to stealing money from a doctor’s office that employed her. But the order wasn’t enforced at the time because Vietnam has traditionally refused to take back immigrants who, like Tran, arrived in the U.S. before 1995.

It’s not clear why Vietnam agreed to Tran’s return now. The Vietnamese embassy did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Tran’s case galvanized her adopted Maryland hometown and drew the attention Wednesday of U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen. In a social media post, the Maryland Democrat criticized the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies and ICE’s treatment of Tran.

“Is she the ‘worst of the worst’?” Van Hollen wrote. “Do you feel safer yet?”

Tran, whose full name is Mong Tuyen Thi Tran, arrived in the U.S. on a green card when she was 11 years old and has lived for nearly half her life in Hagerstown.

She and her husband, Dung “Danny” Nguyen Hoang, started a nail salon and were raising four children in the small Western Maryland city’s North End. According to court records, Tran has stayed out of legal trouble and attended all of her ICE appointments since her conviction 24 years ago.

In May, months after Trump returned to the White House, Tran was arrested at a routine ICE check-in in Baltimore. She spent five months in custody, mostly at a facility 2,700 miles away in Washington state, before a federal judge ordered her freed in October.

Her immigration case remained unresolved, however, and by early November, the U.S. government had obtained travel documents to deport her to Vietnam. After a month at home with her family, she was rearrested on Friday during an ICE appointment in Baltimore and flown to a detention facility in Louisiana.

Tran, who speaks Vietnamese, was greeted at the Hanoi airport by a nonprofit, the Ba Lô Project, that has been providing welcome bags and support to deported Vietnamese Americans.

Tran spent Wednesday night in a hotel in Hanoi with other detainees, Nash said. She flew Thursday to Saigon and is living there with some distant family members.

Nash said the protracted legal battle took a toll on Tran. She lost around 30 pounds and her hair grayed. When Nash accompanied Tran to her ICE appointment last Friday, Tran appeared scared to move or speak.

“She could barely function sitting in that room,” Nash said.

Hours before she was placed on a flight out of the United States, Tran called and sounded distraught but also relieved, Nash said.

“She is free now,” Nash said. “She does not have to wake up tomorrow wondering if somebody’s going to come and lock her up. I know that she’s not with her children, and I know that she’s not with her family. But she is now going to be able to live terror-free.”