Category: Nation & World

One evening last summer, Donna Hughes-Brown was handcuffed and led into a filthy holding cell somewhere in Kentucky, where insects crawled out of a drain and feces streaked the walls.

The Missouri grandmother’s life had taken an unrecognizable turn days earlier, when federal agents pulled her off an arriving flight at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, arrested her and told her she would be deported.

Her crime? Writing two bad checks, for a combined total of less than $75, more than a decade earlier.

Hughes-Brown, a lawful permanent resident of the United States since she was a child, would go on to spend 143 days — nearly five months — in detention. She was only released at the end of last year after an immigration judge granted an application to stop her removal. Her story underscores just how far the Trump administration is willing to go in its quest to boost deportations, extending its dragnet to people who are legally present in the country with minor offenses from years earlier.

For those swept up in the expanding deportation drive, it is also increasingly difficult to win release, resulting in lengthy detentions such as the one Hughes-Brown experienced. In November, the number of people released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention into the U.S. fell about 70 percent from a year earlier, according to a recent report from the American Immigration Council.

When asked about Hughes-Brown, Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, defended her agency’s handling of the case. A conviction for passing bad checks does “not make for an upstanding lawful permanent resident,” McLaughlin said in an email. A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to a request for comment.

Hughes-Brown, 59, is an Irish citizen and green-card holder who immigrated to the U.S. with her parents in 1978. Before last year, she never imagined she would become a target of the administration’s clampdown on immigration, she said, and she believed that everyone should come to the country legally, like she did.

Now back home in small-town Missouri, Hughes-Brown said she thinks constantly of the women she left behind in detention: Jeimy, a 25-year-old from Guatemala who is married to an American citizen; Grace, a woman from Venezuela with a congenital heart condition; Beata, a Polish green-card holder with two convictions for minor retail theft more than a decade ago, her story an echo of Hughes-Brown’s.

“It was the intent for this to happen to so many people,” Hughes-Brown said. “It doesn’t really matter how you got here, the end result is the same.”

A $25 mistake

Hughes-Brown’s ordeal began last July, when she made her first overseas trip in almost a decade. Her aunt had died, so Donna and her husband, Jim Brown, traveled to Ireland, gathering with family at a lighthouse overlooking an estuary as they spread her aunt’s ashes.

At the airport in Dublin, Donna and Jim precleared U.S. Customs and Immigration. Officers pulled Donna aside and asked questions about her travel history. Then they let her proceed to her flight, she said.

As the plane was approaching Chicago’s O’Hare airport, the flight attendant announced that all passengers would be required to show their passports as they exited. That’s odd, Donna thought. Exiting the plane, she saw armed officers waiting on the jet bridge. They were there for her.

After a night in a cell at O’Hare, Donna received paperwork explaining why she had been apprehended. She was flummoxed. Back in 2015, she pleaded guilty to passing a bad check the previous year, a misdemeanor. The check was for $25, court records show, and made out to Krazy Korner, a gas station, and convenience store.

She was living paycheck to paycheck and didn’t realize the check would bounce, Donna says. After it did, court records show, she paid restitution of $80 plus court fees of $117 and served a year of probation. She stabilized her finances, building a career as a home health care aide. She was certain that chapter was closed.

The government also cited a separate 2012 misdemeanor conviction for passing a bad check. Records from that case are not available to the public because the case was either dismissed or expunged, a county official in Missouri said. Donna barely remembered it; she believes it was for less than $50 at a grocery store.

While lawful permanent residents have considerably more protection from deportation than visa holders, the government can seek to deport green-card holders for certain nonviolent offenses. One such situation: crimes of “moral turpitude,” which include offenses with an intent to steal or defraud.

But the government has an “immense amount of discretion” in deciding whether to exercise such powers and whether to detain someone, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor and immigration expert at Ohio State University. In the past, he said, he would have expected DHS to exercise its discretion favorably in Donna’s case, given her “half a century in the United States with only one or two extremely minor hiccups.”

To assert that passing a bad check more than a decade ago “makes you unworthy of living in the U.S. — that’s a policy decision,” García Hernández said. What’s more, detaining someone for months is “neither easy nor cheap.”

The average cost to house an ICE detainee per day was $187, according to the most recent figures available. At that rate, detaining Hughes-Brown cost taxpayers about $27,000.

‘Hell from both sides’

In early August, Donna and several other detainees were handcuffed and loaded into a van for the six-hour drive from Illinois to Campbell County Detention Center, a local jail in Kentucky that also houses ICE detainees. Four hundred miles from home, she lived in a pod with dozens of other women, she says, sleeping on metal bunks with only a thin mat and toilets that were clogged for days.

One of the women was Beata Siemionkowicz, a lawful permanent resident from outside of Chicago who has lived in the U.S. since 1995. Federal agents arrested her at her daughter’s house in August, her lawyer, George Gomez, said, and told her they were launching deportation proceedings. The reason: two misdemeanor cases for retail theft in 2005 and 2011.

Meanwhile, Donna’s husband, Jim, was doing everything he could think of to get her released. They’d met online and married seven years before, building a life in Cyrene, a tiny town south of Bowling Green, where they keep three horses and are active in their church. After Hurricane Helene, they twice filled a 30-foot horse trailer with supplies and drove it to North Carolina to help disaster victims.

A combat veteran turned CT technologist, Jim describes himself as a conservative Christian and voted for Trump in 2024. He’s not against immigration: He grew up around migrant workers in Texas, hard-working people who paid taxes into the system.

When Donna was detained, Jim wrote to every member of Missouri’s congressional delegation. He struck out, but then help came from an unexpected place: Rep. Seth Magaziner, a Democrat who represents Rhode Island. Magaziner brought Jim to Washington to speak at a panel on Trump’s immigration crackdown. At the event, Jim was asked why he had voted for Trump. He paused. “Because I was an idiot,” he answered.

The partisan backlash has been swift, he said. Longtime friends in the ruby-red county where the couple lives have turned their back on him because he criticized Trump. Meanwhile, more liberal neighbors have said his wife’s ordeal is a fitting consequence of his vote.

“My family and I have got hell from both sides,” Jim said.

In December, Magaziner also asked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem about Donna’s case during a hearing on Capitol Hill. “The Trump Administration claimed it would target the ‘worst of the worst,’ but no one understands how false that promise was more than Jim and Donna Brown,” Magaziner said in a statement.

As the months rolled by, Donna spent two stints in an isolation cell, where the only book allowed was the Bible and she was permitted an hour outside every other day. Her requests to be released on bond were rejected by an immigration judge. But on Dec. 18, after a hearing during which family members talked about how devastating her deportation would be, the judge granted her application to cancel removal proceedings. DHS declined to appeal the decision.

Still, Donna doesn’t intend to take chances. Her passport and green card were finally returned to her last week after the Irish consulate intervened. “I’m not even getting close to the border,” she said.

These days, she senses an awkwardness with some friends. They’re sorry for what happened to her but still support the administration’s efforts. That’s their right, she says, and she’s not interested in cutting people off because they disagree with her.

But she does want to talk to them. About how helpless she felt in her darkest moments in detention – labeled a criminal, locked away and unsure if she would ever return to her life in Missouri. She’s determined to fight for the women she met there.

“I’m going to keep on keepin’ on,” Donna said. “Because it is not right. It is not right.”

The Internal Revenue Service improperly shared confidential tax information of thousands of individuals with immigration enforcement officials, according to three people familiar with the situation, appearing to breach a legal firewall intended to protect taxpayer data.

The erroneous disclosure was only recently discovered, the people said. The IRS is working with officials from the Treasury Department, Justice Department, and Department of Homeland Security on the administration’s response.

The IRS confirmed the Washington Post’s reporting in a court filing Wednesday afternoon. Dottie Romo, the tax agency’s chief risk and control officer, wrote in a sworn declaration that the IRS provided confidential taxpayer information even when DHS officials could not provide sufficient data to positively identify a specific individual.

But in a controversial decision, Treasury, which oversees the IRS, in April agreed to provide DHS with the names and addresses of individuals the Trump administration believed to be in the country illegally, pursuant to DHS requests.

Federal courts have since blocked the data-sharing arrangement, holding that it violates taxpayers’ rights, though the government appealed those rulings.

Before the agreement was struck down, DHS requested the addresses of 1.2 million individuals from the IRS. The tax agency responded with data on 47,000 individuals, according to court records.

When the IRS shared the addresses with DHS, it also inadvertently disclosed private information for thousands of taxpayers erroneously, a mistake only recently discovered, said the people familiar, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

Romo, in her declaration, did not state when the IRS learned of its error. She said the agency notified DHS on Jan. 23, to begin taking steps to “prevent the disclosure or dissemination, and to ensure appropriate disposal, of any data provided to ICE by IRS based on incomplete or insufficient address information.”

She declined to state if the IRS would inform people whose data was illegally disclosed to immigration officials, and said DHS and ICE had agreed to “not inspect, view, use, copy, distribute, rely on, or otherwise act on any return information that has been obtained from or disclosed by IRS” because of the pending litigation.

The affected individuals could be entitled to financial compensation for each time their information was improperly shared. And government officials can personally face stiff civil and criminal penalties for sharing confidential tax information.

Charles Littlejohn, an IRS contractor, pleaded guilty in 2023 to leaking the tax returns of President Donald Trump and other wealthy individuals.

Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison. Trump in January sued the IRS for $10 billion in damages related to the Littlejohn leak.

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said that under the data-sharing agreement, “the government is finally doing what it should have all along.”

“Information sharing across agencies is essential to identify who is in our country, including violent criminals, determine what public safety and terror threats may exist so we can neutralize them, scrub these individuals from voter rolls, and identify what public benefits these aliens are using at taxpayer expense,” the spokesperson said.

There is little evidence that undocumented immigrants have attempted to participate in U.S. elections, nor is there a link between undocumented immigrants and higher levels of crime.

“With the IRS information specifically, DHS plans to focus on enforcing long-neglected criminal laws that apply to illegal aliens,” the DHS spokesperson said.

Treasury and Justice Department spokespeople declined to comment, citing agency policies not to comment on active litigation. The Office of the Deputy Attorney General is monitoring the ongoing litigation, but the office is not making any decisions on the matter, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to comment publicly.

When the IRS began conversations with DHS over data sharing shortly after Trump returned to the White House, senior IRS employees warned administration officials that the program was likely illegal and could sweep up misidentified people, the Post has reported.

During early meetings on the project, one agency staffer asked immigration authorities how many people with the same name may live in the same state, according to one of the people, illustrating how easy it would be for the Trump administration to inadvertently breach taxpayers’ privacy, including those who are not targets of immigration investigations.

The IRS’s privacy department was largely sidelined from the talks, two of the people said, and its IT department took over implementing the data sharing. That team had largely been taken over by officials from Trump’s U.S. DOGE Service, the White House’s “efficiency” office charged with shrinking the federal government.

Treasury officials justified the data-sharing agreement by arguing immigration enforcement was pursuing individuals who had violated criminal statutes, though immigration violations are generally civil, not criminal.

Under the arrangement, DHS would provide the IRS with the name and address of a taxpayer. The IRS would then cross-reference that information with its confidential databases and confirm the taxpayers’ last known address.

Immigration officials said the procedure was necessary because DHS lacked reliable information to locate individuals the Trump administration wanted to detain and deport, according to numerous IRS and DHS officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.

“This allegedly unauthorized viewing involves personal information that taxpayers provided to the IRS pursuant to a promise that the IRS would prioritize keeping the information confidential,” Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in a November order. “A reasonable taxpayer would likely find it highly offensive to discover that the IRS now intends to share that information permissively because it has replaced its promise of confidentiality with a policy of disclosure.”