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.”
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