ICE Says Lawful Residents Have Nothing to Fear. It Held Donna Hughes-Brown for 143 Days.
She has lived in the United States since 1977. The government's case rested on two checks to a grocery store, worth about twenty-five dollars each, that she paid back more than a decade ago.
Donna Hughes-Brown has been a lawful permanent resident for forty-eight years. She wrote two bad checks to a grocery store, in 2012 and 2015, worth less than sixty dollars together, and paid them back. Returning from her aunt's funeral in Ireland, she was detained at Chicago O'Hare and held for 143 days.
Donna keeps a dog that was never hers.
It belonged to a Korean War prisoner of war she cared for at the end of his life, a man with no family left, and when he died she took his dog home. She has five children and five grandchildren, rides horses, volunteers with equine therapy programs and dog rescues, and once drove a load of supplies from Missouri to North Carolina after Hurricane Helene.
She also wrote two bad checks over ten years ago, both of which she had already paid restitution for.
For that, ICE detained her for nearly half a year.
Donna Hughes-Brown came to the United States in 1977, when her family moved here from England and she was eleven years old. She has been a lawful permanent resident for forty-eight years. Her husband Jim is a retired Navy combat veteran of twenty years. Her son is a Marine, stationed in Okinawa.
In 2012 she wrote a bad check to her local grocery store. In 2015 she wrote another. Together they came to less than sixty dollars. She was charged with a misdemeanor, paid the money back, and completed a year of probation, according to written testimony her husband later submitted to Congress.
In 2016, with both of those already on her record, she flew to England with her granddaughter so the girl could meet her great-grandmother. She came home through a United States airport and was admitted without incident.
Nine years later she flew home from her aunt's funeral in Ireland.
July 29, 2025
She landed at Chicago O'Hare and was pulled aside at the border. Jim was refused permission to go with her. He was told she needed to sign some paperwork and would be on the next flight home.
She was not on the next flight home. She was arrested, transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, and placed in removal proceedings.
By her husband's account, she was driven from Illinois to Kentucky in a prisoner van, a journey of about six hours, without seatbelts and without food or water for twelve hours. She was held at the Campbell County Detention Center.
In September, he says, she was put in an isolation cell after complaining that the food conflicted with a low sodium diet.
She was held for 143 days.
What the government said
In October, ICE issued a statement:
*"Hughes-Brown was referred to secondary inspection due to her prior criminal history, which includes two convictions for fraud involving the passing of bad checks, one in 2012 and another for 2015. Following the inspection, she was arrested and subsequently transferred to ICE custody, where she was placed in removal proceedings."*
On November 19, Jim Brown read the agency's published enforcement position into the congressional record:
*"Under the leadership of President Trump and Secretary Noem, ICE is prioritizing the removal of criminal alien offenders who POSE a THREAT to the public safety and the rule of law. Individuals who are in the United States lawfully who have not violated immigration laws or committed crimes have no reason to fear enforcement actions."*
What the law actually says
A permanent resident coming home is normally not treated as someone asking to be let into the country, unless crimes have been committed, no matter how long ago. It is likely that U.S. Customs and Border Protection had the authority to detain her.
Under 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(13)(C)(v), a permanent resident is regarded as seeking admission if she "has committed an offense identified in section 1182(a)(2)." Once she was an applicant for admission, Donna was inadmissible for a crime involving moral turpitude. That provision carries no lookback period. There is no point at which an old conviction stops counting.
Only one crime
The law does contain a safety valve. The petty offense exception spares someone whose maximum possible penalty did not exceed one year and who was not sentenced to more than six months. A Missouri class A misdemeanor caps at exactly one year, and she was never sentenced to a day. Restitution and probation clear that test comfortably.
The exception failed on three words. It applies only to someone who "committed only one crime."
She wrote two, three years apart, to a grocery store, for about twenty-five dollars apiece.
The case for the government
No individual officer chose this. A permanent resident with two qualifying offenses is, by the plain text of the statute, an applicant for admission rather than a resident coming home. Once that is true, the law directs that she shall be detained if she is not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted. The officers at the port of entry had no authority to waive the category. Whether a bad check conviction is a crime of moral turpitude is a question of law for an immigration judge, not for an inspection booth. She wrote the checks and has never denied it. The government's position throughout was that she was entitled to a hearing, and that the hearing would decide the question.
The problem was that she got out on day 143.
What the 143 days were
She spent the first week at Broadview, on the edge of Chicago, in a seven-woman cell with a Polish woman, a Ukrainian woman, two Chinese women and two Latina women. English was the only language they had in common. She spent that week teaching the others basic phrases using sketches and hand signals.
In Kentucky she was housed first in a pod of sixty-four beds, then a dormitory of thirty-two. The bunks were steel frame and the sleeping mats were worn through. The women were entitled to an hour a day in the yard, but heat or heavy rain cancelled it, and sometimes a full week passed with nobody going outside. Of the food she said only that it was to be endured.
She was held with the general jail population. Her only reference for what that would be like was prison television. What happened instead was that the other women found out why she was there.
*"Once those girls realized why I was there, they took me under their wing and just said: This is bulls\*\*t. We are here because we did something to be here. You did nothing."*
In September she met a young woman who had been brought from Guatemala at eleven years old, applied for permanent status at eighteen, and had been moved through detention centers in Texas, Louisiana and Indiana. She had no case number and had never been visited by an ICE representative. Hughes-Brown asked the representative on her unit whether he had spoken to her. He said he was sure he had. They checked his list. Her name was not on it.
Jim spent those months contacting senators and congressional offices, and the long nights reading. "I'm pissed," he said afterward. "Because Donna's story, there are hundreds of others in that same situation."
If I am the worst of the worst then America has a bigger problem than it thinks it does.
December 18
An immigration judge granted her cancellation of removal. The requirements are five years as a permanent resident, seven years of continuous residence, and no aggravated felony. She had forty-eight years, forty-eight years, and none. She met every one of them on the day they took her, and on all 143 days that followed.
What changed in between was that eighteen United States senators signed a letter saying she should not be detained, and a member of Congress asked the Secretary of Homeland Security about her by name in a public hearing.
Because the statute exempts anyone granted that relief, the same two checks can never make her an applicant for admission again. She put it more simply.
*"I cannot be brought up on the same issue again in the future."*
She has said she never sought citizenship because she did not want to give up her Irish identity, after four decades of living, working and paying taxes here. She now intends to take the test.
Eighteen senators and a member of Congress intervened on her behalf. The statute they intervened against is unchanged.