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An Irish grandmother who has lived in the US for most of her life and holds a green card is facing deportation because she wrote a bad cheque for $25 in 2015.
Donna Hughes-Brown, 58, was detained in July after landing in Chicago on a flight from Dublin and is being held in isolation in a detention centre in Kentucky. She has lived in the US since 1977, has five children and grandchildren, and ran a horse farm in Troy, Missouri.
Her husband, Jim Brown, a US citizen and military veteran, told reporters his wife was not a criminal and that he “100%” regretted voting for Donald Trump as president.
He said she had been detained on a misdemeanour relating to a $25 cheque she signed a decade ago and for which she made restitution and received probation.
She was detained under legislation amended on 4 July as part of Trump’s sweeping “one big beautiful bill” act. The couple visited Ireland that month for a funeral. When they landed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport on 29 July a police officer was waiting for her on the ramp.
Five days later she was transferred to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Kentucky, where she told her husband conditions were “deplorable”. He lost contact with her this week when she was moved to an isolation cell, he told the Irish Times.
Brown thinks her requests for low-sodium diet might be the reason she was moved. “[They] tried to feed her hot dogs and chilli mac. She probably told them after the fifth time they tried to serve her: ‘I’m not eating that.’ So they locked her up. I haven’t heard from her in three days now.”
Brown said a deportation was scheduled for 17 September. “Hopefully they’ll dismiss it. We have 40 character witnesses we sent to the lawyer.”
Hughes-Brown was born in England and grew up in Ireland before moving as an 11-year-old to the US, where she renewed her green card but never became a citizen.
Brown told Newsweek that his wife did volunteer work for the homeless and poor. Last October, instead of celebrating her birthday, she helped to fill a horse trailer with supplies for victims of Hurricane Helene and delivered it to North Carolina, he said.
Brown, who served in the navy and marines for decades, said he had supported Trump’s promise to deport “criminal illegal immigrants” but that federal authorities were targeting other people to reach quotas.
“You look at the news, and they’re not telling the truth about what’s actually happening to a lot of legal immigrants. What’s bad is that Trump is so demeaning to people, and he’s so condescending and so retaliatory that people are afraid to say anything.”
The case has parallels with other cases, including that of Cliona Ward, a green card holder who was detained in April at San Francisco airport after a visit to Ireland because of offences dating back almost 20 years. She was released in May.
