An Irish grandmother and US green card holder is facing deportation after being arrested and detained after landing in Chicago on a flight from Dublin in late July.
Donna Hughes-Brown (58), a resident of Missouri who is married to a US Navy veteran, is currently being held in isolation in a detention centre in Kentucky operated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the US government’s immigration agency.
Ms Hughes-Brown was detained on a misdemeanour relating to a $25 (€23) cheque she signed in 2015, for which she made restitution and received probation.
An Irish citizen, she came to the US as a child. A legal resident of the US as a green card holder, she is not a US citizen, however.
Her husband Jim Brown accompanied her on the July visit to Ireland, when they attended a funeral and visited family in Cork and Drogheda.
On Tuesday morning, he told The Irish Times about the “crisis” facing his family since Ms Hughes-Brown was detained at O’Hare airport in Chicago on July 29th.
Mr Brown said his wife was cleared by US officials at the pre-clearance facility operated by US Customs and Border Protection at Dublin Airport, which meant “she should not have ever seen customs in Chicago”.
[ Irish woman detained in US after family visit to Ireland due in courtOpens in new window ]
“So they fraudulently arrested her. They scan your passport and that cheque violation was apparently flagged,” he said.
He said there was a police officer on the ramp from the plane at Chicago after the couple had landed.
“He told us she had paperwork to do and she’d be back on the plane from Chicago to St Louis in two hours,” said Mr Brown.
“Well, I got a call the next morning from Customs to say she was being detained. Five days after that they took her to the ICE detention centre in Kentucky.”
Mr Brown has been able to speak to and text his wife during her incarceration. She has described the conditions of the detention centre as “deplorable”.
However, three days ago, she was moved to an isolation cell and her husband has been unable to reach her since then.
He thinks she might have been moved because she was on a low sodium diet and that they restricted her diet.
“[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,’” he said.
“So they locked her up. I haven’t heard from her in three days now. It’s stupid.”
Born in England to Irish parents, Ms Hughes-Brown moved with her family from Ireland to the United States, where she has lived permanently for the past 47 years. She has renewed her green card several times. She has five children and five grandchildren.
Although alarmed by her arrest, Mr Brown was originally hopeful that her case would be heard swiftly and dismissed, but now fears deportation is a realistic possibility.
“I’ve got a lawyer working on it. She’s supposed to have a hearing on Sept 17th. It is a deportation hearing. Hopefully they’ll dismiss it. We have 40 character witnesses we sent to the lawyer,” he said.
Donna Hughes-Brown with husband Jim Brown.
Ms Hughes-Brown was detained under the Immigration and Nationality Act amended by president Donald Trump on July 4th as part of the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”.
It stipulates that any foreign-born resident of the United States who has violated any law whatsoever at any stage over the previous two decades can be deemed inadmissible or barred from entry to the US.
It came into effect on July 24th when the Browns were already in Ireland.
Mr Brown expressed surprise that his wife would be detained over a $25 cheque misdemeanour. “Twenty-five dollars,” he said for emphasis.
“If you get a speeding ticket, that’s a misdemeanour if it goes to court. My problem is that it is hard to believe that this kind of treatment to anyone should be allowed anywhere. That’s insane,“ he said.
“There are literally crackheads and attempted murderers let out on bond. They’ve refused her bond twice. We kept it quiet for a couple of weeks because we thought she would be in court and out. Now it has turned into a crisis.”
Jim Brown served in the Navy from 1985 to 2005 and is a veteran of Desert Storm, the 1990-91 US conflict with Iraq. He and Donna Hughes-Brown married eight years ago and run a horse farm in Troy, about an hour’s drive from St Louis, Missouri.
Speaking with Newsweek about the ordeal, Mr Brown described his wife as an active member of the community who organises “blessing boxes” – food pantries designed to help homeless residents and families facing hardship.
In the recent aftermath of Hurricane Helene, Ms Hughes-Brown launched a community donation drive, filling a horse trailer with clothing and vital supplies and making several trips from Missouri to the stricken areas of North Carolina in the following months.
Mr Brown told Lauren Trager, a reporter for First Alert 4, a St Louis television news network that first reported the story, that the US government was arguing that his wife’s case represented “a crime of moral turpitude”.
A plea to Missouri governor Mike Kehoe was met with the response that the arrest was “a federal issue” only. Attempts to reach Missouri senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, both Republican, on the issue have been unsuccessful.
Mr Brown has also spoken with a representative of the regional Irish Consulate, part of the Department of Foreign Affairs.
“They say they can’t do anything legally,” he said. “We don’t know anything.”