{"id":11142,"date":"2025-09-10T01:10:13","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T01:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/11142\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T01:10:13","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T01:10:13","slug":"ice-places-irish-grandmother-and-green-card-holder-in-us-isolation-cell-over-25-cheque-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/11142\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018ICE\u2019 places Irish grandmother and green card holder in US isolation cell over $25 cheque \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Irish grandmother and US<\/a> green card holder is facing deportation after being arrested and detained after landing in Chicago on a flight from Dublin in late July.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s immigration agency.<\/p>\n

Ms Hughes-Brown was detained on a misdemeanour relating to a $25 (\u20ac23) cheque she signed in 2015, for which she made restitution and received probation. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Her husband Jim Brown accompanied her on the July visit to Ireland, when they attended a funeral and visited family in Cork and Drogheda. <\/p>\n

On Tuesday morning, he told The Irish Times about the \u201ccrisis\u201d facing his family since Ms Hughes-Brown was detained at O\u2019Hare airport in Chicago on July 29th. <\/p>\n

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 \u201cshe should not have ever seen customs in Chicago\u201d.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Irish woman detained in US after family visit to Ireland due in courtOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

\u201cSo they fraudulently arrested her. They scan your passport and that cheque violation was apparently flagged,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

He said there was a police officer on the ramp from the plane at Chicago after the couple had landed. <\/p>\n

\u201cHe told us she had paperwork to do and she\u2019d be back on the plane from Chicago to St Louis in two hours,\u201d said Mr Brown.<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cdeplorable\u201d. <\/p>\n

However, three days ago, she was moved to an isolation cell and her husband has been unable to reach her since then.<\/p>\n

He thinks she might have been moved because she was on a low sodium diet and that they restricted her diet.<\/p>\n

\u201c[They] tried to feed her hot dogs and chilli mac… She probably told them after the fifth time they tried to serve her: \u2018I\u2019m not eating that,\u2019\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

\u201cSo they locked her up. I haven\u2019t heard from her in three days now. It\u2019s stupid.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got a lawyer working on it. She\u2019s supposed to have a hearing on Sept 17th. It is a deportation hearing. Hopefully they\u2019ll dismiss it. We have 40 character witnesses we sent to the lawyer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\"DonnaDonna Hughes-Brown with husband Jim Brown. <\/p>\n

Ms Hughes-Brown was detained under the Immigration and Nationality Act amended by president Donald Trump<\/a> on July 4th as part of the \u201cOne Big Beautiful Bill Act\u201d. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

It came into effect on July 24th when the Browns were already in Ireland. <\/p>\n

Mr Brown expressed surprise that his wife would be detained over a $25 cheque misdemeanour. \u201cTwenty-five dollars,\u201d he said for emphasis.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you get a speeding ticket, that\u2019s 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\u2019s insane,\u201c he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are literally crackheads and attempted murderers let out on bond. They\u2019ve 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s drive from St Louis, Missouri.<\/p>\n

Speaking with Newsweek about the ordeal, Mr Brown described his wife as an active member of the community who organises \u201cblessing boxes\u201d \u2013 food pantries designed to help homeless residents and families facing hardship. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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\u2019s case represented \u201ca crime of moral turpitude\u201d. <\/p>\n

A plea to Missouri governor Mike Kehoe was met with the response that the arrest was \u201ca federal issue\u201d only. Attempts to reach Missouri senators Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, both Republican, on the issue have been unsuccessful. <\/p>\n

Mr Brown has also spoken with a representative of the regional Irish Consulate, part of the Department of Foreign Affairs<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey say they can\u2019t do anything legally,\u201d he said. \u201cWe don\u2019t know anything.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An Irish grandmother and US green card holder is facing deportation after being arrested and detained after landing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39,115],"class_list":{"0":"post-11142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories","14":"tag-united-states"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}