{"id":199064,"date":"2025-12-18T22:08:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T22:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199064\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T22:08:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T22:08:07","slug":"irish-grandmother-donna-hughes-brown-to-be-released-from-us-custody-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199064\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish grandmother Donna Hughes-Brown to be released from US custody \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Donna Hughes-Brown, the Irish woman who has been held in a US<\/a> immigration detention centre since July<\/a>, is to be released in the coming days following a court hearing on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Lawyers for the 58-year-old grandmother, who is a green card holder and has been a permanent resident in the US since the age of 11, filed a bond after the immigration judge, Kelly Johnson, ruled she should be released.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s no longer deportable,\u201d her husband, Jim Brown, said shortly after the court hearing concluded.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe DHS (department of homeland security) can still appeal the decision so that is why our lawyer is filing a bond. If they appeal the decision it can take up to six months for a retrial but we doubt that\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her legal team had about 40 character witnesses ready to testify and a letter signed by 18 US senators stating she should not be detained. The ruling came shortly after the first character witness. <\/p>\n

\u201cAfter that, they realised it was preposterous,\u201d said Mr Brown.<\/p>\n

\"JimJim Brown and Donna Hughes-Brown <\/p>\n

There was an acknowledgment at the hearing of the hardship Ms Hughes-Brown had endured. She was apprehended by a customs official at Chicago\u2019s O\u2019Hare airport when returning from a trip to Ireland on July 29th. <\/p>\n

Her court record showed she had signed two bad cheques, totalling less than $80, during a period of personal difficulty over a decade ago. <\/p>\n

She was transported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) facility in Campbell County, Kentucky, a six-hour drive from the family home in Troy, Missouri. <\/p>\n

Mr Brown described the food and living conditions at the detention centre as \u201cappalling\u201d but said his wife had remained resilient throughout the ordeal, passing time by teaching English to undocumented inmates. The family prepared for Thursday\u2019s hearing with no clear idea of her fate.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe didn\u2019t know anything beforehand. We felt it was a 50\/50 chance in either direction \u2013 either they were going to deport her or let her stay.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr Brown has been advocating for his wife since her detention<\/a> and appeared at two separate House homeland security committees on Capitol Hill, Washington, recently. At one, Kristi Noem, the secretary for homeland security, thanked him for his military service in the navy and agreed to examine the case<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat she has been through is terrible,\u201d he said, adding that he and his wife plan \u201cto work towards immigration reform\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe can\u2019t have people being unfairly jailed for this nonsense,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

But for now, the couple are looking forward to getting back to their horse farm in Troy.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s pretty excited,\u201d Mr Brown said. \u201cIt will take a couple of days to process but she should be out for Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donna Hughes-Brown, the Irish woman who has been held in a US immigration detention centre since July, is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199065,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-199064","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"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199064","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=199064"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199064\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199064"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199064"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199064"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}