Photo from Springfield Daily Citizen, used with permission of Delta Dunklin Democrat

Kennet, Missouri

Carol Hui got a phone call from federal immigration officials at the end of April. They told her to report to an ICE field office in St. Louis, three hours north of her home in the farming town of Kennet, Missouri.  When she showed up as ordered, ICE agents did some research. After determining that she had overstayed a tourist visa two decades earlier, they jailed her pending deportation to Hong Kong, a place she had left in 2004.

In Kennet, people took the news hard. “She always has a smile,” one friend told a reporter for Fox News. “She’ll hug you, she’ll greet you. She always wants to know what’s going on. She’ll share stories of her kids and how proud she is of their scholastic awards.” At St. Cecilia Catholic Church, where Hui had been a regular at Sunday morning Mass with her partner and their three U.S.-born children, worshippers organized prayer vigils and arranged meal deliveries for her family. One church friend, Vanessa Cowart, wanted a New York Times reporter to know she had voted for Donald Trump (“so did practically everyone here,” she said) and generally backed the idea of deporting gang members and criminals. But “no one voted to deport Moms,” Cowart said, adding, after a pause, “This is Carol.”

Reactions were also strong at John’s Waffle and Pancake House, where Hui had been a waitress for twenty years. Co-workers took to wearing “Bring Carol Home” t-shirts and organized a “Carol Day” fund-raiser that netted nearly $20,000. “This lady has the biggest heart in the whole world,” Liridona Ramadani, one of the restaurant’s owners, told the Times.

Hui spent the month of May in a series of county jails. That meant missing her older son’s middle-school graduation ceremony, where he was honored with an agricultural science award. She also lost out on the chance to sit in the stands of a baseball game with her younger son on the pitcher’s mound.

In the end, though, she won her release, thanks to a federal program offering “temporary safe haven” to immigrants from a handful of countries, including Hong Kong, if they have reason to fear for their safety there. “By no means are we in the clear,” her lawyer told the Times. “But at this point I’m optimistic. It’s an immediate sigh of relief.”

Hui’s friends celebrated with her. “One moment we’ll never forget: when her kids ran into her arms for the first time in over a month,” Ramadani wrote in a Facebook post. “There wasn’t a dry eye in sight. Many of us stood there with tears streaming down our faces, overwhelmed by the pure love in that hug. It was one of those moments that reminds you what truly matters… Welcome home, Carol. We’ve missed you so much.”