Troy, Missouri

Donna Hughes-Brown came to the United States from Ireland at the age of 11. Forty-seven years later, she found herself confined to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center, facing deportation.

Hughes-Brown had gone back to Ireland with her American-born husband, James, for a family funeral. Their return flight took them to Chicago, and they were at O’Hare airport, preparing to continue home to their horse farm in Missouri, when federal agents placed her under arrest. Hughes-Brown spent most of August and September at an ICE facility in Campbell County, Kentucky, under conditions she described to her husband as “deplorable” – all, he told reporters, because of a $25 bad check she had written a decade earlier. She had paid the check back and received probation, he said.

“You don’t arrest 58-year-old grandmothers,” James Brown said in a sit-down interview with KMOV-TV. “It’s just wrong… You just don’t do that.”

Brown is a 20-year U.S. Navy veteran who served in Desert Storm and voted for Donald Trump last year – a vote he “100 percent” regrets. “Trump advertised that he was getting criminal illegal immigrants and deporting them, which I don’t disagree with,” Brown told Newsweek. “But that’s not what he’s doing. You look at the news, and they’re not telling the truth about what’s actually happening to a lot of legal immigrants.”

Although his wife never applied for U.S. citizenship, she has had permanent-resident status for decades, and she would not have been a deportation target in the past. Under the Trump administration, however, the criteria have expanded, with immigration officials leaning heavily on a clause in the law that permits the detention and removal of permanent residents with “certain criminal convictions,” including crimes of “moral turpitude,” which the courts have defined  as “conduct that shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality.” This was evidently the basis for the action taken against Hughes-Brown.

“I think it’s nonsense,” Brown said. “I think it’s a blanket thing to catch everybody, to fill beds.”

A neighbor, who has launched a GoFundMe page to “Support Jim and Donna’s Fight for Justice and Freedom,” described the couple as “very strong supporters and helpers of our community… They both are hardworking, honest, and caring individuals… they help anyone who needs it! They are always ready to help without expecting anything in exchange!”

In October 2024, according to Brown, his wife decided that instead of having a birthday party she would mount a relief effort for the victims of Hurricane Helene. After filling a horse trailer with clothing, water and other donations, they drove from Missouri to North Carolina, to deliver supplies to hurricane disaster victims. Less than three months later, they made a second trip for the same purpose.

“We do volunteer work all the time,” Brown said. “We give to single mothers. We help out military families. We have a son who is a Marine, and this is our payment.”

“I want somebody to have the guts and the fortitude to stand up and say, ‘You know what? This is wrong,’” he told Fox. “It’s just crazy that this is even allowed in this country… It shouldn’t be even thought that this should be OK.”

According to a recent update on Hughes-Brown’s GoFundMe page, her deportation hearing, originally scheduled for mid-September, has been postponed twice, most recently until mid-December.

Posted on October 8, 2025