An immigrant waitress from Hong Kong whose looming deportation brought home the reality of President Trump’s immigration crackdown to her conservative Missouri hometown was freed on Wednesday after more than a month in jail.
“They released me,” the waitress, Ming Li Hui, better known as Carol to everyone in Kennett, Mo., said in a voice mail message left for her lawyer and relayed to The Times.
Her lawyer, Raymond Bolourtchi, said Ms. Hui, 45, had been released under a federal immigration program that offers a “temporary safe haven” to immigrants from Hong Kong and a handful of other countries who are concerned about returning there. The so-called deferred enforced departure gives Ms. Hui a reprieve but does not guarantee her future in the United States.
“By no means are we in the clear,” Mr. Bolourtchi said. “But at this point I’m optimistic. It’s an immediate sigh of relief.”
Ms. Hui, who was born in Hong Kong, entered the United States 20 years ago on a short-term tourist visa and stayed long past its expiration, in the process building a life, having three children and becoming a beloved waitress serving waffles and hugs to the breakfast crowd at a diner in Kennett, a rural farming town in the Bootheel of Missouri.
She was ordered deported more than a decade ago but had been able to stay in the country through a series of temporary permissions from the immigration authorities that ended abruptly with her arrest in late April.
On Wednesday, the news of her release buzzed through the city of 10,000. Residents attending a City Council meeting asked each other: “Is Carol really out?” “Is she coming home?”
“I didn’t think it could really happen,” said Lisa Dry, a city councilwoman who called for Ms. Hui’s release.
The staff of John’s Waffle and Pancake House was elated. The diner, a morning mainstay in Kennett, rallied the community to bring attention to her story. Her co-workers organized a “Carol Day” fund-raiser, put petitions to free her on every table and swapped out the servers’ shirts with black-and-yellow T-shirts that read, “Bring Carol Home.”
“It took a whole village,” said Liradona Ramadani, whose family runs the restaurant.
Ms. Hui’s story drew widespread attention as it raced from the waffle house to the local newspaper, The Delta Dunklin Democrat, and beyond. The musician Sheryl Crow, who grew up in Kennett and whose name is on a sign announcing Kennett as her hometown, posted an Instagram message in support of Ms. Hui.
The public outrage and backlash to Ms. Hui’s arrest was remarkable in a town like Kennett, the seat of a rural county where 80 percent of voters supported Mr. Trump last November, and where many voters said they had supported his promises of mass deportations.
But many in Kennett said Ms. Hui should not have been apprehended. To them, she was not a gang member or a criminal alien. She was a mother of three they talked with at soccer and Little League games, who served them waffles and egg skillets, who cleaned houses as a side job and went to Sunday Mass at the local Catholic church.
Mr. Bolourtchi, Ms. Hui’s lawyer, had tried to get her yearslong immigration case reopened after she was arrested in April and said he had been preparing to file a federal lawsuit directly challenging her detention. Before he could, he said, a federal immigration official recommended that Ms. Hui be released under the deferred enforced departure program.
She next has to check in with the authorities on June 25. A spokesman with Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately reply to a request for comment about her release.
Mr. Bolourtchi said her release “never would have happened without her community standing behind her.” And on Wednesday, one of her neighbors made the four-hour drive to the jail where she was being held, to drive her back to Kennett.
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent for The Times who focuses on the politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
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