A grandmother living in Missouri is facing deportation because she wrote a bad check ten years ago for less than $30.
Donna Brown-Hughes, 58, has lived in the U.S. since she was 11 and has renewed her green card seven times.
However, when she and her husband arrived at Chicago O’Hare Airport after a trip to visit family in Ireland in July, a police officer was waiting for her on the tarmac.
According to her husband, Jim Brown, the police officer told him that Brown-Hughes needed to fill out some paperwork and would be released within hours.
However, she was detained the next morning and has been held at an ICE facility in Kentucky since early August.
Now, Hughes-Brown faces a deportation hearing on Sept. 17, which threatens to send her back to a country she hasn’t lived in since the 1970s.
Under the Trump administration, immigration authorities have detained several green card holders with past criminal convictions.
Green card holders are typically deported following violent or drug-related crimes, or for making misrepresentations on their immigration forms. However, ICE has detained several people in recent months due to past convictions for crimes like embezzlement and disorderly conduct—or for unknown reasons.
A Southern California husband is frantic after his wife, a legal green card holder who was working toward becoming a U.S. citizen, was detained by ICE. https://t.co/PTj9mWPOqC pic.twitter.com/a0aPoUuozD
— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) September 4, 2025
In Brown-Hughes’ case, the trigger for her possible deportation is a $25 overdraft check that she wrote in 2015. Court records show that she pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor offense, and her husband said that she paid restitution for the offense.
“People don’t know what it’s like to be poor,” Brown told the Beast, saying that his wife was a single mother working multiple jobs when she wrote the bad check.
Brown-Hughes has five children and five grandchildren, and works as a private home nurse in addition to running a horse farm in her town of Troy, Missouri.
“When we’re not working, we’re volunteering,” Brown said, explaining that his wife cooks food for homeless people in their community and spearheaded a donation drive for North Carolina residents after Hurricane Helene.
A GoFundMe page organized to help pay for the couple’s legal fees described the couple as “hardworking, honest and caring individuals“ and “humble people who are always willing to help.”
Brown, a Navy veteran, said that he last spoke with his wife five days ago, when she was moved to an isolation cell. Before that, he had spoken to her every day, and told the Irish Times that the conditions of the detention centre were “deplorable.”
He and his wife had traveled out of the country before without any problems, and passed through customs in Dublin without an issue on their most recent trip.
Brown said that he doesn’t know what he’ll do if his wife is deported.
“I’ve never been faced with this situation,” he said. “I have children and grandchildren, I can’t just uproot.”
His efforts to appeal to his congressional representatives to intervene in his wife’s deportation proceedings have been unsuccessful.
Brown said that when he contacted the offices of his senators, Republicans Josh Hawley and Eric Schmitt, he was told that “we don’t do legal issues” and that he had to wait for due process to play out.
President Donald Trump campaigned on deporting “tough, vicious” criminals. However, ICE data on the number of immigrants living in the U.S. who have been convicted of homicide or sexual assault suggest that it would be impossible to reach his administration’s goal of deporting 1 million immigrants a year by focusing on those who have committed serious crimes.
Brown, who voted for Trump last year, told Newsweek that he “100 percent“ regrets his vote.
He told the Beast that he supports deporting criminals, but that he doesn’t believe in “separating families and treating them like vermin.”
“You don’t see our story on Fox News because they want you to see all the horrible people they’re deporting. But that’s just not true.”
“It’s crazy that we’ve come to an America that treats humans like this,“ he said. “It’s more than wrong, it’s inhumane.”
The Daily Beast has contacted DHS for comment.
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