Trump voter watches his wife get deported over a $25 bad check – We Got This Covered

In a truly heartbreaking and frankly, unbelievable, turn of events, an Irish woman with a green card, who has lived in the US since she was 11 years old, is facing deportation because of a bad check she wrote a decade ago. It’s an awful situation, and it’s led her husband, a military veteran and self-proclaimed Trump supporter, to say he “100% regret voting for him.”

This is all happening to Donna Hughes-Brown, a 58-year-old grandmother who was detained at Chicago’s O’Hare airport in July after a trip to Dublin for a funeral with her husband, Jim Brown. She’s been living in the US since 1977 and has five kids and several grandkids. Per The Irish Times, the reason for her detention is a misdemeanor for a $25 check she wrote back in 2015. To be fair, she paid the money back and was on probation for it, but now she’s being held in a detention center in Kentucky, with her husband saying the conditions are “deplorable.”

It seems the couple was caught up in new legislation that was amended on July 4 as part of what Jim Brown called Trump’s “one big beautiful bill” act. A police officer was waiting for her on the ramp when they landed, and five days later, she was moved to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. Jim Brown says he hasn’t heard from his wife in three days, and a deportation is scheduled for September 17.

An Irish grandma is detained by ICE after voting for Trump to do this to immigrants

Donna had been moved to an isolation cell after she refused to eat the “hot dogs and chilli mac” they were serving her due to her requests for a low-sodium diet. What’s wild about this whole situation is that Donna Hughes-Brown isn’t some criminal. Her husband told Newsweek that she does volunteer work for the homeless and poor.

Last October, instead of celebrating her birthday, she helped fill a horse trailer with supplies for victims of Hurricane Helene and drove them to North Carolina, per Newsweek. She sounds like a genuinely good person who’s being punished for what seems like a very minor mistake from a decade ago.

Her husband, Jim, who served in the Navy and Marines for decades, said that he had supported Trump’s promise to deport “criminal illegal immigrants,” but only now realizes that federal authorities are targeting other people to reach quotas. He’s said, “You look at the news, and they’re not telling the truth about what’s actually happening to a lot of legal immigrants.”

He also believes that people are afraid to speak out against what’s happening because Trump is “so demeaning to people, and he’s so condescending and so retaliatory.” It sometimes takes this kind of thing to realize that this is not really about criminals.

This isn’t an isolated case, either. There are parallels with other cases, like that of Cliona Ward, a green card holder who was also detained at San Francisco airport back in April after a trip to Ireland for offenses from almost 20 years ago. While Ward was released in May, it shows a pattern of targeting people who have been living in the US legally for a long time.

It feels like this is a massive crackdown that’s just awful for anyone who’s trying to live a normal life. We hope she won’t be deported, but ICE doesn’t have a good track record with making sure they get the right people, let alone deporting people for good reasons.