Last summer, Donna Hughes-Brown’s flight back from Ireland was approaching Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. She was returning from her aunt’s funeral and looking to get back to her home in Missouri.

As the plane approached the airport, the flight attendant made an unusual announcement. All passengers would need to show their passports on the way out. Donna thought that was strange. Then she saw the armed officers waiting on the bridge from the plane.

They were there for her.

The 59-year-old Hughes-Brown is an Irish citizen and a lawful permanent resident of the United States. She has held a green card since she immigrated here as a child in 1978. She has lived in this country for nearly fifty years and is a grandmother.

So what crimes brought armed federal agents to the Windy City to apprehend this obviously dangerous criminal mastermind? Two bounced checks from over a decade ago that added up to around $75.

Your tax dollars at work.

For those of us old enough to have used paper checks, I want to ask a simple question. Have you ever bounced one? Not out of malice or as part of some scheme. Just because you were stretched thin, living paycheck to paycheck, and the timing didn’t work out? I know I sure as hell did. Because that is exactly what happened to Donna. A $25 check to a gas station. She didn’t realize it would bounce. When it did, she paid restitution and court fees and served a year of probation. She got her finances in order and moved on.

These were misdemeanors, not violent felonies. Misdemeanors exist precisely to distinguish minor offenses from serious ones. She did what the system asked of her and got on with her life.

More than a decade later, the government decided that wasn’t enough.

After a night in a cell at O’Hare, Donna was handcuffed and loaded into a van for a six-hour drive to a detention center in Kentucky. Four hundred miles from home. She lived in a pod with dozens of other women, sleeping on a metal bunk with a thin mat. Toilets were clogged and stayed that way for days. At one point she spent time in an isolation cell where the only book permitted was the Bible, because of course it was.

She would spend 143 days, nearly five months, in detention for two bounced checks totaling less than $75.

When asked about Donna’s case, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary offered this response. Writing bad checks does “not make for an upstanding, lawful permanent resident.”

A woman who has lived in this country for nearly fifty years paid her restitution, served her probation, and spent the better part of a decade putting that chapter behind her. Yet the government’s position is that a pair of bounced checks from over a decade ago disqualifies her from being considered upstanding.

The legal mechanism behind this is a phrase called “crimes of moral turpitude.” It’s a category of crime that can include offenses involving intent to defraud. It is a real legal tool with real consequences. It is also, in this application, an obscenity. The moral turpitude framework exists to protect communities from genuinely dangerous people. Using it to pursue a fifty-nine-year-old grandmother over a gas station check is not protecting anyone. It is not making anyone safer. It is not targeting the worst of the worst.

It is the system eating itself over $75 and the government’s need to demonstrate its authority no matter how petty.

Donna Hughes-Brown is home now. An immigration judge finally granted her application to cancel removal proceedings in December, and DHS declined to appeal. She got her passport and green card back only after the Irish consulate intervened.

The government spent tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars detaining a grandmother for five months over $75 in bounced checks from a decade ago. It called her detention a matter of moral integrity. It also left her sleeping on a metal bunk four hundred miles from home while her case wound its way through a system increasingly designed to make release as difficult as possible.

That is not enforcement, nor is it safety.

It is nothing short of cruelty, and as the saying goes, the cruelty is the point.

(Source)

• She bounced a $25 check in 2014. ICE tried to deport her.