ICE Detained a Nun as She Walked to Church on Sunday Morning, Wearing Her Habit

Just in case you’ve been laboring under the delusion that literally anyone in America is safe from the harassment of federal immigration agents: One of ICE’s most recent quarries in Texas was apparently a Catholic freakin’ nun, who they detained while she was literally walking down the street on her way to Mass on Sunday morning, wearing the full habit and everything. Immigration and Customs Enforcement looked at this lady–who has also worked as a registered nurse for more than a decade–and thought to themselves, “We are so powerful that not even the optics of arresting this person will give us pause for even a second.” Consider for a moment how utterly filled with arrogance and grandiosity this entire agency is, when they’re pulling up to detain a nun.

Said nun is 56-year-old Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a native of Nigeria who originally fled threats of violence as a refugee and sought asylum in the United States. That asylum claim was denied in 2019, but the same judge did grant her protection from removal to Nigeria, noting that Ugboaja would likely face a high likelihood of torture or execution if she returned to the African nation. For more than a decade, meanwhile, she’s lived and worked in the United States, as a registered nurse outside of the church system, and as a nun as part of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy, while serving as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at Our Lady of Sorrows Church. She was arrested by armed agents on a Sunday morning as she clutched her Bible and rosary, confused by what was happening and unsuccessfully pleading with the ICE agents to allow her to attend Mass and receive communion.

“Even when I told them, ‘Can I go to Mass; can I just attend Mass; can I receive communion,’ the answer was ‘No,'” said Ugboaja in a press conference this week, her first comments since the detention at the end of June. “For me, a nun, not to go to Mass on Sunday, not to receive Communion, it was very, very heartbreaking for me.”

Sr. Leticia Ugboaja, a nun detained by ICE while walking to Mass: “I’m just a small woman, a nun, armless[sic]*—just with my rosary, my keys, and my phone. I am not the only one… Before anyone is taken into custody, away from their parishes, give them the opportunity to be heard.”
*unarmed

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— Peggy Stuart (@peggystuart.bsky.social) 12:37 AM · Jul 24, 2026

Ugboaja might simply have remained in detention, in a system that has seen record numbers of detainee deaths in 2025 and 2026, but the sheer heartlessness of the imagery of a detained nun wearing a habit garnered a bit too much media and political attention. Parish officials posting about Sister Ugboaja on social media drew attention to the case, and members of Congress lobbied for her release. This doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, however: ICE is still pursuing Ugboaja’s deportation case, and she is expected to check back in with ICE in another meeting in late July, where she may be detained again or fitted with an ankle monitor. Her attorneys naturally decry this as a cruel punishment against a person who has dedicated herself entirely to serving her community’s physical and spiritual health over the last decade.

“We are asking that she not be detained and that no ankle monitor be placed on a person who has broken no rule, posed no danger, and given this country a decade of nursing and a lifetime of ministry,” said attorney Carlos M. Garcia.

Because Sister Ugboaja’s asylum claim was denied back in 2019, she has technically had a final order of removal pending against her ever since–we can surmise that the government just never wanted to get around to apprehending and forcibly deporting a senior citizen nun/nurse because it is:

A. Perhaps the worst optics imaginable, and

B. A genuine loss to the United States, to lose a caring, compassionate, skilled healthcare worker who is a law-abiding resident and positive member of American society in every way you could measure. As Ugboaja’s attorney notes, she has done literally everything asked of her since the order was given, holding a valid work permit and attending mandatory appointments. If there is a class of immigrant you wouldn’t want to lose as an American resident, she would be a standard bearer for it.

Leave it to the second Trump administration, however, to look past anything good about the presence of such a person, and instead ask themselves, “How can we find the misanthropy in this situation?”

Sadly, it gets worse. Because the court order confers protection against Sister Ugboaja being deported to her native Nigeria, the Trump administration instead wants to use “third country” deportation on her–the practice of shipping an immigrant to a completely random foreign country they’ve never been to in their lives, where they are often subsequently imprisoned, detained, or in many cases extradited by that country to the very same home nation U.S. law forbids us from sending them to. In this way, third country deportations have effectively been used as a loophole that can send people back to the place where our own law acknowledges they will likely be tortured or killed.

A total violation of international law. Eswatini is imprisoning people from multiple countries no crime, based on no violation of law in that country, and with the direct knowledge and acquiescence of the United States.

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— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) 5:08 PM · Jul 8, 2026

Things can get very bad for people that the U.S. deports to third countries–look at the four men the U.S. deported to the Africa nation of Eswatini, the continent’s last absolute monarchy, who had to spend 9 months fighting just for the right of having a locally based lawyer while they remained imprisoned. Naturally, the practice is also wasteful to a level that is difficult to imagine: The U.S., for instance, paid more than $1 million per person to deport seven immigrants to Rwanda, none of whom were from Rwanda, and in another instance sent a Jamaican man to Eswatini, only to then send him back to Jamaica on a chartered military flight a few weeks later. All entirely at taxpayer expense, of course.

As for Sister Ugboaja, she has taken the senseless targeting by the Trump association with the sort of grace you would expect from someone in her position. She says she is grateful to those who helped her get (at least for now) out of detention, but notes that “does not mean I can stay quiet about what happened to me, or about what is still happening to others. There are many others in this same situation, people who have been given some form of protection under our laws, who have followed every rule asked of them, and who still live with uncertainty.”