On June 28, 2026 ICE agents arrested Sister Letty Ugboaja a block from her own church, handcuffed her in her full white habit, and took away her rosary as she walked to Sunday Mass in McAllen, Texas.
Sister Letty is 56. She’s a registered nurse who has spent more than a decade caring for patients in South Texas hospitals. On Sundays she serves communion at Our Lady of Sorrows. She lives one block from the church, and on Sunday morning she never made it there.
The ICE agents gave no explanation. They drove her an hour to a detention center in Raymondville. A fellow sister who reached her by phone in custody says she was terrified, didn’t understand what was happening, and that agents refused to let her have the medication she needed. Her diocese says she is in this country legally.
Here’s how this becomes possible. For decades, government policy kept immigration agents away from churches, hospitals, and schools. The President revoked those protections in his first days back in office. A nun in handcuffs on a Sunday sidewalk is not a glitch in the system. It IS the system. We were told that ICE was going to apprehend the worst of the worst criminals. Arresting a nun on her way to church is no longer simply a mistake. It IS the system.
ICE has explained nothing since then. Not why its agents stopped her. Not why they held her. The bishop of Brownsville called the protocols that let agents handcuff a religious sister on her way to church “wildly disturbing.”
She asked her captors on the way to the detention facility in Raymondville whether she might still go to Mass. She asked whether she might receive Communion. She was told no. A registered nurse. An Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion in her own parish. A woman an immigration judge in 2019 barred the government from returning to Nigeria on the finding that she would likely be tortured there. She carried a rosary, a key, and a phone. And the answer to her request for the Eucharist was no.
“For me, a nun, not to go to Mass on Sunday, not to receive Communion, it was very, very heartbreaking for me,” she said.
“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,” Ugboaja said.
The government now signals that it intends to remove her to an unnamed third country.
You and I woke up in America today where there is no more shame and there are no consequences with the people who are in power.
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ALLOW GOD TO CONTINUALLY SOFTEN YOUR HEART SO THAT IT BEATS FOR WHAT GOD’S HEART BEATS FOR – ALL THE PEOPLE GOD CREATED!
