Jim Brown is standing alone in the rotunda of Cannon House, the imposing office building off Independence Avenue. The arched dome is filled with uninspired light. In a few hours, he will speak before a congressional committee about his wife, Donna Hughes-Brown, who has been held in an Ice facility since returning from Ireland in late July.
Brown’s military life brought him to Washington many times in the past. But speaking in the Capitol is different. “I ain’t scared of nobody,” he says with a small laugh. “This speech has to happen.”
There’s some time to kill so we embark on a farcical tour of Cannon House’s underground corridors to find a coffee shop that a security guard promised existed. It seems deliberately hidden. As we order, Brown asks about Ireland. That summer visit was his first time there and you hope the experience hasn’t sullied his memory of the country. “It wasn’t Ireland’s fault,” he says agreeably. “Nothing anybody there did.”
Upon hearing the word “Ireland” the guy serving coffee lights up. He explains that he’s Brazilian American and a football nut. He takes out his phone and insists on showing us, in slow motion, the entirety of Troy Parrott’s winning goal against Hungary. He’s in love with the aesthetics of the goal.
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Brown asks about hurling: the All-Ireland final took place when he and his wife were in Ireland and he became fascinated by the sport. They covered most of the island – Dublin, Cork, Galway and Dundalk, for a funeral of Hughes-Brown’s aunt – during a two-week jaunt. He learned a lot about her family.
The topography of Ireland could not have been different from the US of his youth but both are pastoral. Brown grew up in the western fringes of Nebraska on a ranch and farm. He shudders a little as he recalls the winters of what was a tough upbringing and explains how the livestock survived the perishing gusts and snowdrifts.
When we find a nook to sit down, Brown’s voice cracks a little when talking about the past few months. This day has been slow coming.
In steadfastly Republican Missouri, where the couple live, Brown made more than 100 calls to “the senators, representatives, governors, local representatives and they all gave me the same canned answer”. Then he broadened his range and the invitation came from the office of Seth Magaziner, the Rhode Island Democrat, to address the Democrat’s shadow committee on the department of homeland security. Brown wants to broadcast the magnitude of the injustice visited upon his wife to as many people as possible.
“My essential message will be: I’m a country guy, I grew up dirt poor. And literally came through abuse and the whole nine yards. Joined the military, was highly successful in the military. And also, very successful in my private life. Lived the American dream. And they took it away from me. For nothing.”
[ ‘We are going to defend Chicago’: Trump’s Ice agents face pushbackOpens in new window ]
When his first marriage of 24 years ended, he met Donna Hughes and they found a kinship through a love of horses. “And the volunteer work. I met her when she was working at a dog rescue in southern Missouri.”
Donna Hughes was born in England to Irish parents, who moved the family to the United States when she was just 11. A green card holder, she has lived legally in the United States for the past 47 years. Ten years ago, she wrote two “bad” cheques at a local grocery store during a time of extreme hardship. The total of both cheques was less than $60, a sum that she later repaid.
Shortly after that, she met Jim Brown. He encountered a person who shared his belief in helping those less fortunate. “The majority of the people that my wife and I helped are from minority communities. I never believed that taking out migrant workers was right. I did believe that if you are a criminal, you need to be off the streets. That is what Trump sold. We have a cabinet in our house that has foodstuffs in it for the homeless. We drive around a three-county radius where the food boxes are and make sure they stay full.”
Those decade-old misdemeanours led to Donna Hughes-Brown’s abrupt arrest and detention at O’Hare airport last summer. Now, deportation to Ireland is a distinct threat. The crisis has thrown the Browns’ world into a tailspin and has, Jim allows, led him to examine the orthodoxy of a value system he inherited.
“I was very right-wing Christian conservative until this happened. You are taught that anyone who doesn’t agree with you is wrong. That’s ingrained in you from when you are an itty bitty kid. There is no disparity. Donna is conservative too. But I would call it more principled with us. For instance, I’m often not in agreement with protests because I spent 20 years in military serving the flag. But I think they have the right to do that.”
The afternoon hearing is titled Unmasking the Truth: How Trump’s Immigration Raids Target US Citizens and Terrorise Communities. Brown is sitting beside pastor David Black, the Chicagoan who was shot with pepper balls by Ice agents in Broadview. The video footage was so notorious that it went viral.
In all, six witnesses address the representatives. Pastor Black is a natural speaker, delivering part homily, part demand that the Democrats disband the entire department of homeland security, a proposal that is met with scepticism by the lawmakers. The room is silent as, faltering at first but entirely convincing, Brown reads his statement on his wife’s predicament. He talks about the eeriness of the minutes after their plane from Dublin landed in O’Hare and thrust them into the realm of a US police enforcement style that seemed alien to the America in which he’d lived in all his life. The couple were, he said “completely blindsided” when approached by immigration officials that afternoon.
“Ice refused me to accompany my wife, and I was told she ‘had to sign some paperwork and would be on the next flight home to St Louis’. I patiently waited for Donna to call me to pick her up after her flight but Ice decided to detain her and put her in a prisoner transport van for a six-hour drive to Kentucky, with no seat belts and no food or water for 12 hours. Since being detained there, she has been degraded and subjected to absolutely awful conditions.”
[ Significant rise in Irish people seeking State help to avoid US deportationOpens in new window ]
The committee members listen intently. Hughes-Brown’s son is a marine. Brown served in Desert Storm and has a highly distinguished navy record. His broad point is that his wife is as far removed as possible from Donald Trump’s vow that Ice would target “the worst of the worst”.
Congressman Seth Magaziner will later tell Brown: “Your country owes you an apology – and much more than that.” He promises that Hughes-Brown’s plight won’t be forgotten.
Her deportation hearing is due to take place on December 19th. The couple speaks by video phone every few days for 15 minutes but pastors and her legal team have been denied entry to the Campbell County Detention Centre where she is being held. Brown says she looks well, given her predicament, and is proud that she has taught several of the other women in detention how to speak English. But the entire nightmare seems unreal to them both every time they video-dial.
“The fomentation of what has happened in the last 12 years is crazy in this country,” Brown tells me.
“When Trump went to the podium, his rhetoric says: I’m going to hate anybody who opposes me. But he has taught the other side the same thing. And that’s what we need to get away from. He has caused such rhetoric on both sides that they hate each other and that is what is so wrong with this situation. You can’t call yourself a Christian and be okay with what they are doing in the streets. The Ice deal is wrong. It is absolutely wrong to treat another human being as though they are less than human.”
It gets dark in Washington early at this time of year and the traffic is heavy on the way out to Reagan airport, where Brown is scheduled a teatime flight back west, to St Louis from where he will drive to the couple’s ranch outside Troy. Although he is still a rancher and trains wild horses as a pastime, he works a full-time job in an ER near Troy. His brief visit to the Capitol felt, after months of pleading to deaf ears, like a breakthrough.
“Get her exonerated,” Brown says when asked what he hopes his day will accomplish.
“I don’t know. But they will be a voice. In a building, things rattle.”
[ Ireland is not a mere victim of Maga madness – we help to provoke itOpens in new window ]
