Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Roman Catholic nun in full habit, a woman with legal status in the United States, was walking to Our Lady of Sorrows Church in McAllen, Texas, on June 28 when agents of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took her into custody. Members of Congress intervened and secured her release the same day. On Thursday, she spoke publicly to say what the legal record already demonstrates: people with lawful protections are being detained without the process the law requires.
“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.
She is right. And the law is specific about what went wrong.
Start with the Immigration and Nationality Act. INA Section 240 establishes removal proceedings — the legal mechanism by which the government may seek to deport someone. Those proceedings require a hearing before an immigration judge. They require notice. They require the opportunity to present evidence of legal status. The statute does not authorize agents to detain someone off the street without that process. INA Section 236 governs custody determinations and requires the government to assess whether an individual poses a flight risk or a danger before ordering detention. A nun in a habit walking to morning Mass meets neither criterion. Any detention executed without that individualized assessment violated the statute’s plain requirements.
The constitutional floor is unambiguous. The Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause protects every person within United States territory — not just citizens, not just permanent residents, every person. The Supreme Court affirmed this in Yamataya v. Fisher in 1903 and reaffirmed it in Zadvydas v. Davis in 2001. Due process means the government cannot deprive a person of liberty without affording them the opportunity to demonstrate their legal status before an impartial decision-maker. If ICE detained Sister Leticia without promptly providing access to an immigration judge or the means to establish the protections she held, the detention violated federal due process requirements.
There is also the agency policy that existed to prevent exactly this. For over a decade, ICE enforcement at sensitive locations — churches, schools, hospitals, courthouses — was governed by the Sensitive Locations Memorandum. First issued in 2011 by ICE Director John Morton, the memo prohibited civil immigration enforcement actions at or near these spaces. It was binding guidance across all ERO — Enforcement and Removal Operations — field offices, not discretionary. Its purpose was to ensure that people attending worship, children attending school, and patients seeking medical care could do so without fear of detention. In January 2025, the Trump administration rescinded the Sensitive Locations Memorandum. The enforcement restriction that would have made this detention impermissible under ICE’s own standards was deliberately removed.
The accountability chain is institutional and nameable. The DHS Secretary sets enforcement priorities. The ICE Director and the ERO division operationalize those priorities through field office directives. The agents who executed this detention operated within a framework the administration had intentionally stripped of its protective constraint. That the detention collapsed under the first hour of congressional scrutiny tells you what the government’s own lawyers concluded about its legality.
Now let me tell you what the Bible says, because the Christian-Nationalist political apparatus claims Scriptural warrant for the enforcement posture that produced this detention, and the texts have a different reading.
Leviticus 19:33-34 — “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” The Hebrew word is ger — the sojourner, the resident alien, the person living in a land that is not their home. The formula “for you were foreigners in Egypt” appears more than a dozen times in the Torah. It is not a suggestion. It is a covenant command grounded in the identity of God’s own people as people who once had no standing and were given it anyway.
Matthew 25:35-36 — “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” The passage is the final judgment scene in the Gospel of Matthew. The criterion is not doctrinal correctness. The criterion is not political allegiance. The criterion is whether you welcomed the stranger. Jesus does not say “I was a stranger and you checked my immigration status.” He says “I was a stranger and you invited me in.”
The Christian-Nationalist movement reads Romans 13:1-7 — “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities” — to mean that whatever enforcement action the government takes carries automatic Christian endorsement. That reading has been the theological engine of family separation, of detention-center expansion, and now of a nun detained on the walk to Mass. Paul wrote those words under Nero, the emperor who would have him beheaded. The passage was invoked by slaveholders to demand obedience from the enslaved. It was the proof-text German Christians deployed to justify compliance with the Third Reich’s racial laws. The passage has never meant “whatever the governing authorities do is righteous.” The scholars who built the movement’s theological infrastructure chose the legalist reading because it served the enforcement apparatus they were constructing.
I taught this reading for fifteen years. The SBC passed its 2018 resolution calling for strict immigration enforcement while the messengers debated whether they could say “compassion” without sounding soft. The document that became the Sessions-era Justice Department’s justification for family separation cited Romans 13 as its key text and circulated through Evangelical legal networks as the model for arguing that enforcement is a Christian duty. The people who wrote the amicus briefs and pastoral letters that turned Romans 13 into a deportation apparatus are known to me, because this reading was the one I was raised inside before the texts broke through the legalist machinery.
The INA requires a hearing. The Constitution requires due process. ICE’s own prior policy prohibited this detention. The Sensitive Locations Memorandum was rescinded so that detentions like this could occur. The legal violations are not ambiguous. They are structural — the product of an enforcement posture that treats legal protections as obstacles to removal targets rather than as obligations to be honored.
The Bible says love the foreigner. The enforcement apparatus puts the foreigner in a holding cell. The Bible says welcome the stranger. The apparatus builds a bureaucracy whose purpose is to identify and remove the stranger. The Bible says the final judgment turns on whether you visited the prisoner. ICE detained a nun for walking to the church where she prays for the prisoner.
Sister Leticia is still in McAllen, still wearing her habit, still walking to Our Lady of Sorrows. She said Thursday she spoke out to help others who face the same uncertainty. She is doing what Matthew 25 commands — and what the INA, the Fifth Amendment, and ICE’s own discarded policy all commanded before the Christian-Nationalist political project decided those commands were optional.
The Magnificat says God has “brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty.” The text has not changed. The habit has not changed. The nun is still walking to church. The legal framework that was supposed to protect her is still on the books. What changed is that a political movement decided the laws protecting the stranger were obstacles to dismantle, and it removed the policy constraint that made this detention possible. That is the operation that has captured the soul of American Christianity. The way out is to read the Bible again — and to enforce the laws the machine has decided no longer apply.