ICE officers detained Sister Leticia Ugboaja walking to Sunday Mass in McAllen, Texas, on June 28. Six years earlier, an immigration judge had ruled she would more likely than not be tortured if removed to Nigeria. She is fifty-six. She is a registered nurse at South Texas Health System. She volunteered as an extraordinary minister of holy communion at the parish. She has had permission to work for six years. She begged the arresting officers to let her attend Mass and receive communion. She was told 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 Thursday at a press conference at Our Lady of Sorrows.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who stopped her on the sidewalk had the administrative record in front of them. The record said: do not remove this woman to Nigeria. They did not arrest her because the record was unclear. They arrested her because the program the record was supposed to enforce is the program the Trump administration is running.
Let me show you what the administrative record says.
In 2019, an immigration judge denied Sister Leticia’s application for asylum — asylum requires a well-founded fear of persecution — and granted her withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture. Withholding is a higher bar. The applicant must show it is more likely than not she will be tortured in the country to which she would be removed. The Immigration and Nationality Act at §241(b)(3) and the implementing regulations at 8 C.F.R. §§208.16–208.18 give that finding the force of law: the United States may not remove a protected person to a country where she would more likely than not face torture. The protection belongs to Sister Leticia. The protection did not stop her arrest.
Her attorney, Carlos Garcia, said the United States planned to remove her to a third country — not Nigeria, where the judge found torture likely, but somewhere else, under arrangements the Department of Homeland Security has negotiated with several partner nations. The arrangement is the legal mechanism the administration has built when a CAT withholding order blocks removal to a country of origin: send the protected person somewhere other than the country the court found unsafe, and the withholding obligation is satisfied on paper. Federal courts have called the arrangement what it is. In litigation including Department of Homeland Security v. Thangarajah and related third-country-removal challenges, federal judges have repeatedly ordered the Department of Homeland Security not to remove protected noncitizens to countries where they would face torture, regardless of whether that country is the country of origin. Sister Leticia was about to become one of those cases. The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment on her detention. The apparatus does not explain itself, because explaining would require defending the arrest.
She has spent ten years as a nurse in the Rio Grande Valley. She has a check-in appointment with ICE on Tuesday.
Now let me show you what the Bible says about the woman in the administrative record.
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. I am the Lord your God.”
The Hebrew word is ger. A person who has settled in your land — not a visitor, not someone passing through, but a resident. The text does not distinguish between the ger who arrived last week and the ger who has lived among you for ten years, worked in your hospital, served at your altar. The protection belongs to the resident. The command runs the same direction: love the resident as yourself, because you were once a stranger, and God loved you when you were one.
I say this as someone who was raised in a tradition that read these commandments as belonging to the Mosaic dispensation — superseded, no longer binding on Christian nations. I held that reading until I read the chapter in its actual context. The same chapter that contains the ger commandment also contains the great commandment — “love your neighbor as yourself” — that Jesus named the second greatest of all. The same God, in the same holiness code, in the same chapter, speaks both. The Department of Homeland Security apparatus that quotes Leviticus on the family and Leviticus on the unborn cannot selectively unquote Leviticus when the verse is about the resident foreigner. The selective reading is the indictment. That is not biblical fidelity. That is a political operation using the Bible as a prop.
The Immigration and Customs Enforcement detachment that arrested Sister Leticia did not cite Romans 13 on her file. But the Department of Homeland Security that runs the program has, since Jeff Sessions quoted Romans 13:4 in 2018 to defend the separation of children from their parents at the border. Romans 13:4: the authority is “God’s servant for your good.” Diakonos. A servant. A servant is bound by the master’s standard, and the master’s standard, three chapters of Leviticus earlier, is that the resident foreigner is treated as your native-born. The servant arrested a nun on her way to receive the body of Christ. The servant is not meeting the standard. The verse is not a blank check. The verse never was.
The pattern is the program, not the exception.
“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,” Sister Leticia said.
The third-country removal mechanism the Department of Homeland Security wanted to use on her is the same mechanism immigration advocates have documented being used to send protected noncitizens to South Sudan, Panama, and other countries whose governments have agreed, under arrangements challenged in federal court, to accept people the United States could not lawfully deport to their own countries. An immigration judge’s CAT withholding did not protect Sister Leticia. Her years of compliance did not protect her. Her habit did not protect her. Her rosary did not protect her.
Matthew 25:43, in the red letters: “I was a stranger and you did not invite me in; I needed clothes and you did not clothe me; I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” The criterion of final judgment, according to Jesus, is how you treated the resident. The criterion is not whether the protected person had a diocese behind her and a congressman who would make calls. The criterion is whether the ger at the gate was treated as your native-born.
Amos 5:24: “Let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” Not justice for the one who caught the camera’s attention. Justice like a river.
Sister Leticia will check in on Tuesday. She will walk into the building that arrested her and submit herself, as she has submitted for six years. The question is not whether she will comply. She has complied. The question is whether the Department of Homeland Security and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers who wield the apparatus will answer to the administrative record they are supposed to enforce — or whether the third-country removal mechanism will become another way to make a court order vanish.
The texts are still there. The court order is still on file. The nun still has a Tuesday check-in. And the question of whether a person protected from torture by the United States government will be sent somewhere the United States government does not have to answer for has not changed.