ICE Releases ‘Sister Letty,’ a Nurse and Nun with Legal Status Detained on Her Way to Mass

For most of her week, Sister Leticia Ugboaja works as a registered nurse, treating patients at South Texas Health System in the Rio Grande Valley. On Sundays, she puts on her habit and walks to Mass. That is what she was doing on June 28 when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her just a few miles from the U.S.-Mexico border.

She was released the same night. The questions her detention raised have not gone away.

Sister Letty’s life has been defined by caregiving long before ICE ever stopped her on a sidewalk. Ugboaja is a registered nurse at South Texas Health System, and before that, she spent ten years working as a certified nursing assistant at DHR Health in Edinburg, according to Brenda Riojas, a spokesperson for the Diocese of Brownsville. That decade at the bedside as a CNA, the kind of work that demands patience, physical stamina, and an unglamorous commitment to other people’s worst days, came before she ever earned her RN license or took her vows.

She is a member of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy congregation and serves as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at Our Lady of Sorrows Church in McAllen. In her parish, she is known simply as Sister Letty, the nun who shows up, who happens to also be a working nurse with two decades of direct patient care behind her.

Sister Letty was walking to Mass on the morning of June 28 when ICE officers detained her. The Department of Homeland Security and ICE have not responded to requests for comment about the detention since that day. Reporting indicates she did not have identification papers on her at the time, though she is in the country legally.

Parish officials posted about the arrest on Facebook shortly after it happened. The post spread quickly, and within hours it had reached the offices of South Texas’s congressional delegation.

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What followed was rare in the current political climate: a bipartisan, same-day response. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-San Antonio, and Rep. Monica De La Cruz, R-Edinburg, intervened directly with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Tom Homan to secure Ugboaja’s release. She was back home by Monday.

“As I have repeatedly said, our immigration enforcement should target violent criminals,” De La Cruz said on Facebook. “A Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat to our community.”

“We are grateful for the quick response of local representatives who reached out to the Department of Homeland Security to get her released from custody,” Riojas said in a statement on behalf of the diocese.

Not everyone framed the resolution as a success story. Local Democrat Bobby Pulido pushed back on the idea that this should have required congressional intervention at all. “They detained her. She did not have her papers on her but she’s in the country legally,” Pulido said. “This should not be happening. I call on all the elected officials that have the power to go do something to get her out and also bring attention to this, because there’s a lot of people like Sister Letty that are getting detained needlessly just by how they look or how they talk.”

For nurses, Sister Letty’s story lands differently than a typical headline about immigration enforcement. She is not an abstraction. She is a working RN with a license, a unit, and a patient assignment somewhere in the South Texas Health System, the same as any colleague walking into a shift. The detention of someone with her professional record, on her way to a religious service in full habit, has unsettled a healthcare community that is already grappling with how immigration enforcement intersects with the workplace.

President Trump’s broader immigration enforcement push has extended to what were previously treated as sensitive locations, including houses of worship, and that shift has rippled into how healthcare and faith communities operate day to day. Faith leaders across South Texas have already adjusted their response to congregants who are now too afraid to attend Mass in person, encouraging online attendance for some and offering to run errands like grocery shopping for parishioners who no longer feel safe leaving their homes.

Healthcare workers, particularly those who are immigrants, naturalized citizens, or have family members navigating immigration status, are watching cases like this one closely. A registered nurse with a decade of CNA experience and an active religious vocation was detained on a sidewalk on her way to church. It took a viral Facebook post and two members of Congress from opposing parties to undo it within a single day. Most people in her position do not have that kind of platform.

Sister Letty is back home. She is, by all accounts, expected to return to her patients and to her parish. The questions about how she ended up detained in the first place remain unanswered by the agencies responsible.

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