ICE Detains A Texas Nun Walking to Mass

Sister Letty was walking to Sunday Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows when federal agents took her. Nearly nine in ten American dioceses depend on foreign-born clergy like her.

Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, in white, is welcomed after her release from ICE custody in the Rio Grande Valley on June 28, 2026. She was detained on her way to Sunday Mass and freed hours later after members of Congress from both parties intervened.

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On Sunday morning, a Catholic religious sister known to her parish as Sister Letty set out for Mass at Our Lady of Sorrows in McAllen, Texas. She never reached the pew. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained her on the way.

Sister Norma Pimentel — the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley and a widely respected figure in border ministry — confirmed the arrest. She said she had called ICE for information and gotten no answer. The Diocese of Brownsville said it was still trying to learn what had happened to one of its own.

Her parish asked only for prayers. “We pray for her safety, peace, and strength during this difficult time,” Our Lady of Sorrows wrote, “and we hope for a swift and just resolution that allows her to be released soon.”

The reaction crossed party lines, which is its own kind of evidence. Representative Monica de la Cruz, the Republican who holds the district, said she was working directly with the Department of Homeland Security to free Sister Letty.

“A Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat to our community,” she wrote. Representative Vicente Gonzalez, a Democrat from the neighboring district, called the detention “another effect of this Administration’s hyperaggressive immigration policies” and demanded her immediate release.

She would be freed that same night, but her release came only through bipartisan intervention — Republican and Democratic members of Congress pressing the case of a Catholic sister the government had pulled off the street.

McAllen fits a pattern that has been hardening for months, as a deportation campaign sold to the public as a hunt for criminals keeps closing its hand around the priests and sisters who hold American Catholic life together.

She is not the first. Over the past year federal agents have detained an Episcopal priest in Texas, held a Muslim chaplain in Cincinnati for roughly two months, and arrested an imam in New York. Across very different faiths, the warning to every house of worship lands the same way.

Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago saw it coming. In a January interview with the city’s PBS affiliate, and again in February with the Spanish newspaper El País, the cardinal said federal agents had stopped priests in his own archdiocese and ordered them to prove their citizenship.

He tied the stops to race. “I’ve had some priests who are of a different color being targeted and arrested — stopped — because of their color and asking them to prove that they’re citizens,” Cupich said. “That’s not America.”

Homeland Security rejected the charge.

Its then-assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, called allegations of racial profiling “categorically FALSE” and said such claims had fueled assaults on agents. Cupich was talking about men he ordained. The denial asks American Catholics to disbelieve their own cardinal about his own priests.

A sweep aimed at immigrants keeps catching clergy because the American Church runs on immigrants.

Nearly ninety percent of U.S. dioceses depend on the ministry of foreign-born priests and religious, according to the Catholic Legal Immigration Network. The pastor two towns over who came from Nigeria, Colombia, Vietnam, or the Philippines now wears the ordinary face of the American priesthood.

Those clergy have spent years caught in a visa system that treats them as disposable temporary labor.

In January, the administration dropped one of its harsher features — a rule that forced religious workers to leave the country for a full year once their five-year visas ran out before they could return. The Catholic Legal Immigration Network welcomed the fix and named its limits in the same breath: clergy still have to leave after five years, and travel bans keep many of them from getting visas at all.

While the Trump-Vance White House detains American nuns, the pope has put the migrant at the center of his ministry. In June, on the final day of his trip to Spain, Pope Leo XIV stood at a migrant center in the Canary Islands, on the doorstep of Africa, and told the newcomers that “in a sense, all of us are migrants.”

At Arguineguín, where thousands once slept on concrete after surviving the Atlantic crossing, he bowed before them and warned Europe that its own shores were turning into unmarked graves. On the Fourth of July, he will travel to Lampedusa — the Italian island that has become a cemetery of the Mediterranean — to preach the same Gospel on the morning America celebrates itself.

The teaching underneath all of it is old and plain. Scripture tells the people of God to welcome the stranger, because they remember what it was to be strangers. A government that pulls a sister off the road to morning Mass, or stops a priest to demand his papers, has decided that some children of God must earn their humanity before the state will grant it.

The cost is already visible in the parishes.

In the Archdiocese of Washington, Father Emilio Biosca’s heavily Salvadoran congregation lost more than forty members to ICE since last summer, and Pope Leo answered by sending him to lead a diocese in the heart of Trump’s Florida.

In Chicago, priests and nuns have gone to federal court after being barred from bringing Communion to migrants in detention.

Seminarians have left the country rather than risk arrest, and priests have said plainly that they fear they are next.

Sister Letty is what “next” looks like.

The administration promised it was coming for the dangerous, and its record now includes a woman in a habit taken on her way to receive the Eucharist. Every assurance about targeting criminals dies on the road outside Our Lady of Sorrows.

She was released on Sunday night, a few hours after her arrest, once Representatives Monica de la Cruz and Henry Cuellar pressed the Department of Homeland Security to free her.

Her name is Sister Leticia Ugboaja — a 56-year-old sister from Nigeria, a nurse at a McAllen hospital, living and working in the country legally — which means the government pulled a foreign-born nun with papers off the street on her way to Communion and let her go only after two members of Congress intervened.

The day she spent in a cell is a total affront to the religious liberty of the Catholic Church in the United States. It’s the latest in a series of assaults the Trump-Vance White House has

Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, a 56-year-old religious sister from Nigeria and a longtime registered nurse in South Texas. ICE detained her in McAllen on June 28, 2026, as she walked to Mass.

The seizure of a nun puts a pointed question to the Catholics closest to this administration. Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and Bishop Robert Barron both serve on the White House’s Religious Liberty Commission, tasked with defending the free exercise of faith in America. Vice President JD Vance is the highest-ranking Catholic in the government whose agents arrested Sister Letty.

I reached out to all three offices to ask whether pulling a religious sister off the road to Mass is the kind of threat to religious liberty they were appointed to confront, and what, if anything, they intend to do about it. By press time, none had responded. I will update this piece if they do.

The Diocese of Brownsville is still working to piece together what happened. Its bishop, Daniel Flores, called the arrest “wildly disturbing” and said enforcement protocols that let a religious sister be handcuffed on her way to Sunday Mass “need to be reformed.” LULAC, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights group, has called for an investigation. The Department of Homeland Security has not answered repeated questions about why she was taken.

This assault on religious liberty comes only weeks after the president, the vice president, and their allies in Congress launched a full-throated attack on Pope Leo XIV for condemning the American war against Iran. The same government that told the pope to stay in his lane on questions of war is now detaining the Church’s own sisters.

Her name belongs in our prayers, and her case belongs in the daylight. A Church that leans on the foreign-born for its priests, its sisters, and its future cannot stay silent while the government treats the people in its pews and at its altars as suspects.

At Letters from Leo, we stand with Sister Letty, with the priests Cardinal Cupich watched get stopped on the street, and with every foreign-born sister, brother, and priest who crossed an ocean to serve the American Church — and now serves under the shadow of the same government that disgraces their labor on behalf of the People of God.

We stand, too, with the millions of Catholics and people of goodwill who refuse to accept a country where a woman in a habit can be pulled off the road to Sunday Mass.

This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something steadier than fear — for a faith that keeps welcoming the stranger even as the state turns to hunt him.

If you believe in that movement — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against the cruelty of mass deportation — I am asking you to join us.

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