Nun Arrested By ICE Walking to Mass Speaks Out
Handcuffed in her habit one block from Our Lady of Sorrows, the Nigerian nurse was told no when she asked to receive Communion. ICE now wants her sent to an unnamed third country — her check-in comes Tuesday.
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Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja held a press conference at Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church in McAllen, Texas, on Thursday and spoke publicly for the first time about her June 28 arrest by federal agents who handcuffed her on her way to Mass.
“Honestly, in that moment, I did not understand what was going on, what was happening to me,” she said.
On that Sunday morning, the 56-year-old Nigerian sister of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy left her residence dressed in her habit, carrying a rosary, a key, and a phone when two armed ICE agents stopped her about a block from home.
They handcuffed her and drove her an hour away to the El Valle Detention Facility in Raymondville. She recalled asking the agents, “Can I go to Mass; can I just attend Mass; can I receive communion,” and being 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 told reporters.
Sister Letty is a registered nurse at South Texas Health System, and before that she spent a decade as a certified nursing assistant in Edinburg. She volunteers as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at her local parish.
In 2019, an immigration judge denied her asylum claim yet barred the government from deporting her to Nigeria, ruling that she would likely face torture there. She has a valid work authorization, and her attorney, Carlos Moctezuma Garcia, says she has complied with every requirement imposed by immigration authorities.
As I reported at the time, the local Church raised the alarm within hours.
Republican Congresswoman Monica De La Cruz joined Democratic Congressmen Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez in pressing Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for her release, and by early evening, Cuellar announced she was on her way home.
Nearly a month later, the government has explained nothing behind the arrest. DHS and ICE have ignored four weeks of press inquiries about why agents seized a Catholic nun an immigration judge had already shielded from deportation.
Garcia says the Department of Homeland Security indicated the government planned to remove her to an unknown third country.
She is due at an ICE check-in on Tuesday.
“We are asking that she not be detained and that no ankle monitor be placed on a person who has broken no rule, posed no danger, and given this country a decade of nursing and a lifetime of ministry,” Garcia said.
Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, who has spent weeks seeking answers from the Administration, called Sister Letty “a well-known source of goodness and hope in our community.”
“Homeland Security enforcement protocols that make it possible for a religious sister, or anyone, to be detained and handcuffed while peacefully walking to Church on a Sunday morning are wildly disturbing and need to be reformed,” the prelate argued.
Her case sits inside a season of open aggression against the Catholic Church from the Trump-Vance White House.
Yesterday I wrote about the Trump administration’s lawsuit to seize the ground beneath Mount Cristo Rey, the border shrine near El Paso where a 29-foot limestone Christ the King has drawn pilgrims for nearly a century. A federal judge has already passed the property’s title to the government while the Diocese of Las Cruces fights on.
Earlier this month, ICE agents shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Durán Guerrero, two Catholic men on their way to work.
The U.S. bishops issued a rebuke, warning that acts that diminish human dignity “should never be normalized in our society.”
The prevailing force behind every one of these stories is the White House’s January 2025 decision to scrap the decades-old policy that kept immigration enforcement away from churches, schools, and hospitals.
Catholic teaching is clear. The Church that Sister Letty serves as a nun teaches that every human being carries a dignity that comes from God and that no government can revoke.
Pope Leo XIV drew the line months ago: “Someone who says I’m against abortion, but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.”
Sister Letty put the same truth in the plainest terms available to her. “I’m just a small woman, a nun, harmless, just with my rosary, my key, and my phone,” she said. “I will not pretend, it did hurt, and it’s still hurting me up to today.”
“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,” she said.
Every person facing that uncertainty, she added, “deserves to be heard, deserves to be listened to, deserves to be given attention and opportunity.”
On Tuesday, she will find out whether the government intends to shackle an ankle monitor to a nurse who has spent her time in the United States healing the sick and bringing the Eucharist to her neighbors.
She told reporters she was reflecting on the day’s Mass readings when the agents stopped her. The handcuffs interrupted her prayer, but nothing in her testimony on Thursday suggests they ever reached the heart of her faith — a faith, she said, that “teaches me not to be silent.”
At Letters from Leo, we stand with Sister Letty and with the thousands of foreign-born priests, sisters, and religious workers who hold the Church in the United States together — the women and men who staff our hospitals, carry Communion to the homebound, and now watch the street for unmarked cars on their way to Sunday Mass.
In an era when a government sues the Church for the ground beneath a statue of Christ and handcuffs a nurse in her habit, we remain rooted in a faith that refuses to look away when the powerful come for the small.
This is the fastest-growing Catholic community in the country because people are hungry for something deeper than cruelty dressed up as order.
People come here looking for courage, for truth, and for love made visible — and Sister Letty offered all three from the front of her parish church on Thursday.
If you believe this movement matters — Catholics and people of goodwill standing for human dignity against a deportation machine that seizes a nun off the sidewalk on her way to Mass — I am asking you to join us.
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Thank you for reading. I’ll see you on the road.
It is absolutely incredible that they call themselves Christians and pro-life when they show such little respect for the dignity of every human being. Praying for Sister Letty and others like her.
I’m praying that Sisters Letty is able to continue her very kind and important ministry. She will never be a threat to our country