A Missouri town that voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in the 2024 election has come to regret its choice after a beloved neighbor was detained by ICE, according to The New York Times.
In the farming town of Kennett, MO, population 10,000, Times reporter Jack Healy met with residents who "supported in theory" Trump's tough talk on immigration. Now they're rallying around a Hong Kong immigrant named Ming Li Hui, who went by "Carol" in her adopted hometown.
"In the 20 years since she arrived from Hong Kong, she had built a life and family in Kennett, working two waitressing jobs and cleaning houses on the side," Healy wrote. He quoted a Kennett city councilwoman who said, “Everyone knows Carol."
But Hui has since been arrested and detained by the Department of Homeland Security as she awaits deportation back to her birth country.
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“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” one woman told Healy. “But no one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs, the people who came here in droves.”
According to Hui's attorney, she hoped to gain permanent resident status in the U.S. after paying "an American citizen $2,000 to enter into a sham marriage."
"Ms. Hui was never criminally charged for the fake marriage, which ended in divorce in 2009," Healy wrote. "Court papers indicate that she has no criminal record." In the meantime, Hui stayed on in the U.S. even as her tourist visa expired.
One resident told Healy, "She’s exactly the sort of person you’d want to come to the country. I don’t know how this fits into the deportation problem with Trump.” Another declared, "I can’t believe they’re doing this to her."
Some of Hui's neighbors "said they had implored state and national Republican lawmakers representing the area to intervene to stop Ms. Hui’s deportation, but had gotten mostly cursory responses," Healy wrote.
Read The New York Times article here.