The Price of ICE

by Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge. Rockford Squire Article May 6th 2026
What is the cost of ICE detaining, “The worst of the worst” in the United States? I recently met Donna Hughes-Brown from Missouri. She is a grandmother, a Navy wife, a down-home country gal with a farm and a few horses. She is a woman whose real life is resilient, and rooted—in her children, her grandchildren, her community. Donna is also a Green Card holder and a legal permanent resident of the United States. She immigrated to the United States legally with her parents from Ireland when she was 11 years old. And yet, while walking off a plane in Chicago after her aunt’s funeral in Ireland, she was stopped on the jetway by ICE. And then she was disappeared. Not metaphorically, literally. Donna was taken, transported, handcuffed, and hauled away—seized, shackled, and shipped out. First to a processing center. Then into a windowless transport van—still handcuffed, unable to brace herself, thrown side to side for hours as she was driven across state lines to Kentucky. And then into a cell. A cell with bugs crawling out of the drain. A cell with feces on
the walls. A cell that smelled like neglect and despair. For 143 days. Nearly five months.

Why? Because in 2014, Donna accidentally wrote a check that bounced. It was a check for $25, made out to Krazy Korner, a gas station and convenience store. Two years earlier, in 2012 Donna had also miscalculated her bank balance and had a misdemeanor for an insufficient funds check to the grocery store. In both cases, as soon as she discovered her errors, Donna made it right. Just two bounced checks totaling less than $75, two years apart. As an honest person, Donna admitted her mistakes, she paid her debts and then she moved on. But the system did not. Those very common little miscalculations became part of her record. Donna was detained by ICE and charged with “moral turpitude.” Two cold, clinical and condemning words. It was bureaucratic branding that buried her grandmotherly humanity deep under the
label of political posturing.

Donna is a follower of Jesus and she believes that, “We are human first.” And Scripture shouts this message to us. In the beginning, God created humankind in God’s own image. Not just white people. Not just certain good looking or wealthy people. All people are made in God’s image, with every person bearing divine dignity. Every life is marked with sacred worth. Every face and form is carrying the fingerprints of God on the back of our necks. We were made a human being before we had a birth certificate and before we were declared a citizen or a legal resident. We were human before governmental policies and politics. And yet for 143 days, the image of God that Donna bears was ignored, insulted, and incarcerated.

What does detaining cost? The price we pay to detain someone is far more than we want to admit. There is the fiscal cost. The federal government spends up to $187 per day to detain one person. Do the math. For 143 days, that is more than $26,000 to imprison a grandmother for two simple miscalculations made over a dozen years ago. Add in the cost of arrest. Add the cost of transport. Add the cost of processing, personnel, and infrastructure. The total climbs even higher—public dollars funding private pain, taxpayer money underwriting unnecessary
incarceration. There is also the family cost—months stolen from a husband, from children, from grandchildren waiting, worrying, wondering. There is the community cost—the fear that is fast festering in our black and brown communities. Fear in immigrant families who have followed every rule. Fear in classrooms where children sit silently, unable to concentrate because they are scanning the clock, wondering if Mama will still be home at 3:00.

And then there is the deeper cost. Our shared moral cost, our constitutional cost, and especially our spiritual cost. The cost to the soul of a nation that promises justice but practices something harsher, something colder, something crueler. We claim due process—but we delay it. We claim dignity—but deny it. We claim freedom—but we fence freedom off behind razor wire, red tape, and rigid systems that conveniently forgets that all people are sacred. So what is the price of ICE? It is not just in US taxpayer dollars. It is in our dignity diminished. It
is our trust in each other torn. It is our fears fed and freedoms forgotten and frayed. It is the slow, steady stripping away of our commitment to the sacred truth spoken in Genesis—that every person bears the image of God. With our current “Christian” concentration camp policies we are not just failing our neighbors, we are completely forgetting and forfeiting our faith.

A nation is measured not by how it treats the powerful, but by how it treats the powerless. A Christian is measured by how we show love to the least of these, and not how we protect our personal possessions and power. The price of ICE in our United States is a far higher price than any of us actually want to pay. So the question is not whether there is a cost. The question is— why are we still willing to pay it?