A Missouri town was solidly behind Trump. Then Carol was detained

The first sign of trouble came early this month when Carol didn’t show up for her shift at John’s Waffle and Pancake House.

She was as reliable as the sun rising over rice and melon fields in her adopted hometown, of Kennett, Missouri, a conservative farming hub of 10,000 people in the state’s south-eastern boot heel, where “Missouri” becomes “Missour-uh”.

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. She began every morning at the bustling diner, serving pecan waffles, hugging customers and reading leftover newspapers to improve her English.

“Everyone knows Carol,” said Lisa Dry, a Kennett city councilperson.

That all ended on April 30, when federal immigration officials summoned Carol, 45, whose legal name is Ming Li Hui but who also goes by the surname Mayorga, to their office in St Louis, a three-hour drive from Kennett. Her partner, a Guatemalan immigrant, had voiced suspicion about the sudden call. But “I didn’t want to run”, Hui said in a jailhouse phone interview. “I just wanted to do the right thing.”

She was arrested and jailed to await deportation.

Hui’s detention has forced a rural Missouri county to face the fallout of US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which was supported in theory by many residents in this Trump-loving corner of an increasingly red America.

Many are now asking how you can support Carol and also Trump.

“I voted for Donald Trump, and so did practically everyone here,” said Vanessa Cowart, a friend of Hui from church. “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.”

She paused. “This is Carol.”

Adam Squires, a one-time candidate for mayor of Kennett, saw it differently. He did not bear any ill will for Hui, he said, but he voted for Trump, as did 80 per cent of voters in Dunklin County, and he was glad to see the deportation campaign reach home.

“They vote for Trump, and then they get mad because the stuff starts happening,” he said of his neighbours. “We’ve got to get rid of all the illegals. This is just a start.”

Hui said the call she received from immigration authorities ordered her to appear in St Louis without explanation. At the office, she said, an immigration officer called her into a secure area and initially told her the authorities would help her get a passport. Then she was told that she was being detained for overstaying a tourist visa that had expired long ago and that she would be deported.

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Now, as Hui bounces from county jail to county jail, her name has popped up on prayer lists at churches in Kennett. Her absence was felt, residents said, when she was not in the baseball stands to watch her younger son pitch, nor at the eighth-grade graduation to see her older son receive an agricultural science award.

Cowart was her religious sponsor when Hui converted to Catholicism earlier this year, learning the Gospels from her Chinese Bible. She became a regular at Sunday morning Mass, as was her partner and their three American-born children: a daughter, 7, and sons aged 12 and 14.

Hui was keenly interested in early Christian martyrs, Cowart said: “She’d smile and say, God will take care of us.”

According to the government, Hui does not have a blameless past. In court records, the government said she arrived in the United States from Hong Kong in February 2004, paying an American citizen $US2000 to enter into a sham marriage with her sometime around 2005. She had hoped the marriage would allow her to get permanent resident status and permit her to travel to Hong Kong to see her dying grandmother and return to the US afterwards, according to court records.

Her lawyer, Raymond Bolourtchi, said Hui was young and desperate in those days, and she acknowledged that her actions were wrong. “Not a day goes by that she doesn’t feel remorse,” he said.

Hui was never criminally charged for the fake marriage, which ended in divorce in 2009. Court papers indicate that she has no criminal record.

Nonetheless, she was working, which people who enter as tourists are generally not allowed to do, and her tourist visa had lapsed. Her status in the country became a matter of dispute.

Many people in Kennett expressed outrage that a hardworking mother had spent the past month jailed by immigration authorities.

Supporters described her as an ideal addition to a rural town where the population is declining and the only hospital has closed.

“She’s exactly the sort of person you’d want to come to the country,” said Chuck Earnest, a farmer. “I don’t know how this fits into the deportation problem with Trump.”

Celena Horton, a waitress at a steakhouse, said she and Hui would give each other huge tips when they ate at one another’s restaurants. Horton said she loved almost everything that Trump was doing in his second term. Hui is the reason for the “almost”.

“I can’t believe they’re doing this to her,” Horton said.

The sentiment reflects a stirring unease nationally over Trump’s handling of immigration, his most potent political issue. Although most Americans in a recent New York Times/Siena College survey said they still supported deporting immigrants who are in the country illegally, most respondents disapproved of how Trump was carrying out his immigration policies.

In Kennett, some residents said they had implored state and national Republican lawmakers representing the area to intervene to stop Hui’s deportation, but had gotten mostly cursory responses. Kennett’s own leaders have not officially weighed in.

Hui’s church organised a prayer vigil for her and meal deliveries for her family. Her bosses at the waffle house held a “Carol Day” fundraiser that brought in nearly $US20,000 ($31,100). Petitions to bring Hui home, which have been signed by hundreds of residents, now sit on every table, next to the jelly packets and ketchup.

“This lady has the biggest heart in the whole world,” said Liridona Ramadani, whose family runs John’s Waffle and Pancake House. “Democrat, Republican, everybody was there for Carol” on “Carol Day”, she said.

Well, not everybody.

When an article about her detention was posted by The Delta Dunklin Democrat, a local newspaper, it was deluged with 400 reader comments. Most of them expressing sympathy, but not all.

“If you’re here illegally, expect to be removed,” said one. “This is the consequence of being in a nation with laws,” said another. One commenter simply wrote “Bye”.

The online debate got so nasty that the owners of the waffle house implored people to keep their political comments to themselves.

From jail, Hui expressed surprise that her arrest had galvanised so many people in Kennett.

Only a few people in town speak Cantonese, she said, so when she settled there, she started to go by the English name she had chosen for herself as a girl in Hong Kong, when it was still under British rule.

She started a family with her partner, who also works at restaurants around town. (He declined to comment for this article, and his immigration status is not clear.) Hui bought a house in Kennett, and her front yard is decorated with “Student of the Month” signs.

She made an application for asylum in 2009, saying that her mother in Hong Kong had beaten her and threatened her because Hui was a girl, and that she was afraid to return, according to court records.

Her claim was denied in 2012, and an immigration judge ordered her deported. Despite multiple legal setbacks, though, she managed to stay in the US by getting temporary government permissions known as orders of supervision, according to her lawyer, Bolourtchi.

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Hui’s most recent order of supervision was valid through August 2025, records show. But on the day that Hui was arrested, she was told that the order was being terminated, Bolourtchi said.

ICE officials did not respond to a request for comment about Hui’s case.

Hui said she had been blindsided by her arrest, which was one of many the Trump administration has been carrying out at mandatory immigration check-ins.

She said she spends her days shuffling between her bunk and meals, and waiting for chances to video chat with her children. She frets over how she would see them again if she is deported to Hong Kong. Her lawyer recently filed a legal motion to reopen Hui’s immigration case.

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Hui said that being separated from her family was the hardest part. Her 14-year-old son was upset that she missed his middle-school graduation. Her daughter told her that one of her school friends offered to adopt Hui so she could stay in the country.

During one call, her children tried to cheer up Hui by telling her about “Carol Day”. She said she was stunned to learn about the outpouring of support.

“I didn’t know they loved me,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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