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It's the kind of scene that, until recently, would have seemed almost unimaginable in an American city: a Catholic sister in full habit, on her way to Sunday Mass, stopped on a public sidewalk by federal agents and taken into custody. That is what happened to Sister Leticia Ugboaja on Sunday morning in McAllen, Texas, a few hundred yards from Our Lady of Sorrows Church, where her parish was expecting her to help give Communion. She never arrived. ICE agents arrested her, drove her to a detention facility in Raymondville, and held her there for nine hours.Sister Letty, as the Rio Grande Valley knows her, is a member of the Daughters of Mary Mother of Mercy. She is a registered nurse in the South Texas Health System. Before that she spent ten years as a certified nursing assistant at a hospital in Edinburg, Texas. For nearly a decade she has divided her days between the altar and the bedside. According to her congregation and a member of Congress, the Nigerian-born nun is in the U.S. legally.Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville called Sister Letty "a well-known source of goodness and hope in our community." He said there are "many questions remaining about the circumstances surrounding" her arrest, pointing out that "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."It should not need saying. But it does, because what happened to Sister Letty was not a mistake. It was the system doing exactly what it was built to do.The administration's justification has always been the same. "The worst of the worst." Killers. Rapists. Gang members. Terrorists. The drumbeat is endless.Here is what the records show. As of April 4, of the 60,311 people held in ICE detention, 70.8% had no criminal conviction at all. According to ICE's own internal figures, leaked to the Cato Institute, just 5% of those booked into custody had a violent criminal conviction. As for the rest with records, most were convicted of traffic violations, immigration offenses, or other low-level crimes. Arrests of people with no criminal record surged 2,450% in Trump's first year, according to the American Immigration Council -- driven by roving patrols, worksite raids, re-arrests of people who showed up to their own court hearings, and traffic stops by local police deputized to work with ICE. These are the people being targeted by Trump's mass deportation machine -- not because they pose any threat, but because Stephen Miller's arrest quotas demand bodies. So ICE targets people who are easy to grab. Someone like a nun walking to Mass on a Sunday morning. Sister Letty was lucky, in the narrow way the word applies here. Her parish posted about her detention within hours, and the post spread. Members of Congress from the Valley went straight to the Department of Homeland Security -- Democrat Henry Cuellar and Republican Monica De La Cruz both reaching DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin directly. By evening she was home. "Our immigration enforcement should target violent criminals," De La Cruz said. "A Catholic nun on her way to church is not a threat to our community." Democratic Congressman Vicente Gonzalez said what the whole episode lays bare. The administration's "hyperaggressive immigration policies," he said, "have now led to targeting nuns on their way to Sunday Mass. It's a far cry from the criminals they said they would detain and deport."Everyone knows that the good guys don't arrest nuns on their way to church. But consider all of the other people being swept up indiscriminately by ICE. If a nun in her habit, walking to church, threatening no one, can be arrested and hauled to a detention center, what is happening every day to the people whose names never reach a Facebook post, never trend, never bring a member of Congress to the phone? "Her release," observed the League of United Latin American Citizens, "does not erase the fact that she should have never been detained in the first place."The Department of Homeland Security still has not said why she was detained, what the legal basis was, or who gave the order. It has not answered a single reporter's question since Sunday. The silence is the answer.----To help immigrants who have been arrested or detained, you can support the critical work of the National Immigrant Justice Center at https://immigrantjustice.org/ways-to-helpFor children's books that encourage empathy and understanding of Mighty Girl immigrants of the past and present, visit our blog post, "A New Land, A New Life: 25 Mighty Girl Books About the Immigrant Experience" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=12855For books for children and teens about the importance of standing up for truth, decency, and justice, even in dark times, visit our blog post, "Dissent Is Patriotic: 50 Books About Women Who Fought for Change," at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=14364For books for tweens and teens about girls living under real-life authoritarian regimes throughout history that will help them appreciate how precious democracy truly is, visit our blog post "The Fragility of Freedom: Mighty Girl Books About Life Under Authoritarianism" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=32426To stay connected with A Mighty Girl, you can sign-up for A Mighty Girl's free email newsletter at https://www.amightygirl.com/forms/newsletterTo read more about Sister Ugboaja's arrest, visit https://apnews.com/article/nun-ice-immigration-texas-mcallen-96582ec2ab9582b0b0b5a6ba3c38153b