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Ming Li Hui’s detention by the immigration authorities brought the reality of President Trump’s immigration crackdown to rural Missouri, where supporters rallied for her freedom.
June 4, 2025, 8:55 p.m. ET
An immigrant waitress from Hong Kong whose looming deportation brought home the reality of President Trump’s immigration crackdown to her conservative Missouri hometown was freed on Wednesday after more than a month in jail.
“They released me,” the waitress, Ming Li Hui, better known as Carol to everyone in Kennett, Mo., said in a voice mail message left for her lawyer and relayed to The Times.
Her lawyer, Raymond Bolourtchi, said Ms. Hui, 45, had been released under a federal immigration program that offers a “temporary safe haven” to immigrants from Hong Kong and a handful of other countries who are concerned about returning there. The so-called deferred enforced departure gives Ms. Hui a reprieve but does not guarantee her future in the United States.
“By no means are we in the clear,” Mr. Bolourtchi said. “But at this point I’m optimistic. It’s an immediate sigh of relief.”
Ms. Hui, who was born in Hong Kong, entered the United States 20 years ago on a short-term tourist visa and stayed long past its expiration, in the process building a life, having three children and becoming a beloved waitress serving waffles and hugs to the breakfast crowd at a diner in Kennett, a rural farming town in the Bootheel of Missouri.
She was ordered deported more than a decade ago but had been able to stay in the country through a series of temporary permissions from the immigration authorities that ended abruptly with her arrest in late April.
