US deportations taking a toll

Posted by Jim on January 27, 2018

Concerns have been expressed at the accelerating rate at which
undocumented Irish people living in the United States are being deported
back to Ireland.

Nineteen-year-old Dylan O’Riordan, originally from County Galway, has
already been detained for four months in punitive conditions by US
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In the Suffolk County House of
Corrections in Boston, the teenager is required to wear a bright yellow
jail jumpsuit at all times.

He moved to the US when he was 12 years old along with his parents, who
are both legal US Permanent Residents. He now faces deportation on the
basis he has overstayed his visa.

“I was aware how with Trump immigration was going to get a lot harder,
but I didn’t pay as much mind to it as I should have, which was my first
mistake,” he said.

Dylan is confined with 150 men in a section of the county jail
contracted to ICE. “There’s a lot of people from El Salvador, a lot of
Guatemalans, couple of Haitian people, and I’m the only Irish in the
whole facility,” he said.

O’Riordan’s lawyer points out that his client was brought here when he
was a child, but ICE won’t budge.

“Their position has been, well, he waived whatever rights he had when he
came,” said Tony Marino. “Twelve-year-olds don’t waive rights! I’ve
never seen anything like it. I can’t wrap my head around it.”

A prominent local Irish immigrant, John Cunningham, went on camera with
an Irish TV crew last year talking about his fear of living illegally in
Boston. Weeks later, ICE arrested him and sent him back to Ireland.

Kieran O’Sullivan, of the Irish Pastoral Centre in Boston, said that the
number of Irish being sent home from the US has surged, with a total of
34 Irish immigrants being deported in 2017.

Mr O’Sullivan explained there had been a number of high profile
‘detentions’ involving Irish people in the Boston area over the last 12
months.

He said it was “disturbing” that detainees spend lengthy periods in jail
while paperwork regarding their expulsion is processed.

“This causes considerable upset to the families of those detained
whether in the US or back home in Ireland,” he said. “This notion that’s
out there – that they’re a threat to the country – is nonsense.”

Emigration from Ireland has been officially encouraged by successive
Irish governments, and it is a process that continues. The late former
Tanaiste Brian Lenihan asked people to leave, telling them “we can’t all
live on a small island”. This week Taoiseach Leo Varadkar urged young
people without wealthy parents to emigrate to save up for a mortgage.

It is estimated that as many as 50,000 unauthorised Irish are living in
the shadows in America. Fine Gael TD John Deasy TD has been appointed to
be special envoy to the U.S. Congress to work out a solution to the
problem.

Fionnuala Quinlan, the Irish consul general in Boston, says with the
island’s small population there’s hardly a family in Ireland that
doesn’t know of someone living illegally in the U.S.

“That’s really why the government places such a strong emphasis on it,”
she says. “We know the impact that living an undocumented life has on
people not being able to go home for funerals or celebrations, the fear
and isolation that can result from that.”