Grace
Another cool September Boston morning and Seamus Culloten is making a routine visit to Home Depot to get some supplies for his plastering business. Without warning he is pulled over leaving Home Depot by some unmarked vehicles. The date was September 9, before the full-throttled aggression of ICE was an every day headline. Of course, Seamus felt that aggression right then and there, his world was suddenly much, much colder and a lot meaner.
Visa?
An immigrant married to an American citizen with a legal work permit and no criminal convictions, Seamus thought no big deal, this is going to be OK. That thought flew out the window as soon as he was taken quickly after this “arrest” to the first ICE facility in Buffalo, New York. He got his first taste of Wild West justice then and there.
He was interviewed by an ICE agent who asked him to sign a form agreeing to be deported. He refused, clinging to what he still thought was left of American justice and knowing that leaving the country would restart the “clock” on his immigration process. He checked the box on the form requesting to contest his deportation on the grounds that he was married to a US citizen and held a valid work permit. Those are solid grounds in normal times, but these, dear friends, are far from normal times. These times are about quotas, bureaucracy and showing that we can put “those” people back somewhere.
Pass on El Paso
After five days in Buffalo, the 38 year old Irishman was taken to another facility in El Paso, Texas. This is thousands of miles away from his wife. After almost five months of detention there, Seamus has been able to horrify Ireland with stories of how he has been treated here in the US. I don’t think Lady Liberty is looking very attractive to many Irish tourists now. He described squalid conditions in the facility – up to 70 men in a tent, all kinds of illness, little food or medical treatment, abuse by guards, poor hygiene… Is this how America treats people who they think have no value and when they think that no one is looking?
Can’t You Please Help Me?
Once this news broke in Ireland in mid February, the calls were fierce for the Irish government to intervene to help him. It took a few days, but Tricia McLaughlin, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs in the US responded. She stated that Seamus had indeed received due process in September when he chose to stay in the US. Oh really, that’s what justice looks like? And then our government did what they do best, deflect.
Mirror, Mirror
The script flipped to Seamus’ past. Is Seamus Culloten a perfect human being? Nope, none of us are and thank God that no one is snooping in any of our drawers for the sins of our youth. There is a drug charge in Kilkenny. Before you get too far down the road, it is important to remember that it’s a charge and not a conviction. It’s also important to remember that it happened when he was 21 in 2009. It was small and a first offense that would have probably resulted in a warning or probation. That supposed offense occurred during another collapsing wheeze in the Irish economy. Hard times can make people do stupid things. He left Kilkenny to find work in the US.
System Overload
His other “crime” was overstaying his 90 day work Visa. Happens all the time. It doesn’t make it right but it is what people do who want to work here. Those of us who were born here have no idea what our immigration system is like. Our immigration
Whose Job is it Anyway?
What kind of work did he come here to do? Construction, plastering specifically. If you want to tell me that he took work from hard working Americans, show me the Americans lining up for those jobs. I listen to the panic from all the tradesmen at the moment because there are no young people going into those jobs. The average age of a construction worker is 55.
Bad Hombres or Quotas
Seamus wasn’t arrested for being a bad guy- he was a number, filling a quota. ICE agents are meant to arrest a certain number of people weekly to make their quotas. Seamus wasn’t’t arrested for some ambiguous moral transgressions. The feds only knew about the Visa violation. They are not targeting the people who are dangerous to the community that I think many people believed that they would. Certainly some of these arrests have been on target, but boy have a lot of them been bad.
Sure there are some immigrants who have come into the community and done bad things. But time and time again, we have to look in the mirror and see ourselves, what our own citizens get up to. By and large, our immigrant neighbors are out there busting it. They are working a couple jobs trying to get up the ladder.
The rabid recruitment policies have led to ICE agents hired and put on the street at ten times the rate than their predecessors in the same agency. The ICE agents who arrested Seamus are barely knowledgeable in or concerned with Constitutional rights. The agency stripped the training from that agency when they began their desperate recruitment mission.
Some folks say that God is on the side of ICE, this is what Jesus wants, these are, after all, bad people. Twelve years of Catholic school is shouting in my ear and telling me otherwise. Jesus was an illegal immigrant, running from Herod’s law, and born in a barn. No gold toilets in there. The story of the Good Samaritan doesn’t say that the Samaritan grabbed the Jewish traveler around the neck and threw him in a dirty detention camp with 70 other guys for five months.
One of the more famous sayings in Irish is Àr scàth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine,- (air ska ah whareen na deenah). It’smeaning is that in the shade or protection of each other we all survive. It is a tenant of the culture that people survive collectively. It’s cornerstone of that hospitality that we all love and cherish.
