NO COUNTRY FOR IRISH MEN... OR WOMEN

WHEN outgoing taoiseach Enda Kenny met with Donald Trump at the White House for the traditional St Patrick’s Day shamrock ceremony last year, it was a significant moment. He made reference to the undocumented Irish there, hoping that the Democrats and the Republicans could work together to ‘sort this out once and for all’. ‘Four decades before Lady Liberty lifted her lamp we were the wretched refuse on the teeming shore. We believed in the shelter of America, in the compassion of America, in the opportunity of America. We came and became Americans,’ he said in his speech. ‘We lived the words of JFK long before he uttered them — we asked not what America could do for us but what we could do for America. And we still do.’ At this point, Trump turned to House Speaker Paul Ryan and mouthed, ‘we’re gonna do something about that’. In the end, they turned out to be eerily ominous words.

In June, the Trump administration ended an Obama-era policy that protected undocumented immigrants with children who are US citizens of permanent residents — known as DAPA, or Deferred Action For Parents of Americans.

According to statistics released by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), government agents increased arrests of undocumented Irish people by 30% in 2017. After Trump signed an executive order just days after his inauguration ordering an ICE crackdown on illegal immigration, 34 Irish citizens were deported from America last year, compared with 26 in 2016. ICE has also reportedly hired an additional 10,000 agents to weed out the undocumented.

The Washington Post reported that, as of August 2017, some 19,700 undocumented people without criminal records — of various nationalities — had been arrested. That represents a 100% increase over 2016.

In Boston, the mood among the undocumented Irish community is anxious. In one particularly highprofile case, John Cunningham — a respected community leader — was deported in July. ICE confirmed that the 38-year-old, who first entered the US lawfully on a visa waiver in 1999, was detained for also overstaying his tourist visa. At the time of Cunningham’s arrest and deportation, Boston Globe columnist Kevin Cullen wrote, ‘If John Cunningham is not safe, no-one is safe.’

Scratch the surface, and the stories of America’s undocumented Irish become heartbreaking and complex. It’s hard to put an exact figure on how many are in the US as most are at pains to stay off-radar, but they are estimated to number around 50,000.

Ronnie Millar at Boston’s Irish International Immigrant Centre in Boston says they have heard of instances of undocumented Irish being arrested in their own homes, including one individual who woke up to find two ICE officers in his bedroom.

THE majority of the Irish picked up by agents in Boston have violated immigration laws by overstaying the period of their 90-day holiday visa waivers. More than half of those detained had committed offences other than breaches of immigration laws, according to one community worker, although the offences were minor in nature such as traffic violations.

‘We’ve seen a 30-40% increase in internal enforcement operations,’ Tony Marino, director of legal services at the Irish International Immigrant Centre, explains.

‘People are being arrested and imprisoned because of violations. A lot of people are being found at the courts — ICE have indicated that they have preferred to do enforcement activity at courthouses — but I’ve heard a handful of people saying that tip-offs had been called in. They’re not waiting for people at trials, people cleared of any charges get swept up, too.

‘For the most part, people who stay out of trouble and out of the courts are leading normal lives,’ he adds. ‘We tell people that the best thing they can do is to stay out of trouble, to take public transportation and avoid getting pulled over.’

In previous (government) administrations, Marino explains, there was an effort to prioritise what ICE was spending its resources on, and people who broke no laws and those with children were given the lowest priority. ‘That has explicitly been overruled in the new administration,’ he says. ‘In the past, ICE has exercised some kind of reason but they’ve cracked down. For a lot of enforcement officers, they have been emboldened by anti-immigration rhetoric, and thinking that if they go even further with things, they’ll be supported.

‘Anxiety is definitely increased,’ he continues. ‘People are giving up and abandoning their lives here.’

OF THEIR mindset about the prospect of returning to Ireland, Marino adds: ‘It’s not so much a fear of lack of opportunities, it’s about having roots, a family and a career in the place you’ve called home. I’ve had clients who have been here since they were children and have American accents. They’re fearful about being uprooted suddenly and returning to Ireland.’

Boston lawyer John Foley has represented a number of Irish individuals in run-ins with ICE.

‘ICE has a tough job to do and they deal with many dangerous characters, but I don’t think a nanny or a waitress who has overstayed her visa should be treated the same as a violent criminal involved with gangs, guns and drugs,’ he says.

Foley says the lives of the undocumented Irish have been ‘turned upside down and inside out’.

Larry Donnelly, a lecturer in the Law School at NUI Galway has seen people return to a very different Ireland than the one they left.

‘Many people, especially if they’ve been away for more than ten years, will come back to Ireland and to a situation where their friends, their support networks, have gone,’ Donnelly says. ‘They’re sick and tired of living this way, but they don’t see an alternative here, either.

‘If you’re willing to live in a certain kind of way, you can have a pretty good life,’ Donnelly adds of the US. ‘There are guys working in pubs on Fridays and Saturday nights and making $1,500 cash a week. The reality for a lot of Irish people, especially from a certain part of the country, is that Boston would feel more like home to them than Dublin would.’

RTÉ producer Maire Kearney went to the US last year to film the well-received documentary The Undocumented.

‘It was after Trump had been elected so there were shockwaves being sent through the communities,’ she recalls. ‘If you’re watching this guy on TV telling you that you’re not welcome, that must have a real psychological impact. Time and time again, I heard people talk about having to look over their shoulder.’

In trying to find people to speak on camera about their experiences, Kearney and her team came up against a huge challenge. ‘It was very, very difficult for us to get people to talk,’ she recalls.

Paranoia among the communities is rife, agrees Donnelly.

‘A lot of reporters have asked me if people will speak to them on an anonymous basis, but now they won’t even talk anonymously as they’re afraid of what might happen as a result,’ he explains.

Yet once she started looking for the undocumented Irish, Kearney found a vast swathe of different experiences. Many have benefited from a culture of employers and officials ‘looking the other way’, especially in cities with a rich Irish community like New York, Chicago or Boston. ‘A