An Irish man living in the US for almost 20 years has said he is in fear for his life after being detained by immigration officials last year.
Seamus Culleton, originally from Glenmore in Co Kilkenny, was picked up by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents last September, as first reported by the Irish Times, and taken to a detention centre in Texas, almost 4,000km away from his home in Boston.
Speaking to RTÉ’s Liveline from the detention centre in El Paso, he said: “You don’t know what’s going to happen on a day-to-day basis, you don’t know if there’s going to be riots, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s a nightmare down here.”
Mr Culleton said he is “in fear for my life here”.
He described the accommodation as “a bunch of temporary tents”, adding “there’s probably room for 1,000 detainees in each tent”.
“I believe there are five tents,” he said.
Mr Culleton said he has no real quality of life and he has been locked in the same room for four-and-a-half months.
“I have barely any outside time, no fresh air, no sunshine. We have two TVs on the wall, there are 72 detainees here in total. We get three meals a day, very very small meals – kid size meals, so everybody is hungry,” he said.
Mr Culleton described the conditions there as “filthy” and said the toilets and showers are “completely nasty” and “very rarely cleaned”.
Followed by car
He said that on 9 September, he was finishing work and he had some items in his van that he needed to return to a Home Depot store, so he went there and after returning to his van he set off for home.
“After about two minutes I realised that there was a car following me, a Ford, a blue one, and it just looked suspicious because the guy driving had these deep blue reflective sunglasses,” he said.
“It followed for another couple of minutes and sure enough put on the blue lights and then out of nowhere it seemed like there were seven or eight cars and a bunch of officers at the window of the van, telling me to roll down the window.
“And I did, I complied with everything they said. They asked me if I had a Green Card, I said I didn’t, I said I was married to a citizen and that I had a marriage-based petition in place and I was just about to receive my Green Card and that I had a work permit to be here and work.”
Mr Culleton said however that none of that mattered to the officers and they placed him in handcuffs and took him away.
He said he had received the work permit about “a month or so earlier”, so as far as he knew he was covered.
“I didn’t really know what to think at the time, it was a very unsure moment. I didn’t really know what to think. I guess when I got thrown in the holding cell in Burlington, Massachusetts, that’s when it kind of sunk in, you know, that I might not be getting out of here.”
He said when he was being processed they tried to get him to sign deportation papers, but he did not sign anything.
Appeal for help
Mr Culleton made a direct appeal to Irish politicians to help him get out of the detention centre in Texas.
“I would love for you guys to just try and get me out of here, do all you can, please. I mean I just want to get back to my life, we were so desperate to start a family.
“My own family in Ireland is also suffering, my mother especially, she is heartbroken that I’m in here. She is constantly worrying and stressing about me, it’s not fair on her.
“Just do as much as you can to try and get me out of here, please.”
Mr Culleton said he would like Taoiseach Micheál Martin to mention his case to President Donald Trump when he visits the Oval Office next month.
“I’ll take any help I can get now at this point.”
Mr Culleton said he has been detained for five months and locked in the same room for four and a half of those five months and he does not know how much more he can take.
“It’s just a torture, I just don’t know how much more I can take.”
‘ICE picked me up’
Speaking on the same programme, his wife Tiffany Smyth, who is in Boston, recalled the moment last September when her husband told her he had been detained by ICE.
“He rang me and he said ‘don’t freak out’, I said ‘what is wrong?’ and he said ‘ICE picked me up’.
“They let him make one phone call, it was probably under a minute phone call…I just asked if he was okay and if he knew where he was going and he said ‘no, they’re not telling me anything’.
“He told me where he had parked his work van because I had to go and pick it up. And then that was it, the phone hung up and I didn’t hear from him for almost a week after that.”
Ms Smyth said that during that time she did not know if her husband had been deported, if he was back in Ireland and she had no idea if he was safe.
She said he was in New York for a week and then he got moved again and she only found out he had been moved to Texas when she used an online tracker for ICE detainees to try to locate him.
Ms Smyth said she has not been able to visit her husband, but when he had his last court date, which was supposed to have been on 9 January, she booked a flight to Texas and a hotel there so she could attend court.
However, the day before she was due to fly out, his court date was moved so she lost the money for the flight and hotel, she said.
‘His whole life just ended that day’
Speaking on RTÉ’s News At One, his sister Caroline said Mr Culleton did not have any convictions in the US or Ireland and they do not know why he was taken by ICE.
She said that last September, when he was picked up by ICE, it was “the start of the whole nightmare. His whole life just ended that day, it was put on hold”.
“To this day we still don’t know why he was picked up by ICE.
“At that point, he had a work permit but he didn’t have his Green Card. He had the work permit as part of his Green Card application, which was 99% processed. His last interview was to be held just before he was picked up.
“That application is still open because they want to complete that,” Caroline said.