Undocumented Irish: give them help, not handcuffs

Anxiety levels within Boston's Irish community have soared with last week's arrest of Donegal man John Cunningham, a well-known figure amongst expats in the city through his connections with the local GAA club. The 38-year-old electrician is a long-time resident of Massachusetts and was picked up by US federal agents over "immigration violations" owing to his undocumented status. He faces the prospect of a weeks-long stay in a Boston jail before he is put on a plane bound for Ireland.

Initial fears that his detention might be the start of a crackdown on the Irish living illegally in Boston may have abated when it emerged that he surfaced on the radar of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement – known to many in America’s Irish communities as the dreaded “ICE” – due to a lengthy visa overstay and outstanding felony warrant arising from an alleged theft of $1,300 (€1,448) from a customer in 2014.

The Department of Foreign Affairs has sought to calm nerves, saying it has seen no increase in deportations of Irish citizens in Donald Trump’s America compared with Barack Obama’s time. Still, the advice of immigration lawyers and Irish community immigration counsellors to the illegal Irish is to keep the head down and not to open the door to ICE agents unless they have a warrant. With such alarming counsel, it is little wonder then that Irish-American communities are on such a heightened state of alert.

For many Irish in the US, an overwhelming sense of private frustration has spilled out in public over the failure of the US Congress to find a political solution to a long-standing problem: how do you regularise the affairs of an estimated 11 million people living illegally in the country?

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Trump of course has a right to enforce the country's laws, but his sweeping, impractical campaign promise to deport all 11 million illegal immigrants was merely an attempt to look tough. He has brought that rhetoric into the White House, and his loose definition of "criminal" in executive orders has widened the net that ICE agents can use to catch unauthorised immigrants.

ICE has reported a 37 per cent increase in arrests on immigration charges in the first three months of Trump’s presidency so the undocumented Irish are justified to be fearful of that knock on their door or the flashing lights of a police car in their rear-view mirror.

The unsentimental view is that the undocumented made a choice to live in the US illegally and they must live with the consequences of that decision. But this blithely ignores the complexities of their situations: many have US-born children, and most have contributed much to their communities and have paid US taxes for years. Some own businesses. They deserve a hearing, not handcuffs.