It was Joseph Stalin who supposedly said that the death of one man was a tragedy but the deaths of a million were a statistic. Apocryphal or not, the line sheds uncomfortable light on the failure of human empathy when confronted by mass misery rather than a single, comprehensible story.
That partly explains the Irish fascination with Seamus Culleton, the Kilkenny man held for five months in an immigration detention facility in Texas since his arrest in Massachusetts in September. Culleton’s experience puts a familiar Irish face on the ordeal of thousands of migrants swept up in the current US crackdown.
In the year since Donald Trump returned to the White House, roughly 393,000 people have been arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), with an estimated 290,000 deported. These numbers represent a significant increase on the Biden-era tally but are actually lower than those recorded under Barack Obama.
The difference lies less in the raw numbers than in how suspected illegal immigrants have been treated. Some have been forcibly deported to brutal prisons in El Salvador. Others have been whisked across the country, leaving families bewildered. In Chicago and Minneapolis, people have been pulled from cars and dragged away without explanation. The US supreme court has given Ice a green light to target individuals based on ethnicity or language, clearing the way for racial profiling on an industrial scale.
READ MORE
This is performative cruelty, designed to deter illegal entry and encourage those without documents to “self-deport”.
Three decades on from the last major wave of immigration from this country, the number of undocumented Irish in the US is dwindling. Culleton, who arrived on a 90-day visa waiver in 2009, will hardly encourage others. A court has now granted a temporary order staying his deportation for 10 days.
Culleton married a US citizen, set up a plastering business and built a life in America for 17 years. His experience in detention – locked in a cold, damp room for months, surviving on child-sized food portions, with barely any sunlight – raises concerns about due process. While the legal proceedings must run their course, he is clearly in breach of visa regulations. Were such a case to arise in Ireland, similar rules would apply.
Perhaps the most significant aspect of this affair is not Culleton’s ordeal, nor the cautionary tale it offers anyone tempted to overstay a US visa. It is the insight it provides into what is happening inside the rapidly expanding apparatus of immigration enforcement under Trump, an apparatus that currently detains 73,000 people, nearly three-quarters of whom have no criminal conviction. One Irishman’s story has made that reality harder to ignore.
