President Donald Trump’s deputies are facing a last-minute 10-day delay in deporting an Irish migrant who has overstayed his visitor visa by 20 years.
The legal fight to deport Seamus Culleton has become another tool for the business-backed pro-migration groups who are trying to block Trump’s 2024 mandate to help ordinary Americans by deporting millions of wealth-shifting illegal migrants, regardless of their race.
Culleton’s deportation cause is also a hot topic in Ireland, where Irish politicians and media are lobbying to keep him in the United States as they import a huge number of Indians and Africans into their small green country.
Last week, Culleton’s lawyers won a 10-day reprieve from a federal appeals court in Texas that ends on February 23.
“The First Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday, February 13, 2025, entered a temporary order staying Culleton’s removal for the next ten business days,” said a statement from his Boston-based lawyer, Nigerian-born Ogor Winnie Okoye. She graduated from Boston-based Suffolk University Law School in 2003.
She argues Culleton should be allowed to stay and get a green card because he has no U.S. criminal record, and is married to an American. Before Trump, the Department of Homeland Security “has routinely exercised favorable discretion in such cases, including cases like Culleton’s where a marriage-based adjustment application [for a green card] is already pending,” she said.
However, there is little chance that Culleton will avoid deportation.
A federal judge confirmed he should be deported, partly because the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act imposes a 10-year bar on reentry for migrants who overstay their visas for more than a year.
“The fact is that even before the Trump smackdown, [Culleton] very likely would not have obtained his green card because he had overstayed his 90-day visa,” Niall O’Dowd, the founder of several Irish-oriented U.S. media outlets, admitted in a February 17 article for the Irish Times. O’Dowd added:
But he’s not the only one. We know that other Irish have been picked up. Ninety-nine Irish citizens were deported between January 1st and September 2025.
Culleton also escalated the fight by maximizing his media visibility, so creating a political battle with the Trump administration.
On February 9, for example, Culleton urged Ireland’s pro-migration prime minister — or Taoiseach — to use Ireland’s weak political influence to help him stay in the United States. A reporter in Extra.ie said:
An Irishman caged in a hell-hole detention centre run by Donald Trump’s ICE agents yesterday begged Micheál Martin to ‘Get me out of here… Please’.
Séamus Culleton, from Co. Kilkenny, has been locked up for almost five months in what he calls a ‘modern-day concentration camp’ in El Paso, Texas. And in a direct plea to the Taoiseach ahead of his trip to the White House for St Patrick’s Day, he asked to have his case raised with the US president, saying: ‘If he has Donald Trump’s ear… I will take any help I can get at this point.’
In a February 9 radio interview, he described the detention center as a “modern-day concentration camp” where inmates are killed by teh staff and rival ethic groups fight for food. “It’s an absolute torture, a psychological torture, a physical torture,” Culleton said.
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The Irish government is trying to keep a low profile in the fight, but it is facing pressure from Irish media and political voices. Extra.ie wrote:
Social Democrats senator Patricia Stephenson, based in Carlow-Kilkenny, told Extra.ie yesterday she has been in touch with Mr Culleton’s family about the impact of his detention. She called on Minister for Foreign Affairs Helen McEntee, who has also been briefed on the situation, to intervene and demanded the Taoiseach raise the issue with Mr Trump.
The furore shrank when it was discovered that Culleton had fled Ireland to avoid a criminal charge of drug possession, and had abandoned two young daughters.
But the leading establishment newspaper, the Irish Times, declared on February 17:
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.’
“One Irishman’s story has made that reality harder to ignore,” the editors grandly insisted in an imitation of the Skiberreen Eagle.
In the United States, O’Dowd is evoking racial conflicts to protest the deportation of a single Irishman:
Immigration was a huge winner for Donald Trump in 2024, so why would he not unleash the [ICE] dogs on more undocumented black and brown folks for 2026 during the midterms? Back in 2024 the race baiting was unabashed. “Haitians eating dogs”? Check. “Mexicans raping young women”? Check. Nothing was off-limits then, and now it is being ramped up even more aggressively.
…
The Ice strategy is nothing new. Pro-Nazi, Ku Klux Klan and anti-Asian mobs held large rallies against immigrants in their day. Today’s xenophobia is just as crude as previous efforts, the largest of which – Operation Wetback, introduced by then-president Eisenhower in 1959 targeting Mexicans – failed too.
U.S. officials are not sympathetic.
“Yeah, if you’re in the U.S. illegally for 16 years and have a final deportation order from a judge, you’re going to get deported,” said a comment from DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin. She also retweeted a comment that Culleton is free to leave for home anytime he wishes.
Culleton’s fate is a small fight in a larger political battle over the mass legal and illegal migration that shifts vast wealth from ordinary Americans to investors and to migrants.
Business interests want Congress to gut the “Three- and Ten-Year Bars” that are sending Culleton home because they make it difficult for many illegal migrants to root themselves in the United States. For example, the investor-funded FWD.us lobby group wrote in March 2025:
FWD.us estimates that approximately 1.2 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. have a spouse who is a U.S. citizen who could sponsor them for a green card. On average, these individuals have lived in the U.S. for 15 years, are 39 years old; many have been married to their U.S. citizen spouse for at least a decade. Potentially, tens of thousands more outside of the U.S. are separated from their U.S. citizen families.
…
Allowing undocumented immigrants to receive relief from the bars would restore access to existing legal immigration avenues, allowing them to adjust their immigration status in a reasonable and measured way. This would not be a special pathway, just an opportunity to access the formal process for which they already qualify.
In contrast, Trump and his deputies are helping hundreds of millions of ordinary Americans by moving the economy away from reliance on foreign migration, and towards reliance on high-tech, high-productivity innovation.
Under Trump’s low-migration, high-deportation reforms, Americans’ wages are up, housing costs are down, inflation is declining, transport costs are shrinking, crime is dropping, and corporations are spending heavily to help Americans become more productive and earn more wages for each working hour.
Trump’s economic reforms, however, are opposed by establishment Republicans and their progressive partners.
Trump’s pro-citizen, pro-wage policy is also opposed by Democrats, who instead promise to raise living standards for migrants and citizens via government benefits.
That replace-and-redistribute policy is being pushed hard in Culleton’s adopted home town of Boston, and it is pushing many ordinary Americans out of the city amid inflated housing costs, rising taxes for government aid to migrants, and migrant crime. There is roughly one wealth-shifting migrant in Boston for every three Americans, which is very similar to the fast-growing share of migrants in Ireland which has inflicted massive pocketbook damage on ordinary Irish.
The Democrats’ pushback against Trump’s deportations is also an indirect attack on Trump’s low-migration, high-productivity national economic strategy and his 2026 policy on affordability.
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