Podcast Corner: Land Of The Free meets undocumented Irish in the US
Sean Murray presents the Land of the Free podcast series.
Episode two of Land of the Free, a three-part series from the Irish Examiner exploring the fears and struggles of undocumented Irish immigrants in the US, begins with a snippet of former US president Barack Obama’s address on College Green in Dublin 14 years ago, in 2011. “So you could say there’s always been a little green behind the red, white, and blue.”
First of all, what a brilliant line, a reminder of what a great orator Obama was. Cut to the incumbent president Donald Trump, who we hear state: “All illegal entry will immediately be halted and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came.”
Trump says so much that some of it can be lost amid the noise and bluster, but for the undocumented Irish in the US, they must be worried about the future.
Presenter Sean Murray, who travelled from New York to Boston to Chicago to report Land of the Free, between those two presidents’ quotes, says: “Any hopes that the Obama administration would translate into lasting permanent action for the thousands of undocumented Irish living and working in the States never came to fruition.”
Murray says in the opening episode that in any of those three cities he visited, you don’t have to go far to find an Irish bar, but there is a question you might want to avoid asking just in case: When’s the last time you were home? It could be years, decades, but, he says, they can’t go home because they’re undocumented.
James O’Malley, a New York-based immigration lawyer from Limerick, tells him it is a tiny percentage of Irish people who contact his office over deportation fears - they have clients from some 92 countries.
And what of ICE, the US Information and Customs Enforcement, whose website, says Murray, proudly declares all they are doing to rid the US of all the undocumented people living there?
“Shared among undocumented people and by immigration lawyers is a cheat sheet on what to do if ICE come calling. ‘I do not wish to speak with you, answer your questions, or sign or hand you any documents based on my fifth amendment rights under the United States constitution,’ is what you should tell them. ‘I do not give you permission to enter my home based on my fourth amendment rights under the United States Constitution unless you have a warrant to enter, signed by a judge or magistrate with my name on it that you slide under the door.’”
It’s startling to think this ‘cheat sheet’ is something that thousands of undocumented people, Irish or otherwise, must know.
- All three episodes of Land of the Free are available now at irishexaminer.com/podcast
