Cliona Ward’s case shows Trump’s immigration war isn’t just about a wall
Donald Trump, in a typically abrasive interview with ABC News this week, said voters did sign up for his immigration crackdown, saying: 'This is what I campaigned on'. File photo: AP/Matt Rourke
Sitting in the office of Brian O’Neill in Boston in the first week of Donald’s Trump second presidency, the veteran lawyer painted a bleak picture of what lay ahead.
“He’s going to savage immigration,” he told the , and then picked up a massive tome from his bookshelf of American immigration law.
“[Trump] has this guy with him, Stephen Miller. He’s a vicious person but smart as hell. He is just so anti-immigrant. For anybody. He doesn’t care. They will tell you they like Europeans. But Miller hates everybody. He knows this book back to front. Now he is going to go after everything immigration.”
A few days later, in her law practice in Chicago, Dubliner Fiona McEntee was drawing on a similarly pessimistic canvas. Trumpian rhetoric may frequently refer to the “criminals” and the “aliens” with racial undertones, but from what both he and his closest allies have been saying all along, it wouldn't just be the likes of Latin Americans in the crosshairs.
“That whole ‘who he really means’ needs to just be thrown out the window,” she said. “[Trump’s border czar] Tom Homan, who has an Irish last name, is saying if we’re going after so-and-so, and you’re there, you’re coming. You’re going too.”
With the new administration now over 100 days in, we can see truly this “savaging” of immigration has been borne out. And how indiscriminate it is.
Cliona Ward is a 54-year old, Dublin-born woman who has been held by the dreaded US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a detention centre for over 10 days now. The detention centre in Washington state is a full 1,500 miles from where she lives in Santa Cruz in California.
She has been living in America for more than four decades and possesses a valid green card. But her arrest appears to have been based on two criminal convictions she received in the 2000s for drug possession, even though she had believed those convictions had been expunged.
Ms Ward doesn’t have a court date until May 7 so has another week to wait until she finds out what happens next. "The harsh reality is that Cliona could be held prisoner for months while we plea for her release,” her sister Orla Holladay has said.
A valued member of her community, Ms Ward is an employee with a non-profit Christian charity. And just to reiterate it again, she has the legal status to live and work in the US.
For the thousands of Irish still undocumented in America, they would get no such “due process” - if due process can be called being held in a detention centre for weeks before a court date even though you have the legal right to be in the country.
If they’re caught, they risk being sent straight back to Ireland and away from the lives they’ve created in the US.
With ICE raids and their activity ramping up all over the country, it is unlikely that Ms Ward will be the only Irish person to fall foul of the “savage” immigration stance taken by the Trump administration. Already, we have seen so many examples of people with other nationalities in recent months.
Last month, the Guardian reported that an Australian man with a US working visa had returned to the country of his birth to scatter his sister’s ashes. He had a job, an American partner and an apartment on the east coast.
When he flew back to America, he was taken aside at border control and asked to hand over his phone and the passcode. He was accused of being a drug dealer and his visa was cancelled before he was promptly put on a plane back to Australia. He had no say in the matter.
ICE's website proudly declared this week that it has removed 65,682 "aliens" since Mr Trump took office in January, three-quarters of whom were "criminal illegal aliens". News outlets around the country have reported on their raids.
In Oklahoma City last month, local media reported that ICE raided the home of a family, turned it upside down and seized money and their personal devices - even though the suspects they were looking for didn't live at the property.
Meanwhile, academics have been cancelling planned conferences and seminars in the US because of the risk of harassment and interrogation by immigration officials, according to UCD professor of international politics Scott Lucas.
Foreign-born students, including those who’ve taken part in pro-Palestinian protests on campuses, have also been arrested by ICE and face deportation.
Even children who are US citizens have been deported, along with their mothers, in recent weeks. In one case, this has included a four-year-old with a rare form of late-stage cancer, according to reports.
This is the new normal being created in America. And Mr Trump and his allies will defend these policies to the hilt, never betraying a hint of indecision at the approach.
In a typically abrasive interview with ABC News this week, it was put to Mr Trump that some of the measures he was now introducing weren’t what people "signed up for” when they voted for him. That he’s gone too far in some areas.
“Well, they did sign up for it actually and this is what I campaigned on,” he said.
This was as true a statement as he could utter. He’s doing exactly what he said he’d do. The situation facing so many people like Ms Ward has come about because many of the people who voted for him simply weren’t listening.
And, given the indiscriminate approach of ICE on Mr Trump’s orders, there are likely to be many more examples like Ms Ward’s detention in the months and years to come in the so-called land of the free.
