An Irish man has spent five months in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention and faces deportation despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record.
Seamus Culleton was a “model immigrant” who had become the victim of a capricious and inept system, said his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye.
Originally from County Kilkenny, Culleton has lived in the US for more than 20 years, is married to a US citizen and runs a plastering business in the Boston area. On his way home from work on 9 September 2025 he was arrested in a random immigration sweep, according to Okoye, of BOS Legal Group in Massachusetts.
After being held in ICE facilities near Boston and in Buffalo, New York, he was flown to a facility in El Paso, Texas, where he is sharing a cell with more than 70 men. Culleton said the detention centre was cold, damp and squalid and there were fights over insufficient food – “like a concentration camp, absolute hell”, he told the Irish Times, which first reported the story on Monday.
Culleton said that when he was arrested he was carrying a Massachusetts driving licence and a valid work permit issued as part of an application for a green card that he initiated in April 2025. He has a final interview remaining.
When asked at the Buffalo facility to sign a form agreeing to deportation, Culleton said he refused and instead ticked a box expressing a wish to contest his arrest, which he intended to do on the grounds that he was married to a US citizen, Tiffany Smyth, and had a valid work permit.
At a November hearing a judge approved his release on a $4,000 bond, which Smyth paid, but authorities continued to detain Culleton, initially without explanation.
When his attorney appealed to a federal court, two ICE agents said that in Buffalo Culleton had signed documents agreeing to be deported. Culleton said he did not agree and that the signatures were not his. “My whole life is here. I worked so hard to build my business. My wife is here.”
The judge noted irregularities in ICE’s court documents but sided with the agency. Under US law Culleton cannot appeal but he wants handwriting experts to examine the signatures and believes a video of his interview with ICE in Buffalo would prove he refused to sign deportation documents.
Previous high-profile cases involving people from Ireland include Cliona Ward, who had a green card but was detained by ICE for 17 days over a criminal record from more than 20 years ago. A visiting Irish tech worker who overstayed his visa by three days and agreed to deportation was jailed for about 100 days.
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