February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Border agents said Joseph Black, 47, committed a crime when he answered “no” on a form that asked if he had ever been convicted of a crime of “moral turpitude” or been involved in terrorist activities. He served time in the Maze prison in the late 1970s for being involved in the IRA and shooting a man in the leg.
Black had flown from Ireland to attend a niece’s wedding in Pittsburgh when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents nabbed him.
“Joe is on his way home,” Black’s brother-in-law Sean McClorey, an Irish entertainer in Pittsburgh, told a concert audience on Saturday evening.
Family and friends initially feared that Black could face a six-month sentence for the misdemeanor. McClorey and others in the Irish community had begun to campaign for leniency on Black’s behalf and at the weekend they paid tribute to New York Rep. Eliot Engel, who intervened on his behalf.
It’s believed Engel telephoned Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson, who in turn contacted prosecutors at the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia, according to McClorey.
Black’s family have insisted that he posed no threat to anyone in the U.S. because he left the IRA after his release from prison.
Federal prosecutors agreed that he posed no terrorist threat but said they were enforcing regulations that bar people with past convictions for violent crimes from coming to the United States without a visa.
“Joe let the judge know that if he ever gets another wedding invitation, he’s going to send a check,” McClorey said at the concert, where he was the opening act for Irish singer Maura O’Connell. “He doesn’t intend to come back to the United States anytime soon. Wherever he is, I’m sure he’s sitting with a glass of Irish malt in his hand. No ice.”
Black’s case is one of several involving republicans associated with the Northern Irish Troubles who have been arrested or refused entry to the U.S. since the tougher border security measures imposed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.