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McAllister thankful for second chance

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

“I can’t believe I’m still here,” he said.
Twenty-four hours earlier, McAllister was readying himself for a speedy departure from the United States. He had turned up as instructed at the office of the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Newark. With him were his wife, Bernadette, and four children, Nicola, Gary, Sean and Mark, also known as “Jamie.”
After giving an interview to a CNN reporter in a neighboring Ramada Hotel, McAllister walked from the hotel to the neighboring BICE offices in the Hemisphere Center.
“I waved at everybody who had turned up. As far as I was concerned that would be the end of America,” he said.
McAllister was surprised at just how many people had turned up. In addition to supporters, there was a large contingent of television and print journalists.
Also present were two members of Congress, Stephen Rothman, in whose New Jersey district the McAllisters live, and Eliot Engel of New York.
“It was a good crowd,” said McAllister.
The family was escorted to the fifth floor of the building housing the BICE offices.
They had to wait a nail-biting 45 minutes until a case officer came out carrying a letter from Rep. Rothman to Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
The “sign-on” letter had already gathered the signatures of nine other members of the House of Representatives and New Jersey Sen. Frank Lautenberg.
“The case officer said that because of the letter they were waiting for word from Washington on my case,” McAllister said.
The word eventually arrived and it was positive.
“I was told that I was being released. I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
The moment was a high point, indeed the highest point, in what had been a roller-coaster two weeks for the McAllister family. On Sunday, with deportation seemingly only hours away, Malachy McAllister had been at an especially low ebb. In a phone interview he had had all but thrown in the towel.
“There’s not much we can do now. We’re hoping for some good news but we’re not too hopeful,” he said then. “We’re all pretty much gutted. I’m in a trance.”
McAllister had been away from his Wallington, N.J., home virtually every day and night since BICE agents had arrived at the front door on Friday morning, Nov. 21.
Thanksgiving had been a bit of a bust for the family. No turkey, no thought of one and only a brief meeting between Malachy, Bernadette the children and Malachy’s visiting mother-in-law, Anne Robinson.
It was Robinson who was minding the kids on an October evening in 1988 when loyalist gunmen fired 26 shots into the McAllister family home on the Lower Ormeau Road in Belfast. She remembers watching the TV, two of the kids on the floor in front of her, the crash of breaking glass, thinking it was an explosion nearby and then realizing that it was something far closer and more immediately threatening.
“I remember the barrel of the gun coming through the window,” she said. “There were bullets flying all over the place.”
To this day she will not sit with her back to a window. She is also inclined to keep an eye on the street outside, even if it’s a New Jersey one.
It was Robinson, the streetwise Belfast granny, who twigged the fact that BICE agents were keeping the McAllister home under surveillance after an immigration appeals court ruled against Malachy’s plea against deportation.
Bernadette McAllister also had a hunch.
“I had a feeling they would come on Friday,” she said.
And that’s what happened. She still bristles over the behavior of the jump-suited agents who came looking for her husband even as they forgot their manners.
“Nicola saw them and came screaming,” she said. “They were running from every angle toward the house. I opened the door and they walked straight past me.”
No warrant was produced and Bernadette was told that the agents were investigating a road accident involving her husband’s truck.
She asked one agent for a card and was told “no.”
The BICE agents watched the house for the next couple of days. At one point, Bernadette crossed the street to offer agents a copy of the emergency stay on deportation her husband’s attorney, Eamonn Dornan, had secured with the federal 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.
“They said they didn’t care. They had an arrest warrant for my husband. They said they would arrest me and the children for obstruction. They were also waving across the street at us and mocking us,” she said.
Later, an agent called the McAllister house on the phone and left a message.
“The agent said that they would be seeing a magistrate and would be taking out a criminal arrest warrant to arrest me. They were just trying to frighten me,” she said.
In the end, no warrant was served and Malachy McAllister won his reprieve.
“They can’t say I’m a threat. After all, they released me,” he said Tuesday.
Bernadette and the children had been given 30 days by the Board of Immigration Appeals when it ruled Nov. 17 against Malachy, and also turned aside a previous federal court decision granting her and the children political asylum.
Bernadette and the four kids are each free on $500 bond. Malachy is required to check in with the BICE every week until his case has been decided by the 3rd Circuit court.
“Everything has been on hold,” the 46-year-old contractor said. “I’ll have to start making work calls again. I hope some people I’ve been doing business with haven’t been put off by what’s happened. But the support has been incredible.”
Bernadette nodded. “We’ve a fighting chance now,” she said.
The McAllisters finally had Thanksgiving dinner Monday night. Malachy couldn’t remember what he had. Bernadette had fish.
“We’ll have our turkey at Christmas,” Malachy said. “Hopefully in America.”

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