February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
They were arrested on a Seattle-bound train as it passed through Montana after passengers were scrutinized by U.S. immigration officers. The Whelans had overstayed their allotted time of 90 days in the U.S. and had become undocumented as a result.
When arrested, the two were placed in shackles and moved to Denver chained to 16 other prisoners.
Their plight attracted public support in Waterford and angry questions from their local TD, John Deasy of Fine Gael. Deasy accused the Irish government of not doing enough to help Irish nationals who are detained in the U.S. for immigration law violations.
However, Irish diplomatic pleas on behalf of the two did not fall on entirely deaf ears. The Irish consulate in San Francisco has been dealing with the Whelan case since the two men were arrested.
Those efforts looked this week as if they would pay off — just in time for Christmas.
“They are due home,” said an assistant to John Deasy at his Waterford constituency office Tuesday.
A flight back to Ireland in time for the holiday will be a lucky break for the two men. The current average period of incarceration for undocumented immigrants nabbed by the authorities is two months.
The arrest of the Whelans was the second reported time in recent years that Irish nationals have been detained while traveling in the U.S. by train.
Ten Irish were deported in September 2002 after being arrested on a Chicago-to-Boston train. The eight women and two men were detained by border agents when the train stopped in Buffalo, N.Y. They were returning from the GAA North American championships in Chicago.
The 10 were made to walk the entire length of the train escorted by armed officers. At a subsequent hearing in Boston, all were told they were barred from the U.S. for 10 years even though some had not overstayed long enough under visa-waiver program regulations to warrant such a punishment.
The arrest of the Whelan cousins, meanwhile, prompted Deasy to ask Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern, in a written D_il question, just how many cases of Irish nationals facing deportation proceedings in the U.S. were currently being dealt with by his department. The Waterford TD also asked Ahern how many Irish citizens had been deported from the U.S. each year for the last five years.
Ahern, in his written response, said his department was aware of eight Irish nationals presently awaiting deportation from the United States. He stated that figures published by the U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics indicated that 290 Irish nationals were deported from the United States between 1999 and 2004.
Of these, 191 were categorized by the U.S. authorities as “non-criminal” deportations and were likely to have arisen from immigration offenses.