February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
After all, Britain had abandoned its extradition case against Brennan and two other IRA fugitives discovered in the Bay area – Kevin Artt and Terry Kirby – back in 2000.
Since then, the Belfast native and his American wife had gone about their business, openly working, socializing and traveling, without any trouble.
However, the post 9/11 years have seen the Bush administration dispatch many new border patrol agents to the frontier with Mexico. Brennan and Volz ran smack into an effect of this on Sunday, January 27.
“We were driving to visit friends in Texas and we were stopped at this border patrol checkpoint, which is about a hundred miles inside (the U.S. from) the Mexican border,” Brennan told the Irish Echo during a telephone interview from the Port Isabel Processing center, a Department of Homeland Security facility outside Los Fresnos, Texas.
“And they asked me if I was a citizen. I said no, I was an Irish citizen. And I gave them my papers. And they said ‘This has expired,'” said 53-year-old Brennan, who is being held pending a yet-to-be scheduled immigration hearing.
Brennan, who has worked as a carpenter since being released from federal custody in 1998, is required to renew his work permit every six months.
“The last time I applied for a work permit was in ’06, and they never issued me one,” he said. “But I still have the application pending. The hiccup wasn’t on our part. I did apply for it. The hiccup was on their part.”
Brennan and Volz were escorted inside a nearby immigration building, where
U.S. border patrol agents began searching a computer database for any name or fingerprint matches. It wasn’t long before a now lapsed InterPol warrant pertaining to Brennan’s 1983 Maze escape, and information about his IRA past, appeared.
“At one point there were six guards all gathered around the computer screen,” Joanna Volz told the Echo during a phone interview from the couple’s Oakland, California home. “They were so excited. It was like they caught Osama Bin Laden.”
Brennan contacted his lawyer in San Francisco, who promptly faxed the checkpoint personnel all relevant paper work proving that Brennan has been living openly, while waiting to find out if he’d be deported for entering the U.S. under a phony name in 1983.
He has also filed for political asylum in the U.S., claiming that he could be targeted by loyalist paramilitaries if returned to Northern Ireland.
The faxed documents from Brennan’s lawyer didn’t satisfy the Texas-based border patrol guards.
“They said ‘Well, just because you have an application pending doesn’t mean you have a legal right to be in the United States. So we are going to detain you,'” said Brennan.
Joanna Volz said that at one point a guard knelt down aggressively “in Pol’s face” and said: ‘You were convicted of having a bomb, weren’t you? You had a bomb.'”
“We were both very startled,” she said. “And P