MAGA doing what MAGA does: screw up, and lie to cover it.
Seamus Culleton has lived in US for two decades, married a citizen and runs a plastering business but faces deportation
www.theguardian.com
Culleton entered the US in 2009 on a visa waiver programme and overstayed the 90 day-limit but, after marrying a US citizen and applying for lawful permanent residence, he obtained a statutory exemption that allowed him to work, Okoye told the Guardian. “He had a work-approved authorisation that is tied to a green card application,” she said.
Culleton’s detention prevented him from attending the final interview in October, she said. “It’s inexplicable that this man has been in detention. It does not make sense. There’s no reason why the government shouldn’t just release him and allow him to attend the interview that will confirm his legal status.”
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.”