A Boston Life on Hold: An Irishman’s Plea from a Texas Tent Camp
When Seamus Culleton closes his eyes, he does not see the red-brick terraced streets of Glenmore in County Kilkenny or the bay at Barna where the family used to meet. He hears the distant clank of a metal door and the murmur of dozens of other voices under a canvas roof 3,700 kilometres from his Boston home—an unfamiliar geography that has become his world since last September.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen on a day-to-day basis,” he told callers on Irish radio from a detention centre in El Paso, Texas. “You don’t know if there’ll be riots, if someone will get sick, if a transfer will come at midnight. It’s a nightmare down here.”
Seamus’s story reads like a modern migration fable: work, marriage, a petition for permanent residency, and then—suddenly—silence, distance, and the indifference of a system. But it is not a fable. It is very real for the Culleton family, who have been living in limbo while one of their own waits in a tented ICE facility, pleading for help across an ocean.
The Day the Van Stopped
He was running an errand. After a day’s shift, Seamus stopped at a Home Depot to return a few items from his work van. Two minutes into his drive home, a blue Ford fell in behind him and stayed there. “It just looked odd—the driver had these deep reflective sunglasses,” he recalled. “Then he put on blue lights, and within minutes there were seven or eight cars.”
He complied when officers asked him to roll down his window. He told them he was married to a US citizen, that he had a pending marriage-based petition, and that he had recently been issued a work permit. None of that saved him. He was handcuffed, processed, briefly held in Burlington, Massachusetts, and then moved—first to New York, and then to Texas—without clear explanations.
“They tried to make me sign deportation papers,” he said. “I didn’t sign anything. I’m still waiting for the Green Card interview to be completed. It feels like someone pressed pause on my life.”
Inside the Tents
Picture canvas walls instead of concrete. Rows of makeshift sleeping areas, fluorescent lights humming through the night. Seamus describes the site as a campus of temporary tents—“probably room for a thousand people in each tent,” he said—with five such structures sitting under the harsh West Texas sun.
Living conditions, he says, are grim. “We get three meals a day, but they’re like kid-size portions. There are two TVs on the wall, seventy-two detainees in our room, and I’ve been in the same space for four and a half months.” The toilets and showers, he adds, are “very rarely cleaned.”
For many migrants and would-be immigrants, detention in the United States means time in a sprawling, bureaucratic system that moves people across states without much notice. Transfers of detainees thousands of kilometres from their homes are not uncommon, and for families, the logistical and emotional cost is crushing: missed appointments, shattered finances, and the constant fear of losing a spouse, a breadwinner, a parent.
Data on immigration detention fluctuates with policy and administration, but Department of Homeland Security figures in recent years show that tens of thousands of people pass through ICE custody annually. Even when average daily populations drop, the human stories behind those numbers—like Seamus’s—reveal a tangle of legal limbo, health concerns, and family trauma that the statistics cannot fully cover.
“I’m in Fear for My Life”
Seamus speaks plainly about his fear. “I’m in fear for my life here,” he told listeners. “No fresh air, no sunlight. We’ve hardly any outside time. You don’t know if there’ll be an outbreak, or if someone will get violent. It’s a torture.”
His wife, Tiffany Smyth, stayed in Boston and lived through the first terrifying week when the line to the world went dead. “He rang and said, ‘Don’t freak out’—then, ‘ICE picked me up,’” Tiffany remembers. “He had under a minute on the phone to tell me where he’d parked the van.” After that, weeks of no news followed while she tried online trackers and called friends and lawyers to locate him.
“I didn’t know if he had been deported or worse,” Tiffany says. “You feel powerless and angry. We were desperate to start a family. That dream is on hold.”
Family, Politics and a Plea for Help
Back in Kilkenny, Seamus’s mother wakes each morning with worry. “She’s heartbroken,” he said. “She calls every day.” His sister Caroline describes her brother’s arrest as “the start of the nightmare. His whole life just ended that day.”
In Dublin, politicians have taken notice. Fianna Fáil TD John McGuinness has urged immediate diplomatic action and says he has briefed the Taoiseach’s office, calling for contact with US authorities. Social Democrats Senator Patricia Sheehan described the conditions as a violation of human rights and demanded “credible action.” Labour TD Duncan Smith called Seamus’s testimony “harrowing” and urged the government to obtain information on all Irish citizens currently in ICE detention.
“There needs to be an urgent response from foreign affairs,” McGuinness said in a statement. “We can’t leave citizens stranded thousands of kilometres away without visibility or assistance.”
What This Case Tells Us
Seamus’s account is not just one man’s plight; it sits at the intersection of larger debates about migration, due process, and the transnational reach of state power. What do we owe citizens who make their lives abroad? How do legal systems preserve dignity when the machinery of detention is designed for efficiency rather than empathy?
Human rights advocates say transparency and access to legal counsel are vital. “The problem is not just transfers across states—it’s that families have no way to advocate when their loved ones are moved out of reach,” says an immigration lawyer who requested anonymity to speak freely about ICE practices. “This affects people who have built lives here: jobs, families, entitlements tied to pending applications.”
There’s an emotional geography to this case, too: the New England Irish community has for generations been a cushion for newcomers, a network that stretches from parish halls in Kilkenny to pubs in Boston. When one of its members is suddenly invisible, that communal web is put to the test.
What Would You Do?
Ask yourself: if someone you loved were taken across a continent and placed in a tent behind barbed wire, how quickly would you scramble to find them? How loud should small governments be in pressing larger partners for humane treatment of their citizens? And what does fairness look like when the wheels of immigration law grind slowly and implacably?
For now, Seamus waits. His petition remains open, his work permit still on file, and his plea to Irish leaders simple and direct: “Please, do all you can. I just want to get back to my life.”
There are no neat endings yet, only a long corridor of uncertainty. But every time a member of a diaspora raises their voice—across a tent wall, a phone line, a parliamentary chamber—that corridor becomes a little more visible. The question is whether visibility will turn into action before more lives are put on hold.
