On the surface, Malachy McAllister seems ordinary.

The 47-year-old widower lives in a neat, cozy apartment in Wallington with his two teenage kids. Industrious and methodical, McAllister, a veteran bricklayer, owns a thriving masonry business.

But this book is infinitely more complicated than its cover.

McAllister, who came from Northern Ireland as a tourist, is fighting the U.S. government, which wants to deport him. While courts have turned down his request for political asylum, an attempt to deport him last year failed because he wasn't home when agents arrived. He now has a work permit until his case is resolved.

But unlike many foreigners fighting deportation, it's not his illegal status that is central to the U.S. government's determination to get him out. It's his involvement more than two decades ago with the paramilitary Irish National Liberation Army and his role as a lookout in an assault on a Royal Ulster Constabulary officer in Northern Ireland. The Department of Homeland Security charges that McAllister was a terrorist and may still pose a threat to the security of the United States.

On Wednesday, Rep. Steve Rothman, D-Fair Lawn, plans to unveil a bill that calls for McAllister and his family to receive legal permanent residency in the United States. Rothman and Irish-American organizations will hold a briefing that day to call on Homeland Security to suspend deportation proceedings.

McAllister, who served prison time in Northern Ireland for his involvement, and his lawyer argue that he was a political prisoner, a freedom fighter. They say his conduct in Northern Ireland was inevitable, given the environment - a battleground where, McAllister says, British rule resulted in favorable treatment for Protestants and mistreatment of Catholics.

"Because of the situation in Northern Ireland," McAllister says, "there was no real alternative."

In his folksy Irish brogue, McAllister speaks of how his father was beaten, and friends killed, by paramilitary fighters who favored British rule. Then in 1981, when Bobby Sands, a member of the outlawed Irish Republican Army, died during a hunger strike in prison, McAllister says he decided to join a mainly Catholic paramilitary group.

In 1988, the violence became too much when pro-British gunmen fired 26 rounds into his living room, narrowly missing his children, who were playing nearby. McAllister and his family fled the country.

"The most important thing for us to establish is that the offenses for which Malachy was convicted over 23 years ago were political offenses," says Eamonn Dornan, McAllister's lawyer. "The fact that these activities took part in a centuries-old struggle against the British occupying force in Northern Ireland is clearly a political offense. Political offenses can't be considered terrorist offenses; they're mutually exclusive."

The Department of Homeland Security sees things differently.

"A criminal conviction is a criminal conviction," said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for the agency in Washington, D.C. "It doesn't matter if it's theft or something else, it's a criminal conviction. Under immigration law, it makes him inadmissible and deportable."

British consulate officials in Manhattan say they are familiar with McAllister's case, but declined to comment, calling it "a matter between the U.S. government and Mr. McAllister."

As McAllister's years-long battle against immigration officials approaches its last duel - the final hearing is planned for July 1 at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Newark - he stands as part of a little-noted legacy of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Exiles in the United States who once could find some sympathy for their political causes, even when violence was involved, now find condemnation in a nation changed by the 2001 terrorist attacks.

"No doubt the atmosphere has changed dramatically since Sept. 11," Dornan says. "It makes it very difficult because of the controversial nature of charges that something was a terrorist incident. When the American public thinks of that word, terrorist, it associates it with al-Qaida and the events of Sept. 11."

McAllister regrets the youthful zealotry that drove him to see violence as a solution.

"I'm sorry I ever got involved in that organization," he says. "I realized immediately after that incident that I couldn't be a part of the war, I couldn't take anybody's life or hurt anybody, and I withdrew from that organization."

But in no way, he says, should he ever be seen in the same light as al-Qaida. "It's really troublesome to be associated with someone of that sort of ilk," he says.

McAllister's situation is not unique. The long emotional shadow of Sept. 11 also has fallen upon other Irish nationals who had begun to find some acceptance in the United States during the Clinton administration.

The Bush administration didn't invite Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams to the White House on St. Patrick's Day this year for the first time since 1995. Adams is purported to have been a commander in the 1970s of Sinn Fein, the political group associated with the IRA.

Even Sen. Edward Kennedy, who has met with Adams every St. Patrick's Day since Protestant and Catholic groups in Northern Ireland reached a peace accord in the late 1990s, skipped it this year because of accusations that the IRA mounted the world's largest bank robbery, stealing $50 million from a Belfast bank last year.

U.S. officials acknowledge the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, but the U.S. State Department Web site suggests that the IRA is impeding peace by "continued engagement in paramilitary activity."

Then it adds: "The United States remains firmly committed to the peace process in Northern Ireland ... [and] has condemned all acts of terrorism and violence, perpetrated by any group."

"I don't know that there was ever any tolerance for someone caught up under anti-terrorism provisions," Dornan says. "But there's certainly zero tolerance after Sept. 11."

McAllister's supporters are trying to improve his odds of staying in the United States despite the stricter interpretation of the laws following the terrorist attacks. They also are pushing for the United States. to grant asylum to his children. The youngsters and McAllister's wife, who died last year, had won asylum in 2000, but then another court reversed the decision after U.S. officials appealed. His supporters have held heavily attended fund raisers. They have an elaborate Web site about his case. And they hold frequent discussions with state and national legislators.

"Malachy McAllister committed a crime which arose in a very difficult civil war," Rothman says. "He deserved punishment, nonetheless, and was sent to prison in Northern Ireland. But he was released from prison by Northern Ireland authorities, because they decided he had paid his debt to that society and should be set free. So, then, America should welcome him as a political refugee, and live up to its tradition of giving people second chances."