In Terror War, Justice for All?

Jimmy Breslin

November 25, 2003

Last Wednesday, while George Bush was dining in Buckingham Palace with the queen, here in America a flying squad of agents of Bush's Homeland Security were opening another assault on the freedom of another Irish family in this country.

That day, Malachy and Bernadette McAllister, who are here with their two children on political asylum from Northern Ireland since 1988, were told by the immigration authorities that they were being stripped of their political asylum status and deported within 30 days to Belfast. The husband did not even have that much time. He was to be arrested and deported immediately.

Bush - I've been to London to visit the queen - slept off dinner in Buckingham Palace.

The Irish are supposed to be natural opponents of the Brits, but the Irish here approve of anything done by Republicans like Bush. If he is in Buckingham Palace, then, oh, my, how great it must be for him. If they are arresting and deporting Irish here, well, they aren't ours. They are the dirty communists, and there must still be a thing that you could call communists. Anyway, the Irish support the war in Iraq, vote for Bush because he goes to war and also because his entire constituency is against the blacks and that makes everything else he does all right.

The Irish here love law enforcement, lawyers, insurance. They come from a heritage of writing, but they have no writers worth mentioning over here. You can't write unless you rebel first and the Irish here don't rebel; they genuflect. They are not worth much more than filling up the empty spaces at the St. Patrick's Day Parade.

And in New Jersey, ordered to be deported, Bernadette McAllister's husband had to take off to avoid being shackled and thrown out of the country. He is a stone mason. He went away on a business trip, his wife said. On Thursday, Bernadette went with lawyers to file an appeal on the deportation hearing with the U.S. Court of Appeals in Philadelphia.

At 5:15 on Friday morning, there was noise outside the two-family house near the Meadowlands sports stadium. Her teenage daughter, Nicola McAllister, looked out the window. The agents on the ground put flashlights on her. She screamed and ran into the mother's bedroom.

The last time this happened, in Belfast, Loyalists saw Nicola in the window and fired 26 shots at her and the house.

This time, when Bernadette looked out the window, she saw agents running at the house from every direction. She counted 10 of them. She went downstairs to the front door and opened it.

Three men were there. They pushed past her and went up the stairs.

"Who are you?" she asked.

Nobody answered. Then in her living room, one man asked, "Does anybody here have ID?"

Bernadette McAllister showed hers. I don't know why she did that, but she did. She is an Irish law-abider.

"We're here investigating a hit and run," one of them said. "Do you have a black Toyota? We need to see it."

The McAllisters have that make, but Bernadette knew that the car hadn't been in miles of an accident.

"If the vehicle is returned here, don't touch it," the agent said. "We need to see it."

"Can I have your card?" Bernadette said.

"No."

They left. At first, that day, agents sat in front of the house in a car. Now the agents park down the block. And Malachy McAllister can't come to the house.

The McAllisters are here because Malachy was convicted of conspiracy to murder by a Diplock Court, a British invention for Irish defendants that has trials with no juries. He served four years. When he came out and the family lived in daily danger in Belfast, he applied for a refuge for his family in America and it was granted.

Now there is Bush and it is all changed. Suddenly, Homeland Security agents, whose badges might be engraved with the bureau motto, "No Heavy Lifting," go about following the Bush Justice Department's orders to get the Irish.

God save my queen from these people.

First, Bernadette Devlin was arrested at Chicago airport because of her politics in Northern Ireland. Just about nobody protested.

Then John McNicholl, after living and working here for 20 years, and raising a family, was ordered deported last July.

On Nov. 13, Donald Browne, 44, Damien McCafferty, 35, and David Curtis, all from the city of Derry in Northern Ireland, were aboard British Airlines flight 215 from London to Boston. They signed immigration forms that asked if they ever had been convicted of a crime of moral turpitude. Good Lord, never. How could you ask that of me?

When the plane landed, agents of the U.S. Attorney's Anti-Terrorist unit, the Immigration Customs and Enforcement in New England, Field Operations of Customs and Border Protection and also the FBI waited on the ground to arrest them for marking the wrong box on their forms. The charge is "Conspiracy and making false statements on an immigration document." The crime on their records was in Northern Ireland in 1997 and the sentence was probation. Almost no Catholic of their ages in Northern Ireland has not been convicted of something.

In Denver on Nov. 17, Ciaran Ferry had his appeal denied by an immigration judge who misread an old Northern Ireland court report and concluded that while in Northern Ireland Ferry had committed "serious non-political crimes." His asylum was denied.

And now the Bush government has a new extradition treaty with Britain up for Senate confirmation that calls for the detention and deportation to Britain of any citizen or resident of the United States without any probable cause, with only the barest show of unsupported allegations.

The Irish here will love it. This is their idea of true justice.