The phone call from the side of a Texas highway lasted barely a minute.
'ICE stopped me and they're taking me away,' Seamus Culleton told his wife, Tiffany Smith, before the line went dead. For five days, she says, she had no idea where he was. No chance to speak to him, no explanation, only the dawning realisation that her husband of 10 years had vanished into the machinery ofUS immigration enforcement.
Culleton, a businessman from Kilkenny who has lived and worked in the United States for more than 16 years, is now at the centre of an ugly diplomatic and moral row. What might once have been a dry legal dispute over immigration status has become something far more charged: an accusation, delivered on the floor of the European Parliament, thatDonald Trumpis using America's immigration system as a 'political weapon.'
That phrase came from Irish MEP Billy Kelleher, who on Thursday used some of the EU's most formal political real estate to make a pointed intervention in a single man's case—and, by extension, to question what the US is turning into.
Kelleher did not water down his language. Describing recent scenes from across the US, he spoke of 'harassment and intimidation with multiple breaches of people'shuman rights' and admitted that, for those in Europe who grew up with a broadly positive view of America, it is 'heartbreaking' to watch.
He then turned to Culleton. Here, he argued, was not some shadowy caricature of the 'illegal immigrant' often invoked in Republican stump speeches, but a small business owner, married to a US citizen, who had been quietly trying to regularise his status.
'Until President Trump returned to office, Mr Culleton's case wasn't on anyone's radar,' Kelleher told MEPs. Yet now, he said, the 40‑something Irishman is being held in 'inhumane conditions for political reasons' at a detention facility in Texas.
Raised the case of Kilkenny man, Seamus Culleton who is being detained in inhumane conditions by ICE in Texas.Current 🇺🇸 immigration enforcement is akin to how citizens were treated in former Soviet Dictatorships.President Trump is using immigration as a political weapon.pic.twitter.com/0tTf0Appej
The phrase is loaded, but it reflects a growing suspicion among critics that theTrump administration's second‑term immigration blitzis not merely about enforcement. It is also about spectacle and fear—about showing voters that no one, not even long-settled workers from friendly nations, is beyond the reach of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
For Tiffany Smith, any grand political design feels painfully remote. She described the shock of that one short call, and the emptier days that followed, in simple terms. 'I had no idea where he was,' she said. Since then, she has watched her husband's case ricochet from small local reports to international coverage, all while he remains locked up.
Source: International Business Times UK
