An American dream morphs into a nightmare – The Boston Globe

John Culleton recovered, miraculously, and moved back to Ireland, while Punter Culleton defied all medical expectations and lived a long, purposeful life before he died in 2016 of complications from a surgery designed to improve his quality of life as a quadriplegic.

For all the tragedy visited upon the Culletons in Massachusetts, Seamus Culleton loves Boston, loves the local community in Wakefield that’s embraced him, and loves Americans so much that last year he married one, Tiffany Smith, determined to make his life here forever.

After he and Tiffany got married, Seamus applied for a Green card to legalize his status. By entering that process, he was given a work permit that allowed him to work legally in a country where he had previously worked in the shadows.

All was going well, and he was in the final stages of the Green card process last Sept. 9, when ICE agents staked out the Home Depot in Saugus. After buying some materials for his plastering business, Seamus noticed some agents following him. They pulled him over and arrested him.

They allowed him a single phone call to Tiffany.

“He said, ‘Don’t panic. ICE picked me up.’ I wanted to know where they were bringing him, but ICE wouldn’t say,” Tiffany told me.

That one phone call was it for a week. It’s a tactic that ICE has perfected under the Trump administration, refusing Seamus’ requests to call his lawyer and his family, while they quickly moved him out of Boston, first to Buffalo, then to Texas.

ICE likes Texas because the state is full of judges who are more up on the Ten Commandments than the Constitution, except they always seem to skip over that pesky thing Jesus Christ said about loving your neighbors.

“They want to get you out of Massachusetts as fast as they can, so you won’t have support,” or judges that might challenge the legality of their tactics, Seamus told me over the phone from the detention center in El Paso where he’s been held for nearly five months.

The conditions are appalling, he said. More than 70 men are crowded into a large room, so tensions are high. Detainees fight over the small portions of food they are afforded, Seamus said.

“It’s a modern-day concentration camp, with filth and sickness and disease,” he said. “The people watching over us are inhumane. They are told to leave their humanity at the door, and they do so. It’s a nightmare.”

It is, he says, a nightmare with a purpose: to break down the detainees so they will sign documents consenting to be deported.

ICE claims that’s just what Seamus Culleton did.

Seamus and his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye, say that’s a lie. They say someone in the government forged Seamus’ signature and found a judge in Texas who agreed with ICE even though the judge had no foundation or expertise in handwriting analysis.

Seamus said he has signed papers while in custody, to contest his deportation, not to consent to it.

Oyoke, who has spent her career sticking up for the little guy against an all-powerful government, told me that the government’s treatment of Seamus Culleton is the saddest, most pointless she has encountered.

“Seamus is a model immigrant,” she said. “He did everything right. The only thing he did wrong was not depart the US after 90 days.”

If you enter the US under the visa waiver program, as Seamus did, and overstay your visa after 90 days, you typically waive your right to fight deportation. But, Oyoke said, there is a statutory exception to that.

“If you marry a US citizen, as Seamus did, you are entitled to submit an application for a Green card,” she said, “and in the past ICE would give you the chance to legalize your status.”

But that was before Donald Trump rode into the White House on a platform of rounding up millions of immigrants who don’t have legal status. To quickly assemble a paramilitary force willing to execute his plan, Trump dropped any semblance of ICE being a legitimate, well-trained law enforcement agency. The government reduced training from six months to 47 days, eliminating age limits and educational achievement, and offering sign-up bonuses of up to $50,000 to quickly fill the ranks with tens of thousands of agents who are obsessed with filling quotas, not arresting dangerous criminals.

If Seamus Culleton had $15,000 for fees at his disposal, and the ability to donate $1 million to the US treasury, he would be eligible for a Trump Gold Card to legalize his status. Check out the residency program for rich people. It’s either laughable or Kafkaesque. Take your pick.

The idea that Americans are safer because Seamus Culleton is locked up in squalor and facing deportation is a joke. The idea that some poor American lost out on a plastering job because Seamus Culleton built a company out of nothing is preposterous.

And those two terms — a joke, and preposterous — perfectly describe an immigration policy that is built on performative cruelty.

Oyoke visited Seamus in El Paso.

“It is the most horrendous place,” she said. “When I went to see Seamus, he looked jaundiced. They don’t let them spend enough time outside. It’s cruelty. Pure cruelty.”

Tiffany’s coworkers at the Stoneham Animal Hospital set up a GoFundMe page, to help make up for Seamus’ lost income, as Tiffany keeps payments up on his truck and other financial obligations.

On Monday, I asked the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to comment on Seamus Culleton’s case. DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin, in a statement Tuesday, did not address the forgery claims. She said Seamus Culleton illegally overstayed his visa and was given full due process rights after he was detained.

“He was offered the chance to instantly be removed to Ireland but chose to stay in ICE custody, in fact he took affirmative steps to remain in detention,” McLaughlin said, a statement that is at odds with ICE’s claims that Seamus Culleton signed documents saying he was consenting to deportation.

McLaughlin also said any claims of “subprime conditions at ICE facilities are FALSE.”

Back in Ireland, Seamus’ sister, Caroline, has spent sleepless nights trying to find out if her brother is okay. She worries about his mental health as much as his physical health.

She doesn’t believe for a moment that her brother signed papers consenting to losing his wife, his home, his business, his American dream.

“Seamus can be stubborn,” she said. “I’m his sister. I know him. He didn’t sign those papers.”

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.