AN IRISHMAN WHO has been detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials for almost five months has appealed to the Irish government for help.

Seamus Culleton, who is originally from Kilkenny but has been living in the US for 20 years, was arrested by Ice last September, despite having a valid work permit and driver’s license and being in the process of attaining a green card.

Culleton owns his own plastering company and lives with his wife, US citizen Tiffany Smyth, and two dogs in Massachusetts.

He was arrested while driving back from work in Boston.

Speaking on RTÉ’s Liveline from Ero El Paso Camp East Montana, in Texas, Culleton pleaded with the Irish government for help.

“I’d love for you guys to just try to get me out here. Do all you can please. It’s absolute torture, psychological torture, physical torture,” he said.

“I just want to get back to my wife. We were so desperate to start a family. “ 

Culleton said his family in Ireland are suffering: “My mother, especially, is heartbroken that I’m in here. She’s just heartbroken over the whole situation. I don’t want her health to get any worse. She’s constantly worrying and stressing about me. It’s not fair on her,” he said.

The Kilkenny man said he is living with 72 other people in a tent in the Texas detention centre.

“You just don’t know what’s going to happen on a day to day basis. If there’s going to be riots, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s a nightmare down here.”

He said the facilities are “filthy” and detainees are often suffering from illnesses. 

“We’re often without hygiene products. We’re often without shampoo and soap. The showers are filthy, the toilets are filthy. Infection, disease and sickness is right here,” he said.

“Everybody’s sick. There’s covid in every pod. There’s influenza in every pod. It’s just horrible, horrible, horrible place.”

He also said detainees are given “child-sized” portions of food. “I have lost weight, for sure. I definitely have, everybody has,” he added.

“It’s very hard to stay positive in a situation like this,” he said.

Speaking on Liveline, his wife Tiffany Smyth said that her biggest fear would be her husband being “left to languish” in the facility.

“Your life is just completely taken from you. That’s probably the worst fear, and this is exactly why we haven’t spoken out, and why we were scared to speak out, because we thought it would hurt us in some way,” she said.

Speaking on Liveline Sinn Féin TD for Carlow-Kilkenny, Natasha Newsome Drennan said: “The Irish government have to pull out all stops here on this one now.”

“This needs to be broadly publicised. Call it out for what it is, they are concentration camps, 72 people in the room, in squalor. You just wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy,” she said.

Labour’s foreign affairs spokesperson Duncan Smith TD called on the Minister for Foreign Affairs to intervene.

“The testimony from Seamus Culleton, originally from Kilkenny but living in the United States, is absolutely harrowing. Mr Culleton described his experience in detention facilities as being “like a concentration camp”,” he said in a statement today.

“Data from the Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed that at least 66 Irish citizens have faced deportation procedures in the United States last year.”

The Department of Foreign Affairs has been contacted for comment.