Articles By Jim Dee

 

Maze escapee Brennan is ordered to stay in US jail (Jim Dee, Belfast Telegraph)   Thursday, 28 August 2008   An American immigration appeals court has upheld Maze escapee Pol Brennan’s bail denial, just weeks after three US Congressman wrote to the Department of Homeland Security calling for the Ballymurphy native be freed on bond. In its ruling this week, the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Virginia, agreed with a Texan judge’s April ruling that Brennan is a danger to society. The court said his 1984 entry into America using an alias, and his subsequent purchase of a targeting pistol using the alias, proved that he has criminal tendencies. The court also cited his 2005 misdemeanor assault conviction after a builder allegedly refused to pay Brennan $1,000 in back wages. Brennan insists the contractor attacked him. He was found guilty and had to pay a $1,500 fine and performed 500 hours of community service. Unlike the judge who’s been handling Brennan’s case since he was detained for having a lapsed US work permit in Texas in January, the Board of Immigration Appeals court didn't deem Brennan a flight risk. In a letter sent to Department of Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff in July, three Congressmen — New York Republicans Peter King and Jim Walsh, and Massachusetts Democrat Richard Neal — insisted that Brennan’s honoring of bail terms when he was twice freed from US jails while Britain sought his extradition in the 1990s proves that he isn’t a flight risk. In 1977, Brennan was sentenced to 16 years in prison after being caught moving explosives through Belfast. In September 1983, he was among 38 IRA prisoners who escaped the Maze. A decade later, he was arrested by the FBI living in Berkeley, California. In 2000, Britain dropped its extradition case against him. US authorities then gave him permission to work in the San Francisco area pending resolution of his residency status. On January 27, as Brennan and his American wife were driving to visit friends in Texas, he was detained over the lapsed work permit. Although he’d applied to renew his permit, US authorities hadn’t yet sent it to him. Department of Homeland Security prosecutors now want him deported for entering the US illegally in 1984. Brennan was held at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas until late July. On July 22, a day before Hurricane Dolly slammed into Texas, he and hundreds of others were evacuated. Over the next 18 days, he endured three long-distance prison relocations, traversing nearly 2,000 miles of Texas and New Mexico in the process. He’s now at the Willacy County Processing Center (WCPC) in Raymondville, Texas. Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph by phone from WCPC on Tuesday, Brennan said he’s frustrated that the misdemeanor assault conviction continues to dog him because, “it was self-defence. The guy got aggressive with me first”, he claimed. He added: “I’m disappointed with the ruling, but I’m not surprised. “I wasn’t expecting anything different. But now we’ll take (the bail appeal) to the federal level.” Brennan’s next deportation hearing is on September 24.     Reps back Brennan as Dolly moves him   (Jim Dee, Irish Echo) Having spent six months in a Texas immigration jail, and with a key August court date with an unsympathetic judge looming, it seemed the circumstances in which in Pól Brennan has been battling against deportation from the U.S. couldn't get any worse. Then Hurricane Dolly slammed into the Lone Star State, sending the Maze prison escapee on new odyssey that landed him in 23-hour solitary confinement in New Mexico, this just weeks after his first months long solitary stint in Texas ended when a U.S. immigration official decided his "security threat" classification was inappropriate. Hundreds of immigration detainees were evacuated from the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas the day before Dolly's July 23 arrival. Speaking to the Irish Echo via phone from the Otero County Detention Center in Chaparral, New Mexico, Brennan said that he and another prisoner, who also had an escape history, were put in a special mini-van with blacked-out windows for the 14-hour trip to the new jail. Brennan's legs were shackled and he had to sit on a metal bench with no cushion for the entire 925 mile journey. He blames extreme temperature fluctuations inside the van – which alternately left him severely chilled from air conditioning, and then sweating profusely from high heat – for making him very sick en route. "I was sore and in a sorry state when I arrived here," he told the Echo "It was very stressful." Brennan is currently only allowed out of his cell one hour daily for exercise while meals are delivered under his door. ICE public affairs spokeswoman, Leticia Zamarripa, told the Echo on Monday that Brennan was placed in solitary for "security reasons," but that his case was being reviewed and he could be returned to dormitory- style lock up in the future. Brennan was among 38 IRA prisoners who escaped Northern Ireland's Maze prison in September 1983. Entering the U.S. months later, he lived under an alias in the San Francisco Bay area until arrested by the FBI in January 1993. In 2000, in the wake of the Good Friday agreement, Britain dropped its extradition request. U.S. authorities then authorized Brennan to work as a carpenter in the San Francisco Bay area while awaiting a rulings on his political asylum case, and deportation proceedings against him for entering the country illegally. On January 27, he was detained a Texas immigration checkpoint because his U.S.-issued work permit had expired. Brennan had applied for renewal, but had not yet received an updated permit. Brennan twice honored bond terms when released in the 1990s during British extradition proceedings. However, the judge in his current case, has denied him bail because he deems the Belfast native a flight risk and a danger to society. On Tuesday, three Congressman, Peter King (RNY), Richard Neal (D- MA) and Jim Walsh (R-NY), sent a letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff calling for Brennan to be granted bail. "Mr. Brennan's continued detention without bond appears to serve no end that is consistent with the interest of the United States to foster a lasting peace in Northern Ireland," the letter reads. "With his marriage to a United States citizen and provisions in the law to waive his prior unlawful presence in the U.S., Mr. Brennan ought to be granted the opportunity to contest the charge of removal with the privilege of release on bond. His continued detention is not justified for the security of the United States, or its people, nor is he a flight risk." In a phone interview with the Irish Echo on Monday, Rep. King, a former chairman of the house of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, was asked if he thought Brennan should ultimately be allowed to stay in the US. "Yes I do. My understanding is the only problem with that is that he didn't file (the work permit renewal form) on time," said Congressman King. "As I understand it, he was living here legally and then there was a paperwork error," he added. "And whether it was his fault or the government's fault, the fact is, as I understand it, there was no malice, there was no attempt not to file it. So if they are the facts, then he should stay." Joanna Volz, Brennan's American wife of 19 years, told the Echo that she doesn't disagree with the decision to evacuate a facility in the path of a hurricane. But her husband's relocation to New Mexico means that visiting her husband will be next to impossible. "I was seeing him every Saturday for either a halfhour or an hour," said Volz "Now that is no longer possible. The new prison is in the middle of nowhere. It would be a two-day drive each way for me to see him." Brennan's next scheduled court appearance is on August 12. However, given that the Texas courtroom where judge overseeing his case normally presides was damaged by Hurricane Dolly, those proceedings could be pushed back several weeks, or even months. August 1, 2008 ________________ This article appeared in the July 30, 2008 edition of the Irish Echo.     Brennan's plight rooted in '96 as much as 9/11 By Jim Dee letters@irishecho.com June 25, 2008 Sitting 20 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, tiny Turcotte, Texas has seen its share of hurricanes. However, an unlucky Irishman passing through the area five months ago encountered a different maelstrom: new U.S. immigration and Homeland Security realities that have him jailed at time when his native Northern Ireland is at peace, and Washington hails some of his former IRA comrades as statesman. Maze escapee Pol Brennan has been cooling his heels in a Texas immigration jail since being detained at a U.S. immigration checkpoint north of Turcotte on January 27 - this for having a lapsed U.S. work permit. The fact that Brennan had filed the renewal form on time, and that U.S. authorities simply hadn't updated it at the time he was stopped, was deemed irrelevant. So too was Britain's 2000 decision to drop its efforts to extradite Brennan back to Northern Ireland for being one of 38 IRA men who escaped the Maze prison in September 1983. And Homeland Security prosecutors haven't been moved by the fact that federal officials had earlier authorized Brennan to live freely in the San Francisco Bay area for years while awaiting the outcome of his political asylum application. America is far different place today than when Brennan was first arrested in 1993. The U.S. has been waging a "war on terror" since 9/11, and a bourgeoning security apparatus headed by the Department of Homeland Security looks more harshly than before at anyone with even the remotest connection to terrorism. But "war on terror" realities aren't the chief reason that Brennan now faces the toughest battle of his 15 year struggle remain in the United States and with his American citizen wife. Far more pertinent is the fact that his current deportation case is being framed by tough 1996 immigration reforms that scorn most circumstantial considerations and discourage any nuanced interpretations of individual cases by judges. Like the 'three-strikes-and-your-out' criminal laws so popular nationwide in the 1990s, the 1996 immigration reforms mandate black-and-white remedies to deal with undocumented immigrants whose circumstances are can often complicated and mitigating factors. On the surface, the case against Brennan seems pretty open-and-shut. He has a 1995 felony gun conviction that appears to disqualify him from staying in the U.S. under any circumstance under the rules contained in the 1996 legislation. He bought the gun from a licensed dealer in the early 1990s. However, by using an alias when buying it, he committed a felony. Given the clichéd depictions of "hardened terrorists" prevalent in pop culture today, it might be presumed that the IRA fugitive was "packing" in preparation of shooting his way out if the feds ever swooped. But Brennan's reality was much more mundane. For starters, when the FBI arrested him in January 1993, he didn't even own the gun anymore. He'd sold it to finance his new hobby: astronomy, which he'd taken up after his wife bought him a telescopic viewer in the hopes of weaning him off the target-shooting hobby that she feared would cause problems. "I obtained a pistol for the purpose of target shooting in the early '90s," Brennan told the Irish Echo, during a phone interview from the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas. "After the initial fascination wore off, I resold the pistol and bought my first telescope, as my interest in astronomy grew and the opportunity to buy some real observational equipment meant that I could put my spare time to better use increasing my knowledge of the night sky, instead of just punching holes in paper targets," said Brennan. But what possessed him to risk buying a gun in the first place? Brennan told the Echo that, having grown up in Belfast's Ballymurphy area - an IRA stronghold that saw daily gun battles in the early 1970s - he'd grown up viewing guns differently than someone reared in a place like Westchester County, New York or Palm Springs, California. "It's not unusual for people who grow up around guns to retain an interest in them after their initial exposure," said Brennan. "Coming from an unstable situation in my own country where I was exposed to an underground gun culture that arose in defense of neighborhoods that I grew up in, and being mechanically-minded, I was drawn to the unique mechanical systems of guns." Brennan knows that he made a major mistake in buying the pistol. But he stressed that he believed that he'd already paid his debt to society for the offense. "When I was fighting my extradition case back in the mid-90s, this gun charge was dealt with by (U.S. District Court) Judge Charles Legge, who found that I had only obtained the said pistol for sporting purposes," said Brennan. "He gave me six months, time-served, for the offense. That's where I thought it ended. Apparently not." The gun issue might have faded away had it not been for the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996. Passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the IIRIRA dramatically increased spending on border enforcement. Outlays for detention and deportation of illegal immigrants have risen in the intervening years by 750 percent. A central plank of the IIRIRA was its virtually elimination of any hope of judicial relief from deportation for any undocumented immigrant who commits a crime in the U.S. "Since the 1996 immigration reforms, the big crackdown has been on criminal aliens," said Kevin Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in how the "war on terror" has impacted civil liberties and racial profiling. Johnson said that post-9/11 deportations have risen dramatically. "Every year we're setting records for the number of people deported. The last couple of years it's been around 200,000 a year," he said. Professor Johnson said that America has a long history of enacting legislation to deal with a perceived threat from immigrants, from the Chinese Exclusion Laws of 1882, to Cold War provisions that allowed for the deportation of communists and political dissidents. "And, in some ways, the fear of terrorism, the fear of criminal aliens, fits in nicely with the long history of our response, some would say over-response, to the perceived immigration threat of the day," he said. Johnson said that the current focus of immigration enforcement policies is "immigrants who are in the country who have committed crimes. And the laws have become harsher and harsher, tougher and tougher." "If you've got one conviction, maybe you can avoid deportation. If you've got two convictions, it's harder," he added. "And if you've got a firearms conviction, it's going to be very, very tough to stay." Northern Ireland now has an historic DUP-Sinn Fein power sharing government. As one of its leaders, former IRA man Martin McGuinness has been warmly welcomed in the White House. Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly, who escaped the Maze alongside Brennan, has also traveled freely to and from the U.S. several times in recent years. Both men have said that tumultuous events on the ground in Northern Ireland three decades ago heavily influenced their decisions to join the republican movement. And clearly their life choices in leaving armed struggle behind in favor of politics have impressed U.S. officials at the highest levels. Supporters of Pól Brennan - and one politician now arguing in favor of bail is Congressman Peter King, no soft touch when it comes to border security - contend that key events in his life, including his 1977 conviction for ferrying explosives through Belfast, his participation in the grueling blanket, no-wash and hunger strike protests inside the Maze, and his subsequent escape, were also shaped by the troubles. However, Brennan's war ended when he escaped the Maze prison nearly a quarter of a century ago. At 56, he has spent nearly half his time on earth, and the overwhelming majority of his adult life, living in America. He has been married to an American woman, Joanna Volz, for 19 years. Brennan recently put himself through community college and later passed a test to become a certified California building inspector. He has also taken his passion for astronomy to a higher level by becoming a volunteer at Oakland's Chabot observatory, the staff of which sent a glowing character reference letter to judge in his current deportation case. "I was living quite normally, and moving forward, before all this happened in January," Brennan told the Echo. "I feel that, in the circumstances that I'm in now, the gun issue is being used in a more punitive way than in other ways it would have been," he added. "I feel that people have moved on over in Ireland. But, in this respect, I've not been allowed to. It's like being in a time warp."   This story appeared in the issue of June 25-July 2, 2008   King backs Brennan's bid for Texas bail By Jim Dee letters@irishecho.com June 18, 2008 A leading member of the House Homeland Security Committee in Congress has become the first politician to back Maze escapee Pól Brennan's quest for bail from the Texas prison where he's been held since January 27. During a phone interview with the Irish Echo last week, New York Rep. Peter King, said: "My experience dealing with (Irish) republicans is that they don't jump bail in this country. They honor their commitments." King, ranking Republican on the Homeland Security Committee and formerly its chairman, added: "So, based on my experience, and also the republican movement's commitment to the peace process, I think he should get bail." Brennan was detained at a U.S. immigration checkpoint in Texas, 100 miles from the Mexican border, while en route to visit friends in the Lone Star state. He was initially held over an expired U.S.-issued work permit. However, when a computer background check revealed his role in the mass IRA jailbreak of 38 prisoners from the Maze in September 1983, he was taken to Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos where he remains. U.S. authorities have known about Brennan's whereabouts since the FBI arrested him in Berkeley, California in 1993. Although Britain dropped its seven-year drive to have Brennan extradited in 2000, Department of Homeland Security prosecutors now want him deported because he entered the U.S. using a phony name months after the escape. In April, Texas immigration judge Howard Achtsam rejected Brennan's bail petition because he deemed the Belfast native a flight risk, and a danger to society, due to a misdemeanor 2006 assault conviction. Brennan's lawyer has appealed the bail denial, arguing that Brennan's strict observance of bail terms when twice freed from U.S. custody in the 1990s during pending British extradition moves, proves that he isn't a flight risk. Having the support of Congressman King, a longtime high-profile supporter of Irish causes in the U.S., will add momentum to campaign calling for Brennan's release that has been gathering steam in the US, Ireland and Australia. In Belfast, former IRA prisoner Joe Doherty, who was extradited to Northern Ireland in 1992 after fighting a nine year battle to stay in the U.S. from a Manhattan jail, has been working to highlight Brennan's plight. In the U.S., Ancient Order of Hibernians president Jack Meehan has called for Brennan to be given bail, and for U.S. authorities to drop deportation proceedings against him. And in Australia, Paul Lynch, a Labor Party Minister for Aboriginal Affairs in the New South Wales assembly, has written to the U.S. Consul General in Sydney, Judith Fergin, to express concern over Brennan's continued detention, which he called "at best, absurd." Lynch told the Irish Echo in a phone interview that he particularly can't understand why Brennan is being denied bail. "At an earlier time, Pól Brennan was allowed bail and reported back to face the tribunal," Lynch said "That having been the case in the past - given that the Good Friday agreement has since occurred - it seems utterly bizarre that he wouldn't be allowed bail now." Over 600 people have thus far signed an on-line petition at www.polbrennan.com which also calls on the U.S. government to drop its deportation proceedings. Joanna Volz, Brennan's American wife, told the Echo the growing support has buoyed Brennan's spirits. "I'm really grateful that people are noticing what's happening to Pól and are having the courage to speak out about it," said Volz "It makes a huge difference to Pól. He's just greatly relieved to be on the map somewhere, in terms of people's concerns." Brennan's next court date is on August 12, when immigration Judge Howard Achtsam will consider whether or not to grant Brennan a green card, based on his 19-year marriage to Volz. A favorable ruling by Achtsam, who has a track record of generally ruling against immigrant asylum petitions, would mean that Brennan would then receive permanent residency in the U.S. This story appeared in the issue of June 18-24, 2008