Cliona Ward was born in Ireland but has lived in the United States, where she is a legal permanent resident, since she was 12. For more than 30 years, she has been settled in Santa Cruz, Calif.
In March, returning home from a visit to Youghal, County Cork, where she had been caring for her ailing father, immigration officials flagged her re-entry because of two minor drug possession charges and other offenses from her past. They had been expunged from her record by the State of California but were still showing up in a federal database. A green-card holder, her residency assured until 2033, she was nonetheless detained for almost three weeks by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and feared deportation.
Ms. Ward is a trusted employee of a Christian charity that teaches children about environmental sustainability. She supports an adult child who suffers from a chronic illness. Through intense lobbying from her family, her trade union—Service Employees International Union—and elected representatives, Ms. Ward was eventually released from ICE custody.
She has been allowed to return to the life she built for herself in Santa Cruz as a valued member of her community. But the same cannot be said for many others who, though resident for years in the United States, may face deportation this year.
The deportation dragnet
Just about no one in Ireland would say that Irish citizens living in the United States are being treated as badly or being picked off as cruelly as immigrant residents from Latin America, South Asia or Africa. But consternation is on the rise about U.S. policy on immigrant residents and its escalating use of deportation.
Just five undocumented Irish immigrants were deported from the United States to Ireland in the whole of 2021. By the end of July in 2025, that number had already reached 56.
The issue has even been raised in the Dáil, the Irish parliament. There is a sense that the new attention to undocumented Irish, long previously tolerated on U.S. shores, represents another symbolic collapse suggesting that the United States is not the ally it used to be anymore.
Simon Harris, the minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, sought to underline how the official numbers are potentially underestimating the problem. “It is important to note that this figure only relates to cases where a citizen or their family has requested consular assistance and does not necessarily reflect all deportations to Ireland or where a citizen is currently being detained by ICE,” he said.
The rich connection between Ireland and the United States has been forged by more than a century of Irish emigration. There had been a time when Irish immigrants were viewed mostly positively both by the communities where they landed and the U.S. authorities that they interacted with. Increasingly, this is no longer the case. What happens when the system that was once welcoming turns hostile? And how is that experience reflected in how Irish people now treat those seeking refuge on the Emerald Isle?
Lena Deevy, a member of the Little Sisters of the Assumption, is perhaps uniquely placed to speak to both issues. Trained originally as a nurse, Sister Lena worked for almost 20 years in one of Dublin’s most disadvantaged communities, Ballymun. The neighborhood became nationally famous as host to the Ballymun Flats, an experimental public housing project built in the 1960s within utopian ambitions that ran aground on some hard economic realities and practical design flaws. High crime and social marginalization followed.
“Wherever I was,” she explains, “I was always interested in people on the edges.”
Her work in assisting the residents of Ballymun bore fruit but wore her out. And when it came time to take a sabbatical, she was encouraged on a path she never expected—pursuing a Master’s Degree in Education from Harvard University.
Exchanging the tower blocks of Ballymun for the ivory towers of Cambridge, Mass., in the late 1980s was a culture shock, but Sister Lena found her feet supporting the vulnerable Irish migrants who had made a home in the Boston area. The situation they faced then highlights the changes that have taken place in American attitudes to immigrants since the 1990s.
When she began her work at the Boston Irish Immigration Center (now the Rian Immigrant Center), Irish immigrants were protected by targeted visa schemes that had been sponsored by prominent U.S. politicians like two former Democratic members of the U.S. House, Bruce Morrison of Connecticut and the late Brian Donnelly of Massachusetts. The programs allowed thousands of undocumented Irish immigrants to regularize their status.
Although she could have easily forged links by making the center a church-related body, Sister Lena chose not to go that route. It was important for her to reach out to those “people who left Ireland because the society had left them behind. Some of them left Ireland because they were gay. Or some of them left an Ireland where they were not wanted, seen variously as undesirable.”
While others celebrated a sanitized version of Irish emigration, Sister Lena confronted the racial and structural privileges that allowed Irish migrants to blend in while other immigrants were hunted. Whiteness offered Irish migrants a kind of conditional invisibility. That same privilege was not extended to Black and Latino migrants, who were much more energetically surveilled and then deported. “You blended in unless you spoke,” she says.
Under her leadership, the center quietly reoriented the landscape of Irish-American immigration advocacy. It began to offer legal aid, trauma-informed support and pathways to stability to all comers.
A historic reversal in Ireland
While her work unfolded in Boston, it carried lessons far beyond the American context. When Sister Lena returned home to Ireland, she found a society shifting from being a migrant-sending nation to becoming a migrant-receiving one. The change has exposed deep inconsistencies in how Irish society understands justice and belonging.
If whiteness once offered Irish migrants a kind of cover abroad, it now risks becoming the lens through which hospitality at home is rationed. The question becomes not just how others treat the Irish abroad, but how the Irish treat people seeking refuge in their midst.
Both the United States and Ireland “now treat the people they don’t want one way and those they do want another,” Sister Lena concludes. And both nations “are classifying whole groups of people as ‘undesirable.’”
Ireland absorbed waves of immigrants from Poland and other new E.U. member states from the late 1990s onwards without much civic uproar, but the more recent arrivals of Chinese, south Asian and African immigrants, joined by thousands of Ukrainians seeking refuge, has provoked an “Ireland First” movement similar to the resistance to immigration emerging in the United States.
But there are institutions that push back. Most notably, perhaps, is the hugely influential organization for “Gaelic games,” the Gaelic Athletic Association, which explicitly presents its mission in terms of being “where we all belong.” This year the G.A.A. made its landmark stadium, Croke Park in Dublin, available for the celebration of the Muslim holiday of Eid Al-Adha.
When new G.A.A. clubs like Columbus Gaelic are established in Dublin entirely by migrants to Ireland who seek to embed themselves more fully in their new home, they replicate in a way the role the G.A.A. had long served for Irish immigrants to the shores of America and elsewhere. The G.A.A. is a common first port of call whether an Irish immigrant lands in Knoxville, Dubai or even Kampala to find a group who play the ancient Irish sports.
The Irish Catholic Church has also played a role in confronting a surge of xenophobia in Ireland. The episcopal conference issued a 2024 pastoral letter, “A Hundred Thousand Welcomes? Exploring what hospitality for migrant people means in contemporary Ireland,” which forcefully argued that hospitality was a Christian virtue and responsibility.
Michael O’Sullivan has spent decades working at the intersection of migration and public policy in Ireland. As one of the founders of the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland, he has been involved in advocacy since the early 2000s.
He cautions against easy narratives of decline or backlash. “I don’t think Irish attitudes have changed that much,” he argues. “There’s no innate or culturally fixed antipathy toward migration. But there’s also no deeply ingrained hospitality either.”
The welcome that exists, he suggests, has always been patchy, shaped more by context and opportunity than by deep-seated conviction. And behind even the most generous public discourse, the Irish state’s approach has long been shaped by what he calls a “security manager” mindset—cautious, gatekeeping and risk-averse.
Sister Lena agrees, noting that in both the United States and Ireland “what alarms me is that in many ways we are more and more seeing migrants as a threat, missing out on the rich opportunities and gifts that they bring us.”
Security trumps solidarity
There are significant successes that the Migrant Rights Centre can point to. An ambitious amnesty for undocumented migrants in 2022 allowed more than 8,000 workers to regularize their status in Ireland. But there have also been serious setbacks, most notably a constitutional referendum that successfully changed citizenship laws to make it harder for the children of immigrants to establish themselves as Irish citizens.
Mr. O’Sullivan is clear that progress in Ireland has often depended on the persistence of civil society rather than the emergence of comprehensive state vision. “The Department of Justice always saw immigration as something to be controlled, not something to be engaged with creatively,” he says.
The 2022 amnesty was a breakthrough, but “it was successful because it was exceptional, not because the underlying [immigration] system had changed.”
That system continues to operate according to a logic of deterrence. In recent months, asylum seekers arriving in Ireland have been left to sleep on the streets while awaiting accommodation. And the Irish government, responding to a small but vocal bloc of voters, has begun to quietly reduce social supports like housing assistance for immigrant arrivals. Its deportation orders have been dispatched more rapidly.
“What we’re seeing,” Mr. O’Sullivan warns, “is a quiet sidelining of the 1951 Refugee Convention.” That U.N. agreement created historic protections for asylum seekers and mandated obligations for receiving nations.
According to Mr. O’Sullivan, Irish officials are not abandoning the convention “as loudly” as other E.U. states, “but it’s doing it.”
As in the United States, the official language around migration in Ireland is increasingly shaped by ideas of risk, order and control rather than solidarity or shared humanity. Ireland may continue to tell a proud story about its emigrant past, but it is increasingly distancing itself from its obligations to migrants in the present. The country that once sent its people across oceans to build bridges and skyscrapers now builds bureaucratic walls against those who arrive by ferry.
Irish society aspires to hospitality as an abstraction, Mr. O’Sullivan says, but when push comes to shove, the welcome is often threadbare.
“We’re good at being good,” he says, “until it’s past our door.”
Perhaps that is what makes Cliona Ward’s story so unsettling, exposing how precarious even a “desirable” immigrant’s security can be. The Bible repeatedly insists that solidarity must be expressed for resident aliens, people entitled to particular protections precisely because of their vulnerability. When solidarity can be hard to find and the ground seems to be shifting on a daily basis, large populations in both Ireland and the United States find themselves exposed.
Those lucky to be thoroughly settled in a new homeland must remain vigilant to the temptation to separate what Sister Lena categorizes as the “acceptable people” from the “unacceptable” ones. To do that is to forget how our own histories have so often been shaped by exclusion and flight.
“We need to remember,” she says, “we all belong to each other.”
Ireland’s immigration reversal
Ireland’s population, including both Northern Ireland, a member state of the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland, remains below its pre-famine level of 8.2 million people (1841 census). The republic’s current population is 5.5 million. Northern Ireland’s population is 1.9 million.
A net exporter of people for almost two centuries, Ireland began to experience a reversal of fortune in the mid-1990s. But sharp increases in population during the economic boom of the Celtic Tiger era, when most immigrants came from European Community member states, ended during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. Net migration over the last decade turned positive again, with more immigrants arriving from India and Central European and African states.
Ireland’s fertility rate of 1.5 children per woman is far below the natural replacement rate of 2.1. That means that without immigrants, Ireland’s overall population would be declining. Of new immigrants in 2025, 31,500 were returning Irish citizens, 25,300 were other E.U. citizens, and 4,900 were U.K. citizens. The remaining 63,600 immigrants were citizens of other countries; 65,600 people left the republic.
Annual net migration to Republic of Ireland, 2000-25 (in thousands)
Sources: Central Statistics Office, Ireland; Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency; World Bank
This article appears in November 2025.
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