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The wife of an Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for five months - despite having a valid work permit – is pleading for help in instigating his release from the “dire conditions” he is facing in detention.
“I just want him home where he belongs. I want us to be able to finish what we started,” Tiffany Smyth, wife of Seamus Culleton, said during a Wednesday press conference.
“Seamus is a good man. He doesn’t deserve what is going on, and it’s heartbreaking. It’s absolutely heartbreaking. I don’t know how I’ve gone on these last five months to be honest, it’s just been awful, and I don’t wish this upon anybody.”
Smyth added that she is a US citizen and has lived her whole life in the Boston area.
Originally from County Kilkenny, Ireland, Culleton runs a plastering business in the Boston area. He was followed by ICE agents and arrested on 9 September 2025.
He told Ireland’s RTÉ radio that conditions at his detention center in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile, adding that he feared for his life. He has been transferred multiple times to different ICE facilities, including to El Paso, Texas, according to his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye.
Culleton entered the US in 2009 on a visa waiver program and overstayed the 90-day limit. But after marrying a US citizen and applying for lawful permanent residence, he obtained a statutory exemption that allowed him to work.
“Culleton is still in ICE detention under extremely dire conditions,” Okoye said. “He is in danger of being removed from the United States any day.”
“We’re asking for his immediate release so that he can complete the process of adjusting his status to that of a lawful permanent resident of the United States, a process that’s already started, and the process that might be consummated if he is released from custody,” she added.
ICE first apprehended Culleton while he was outside a Home Depot in Saugus, Massachusetts, where he was in the process of returning items he had purchased, said Okoye. She believes that agents identified him as a non-citizen by running his license plate.
Home Depots have become a popular site for ICE agents to target immigrants, with the hardware chain having long maintained an unofficial, symbiotic relationship with the undocumented laborers who gather in store parking lots, hoping to get hired for a day of painting, landscaping or roofing.
Okoye said that her client was “the perfect candidate” to have the government exercise a favorable discretion on his behalf because he is not a flight risk nor “a criminal of any sort”.
Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade said it was providing consular assistance via the Irish consulate in Austin, Texas, and that the embassy in Washington was engaging with the US Department of Homeland Security at a “senior level”.
