An Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for five months despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record says he fears for his life and has appealed for help from Ireland’s government.
Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.”
Speaking from the El Paso facility to Ireland’s RTÉ radio, Culleton implored the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, to raise his case with Donald Trump when he visits the White House next month for St Patrick’s Day celebrations.
“Just try to get me out of here and do all you can, please. It’s an absolute torture, psychological and physical torture,” Culleton said, adding he did not know how much more he could take. “It’s just a horrible, horrible, horrible place.”
Originally from County Kilkenny, Culleton, 42, runs a plastering business in the Boston area. After buying supplies at a hardware store on 9 September 2025 he was followed by ICE agents and arrested.
Culleton entered the US in 2009 on a visa waiver programme and overstayed the 90-day limit but after marrying a US citizen, Tiffany Smyth, and applying for lawful permanent residence, he obtained a statutory exemption that allowed him to work, according to his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye.
The detention prevented him from attending the final interview in October for his green card that would have confirmed his legal status, said Okoye. “It’s inexplicable that this man has been in detention.”
Trump's immigration chiefs to testify in Congress following protester deaths
The heads of the agencies carrying out president Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda will testify in Congress on Tuesday and face questions over how they are prosecuting immigration enforcement inside American cities.
Trump’s immigration campaign has been heavily scrutinized in recent weeks, after the shooting deaths in Minneapolis of two protesters at the hands of Homeland Security officers, AP reports. The agencies have also faced criticism for a wave of policies that critics say trample on the rights of both immigrants facing arrest and Americans protesting the enforcement actions.
Todd Lyons, the acting director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Rodney Scott, who heads US Customs and Border Protection, and Joseph Edlow , who is the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, will speak in front of the House Committee on Homeland Security.
The officials will speak at a time of falling public support for how their agencies are carrying out Trump’s immigration vision but as they are flush with cash from a spending bill passed last year that has helped broaden immigration enforcement activities across the country.
The administration says that activists and protesters opposed to its operations are the ones ratcheting up attacks on their officers, not the other way around, and that their immigration enforcement operations are making the country safer by finding and removing people who’ve committed crimes or pose a threat to the country.
Donald Trump has done a number of U-turns on the Epstein files since his campaign in 2024.
The president wants the latest batch of files to be the last, but Democrats are pushing for 3m more to be released.
The Guardian US reporter Richard Luscombe gives an overview of the latest findings after the Department of Justice released the files…
Americans’ hope for their future has fallen to a new low, according to new polling.
In 2025, only about 59% of Americans gave high ratings when asked to evaluate how good their life will be in about five years, the lowest annual measure since Gallup began asking this question almost 20 years ago, AP reported.
It’s a warning about the depth of the gloom that has fallen over the country over the past few years. In the data, Gallup’s ‘current’ and ‘future’ lines have tended to move together over time - when Americans are feeling good about the present, they tend to feel optimistic about the future. But the most recent measures show that while current life satisfaction has declined over the last decade, future optimism has dropped even more.
“While current life is eroding, it’s that optimism for the future that has eroded almost twice as much over the course of about that last 10 years or so,” said Dan Witters, the research director of the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index.
Gallup assesses people who rate their current life at a 7 or higher and their anticipated future at an 8 or higher as “thriving.” Fewer than half of Americans, about 48%, are now in that category.
Police departments across the US are quietly leveraging school district security cameras to assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign, an investigation by the 74 reveals.
Hundreds of thousands of audit logs spanning a month show police are searching a national database of automated license plate reader data, including from school cameras, for immigration-related investigations.
The audit logs originate from Texas school districts that contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers and other surveillance technology. Flock’s cameras are designed to capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company’s national network.
Multiple law enforcement leaders acknowledged they conducted the searches in the audit logs to help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforce federal immigration laws. The Trump administration’s aggressive DHS crackdown, which has grown increasingly unpopular, has had a significant impact on schools.
Educators, parents and students as young as five have been swept up, with immigrant families being targeted during school drop-offs and pick-ups. School parking lots are one place the cameras at the center of these searches can be found, along with other locations in the wider community, such as mounted on utility poles at intersections or along busy commercial streets.
The data raises questions about the degree to which campus surveillance technology intended for student safety is being repurposed to support immigration enforcement.
A federal judge on Monday blocked a California law from going into effect that would ban federal immigration agents from covering their faces, but they will still be required to wear clear identification showing their agency and badge number.
California became the first state to ban most law enforcement officers from wearing facial coverings under a bill that was signed by Gavin Newsom, the governor, in September, following last summer’s high-profile raids by ICE officers in Los Angeles.
The Trump administration filed a lawsuit in November challenging the law, arguing it would threaten the safety of officers who are facing harassment, doxing, and violence. The Department of Justice claimed the law violated the constitution because California would be directly regulating the federal government. The agency argued that federal officers should be able to choose a whether to wear a face covering.
“Denying federal agencies and officers that choice would chill federal law enforcement and deter applicants for law enforcement positions,” the justice department wrote in its lawsuit.
Judge Christina Snyder said she issued the initial ruling because the mask ban as it was enacted did not also apply to state and local law enforcement authorities, thus it discriminated against the federal government.
Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, called the ruling a “key court victory” in a post on social media, saying federal agents are “attacked on a regular basis just for doing their jobs”. She added that the justice department “will ALWAYS have the backs of our great federal law enforcement officers”.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will prioritise discussions on negotiations with Iran when he meets with US president Donald Trump in Washington this week.
“On this trip we will discuss a range of issues: Gaza, the region, but of course first and foremost the negotiations with Iran. I will present to the president our views regarding the principles for the negotiations,” Netanyahu said before heading to the United States, where he will meet Trump on Wednesday.
Their meeting comes days after Iran and the United States held talks in Oman last week, after which Trump said another round of negotiations would follow, AFP reports.
Trump threatens to block bridge he previously endorsed as 'vital economic link'
Donald Trump last night threatened to block a bridge connecting the US and Canada and made a bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.
Trump began his latest diatribe against the US’s second-largest trading partner by claiming that “everyone knows, the Country of Canada has treated the United States very unfairly for decades”.
The president also threatened to block the scheduled opening of the $4.6bn Gordie Howe International Bridge, connecting Windsor, Ontario and Detroit, Michigan, built by a binational partnership that won approval during the Obama administration but began construction in 2018, when Trump was president.
“I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve,” Trump wrote on Monday.
Trump himself had publicly endorsed the bridge project in 2017, before construction began, in public comments and a joint statement issued by him and the then prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau.
“No two countries share deeper or broader relations than Canada and the United States,” the joint statement issued on 13 February 2017 read.
“Given our shared focus on infrastructure investments, we will encourage opportunities for companies in both countries to create jobs through those investments. In particular, we look forward to the expeditious completion of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will serve as a vital economic link between our two countries,” Trump and Trudeau said after their first meeting that day.
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Updated
Democrats say White House offer on ICE is 'insufficient' as Homeland Security funding set to expire
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I’m Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that Democratic leaders say a proposal from the White House is “incomplete and insufficient” as they demand new restrictions on president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries said in a statement late Monday that a White House counterproposal to the list of demands they called for over the weekend “included neither details nor legislative text” and does not address “the concerns Americans have about ICE’s lawless conduct.” The White House proposal was not released publicly.
The Democrats’ statement comes as time is running short, with another partial government shutdown threatening to begin Saturday, AP reported. Among the Democrats’ demands are a requirement for judicial warrants, better identification of DHS officers, new use-of-force standards and a stop to racial profiling. They say such changes are necessary after two protesters were fatally shot by federal agents in Minneapolis last month.
Earlier on Monday, Senate majority leader John Thune had expressed optimism about the rare negotiations between Democrats and the White House, saying there was “forward progress.”
Thune said it was a good sign that the two sides were trading papers, and “hopefully they can find some common ground here.” But coming to an agreement on the charged issue of immigration enforcement will be difficult, especially as rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties were skeptical about finding common ground.
Many Democrats who are furious about ICE’s aggressive crackdown have said they won’t vote for any more Homeland Security funding until enforcement is radically scaled back. “Dramatic changes are needed at the Department of Homeland Security before a DHS funding bill moves forward,” Jeffries said earlier Monday. “Period. Full stop.”
In other developments:
Donald Trump threatened to block a new bridge connecting the US and Canada he supported in 2017 and made the bizarre false claim that increased trade between Canada and China would include a total ban on Canadians playing ice hockey.
The Miami Herald reported that one partially redacted Epstein files document includes an account of a 2006 phone call in which Trump told the Palm Beach police chief that “everyone has known” Jeffrey Epstein was abusing girls and Ghislaine Maxwell ‘“is evil”. Trump now says he had no idea Epstein was abusing girls and wishes Maxwell well.
An immigration judge rejected the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was arrested last year as part of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian campus activists, her lawyers said in a statement.
The US military’s Southern Command, which oversees operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, announced it carried out another deadly strike on Monday, killing two suspected drug smugglers in the eastern Pacific.
A federal judge in California issued a preliminary injunction that blocks part of a new state law that bans federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces.
