Taoiseach Enda Kenny and President Barack Obama
in the White House on St. Patrick's Day, 2015
CHUCK KENNEDY/WHITE HOUSE
By Ray O’Hanlon
Trade and Brexit will be top of Taoiseach Enda Kenny’s agenda when he visits the U.S. for St. Patrick’s Day celebrations.
The undocumented Irish, and what they now face, will be the elephant in the room regardless of whatever else is being discussed.
And that includes the East Room of the White House where, if ceremony and form is repeated, the taoiseach who is likely heading out of office will present a bowl of shamrock to the American president who has just taken office.
That ceremony is set for Thursday, March 16 as Mr. Kenny is planning to be in New York on St. Patrick’s Day itself.
Mr. Kenny has raised the matter of the undocumented Irish more than once on his visits to the United States.
He raised it most recently in post-election phone conversations with both Donald Trump and Mike Pence.
And he will doubtless raise the issue again during his St. Patrick’s week stay.
But this time with an even darker cloud hanging over the prospects of an undocumented Irish community that, by higher end estimates, could number as many as 50,000 souls.
St. Patrick’s Day might seem like a holiday to many Americans.
But it isn’t.
And on March 17 it will be just another working day for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement which, as of this week, has been charged with ramping up the removal from American soil of undocumented and illegal persons.
As the New York Post put it: “The U.S. can give the boot to virtually every illegal immigrant in the country.”
And as the Department of Homeland Security put it: “Department personnel have full authority to arrest or apprehend an alien whom an immigration officer has probable cause to believe is in violation of the immigration laws.”
Suffice it to say, “probable cause” will probably be something of an open-ended term under DHS’s new battle plan.
During his campaign, President Donald Trump pledged to unleash the federal authorities on the roughly eleven million who live in the immigration shadows.
And his eye was cast well beyond what the Obama administration defined as “criminal aliens.”
Opined the New York Times in an editorial: “The targets now don’t even have to be criminals. They could simply have been accused of a crime (that is, still presumed “innocent”) or have done something that makes an immigration agent believe that they might possibly face charges.”
March is typically designated Irish Heritage Month by the incumbent president.
This year’s third month might be a time for some Irish to play down that heritage.
St. Patrick’s Day in the United States has long been a high point in the year for Irish taoisigh.
But all the fuss and attention can have its drawbacks.
There was that St. Patrick’s Day some years ago when Taoiseach Charles Haughey arrived for all the usual ballyhoo and bonhomie.
It wasn’t Haughey’s fault that the then Immigration and Naturalization Service, rather like the birds, was feeling energized by the arrival of spring.
By coincidence, or maybe not, the INS decided to mount a series of raids in Boston and New Hampshire that coincided with the Haughey visit.
Agents led six young Irish women out of a Boston bar in handcuffs.
Four Irishmen were picked up on a construction site in New Hampshire and put on a London-bound flight in prison garb and cuffs.
The shamrock presented by Haughey to President George H.W. Bush looked a little limp that year.
Enda Kenny, one can assume, will be hoping for rather better Irish luck on the big Irish day this year.
