Mastodawn

Do not travel to the USofA, part XXXIV:

- doing everything right is not enough
- white skin does not protect you
- detention may mean a cell shared with 70 people, fighting over food, without medical supplies
- your signature will get forged if you refuse
- judge orders for release on bail are ignored

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/09/irish-man-seamus-culleton-ice-detention

Irish man with valid US work permit held in ICE detention for five months

Seamus Culleton has lived in US for two decades, married a citizen and runs a plastering business but faces deportation

The Guardian

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e. hashman 🇵🇸Feb 10

@icing look, this is not at all an excuse for the man's horrific treatment, but it is simply not accurate to say he "did everything right" by the immigration system rules. The article states he overstayed a visa, and he's been living in the US for 2+ decades without a green card.

It only takes a few years at most for a marriage-based application, implying he probably was living in the US without legal status for over a decade, and only got his work authorization in the last couple years. It just does not take 20 years to get a marriage-based green card.

You are not going to get arrested as a European for simply visiting the US without a criminal record or prior visa violations. I'm an immigrant to the US and have spoken extensively with an immigration lawyer on this topic. The biggest risk right now is to Spanish-speakers and folks who aren't white.

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Salearlyman Feb 10

@ehashman @icing I think you're nitpicking here. The US immigration system is a bureaucratic nightmare. If this guy was not legally in the US why did he get a work permit? It makes no sense that you can be deportable and have legal status at the same time unless you've intentionally designed a system that lets you arbitrarily abuse people, which absolutely applies to the US immigration system. Nobody is arguing that people who aren't white are being disproportionally targeted and are suffering worse abuses.

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e. hashman 🇵🇸

@icing @duk3luk3 > If this guy was not legally in the US why did he get a work permit?

Probably because he only married a US citizen recently and therefore wasn't previously eligible for any work permit, and was working under the table before which was tolerated because he's a white European who wasn't committing crimes?

The US immigration system is absolutely miserable but it's true of of most countries that you can't overstay a tourist visa and then stick around and work without authorization for two decades. I am a US LPR, I submitted over 200 pages for my application, and I have been following immigration abuses since the Obama era. And yet no one was saying "don't come to the US" when this was happening to non-white folks over the past decade+.