A Belfast man is currently fighting deportation from the US where he has been living since he fled Ireland in 1988.
Malachy McAllister and his family, from the Lower Ormeau, left Belfast in the late 1980s in the wake of an assassination attack on their home by a loyalist death squad.
Having made it to the US, Malachy's wife Bernadette and their four children were initially granted political asylum by an immigration court in New Jersey, the federal Judge having found that they had suffered "severe past persecution" because of their political beliefs.
Malachy's request for asylum, however, was denied as a result of past convictions in Belfast during the conflict.
In a controversial decision by the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA), Bernadette and her children were soon stripped of their asylum status.
The BIA, flying in the face of the facts and expert testimony as exhaustively outlined in the Immigration Judge's decision, ruled not only that the McAllisters had failed to demonstrate that they had suffered "severe past persecution" but that they had suffered no persecution at all. The McAllister family's case has received notoriety in the US where senior Washington officials, including Senator Hillary Clinton, have come out in support of their campaign to stay in the US.
Sadly, the family's plight was made worse when Bernadette died suddenly in May of 2004 leaving Malachy, now a single parent, to fight for his family's right to stay in the US and work to keep the remaining two children that still live at home.
"Basically I could be deported at any minute," Malachy told the Andersonstown News. "I was actually on Capitol Hill lobbying members of Congress when I got a phone call to tell me my house was being raided and that officers of Homeland Security were going to deport me. Fortunately, we managed to challenge that decision and have it put on hold."
This is how Malachy now lives, with the threat of deportation hanging over him and his family on a daily basis and despite claims that the situation in the North has settled down, Malachy is still the subject of death threats.
Just last year, Irish America's largest newspaper, The Irish Echo, received an email from the Red Hand Commandos threatening "next time we won't miss" should the McAllisters be deported. With the help of his solicitor, Eamonn Dornan, an Irish immigrant, Malachy is fighting the threat of deportation which, he believes, would result in his death at the hands of loyalist paramilitaries. The case has gone as far as the Court of Appeals Third Circuit but as of yet, no decision has been handed down.
