Despite the Good Friday peace accord, Northern Irish activist Malachy McAllister faces deportation after an immigration court denied his appeal against deportation.  Additionally, the Board of Immigration Appeals reversed a previous court decision to grant asylum to McAllister’s wife and the couple’s four children. Irish activist groups in the US have rallied around the cause of McAllister.

In his youth, McAllister was a member of the Irish National Liberation Army. He argues that he joined the group so that he could fight what he saw as the persecution of Catholics.  During his affiliation with the paramilitary organization, he was involved in a plot to kill two officers of the Royal Ulster Constabulary.  The officer was wounded in one case, and the plan was never carried out in the other.  McAllister served over three years in prison and was released in 1985.

In 1988, masked gunmen fired 26 shots into the McAllisters’ home while three of their four children were inside with their grandmother.  Soon after, the McAllisters moved to Toronto, and from there, to New Jersey in 1996.

Although the entire family requested political asylum because they knew their lives would be in danger if they returned to their hometown of Belfast, an immigration judge ordered in late 2000 that Malachy McAllister be deported, while granting asylum to his wife because she suffered extreme persecution.  McAllister appealed his denial and the government appealed the asylum granted to his wife.

While McAllister was attending a meeting last week at the Capitol Hill office of Rep. Donald Payne, an incoming cell phone call relayed the message that the Board of Immigration Appeals not only had ordered his immediate deportation, but also had revoked the asylum status of his wife and children.

McAllister immediately filed motions with an appeals court in Philadelphia, and won a temporary stay of his deportation, although not of his detention.  The same court, however, recently ruled in favor of deportation of another former INLA man, John Edward McNicholl, and refused to hear an appeal to suspend McNicholl’s deportation.