Is Donald Trump Using ICE As 'Political Weapon'? Businessman Held In 'Inhumane' Detention For Months

The phone call from the side of a Texas highway lasted barely a minute.

'ICE stopped me and they're taking me away,' Seamus Culleton told his wife, Tiffany Smith, before the line went dead. For five days, she says, she had no idea where he was. No chance to speak to him, no explanation, only the dawning realisation that her husband of 10 years had vanished into the machinery of US immigration enforcement.

Culleton, a businessman from Kilkenny who has lived and worked in the United States for more than 16 years, is now at the centre of an ugly diplomatic and moral row. What might once have been a dry legal dispute over immigration status has become something far more charged: an accusation, delivered on the floor of the European Parliament, that Donald Trump is using America's immigration system as a 'political weapon.'

That phrase came from Irish MEP Billy Kelleher, who on Thursday used some of the EU's most formal political real estate to make a pointed intervention in a single man's case—and, by extension, to question what the US is turning into.

'Inhumane' Detention and a Changed America

Kelleher did not water down his language. Describing recent scenes from across the US, he spoke of 'harassment and intimidation with multiple breaches of people's human rights' and admitted that, for those in Europe who grew up with a broadly positive view of America, it is 'heartbreaking' to watch.

He then turned to Culleton. Here, he argued, was not some shadowy caricature of the 'illegal immigrant' often invoked in Republican stump speeches, but a small business owner, married to a US citizen, who had been quietly trying to regularise his status.

'Until President Trump returned to office, Mr Culleton's case wasn't on anyone's radar,' Kelleher told MEPs. Yet now, he said, the 40‑something Irishman is being held in 'inhumane conditions for political reasons' at a detention facility in Texas.

The phrase is loaded, but it reflects a growing suspicion among critics that the Trump administration's second‑term immigration blitz is not merely about enforcement. It is also about spectacle and fear—about showing voters that no one, not even long-settled workers from friendly nations, is beyond the reach of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

For Tiffany Smith, any grand political design feels painfully remote. She described the shock of that one short call, and the emptier days that followed, in simple terms. 'I had no idea where he was,' she said. Since then, she has watched her husband's case ricochet from small local reports to international coverage, all while he remains locked up.

'He didn't even have an unpaid parking ticket,' she insists. 'He's living in hell. I don't know how he's staying strong like he is. He has good days and bad days.'

Irish Anger, Transatlantic Pressure On Trump

The Irish government has been dragged, somewhat reluctantly, into the affair. According to Kelleher, his office has already raised Culleton's situation with Taoiseach Micheál Martin. The Irish premier, addressing the Dáil this week, trod a careful line: yes, Dublin would 'do everything it could' for the Kilkenny native, but he noted that cases like Culleton's 'vary in terms of status' and that any intervention would have to be calibrated to be 'effective.'

Behind the diplomatic phrasing lies a blunt reality. Ireland is dealing with an American administration that has chosen immigration as one of its defining battlegrounds. Pushing too hard carries risks; doing too little carries its own moral cost, and not just to the tens of thousands of Irish citizens living under the radar in the US.

What makes Culleton's case particularly striking is that it threatens to shatter a comfortable myth. For years, many Irish in America believed—with some justification—that they were unlikely to be priorities for removal. They were white, English-speaking, generally working, disproportionately seen as sympathetic figures. Trump's aggressive, highly visible enforcement campaign has shredded that complacency.

Kelleher's wider charge is that this is not a neutral tightening of the rules, but a deliberate political strategy. Trump, he suggests, is not merely enforcing immigration law, but weaponizing it—using the raw power of detention and deportation to send a message, to both his supporters and his opponents, about who is in control.

Operation Ends, But Questions Deepen

There are competing narratives here. On the same day Kelleher spoke in Strasbourg, the White House's Border Czar, Tom Homan, appeared before cameras in Minnesota to announce that a major federal enforcement 'surge' was being wound down. The operation, which he has overseen, has been deadly; Homan confirmed that two US citizens were killed during its course.

'I have proposed—and President Trump has concurred—that this surge operation conclude,' he said. A 'significant drawdown,' he added, was already under way and would continue into next week.

Supporters of Trump's approach will read that as evidence of a tough but time‑limited push against lawbreakers—a tightening of borders, nothing more. Critics will see something darker: an aggressive dragnet that has swept up people like Culleton, seemingly at random, and used them as examples.

Somewhere inside a Texas detention centre, far from the rhetoric in Brussels and Washington, a man who once counted himself part of the quiet, working backbone of America is waiting to find out which version of that story wins.

Whether his case proves to be an outlier or a warning is, for now, an open question. What cannot be ignored is how easily, and how quickly, a life can be upended when immigration policy becomes a stage for political performance.