Cliona Ward: How a Midleton family outshone America's dark immigration system

Irish Examiner

09-05-2025

For weeks we had known it was coming.
The Trump administration's aggressive crackdown on alleged illegal immigration had given rise to so many horror stories, it was surely only a matter of time before an Irish citizen was affected, not least given the sheer amount of undocumented Irish living in the US.
The surprise, really, was that the case, when it inevitably happened, was taken against a person who had been quietly, legally, living in America for more than 40 years.
The Ward family is a plainly ordinary one which became caught up in the most horrible, extraordinary circumstances.
Cliona Ward, the 54-year-old Dublin-born woman who found herself at the centre of a nightmare, had been living in the US, along with her younger sister Orla, for more than 40 years, 30 of them in Santa Cruz, California.
Her green card is valid and not due to expire until 2033. She had travelled to and from Ireland without notice for years.
The warning signs were there, however, when Cliona returned from a trip to Cork in late March, having chaperoned her 86-year-old stepmother to see her father — who is living with dementia in a nursing home in Youghal.
She was detained at Seattle Airport upon arrival into the US, and held for three days.
The reasons for this were technical, but similar situations have seen multiple travellers detained since Donald Trump took office last January and began delivering on his campaign promise to deliver the greatest mass deportation in history.
Immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) officials are reportedly under orders to deliver a minimum 75 arrests per day for each of its offices, 1,800 in total. When under that kind of pressure, numbers become more important than accuracy.
Cliona had fallen foul of the law a number of times close to 20 years ago. For several years, she struggled with addiction. She picked up a couple of felony convictions, one for possession of crystal methamphetamine.
It is also true to say she turned her life around, earned a qualification, cared for her son, and lived a fruitful life.
Displaying not a little foresight, she moved to have her convictions expunged from her record in tandem with the upturn in her fortunes.
While this was achieved at a state level in California, it seems the expungement was not replicated at a federal government level.
In a country the size of the US, with 50 competing autonomous state administrations, red tape fails of that sort are two a penny.
To an adrenalised Ice at present, however, any bureaucratic question represents an immediate opportunity.
To make matters worse, while the agency has always had enormous powers in terms of deportation, under Trump it has been let off the leash completely.
Cliona was released from Seattle on March 22 and ordered to present evidence of her expunged convictions at San Francisco Airport a month later, which she duly did, only to be arrested and transported to Ice's detention facility in Tacoma, Washington — 900 miles from her home.
What ensued was a living nightmare for her and her family.
Conditions in Ice's for-profit prisons are notoriously inhospitable.
Unlike many detained by US immigration officials, Cliona Ward had a formidable support network.
They are designed to be that way, all the better to discourage people from entering the country illegally.
But in her own way, Cliona was fortunate.
She and her family are educated and fluent in English, and she had a formidable support network to fall back on.
From day one, her sole concern was that she would become "lost" in the system.
Cliona met so many other women during her time in Tacoma — without English, without loved ones they could contact — who had vanished without trace in the system, bussed from state to state, detention centre to detention centre. Cliona's family was not about to let that happen.
'We have a lot of eyes on her, and we're being very vocal about this,' Cliona's sister Tracey, who still lives in Midleton, said a week after her sister's arrest.
The family set up a GoFundMe to help with Cliona's inevitable legal bills, stemming from having to retain legal counsel in two states. They provided constant updates for the media, for family, and friends.
The Wards are a spiritual family, with no interest in the limelight. But they did what they had to do.
They befriended a champion in local Democratic congressman Jimmy Panetta.
A former prosecutor, Panetta has made clear he is no fan of criminals.
But he also made clear that, in light of Cliona's redemption arc, deporting her for a decades-old conviction 'does nothing for our nation'.
Panetta was instrumental in securing post-conviction relief for Cliona, effectively overturning her previous convictions.
And when she finally appeared in front of a judge in Seattle on May 7, she was informed the case against her was to be dropped immediately. She was free.
What happens next? The Wards will return to their normal lives.
They hope the trauma Cliona experienced is something she can overcome.
A quiet, empathetic soul with a strong will, the odds are in her favour.
But this particular mosquito bite on the rear end of Trump's grotesque deportation policy may prove to be an influential one.
Cracks are starting to show in terms of how this most inept and boorish of Governments functions.
They have moved to suppress academic freedom with the threat of lost funding for America's most revered universities, only to meet pushback when they went too far in targeting Harvard.
They tried to deny federal funding for school lunches in Maine when its governor declined to implement the administration's hopelessly cruel anti-trans policy ahead of the state's own laws.
They lost in court.
And they tried to deport an Irish woman who had lived peacefully there for 40 years for the most spurious of reasons.
But this time, right-thinking people stood up to be counted and common sense prevailed.
With luck, Cliona Ward's success this week will shine as a beacon of light for others similarly plunged into a nightmare not of their own making.