Joe Moore writes about the Irish government’s recent mass deportations and the wider shift to the right on immigration.

On January 28th 1948, a deportation flight from California to Mexico crashed in the Los Gatos Canyon, killing 32 people. Twenty-eight of those who lost their lives were the migrant farm workers who were being deported. This tragic event was the subject of Woody Guthrie’s well known protest song “Deportee” (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos). The chorus ends with the lines;

“You won’t have your names when you ride the big aeroplane,

All they will call you will be “deportees”.”

On Wednesday April 30th, the Irish Justice Minister, Jim O’Callaghan, deported 39 Georgians, including 4 women and 5 children. And just like those on the ill-fated Los Gatos flight of 1948, we don’t know the names of the Georgian people.  The media refers to them as deportees.

This is the second mass deportation carried out by Jim O’Callaghan since he assumed office a few short months ago. O’Callaghan also intends to “reform” the asylum application process.

In a statement issued by his office, the minister said that the new system will result in “streamlining the decisions process, streamlining the returns process, a new ‘Border procedure’ with a three-month time limit for decisions, and new institutional arrangements for international protection decisions and appeals”.  In other words, the new system will result in more people being deported. 

Right-wing shift

O’Callaghan’s proposals are part of the right-wing shift on immigration that is taking place across Europe. The Irish government has signed up to the EU Commission’s Pact on Migration and Asylum. The pact, which was agreed in April 2024, is designed to “establish a European solution to migration challenges” by providing “more secure borders, faster and more efficient procedures for asylum and return and more solidarity with member states at external borders.”  In other words, tighter border controls and more deportations. 

The Pact includes binding regulations that must be fully implemented in all EU states by June 2026. The Pact will result in even more people losing their lives in the Mediterranean and at external land borders.  It will see an increased use of detention centres, a speeding up of the asylum process and contracting out of border controls to non-EU countries.

Deportation in Ireland

According to Canadian based writer and activist Harsha Walia, “every deportation is an act of state violence.”

In Ireland, deportation is part of the architecture of cruelty that is Ireland’s asylum system. When people seeking protection arrive in Ireland they are placed in the Direct Provision system, if they are lucky. Under the previous FF-FG-Green government many people, especially single men (the same cohort targeted by the far right) were denied accommodation and forced to live rough on the streets. 

The asylum application then begins and with it, depression. People are unsure of how their claim will be adjudicated and as a result cannot plan their futures. 

A deportation order is like a Sword of Damocles hanging over a person. The language of the letter is designed to terrify people. The recipient is asked to present themselves to the Garda National Immigration Bureau (GNIB) in order to facilitate their removal from the state. People cannot eat or sleep, scared in case they will be taken into custody ahead of the deportation flight. Under immigrant law, people can be imprisoned for up to eight weeks without charge. During this time arrangements are made for their deportation. This is a form of internment without trial. 

These deportations can result in family separation. This practice was challenged in the courts, however the Supreme Court ruled in favour of the state. The Lobe and Osayande ruling 2003 confirmed the right of the state to carry out deportations, even where that would result in the separation of a family. It was given by Susan Denham who ruled that if the “common good” requires it, “the Minister for Justice has the right to terminate the residence in Ireland of non-national parents of Irish citizens, even where this would lead to the breakup of the family or the constructive deportation of the child citizen.” The rationale was that the integrity of the asylum process could take precedence over the right of a family to live their life together. 

On the deportation flights total control is exercised over those being deported. There is an almost one to one ratio between them and GNIB officers. They must keep the door open when using the toilet and the role of the inflight doctor is to subdue anybody who offers resistance. Upon arrival people are handed over to waiting police. In one case highlighted to Anti Deportation Ireland, a Tanzanian man, Mohamed Ali Sleyum, was taken into custody in Dar es Salaam and badly beaten. He was thrown onto the street and taken to hospital where he died three days later. Mohamed was deported on August 2nd 2014. Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald had nothing to say about his death when it was raised in the Dáil.

Escalation

The chartered flights constitute a significant escalation by the Irish Government. Chartered deportation flights have not been used by the state since 2019, and even then, this was a joint operation with Belgium and Iceland. Ireland also joined chartered deportation flights led by other countries, for example a UK-led chartered flight to Nigeria in 2018. Instances of Ireland chartering its own deportation flights have thus far been rare. Deportations have usually been on commercial flights with smaller numbers of people.

Now, the Irish government has chartered two flights for mass deportations in a matter of months. On each occasion, Jim O’Callaghan tweeted about the flights. After the first one, the Irish Times reported that, “cameras followed the convoy of deportees down the motorway, later broadcasting the footage on national television. Clips showed deportees arriving at the airport in prison vans, walking up aircraft steps.”

The public show is part of an attempt to appear tough on immigration, but this is not just about optics. O’Callaghan is on course for record deportation orders in 2025. Add to this the prospect of an even more draconian measures of detention and restriction of movement for asylum seekers, and it is clear that the Irish government intends to follow the right-ward shift on immigration that is being implemented across the EU.

Oppose Deportations

Deportation is the most brutal form of state racism and should be opposed by anti-racists. However, it is not simply a question of opposing deportations on moral grounds. The deportability of people, primarily racialised migrants, is what underlines the state’s border regime and that of the EU more broadly. To accept deportation as a legitimate action by the state is to accept that certain people can be excluded from society and removed. This ideology of exclusion can be extended to wider layers of people if the state moves in a more right-wing direction.

The repressive apparatus that has been built to facilitate detention and deportations can also be inflicted on wider layers of people. In the United States, for example, ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) was set up under the Bush Administration in 2003. It was expanded by successive Obama, Trump and Biden administrations to become a massive, militarised force that sought to detain and deport immigrants. Now, under the second Trump presidency, it is being used not only to arrest and deport immigrants, but is also being turned on US citizens.

As Ireland and the EU ramp up their racist border policies, it is crucial that anti-racists everywhere oppose these deportations by the Irish state, along with the racist architecture of detention and discrimination that isolates and excludes asylum seekers and migrants from our society.