Hernán Rozemberg - Express-News
The moment border agents in a desolate, brush-laden highway in South Texas asked him to pull over for further questioning, Pól Brennan knew he was in for a long day.
But he never thought he'd end up behind bars in the Rio Grande Valley, waiting to get the boot back to a place he long ago had put out of his mind.
Even though U.S. authorities have known about Brennan, a fugitive militant from Northern Ireland who originally came into this country 24 years ago using another person's passport, they essentially have looked the other way for more than a decade, allowing him to remain in the country in legal limbo.
Brennan, now sitting in a Raymondville immigration prison, said recently he has become the U.S. government's latest immigrant patsy.
“I'm a product of the anti-immigrant bent this administration is pushing,” Brennan, 56, a former member of the Irish Republican Army, a guerrilla outfit that employed terrorist tactics in a decades-old fight against British rule, said by phone. “They're doing anything to clean up the system, even if it makes no sense.”
If there was a time he'd run into trouble, he said, it would have been more than two decades ago after he illegally entered and settled in the country. Brennan sought clandestine exile here after he and 37 IRA activists took part in a famous prison break — dubbed “The Great Escape” — from the Northern Ireland capital of Belfast.
He'd served eight of 16 years after being convicted of bomb and firearms possession.
Brennan's new shadow life, settling down in San Francisco as a carpenter, thrived until he applied for a U.S. passport under a newly assumed identity.
Background checks on his application eventually led authorities to unearth his fugitive status, and the FBI arrested him in 1993.
He was imprisoned in the Bay Area for more than three years. But he thought he finally was home free in 1998 when, as part of a U.S.-brokered agreement to end the violence in Ireland, Brennan and other IRA militants in America were given “deferred action” — immigration limbo status allowing renewable yearly work permits with governmental discretion to seek deportation at any time.
That discretion now is being applied to Brennan's case, after Border Patrol officials questioned him and his wife, Joanna Volz, at the agency's checkpoint in Sarita on U.S. 77 in January when they were on their way to Austin after visiting Volz's mother in Brownsville.
Brennan pleaded his case with border agents for six hours to no avail, even as his lawyer faxed records from San Francisco.
Border agents concluded Brennan's work permit had expired — he countered he had applied but not yet received a new one — and thus he was in the country illegally.
“You should have seen those border agents — they thought they had caught Osama bin Laden,” said Volz, 62.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for the detention and deportation of unauthorized immigrants, declined to comment on the case.
Besides the expired work document and fraudulently entering the country, the agency's deportation case also is backed by Brennan's 1995 felony conviction for buying a gun with a fake identity.
Representatives with the Irish and British governments also declined interviews, citing confidentiality issues. They wouldn't clarify which country would take Brennan back if he's ordered to leave.
Beyond the terms of the international agreement allowing him to stay, Brennan also cites a years-long asylum application that has yet to be decided, as well as a more recent sponsorship petition through Volz, who's a U.S. citizen.
There's also a fledgling political movement backing Brennan, including an online petition that has garnered nearly 1,000 signatures.
Three U.S. congressmen are calling for him to at least be released on bond — a call seconded by the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the largest Irish-American group in the country — saying he's not a flight risk since he previously put up a $1 million bail in California and never disappeared.
Brennan's not shy about openly discussing his past revolutionary politics, but his dedication to Irish independence has got nothing to do with his clean life in the United States, he insisted.
“They did nothing to us in the eight years since they let us out and now all of a sudden we're being thrown into the terrorist threat mix,” he said. “I haven't been hiding. And if you look at my record here, I'm a law-abiding citizen. I pay my taxes. I'm a working stiff.”
Should he lose his case and end up deported, Brennan said he undoubtedly will be dispatched straight to prison in Northern Ireland. That move would be equivalent to a death sentence, he noted, since his former enemies would find a way to get him.
If he's sent packing, Volz is not sure what she will do. She already has uprooted her life in San Francisco and settled in Brownsville to be closer to him, as well as to care for her ailing mother.
She was clueless about the past politics of the man she fell in love with after he asked her to dance in a bar. Volz initially was shocked when, after they had moved in together, he told her a family featured in a U.S.
magazine article she was reading on the Irish conflict was his family.
He was the unidentified man mentioned as being on the lam.
Though she would have preferred to hear the story up front, Volz agreed with Brennan's political convictions and they stayed together, eventually marrying.
The conflict in Ireland is centuries old, dating to the 16th-century Reformation when the British, who claimed Ireland, adopted Protestantism.
The independent Republic of Ireland was created in 1949, but deep divisions turned into bloody struggle in the smaller northern portion of the island that maintained allegiance to London, as Northern Ireland and as the Catholic majority unsuccessfully tried to boot out Protestant British loyalists.
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ireland. Show all posts
September 3, 2008
August 28, 2008
Brennan Denied Bail Again
August 28, 2008
By Jim Dee
JUST weeks after three congressmen called for Maze escapee Pol Brennan to be released on bail from a Texas immigration jail, an appeals court has upheld his earlier bond denial, making it all but certain that the Belfast native will remain imprisoned until his next scheduled court appearance on September 24.
In issuing its ruling on Tuesday, the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Virginia, agreed with the Texas judge who denied Brennan bail in April on the grounds that he was a danger to society.
The court cited Brennan’s 1984 entry into the U.S. using a false name, and his later purchase of a targeting pistol using an alias, as proof that he had criminal tendencies. The court also noted a 2005 misdemeanor assault conviction, which Brennan received after an altercation with San Francisco contractor who’d refused to pay him $1,000 in wages owed.
Although Brennan has always insisted that the contractor assaulted him first, on advice from his lawyer he eventually pleaded guilty and subsequently paid a $1,500 fine and performed 500 hours of community service.
However, unlike Judge Howard Achstsam who has been overseeing Brennan’s case since he was stopped for having a lapsed U.S. work permit at a Texas immigration checkpoint in late January, the Board of Immigration Appeals court didn’t find that Brennan is a flight risk.
Last month, three congressmen – New York Republicans Peter King and Jim Walsh, and Massachusetts Democrat Richard Neal – called for Brennan to be granted bail pending the outcome of deportation proceedings against him. They had insisted Brennan is not a flight risk, and cited the fact that he had twice been bailed from U.S. jails without incident when Britain was seeking his extradition in the 1990s.
Speaking to the Irish Voice on Tuesday, Brennan’s lawyer, San Francisco-based Jim Byrne, said that the fact that the appeals board ruled Brennan was not a flight risk was a positive development.
“We were glad that they overturned the judge on the issue that he was a flight risk, “ said Byrne, “But I disagree with the ruling that he is a danger to the community.”
He said he now plans to appeal the bond denial to a higher court.
Brennan was one the U.S. 38 IRA prisoners who escaped Northern Ireland’s Maze in September 1983. He entered the U.S. months later, and was eventually caught by the FBI in Berkeley, California in 1993.
Two years after 1998’s Good Friday peace agreement in the North, Britain abandoned its extradition case against him. U.S. authorities then granted him a work permit that allowed him to work as a carpenter in the San Francisco Bay area.
On January 27, while driving with his American wife of 19 years to visit friends in Texas, Brennan was detained at an immigration checkpoint because his work permit had expired. Although he’d applied to renew his permit, authorities hadn’t yet sent it to him by the time he was stopped.
Department of Homeland Security prosecutors now want to deport him for entering the US using an alias in 1984.
Brennan was held at Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas from January until later July, when the jail was evacuated as Hurricane Dolly approached on July 22. Since then Brennan has had three prison relocations which have taken him across nearly 2,000 miles of Texas and New Mexico in less than two weeks.
He is currently at the Willacy County Processing Center (WCPC) in Raymondville, Texas, a private prison run by Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC).
Speaking to the Irish Voice from WPPC on Tuesday, Brennan said that he is particularly frustrated by the fact that the misdemeanor assault continues to disadvantage him.
“It was self-defense,” he said “The guy got aggressive with me first.”
“I’m disappointed with the ruling, but I’m not surprised,” he added. “I wasn’t expecting anything different. But now we’ll take it to the federal level.”
By Jim Dee
JUST weeks after three congressmen called for Maze escapee Pol Brennan to be released on bail from a Texas immigration jail, an appeals court has upheld his earlier bond denial, making it all but certain that the Belfast native will remain imprisoned until his next scheduled court appearance on September 24.
In issuing its ruling on Tuesday, the Board of Immigration Appeals in Falls Church, Virginia, agreed with the Texas judge who denied Brennan bail in April on the grounds that he was a danger to society.
The court cited Brennan’s 1984 entry into the U.S. using a false name, and his later purchase of a targeting pistol using an alias, as proof that he had criminal tendencies. The court also noted a 2005 misdemeanor assault conviction, which Brennan received after an altercation with San Francisco contractor who’d refused to pay him $1,000 in wages owed.
Although Brennan has always insisted that the contractor assaulted him first, on advice from his lawyer he eventually pleaded guilty and subsequently paid a $1,500 fine and performed 500 hours of community service.
However, unlike Judge Howard Achstsam who has been overseeing Brennan’s case since he was stopped for having a lapsed U.S. work permit at a Texas immigration checkpoint in late January, the Board of Immigration Appeals court didn’t find that Brennan is a flight risk.
Last month, three congressmen – New York Republicans Peter King and Jim Walsh, and Massachusetts Democrat Richard Neal – called for Brennan to be granted bail pending the outcome of deportation proceedings against him. They had insisted Brennan is not a flight risk, and cited the fact that he had twice been bailed from U.S. jails without incident when Britain was seeking his extradition in the 1990s.
Speaking to the Irish Voice on Tuesday, Brennan’s lawyer, San Francisco-based Jim Byrne, said that the fact that the appeals board ruled Brennan was not a flight risk was a positive development.
“We were glad that they overturned the judge on the issue that he was a flight risk, “ said Byrne, “But I disagree with the ruling that he is a danger to the community.”
He said he now plans to appeal the bond denial to a higher court.
Brennan was one the U.S. 38 IRA prisoners who escaped Northern Ireland’s Maze in September 1983. He entered the U.S. months later, and was eventually caught by the FBI in Berkeley, California in 1993.
Two years after 1998’s Good Friday peace agreement in the North, Britain abandoned its extradition case against him. U.S. authorities then granted him a work permit that allowed him to work as a carpenter in the San Francisco Bay area.
On January 27, while driving with his American wife of 19 years to visit friends in Texas, Brennan was detained at an immigration checkpoint because his work permit had expired. Although he’d applied to renew his permit, authorities hadn’t yet sent it to him by the time he was stopped.
Department of Homeland Security prosecutors now want to deport him for entering the US using an alias in 1984.
Brennan was held at Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas from January until later July, when the jail was evacuated as Hurricane Dolly approached on July 22. Since then Brennan has had three prison relocations which have taken him across nearly 2,000 miles of Texas and New Mexico in less than two weeks.
He is currently at the Willacy County Processing Center (WCPC) in Raymondville, Texas, a private prison run by Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC).
Speaking to the Irish Voice from WPPC on Tuesday, Brennan said that he is particularly frustrated by the fact that the misdemeanor assault continues to disadvantage him.
“It was self-defense,” he said “The guy got aggressive with me first.”
“I’m disappointed with the ruling, but I’m not surprised,” he added. “I wasn’t expecting anything different. But now we’ll take it to the federal level.”
June 25, 2008
Brennan's plight rooted in '96 as much as 9/11
By Jim Dee
letters@irishecho.com
June 25, 2008 Sitting 20 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, tiny Turcotte, Texas has seen its share of hurricanes. However, an unlucky Irishman passing through the area five months ago encountered a different maelstrom: new U.S. immigration and Homeland Security realities that have him jailed at time when his native Northern Ireland is at peace, and Washington hails some of his former IRA comrades as statesman.
Maze escapee Pol Brennan has been cooling his heels in a Texas immigration jail since being detained at a U.S. immigration checkpoint north of Turcotte on January 27 - this for having a lapsed U.S. work permit.
The fact that Brennan had filed the renewal form on time, and that U.S. authorities simply hadn't updated it at the time he was stopped, was deemed irrelevant.
So too was Britain's 2000 decision to drop its efforts to extradite Brennan back to Northern Ireland for being one of 38 IRA men who escaped the Maze prison in September 1983.
And Homeland Security prosecutors haven't been moved by the fact that federal officials had earlier authorized Brennan to live freely in the San Francisco Bay area for years while awaiting the outcome of his political asylum application.
America is far different place today than when Brennan was first arrested in 1993. The U.S. has been waging a "war on terror" since 9/11, and a bourgeoning security apparatus headed by the Department of Homeland Security looks more harshly than before at anyone with even the remotest connection to terrorism.
But "war on terror" realities aren't the chief reason that Brennan now faces the toughest battle of his 15 year struggle remain in the United States and with his American citizen wife.
Far more pertinent is the fact that his current deportation case is being framed by tough 1996 immigration reforms that scorn most circumstantial considerations and discourage any nuanced interpretations of individual cases by judges.
Like the 'three-strikes-and-your-out' criminal laws so popular nationwide in the 1990s, the 1996 immigration reforms mandate black-and-white remedies to deal with undocumented immigrants whose circumstances are can often complicated and mitigating factors.
On the surface, the case against Brennan seems pretty open-and-shut. He has a 1995 felony gun conviction that appears to disqualify him from staying in the U.S. under any circumstance under the rules contained in the 1996 legislation.
He bought the gun from a licensed dealer in the early 1990s. However, by using an alias when buying it, he committed a felony.
Given the clichéd depictions of "hardened terrorists" prevalent in pop culture today, it might be presumed that the IRA fugitive was "packing" in preparation of shooting his way out if the feds ever swooped. But Brennan's reality was much more mundane.
For starters, when the FBI arrested him in January 1993, he didn't even own the gun anymore. He'd sold it to finance his new hobby: astronomy, which he'd taken up after his wife bought him a telescopic viewer in the hopes of weaning him off the target-shooting hobby that she feared would cause problems.
"I obtained a pistol for the purpose of target shooting in the early '90s," Brennan told the Irish Echo, during a phone interview from the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas.
"After the initial fascination wore off, I resold the pistol and bought my first telescope, as my interest in astronomy grew and the opportunity to buy some real observational equipment meant that I could put my spare time to better use increasing my knowledge of the night sky, instead of just punching holes in paper targets," said Brennan.
But what possessed him to risk buying a gun in the first place?
Brennan told the Echo that, having grown up in Belfast's Ballymurphy area - an IRA stronghold that saw daily gun battles in the early 1970s - he'd grown up viewing guns differently than someone reared in a place like Westchester County, New York or Palm Springs, California.
"It's not unusual for people who grow up around guns to retain an interest in them after their initial exposure," said Brennan.
"Coming from an unstable situation in my own country where I was exposed to an underground gun culture that arose in defense of neighborhoods that I grew up in, and being mechanically-minded, I was drawn to the unique mechanical systems of guns."
Brennan knows that he made a major mistake in buying the pistol. But he stressed that he believed that he'd already paid his debt to society for the offense.
"When I was fighting my extradition case back in the mid-90s, this gun charge was dealt with by (U.S. District Court) Judge Charles Legge, who found that I had only obtained the said pistol for sporting purposes," said Brennan. "He gave me six months, time-served, for the offense. That's where I thought it ended. Apparently not."
The gun issue might have faded away had it not been for the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.
Passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the IIRIRA dramatically increased spending on border enforcement. Outlays for detention and deportation of illegal immigrants have risen in the intervening years by 750 percent.
A central plank of the IIRIRA was its virtually elimination of any hope of judicial relief from deportation for any undocumented immigrant who commits a crime in the U.S.
"Since the 1996 immigration reforms, the big crackdown has been on criminal aliens," said Kevin Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in how the "war on terror" has impacted civil liberties and racial profiling.
Johnson said that post-9/11 deportations have risen dramatically.
"Every year we're setting records for the number of people deported. The last couple of years it's been around 200,000 a year," he said.
Professor Johnson said that America has a long history of enacting legislation to deal with a perceived threat from immigrants, from the Chinese Exclusion Laws of 1882, to Cold War provisions that allowed for the deportation of communists and political dissidents.
"And, in some ways, the fear of terrorism, the fear of criminal aliens, fits in nicely with the long history of our response, some would say over-response, to the perceived immigration threat of the day," he said.
Johnson said that the current focus of immigration enforcement policies is "immigrants who are in the country who have committed crimes. And the laws have become harsher and harsher, tougher and tougher."
"If you've got one conviction, maybe you can avoid deportation. If you've got two convictions, it's harder," he added. "And if you've got a firearms conviction, it's going to be very, very tough to stay."
Northern Ireland now has an historic DUP-Sinn Fein power sharing government. As one of its leaders, former IRA man Martin McGuinness has been warmly welcomed in the White House. Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly, who escaped the Maze alongside Brennan, has also traveled freely to and from the U.S. several times in recent years.
Both men have said that tumultuous events on the ground in Northern Ireland three decades ago heavily influenced their decisions to join the republican movement. And clearly their life choices in leaving armed struggle behind in favor of politics have impressed U.S. officials at the highest levels.
Supporters of Pól Brennan - and one politician now arguing in favor of bail is Congressman Peter King, no soft touch when it comes to border security - contend that key events in his life, including his 1977 conviction for ferrying explosives through Belfast, his participation in the grueling blanket, no-wash and hunger strike protests inside the Maze, and his subsequent escape, were also shaped by the troubles.
However, Brennan's war ended when he escaped the Maze prison nearly a quarter of a century ago.
At 56, he has spent nearly half his time on earth, and the overwhelming majority of his adult life, living in America. He has been married to an American woman, Joanna Volz, for 19 years.
Brennan recently put himself through community college and later passed a test to become a certified California building inspector. He has also taken his passion for astronomy to a higher level by becoming a volunteer at Oakland's Chabot observatory, the staff of which sent a glowing character reference letter to judge in his current deportation case.
"I was living quite normally, and moving forward, before all this happened in January," Brennan told the Echo.
"I feel that, in the circumstances that I'm in now, the gun issue is being used in a more punitive way than in other ways it would have been," he added. "I feel that people have moved on over in Ireland. But, in this respect, I've not been allowed to. It's like being in a time warp."
This story appeared in the issue of June 25-July 2, 2008
letters@irishecho.com
June 25, 2008 Sitting 20 miles inland from the Gulf of Mexico, tiny Turcotte, Texas has seen its share of hurricanes. However, an unlucky Irishman passing through the area five months ago encountered a different maelstrom: new U.S. immigration and Homeland Security realities that have him jailed at time when his native Northern Ireland is at peace, and Washington hails some of his former IRA comrades as statesman.
Maze escapee Pol Brennan has been cooling his heels in a Texas immigration jail since being detained at a U.S. immigration checkpoint north of Turcotte on January 27 - this for having a lapsed U.S. work permit.
The fact that Brennan had filed the renewal form on time, and that U.S. authorities simply hadn't updated it at the time he was stopped, was deemed irrelevant.
So too was Britain's 2000 decision to drop its efforts to extradite Brennan back to Northern Ireland for being one of 38 IRA men who escaped the Maze prison in September 1983.
And Homeland Security prosecutors haven't been moved by the fact that federal officials had earlier authorized Brennan to live freely in the San Francisco Bay area for years while awaiting the outcome of his political asylum application.
America is far different place today than when Brennan was first arrested in 1993. The U.S. has been waging a "war on terror" since 9/11, and a bourgeoning security apparatus headed by the Department of Homeland Security looks more harshly than before at anyone with even the remotest connection to terrorism.
But "war on terror" realities aren't the chief reason that Brennan now faces the toughest battle of his 15 year struggle remain in the United States and with his American citizen wife.
Far more pertinent is the fact that his current deportation case is being framed by tough 1996 immigration reforms that scorn most circumstantial considerations and discourage any nuanced interpretations of individual cases by judges.
Like the 'three-strikes-and-your-out' criminal laws so popular nationwide in the 1990s, the 1996 immigration reforms mandate black-and-white remedies to deal with undocumented immigrants whose circumstances are can often complicated and mitigating factors.
On the surface, the case against Brennan seems pretty open-and-shut. He has a 1995 felony gun conviction that appears to disqualify him from staying in the U.S. under any circumstance under the rules contained in the 1996 legislation.
He bought the gun from a licensed dealer in the early 1990s. However, by using an alias when buying it, he committed a felony.
Given the clichéd depictions of "hardened terrorists" prevalent in pop culture today, it might be presumed that the IRA fugitive was "packing" in preparation of shooting his way out if the feds ever swooped. But Brennan's reality was much more mundane.
For starters, when the FBI arrested him in January 1993, he didn't even own the gun anymore. He'd sold it to finance his new hobby: astronomy, which he'd taken up after his wife bought him a telescopic viewer in the hopes of weaning him off the target-shooting hobby that she feared would cause problems.
"I obtained a pistol for the purpose of target shooting in the early '90s," Brennan told the Irish Echo, during a phone interview from the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos, Texas.
"After the initial fascination wore off, I resold the pistol and bought my first telescope, as my interest in astronomy grew and the opportunity to buy some real observational equipment meant that I could put my spare time to better use increasing my knowledge of the night sky, instead of just punching holes in paper targets," said Brennan.
But what possessed him to risk buying a gun in the first place?
Brennan told the Echo that, having grown up in Belfast's Ballymurphy area - an IRA stronghold that saw daily gun battles in the early 1970s - he'd grown up viewing guns differently than someone reared in a place like Westchester County, New York or Palm Springs, California.
"It's not unusual for people who grow up around guns to retain an interest in them after their initial exposure," said Brennan.
"Coming from an unstable situation in my own country where I was exposed to an underground gun culture that arose in defense of neighborhoods that I grew up in, and being mechanically-minded, I was drawn to the unique mechanical systems of guns."
Brennan knows that he made a major mistake in buying the pistol. But he stressed that he believed that he'd already paid his debt to society for the offense.
"When I was fighting my extradition case back in the mid-90s, this gun charge was dealt with by (U.S. District Court) Judge Charles Legge, who found that I had only obtained the said pistol for sporting purposes," said Brennan. "He gave me six months, time-served, for the offense. That's where I thought it ended. Apparently not."
The gun issue might have faded away had it not been for the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) of 1996.
Passed by a Republican-controlled Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the IIRIRA dramatically increased spending on border enforcement. Outlays for detention and deportation of illegal immigrants have risen in the intervening years by 750 percent.
A central plank of the IIRIRA was its virtually elimination of any hope of judicial relief from deportation for any undocumented immigrant who commits a crime in the U.S.
"Since the 1996 immigration reforms, the big crackdown has been on criminal aliens," said Kevin Johnson, a law professor at the University of California at Davis who specializes in how the "war on terror" has impacted civil liberties and racial profiling.
Johnson said that post-9/11 deportations have risen dramatically.
"Every year we're setting records for the number of people deported. The last couple of years it's been around 200,000 a year," he said.
Professor Johnson said that America has a long history of enacting legislation to deal with a perceived threat from immigrants, from the Chinese Exclusion Laws of 1882, to Cold War provisions that allowed for the deportation of communists and political dissidents.
"And, in some ways, the fear of terrorism, the fear of criminal aliens, fits in nicely with the long history of our response, some would say over-response, to the perceived immigration threat of the day," he said.
Johnson said that the current focus of immigration enforcement policies is "immigrants who are in the country who have committed crimes. And the laws have become harsher and harsher, tougher and tougher."
"If you've got one conviction, maybe you can avoid deportation. If you've got two convictions, it's harder," he added. "And if you've got a firearms conviction, it's going to be very, very tough to stay."
Northern Ireland now has an historic DUP-Sinn Fein power sharing government. As one of its leaders, former IRA man Martin McGuinness has been warmly welcomed in the White House. Sinn Fein's Gerry Kelly, who escaped the Maze alongside Brennan, has also traveled freely to and from the U.S. several times in recent years.
Both men have said that tumultuous events on the ground in Northern Ireland three decades ago heavily influenced their decisions to join the republican movement. And clearly their life choices in leaving armed struggle behind in favor of politics have impressed U.S. officials at the highest levels.
Supporters of Pól Brennan - and one politician now arguing in favor of bail is Congressman Peter King, no soft touch when it comes to border security - contend that key events in his life, including his 1977 conviction for ferrying explosives through Belfast, his participation in the grueling blanket, no-wash and hunger strike protests inside the Maze, and his subsequent escape, were also shaped by the troubles.
However, Brennan's war ended when he escaped the Maze prison nearly a quarter of a century ago.
At 56, he has spent nearly half his time on earth, and the overwhelming majority of his adult life, living in America. He has been married to an American woman, Joanna Volz, for 19 years.
Brennan recently put himself through community college and later passed a test to become a certified California building inspector. He has also taken his passion for astronomy to a higher level by becoming a volunteer at Oakland's Chabot observatory, the staff of which sent a glowing character reference letter to judge in his current deportation case.
"I was living quite normally, and moving forward, before all this happened in January," Brennan told the Echo.
"I feel that, in the circumstances that I'm in now, the gun issue is being used in a more punitive way than in other ways it would have been," he added. "I feel that people have moved on over in Ireland. But, in this respect, I've not been allowed to. It's like being in a time warp."
This story appeared in the issue of June 25-July 2, 2008
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