Roscommon Herald<\/a> from his home in Minnesota, Jonathan Cunniffe has recalled his chilling story of being stopped at gunpoint and detained by ICE agents last month.<\/p>\nHe explained that he has been \u201cfully legal\u201d since moving to the US about three and a half years ago. He has all the required paperwork, including a green card, a work visa and social security card.<\/p>\n
Jonathan, who is a licensed medical massage therapist, also made it clear that he doesn\u2019t have a criminal record or even a speeding ticket.<\/p>\n
On the morning of February 19th, he was driving to his workplace in Cambridge, Minnesota, located approximately 45 minutes from his rural home where he lives with his wife LaShae.<\/p>\n
When he stopped at a filling station to fill up his car, he firmly believes that ICE agents in plain clothes overheard his Irish accent when he went to pay at the register. Before he knew it, he was being followed by an unmarked SUV.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey followed me for about 25 minutes and took every turn that I took and were right behind me.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey took my documents, which are all legitimate and looked them over. And they were saying \u2018Oh, they aren\u2019t real, they aren\u2019t real\u2019.<\/p>\n
e claims he was dragged from his car, assaulted and then bundled into the back of the ICE SUV before being taken to a building in Minneapolis where he remained handcuffed in a room for six hours.<\/p>\n
Jonathan claimed he was assaulted again and subjected to physical aggression and intimidation, despite repeatedly telling ICE agents that he was in the US legally.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t think I was going to make it out of that room if I\u2019m being honest with you.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were questioning me about when I came over here. They were bringing up images of me and my wife\u2019s social media. I was completely terrified,\u201d<\/p>\n
Jonathan believes that he was eventually released from detention after constantly repeating the assertion that his wife had contacted the Irish Embassy. Feeling battered and bruised and very disoriented, he eventually managed to find his way back home.<\/p>\n
What made matters worse for him was that he lost his job the next day for missing work despite explaining to his company what had happened to him. \u201cWe think that they\u2019re just scared of the ICE situation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI barely sleep anymore. My wife has a panic attack every single time I have to step foot out of our door.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Roscommon man living legally in the United States has recounted his terrifying ordeal at the hands of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372915,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-372914","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372914\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372915"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}