"Bring Them Back"

The story of Elizabeth Odunsi and Iyabo Nwanze begins like the grim familiar tale of illegal immigrants anywhere. Fleeing religious violence, the two mothers followed a path taken by thousands of other Nigerians, and in 2001 sought refuge in Ireland with their six children. They lived on government rations in a trailer park built to house refugees on the outskirts of Athlone, a sleepy midlands town, while awaiting a verdict on their asylum applications. Community worker Salome Mbugua Henry describes the scene as "kind of like an open prison system." The two women took vocational classes and made Irish friends. But after four years in bureaucratic limbo, their new lives evaporated in March, when they were deported with their 5-year-old sons. The women got so little warning that their four other children were left behind, as immigration officers escorted the women to Dublin Airport before the older ones walked home from school. As the mothers scrounged to bribe police officers and pay hospital bills back in Nigeria — their 5-year-olds had never received vaccinations against African diseases — the older children went into hiding. "We expected that they would have been more civil about it," says Kemi, a friend of the women who refused to give her last name, out of fear that doing so might affect her residency status. "It's depressingly shattering. It sent shivers through us," she says, as her 1-year-old son plods across the floor of her trailer, playing with an empty butter tub.

But Odunsi and Nwanze's story has an Irish twist: Athlone didn't want to let them go. Within 24 hours of their departure, more than 4,000 people — nearly one-fifth of the town's population — had signed a petition asking Ireland's Justice Minister to reconsider. The town council passed a near-unanimous motion demanding that they be allowed to return, and hundreds of residents marched in a demonstration during which the leader of the Irish Senate declared her support. Posters still hang in shop windows on Athlone's main street, showing a three-year-old photograph of Prime Minister Bertie Ahern embracing the women at an election rally, alongside the plea, bring them back.

The families are living in a slum in Lagos, and are often too upset to speak on the phone, people in Athlone say. "We're not going to give in on this," says Frank Young, a retired farmer who met Odunsi and Nwanze when they were students in a class taught by his wife. Young says his antideportations group, Athlone Families Together, is prepared to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg: "People are fiercely determined that justice will be done."

While much of Europe is considering restricting immigrants, the Irish, it seems, want to keep theirs. That sentiment was unheard-of five years ago, when the government began housing asylum seekers in hostels and detention centers around the country. As busloads of African and East European immigrants arrived in villages that were homogeneously Irish — and 100% white — many residents feared exotic diseases, rising crime rates and falling property values. So they took to the streets to keep foreigners out.