The Irish Prison Service had asked the government to revisit the policy, given more serious high-risk offenders had to be released early to make the space.
The Irish Prison Service (IPS) didn’t have the capacity to accommodate short-term, low-risk offenders, like immigration detainees, its director general told a Department of Justice official in a February 2024 letter.
Since November 2022, the IPS had notified the government that it was letting out not-so-dangerous prisoners temporarily to ease overcrowding in prisons.
The IPS has been gripped with capacity problems for a number of years now, show submission documents of the 2024 report from the Prison Overcrowding Response Group.
But there’d been a policy decision to prosecute people who arrive in Ireland without valid travel documents, documents show. And the Department of Justice had asked the IPS to exclude immigration detainees from temporary release.
“It is understood that GNIB [the Garda National Immigration Bureau] are testing the impact of stricter enforcement of the requirement to have a valid travel document”, it says.
Early release of those being prosecuted for it would undermine the decision to penalise undocumented arrivals, immigration officials said, according to the documents.
But the IPS wanted a reversal of that policy or some sort of intervention, documents show.
As “overcrowding necessitates the early release of more serious high risk offenders to make space for offenders deemed to be low risk from a reoffending and community safety perspective,” it says.
In July, Minister for Justice Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan TD told the Dáil that decisions on who can be released temporarily are made on a case-by-case basis. “And the safety of the public is paramount when those decisions are made,” he said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said Tuesday that the policy of eschewing temporary release for immigration detainees remains unchanged.
Between January and September 2024 alone, there were 226 prosecutions of people who did not have travel documentation or an asylum card to hand, according to official figures.
This didn’t used to happen at all, says Emily Cunniffe, former researcher at the Economic and Social Research Institute’s (ESRI) European Migration Network (EMN).
“People used to be temporarily detained under the Immigration Act, but they are now being charged for not holding a passport, and then they can be detained for up to a year,” she said by phone last week.
Other immigration detainees in Irish prisons are people awaiting deportation after an unsuccessful asylum claim. That’s because Ireland does not have a dedicated immigration detention centre.
Out of about 5,200 people in custody, there were up to 51 "extradition/immigration" detainees held in Irish Prisons at any one time between January and June of this year, official figures show.
As anti-immigrant activists rally online and in real life, the idea that there’s always something sinister behind undocumented travel ricochets around their circles and seeps into mainstream conversations – rhetorically criminalising irregular migration.
People can travel without their passports for an array of varied and complex reasons.
Since visa barriers can’t stop everyone from wanting out of a country, some purchase passports from smugglers and board a plane that way.
For some, safer direct air travel is not always an option, as different smugglers offer different routes, some filled with dangerous turns.
Other times, because they are known to officials of a dictatorship regime, and showing up at the airport, even on false passports, is risky.
Like Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, who had his passport confiscated by the regime, too.
Rasoulof, who’d been imprisoned before, was summoned to serve an eight-year prison sentence plus flogging. But with the aid of smugglers, he fled Iran by crossing land borders on a journey to Europe full of twists and turns that he later described to the Guardian as “exhausting and extremely dangerous”.
“The risks along these routes are staggering,” says a recent report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
Since 2014, 32,435 people have been swallowed by the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe, shows data compiled by the IOM’s Missing Migrants project.
Overall, in that window, 76,524 people have disappeared across the world as they tried to leave their country of birth, its data suggests.
“Although migration restrictions are meant to limit the ways in which migrants can enter countries legally, motivations for global migration exceed these legal possibilities,” said a 2023 paper published in the Journal of Iranian Studies.
So, increasingly, people opt for irregular routes, it says.
The EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact – which takes hold in June 2026 – is another effort to curb undocumented travel by pulling aside those travellers, processing their asylum cases at high speed while restricting their freedom of movement so it’s easier to deport them.
Frontex, the EU’s Border and Coast Guard Agency – which in the past has been accused of human rights violations by prioritising pushbacks over the safety of people trying to cross – is looped into talks on “alternatives to detention” as part of the pact, show documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
“The interconnection between asylum and return will now become even stronger within the border procedures, aimed at expediting the assessment of applications for international protection and swiftly returning persons who are not eligible for protection,” says a joint cover letter on alternatives to detention in the context of the EU pact from Frontex and the European Agency for Asylum.
Ireland’s Department of Justice has been mining research on “specialised prison facilities” as it sketches out a plan to lay down the pact, documents suggest.
So, does that mean the incoming law will stop people from ending up in regular prisons if they are prosecuted for not having passports on arrival?
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said the pact doesn’t mean “automatic detention” of people seeking protection.
Detention may happen proportionately and within the safeguards of EU law as a measure of last resort and subject to judicial scrutiny, they said.
But “Alternatives to detention are being explored to deliver enhanced monitoring of applicants. This may involve using innovative technological solutions,” they said.
The government is supposed to hold immigration detainees separate from other prisoners, in Block F of Cloverhill Prison, says sociologist Lucy Michael.
But it’s not doing that at the moment, the Minister for Justice, Fianna Fáil’s Jim O’Callaghan, told the Dáil earlier this year.
Michael, the sociologist, said that “When you look at not using the F Block at Cloverhill, in the situation of overcrowding, you start asking questions.”
What physical and psychological harm do these detentions unleash on immigrants?
Is the government assessing their illnesses, disabilities and so forth, asks Michael, before placing them in cramped jails alongside people who can be dangerous?
That prison overcrowding is “positively associated” with infectious disease, depression, self-harm, and violence is also the upshot of a recent research review.
Djamal Abdoun – who is in the process of appealing a negative decision on his asylum claim – has launched a petition asking the government not to incarcerate people like him alongside serious offenders. He’s watching it happen to his friends, one after another, he said.
Those with a rejected asylum claim and a deportation order haven’t committed any crime, said Abdoun. And it pains him, he said at a city café on Monday morning. “This practice is dehumanising,” he had said earlier in an email.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said the Gardaí decide whether prison is a suitable option for someone.
But deportation orders have to be enforced, and if people don’t comply with them, they can get arrested, they said.
Gardaí regularly use alternatives to detention in these cases, the spokesperson said.
“But it can be necessary to detain people in advance of deportation to prevent absconding,” they said.
Work to bulk up prison capacity, as laid out in the Programme for Government, is already underway, said the spokesperson.
Groups such as the Irish Penal Abolition Network argue that the answer to overcrowding is not more prison cells, but a changed understanding across society of justice and accountability.
In October 2024, a man facing deportation died in Cloverhill prison, reported as dying of “suspected natural causes”.
In December of that year, the IPS refused a request under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to access its internal records about the man’s stay in Cloverhill, citing privacy exemptions under the law.
An appeal on public interest grounds was also unsuccessful.
The Council of Europe’s Anti-torture Committee (CPT) report on conditions in five Irish prisons, published this year, outlines the impact of overcrowding.
“Some persons were forced to sleep on camp beds or mattresses on the floor, sometimes in squalid conditions,” it says.
It spotlights issues at Cloverhill and Limerick prisons.
“Allegations of prisoner abuse by staff have increased since 2019, particularly in Cloverhill and Limerick Prisons,” it says.
Cunniffe, the former ESRI researcher, points to narrowing of access to interpreters and lawyers in detention for immigrant inmates.
“Because they’re in there temporarily, if someone doesn’t have contact with a solicitor before that, they can really struggle to get access to legal representation," she said.
Saoirse Brady, Executive Director of the Irish Penal Reform Trust (IPRT), a non-profit advocating for a human-rights approach to penalisation, said it is concerned about the psychological toll of imprisonment on immigration detainees.
Going to prison, being pulled away from routine and normalcy, is so traumatising, she said.
Prisons, including Cloverhill, are experiencing “unsafe” and “unacceptable” levels of overcrowding at the moment, said Brady.
“Detaining people in prison for immigration reasons only applies further unnecessary pressure on both prisoners and staff,” she said.
Immigration detention should be “exceptional” and “proportionate”, she said.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said those facing deportation can be detained for up to 56 days “for the purpose of ensuring their deportation from the State”.
That period can be prolonged if the district court allows, they said.
A spokesperson for the Gardaí said it sometimes uses the airport Garda station to accommodate detainees of “all criminal offences, which may include immigration offences”.
But that’s not a holding place or detention centre for immigration detainees. It’s just a Garda station like any other, they said.
“It may be used for short periods where deportation orders have been executed and the deportee is awaiting a departure flight from Dublin Airport,” the spokesperson said.
Between January and 31 July of this year, 2,965 people were refused leave to land at Dublin Airport, official figures show.
Citizens of Albania, Brazil, Somalia, Georgia and China topped the list.
Most people refused leave to land say they want to apply for asylum, but not all of them follow through, said a spokesperson for the Department of Justice.
Those who don’t turn up at the International Protection Office (IPO) later to apply are here “illegally” and can get deported, they said.
One alternative to detention for unsuccessful asylum applicants is requiring them to present to a garda based at the immigration office on Burgh Quay and sign paperwork to show they haven’t gone off grid, says Cunniffe, the former ESRI researcher.
It’s better than detention and saves money for the government, she says.
Says Brady, the Executive Director of IPRT: “It costs on average almost €100,000 to imprison someone for a year.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice also mentioned it as a long-practised
alternative to detention by the Gardaí.
Though Cunniffe points to the cost of travelling for people who live outside Dublin just to sign.
At that tail end of the process, many people who’d sought asylum live in extreme poverty because they’re not allowed to legally work and also no longer entitled to the meagre weekly asylum allowance.
Some people can regularly report to the immigration office while in the process of fighting deportation and still end up in jail too.
Back in June, Mostafa Mihi was at home when a clutch of vans stopped outside his house and a crowd of guards poured out.
One of them was armed, he said, which terrified his friend. Mihi had arrived in Ireland in 2022.
Since working at a chicken factory – where he sustained a disability in his left elbow – he had been renting privately with friends outside the asylum accommodation system, he said on a video call on Monday, showing his elbow.
“We said, ‘We appealed our decisions, we’re still waiting, why is this happening? Why no warning?’’’ said Mihi.
He says the cops shrugged them off, put them in a van and drove them to a Garda station. And from there to Cloverhill Prison, he said.
“Conditions were tough, you can imagine, you’re in a cell with criminals from all cases, somebody killing, somebody kidnapping,” said Mihi.
By the time he managed to call his lawyer, Mihi says, he had spent about a week in prison already.
“My friend was deported after 17 days, they released me after 39 days,” he said.
Cunniffe, the former ESRI researcher, points to a recent court case that tells a similar story.
That’s the case of G.T, who had sought political asylum from Georgia – the country, not the US state.
In her judgment dated 5 March 2025, Ms Justice Siobhán Phelan noted that G.T. – then an inmate at Cloverhill – had a perfect track record of showing up to sign deportation paperwork. “There is no record of the Applicant failing to present as required.”
Ms Justice Phelan said that the state solicitor, Clara Gill, presented concerns that G.T. would go off-grid to dodge deportation if released.
G.T.’s lawyers managed to delay their deportation in February. But in the end, Ms Justice Phelan didn’t free them on bail, until later if things change.
If it weren’t for their efforts to fight deportation in February, they wouldn’t have been in prison anyway, says the ruling, they would’ve been deported.
The Department for Justice can still probably deport them soon, in the middle of the month, said Ms Justice Phelan in her ruling in early March.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice said that by 8 August 2025, it had deported 106 people on charter flights and 93 people on commercial flights.
“Most of these cases have involved periods of detention prior to departure,” they said.
It’s not detaining children, though, the spokesperson said.
Michael, the sociologist, said she is concerned about the impact of imprisonment on young adults and young people who say they’re underage but aren’t believed. “If the age assessment wasn’t robust,” she said.
By Tuesday, Abdoun had collected a little over 400 signatures on his petition asking the government not to place people with rejected asylum claims in prisons alongside convicted felons.
This policy is a violation of the rights of people whose only crime was that they left their country of birth and tried to live elsewhere, he said.
They’re not criminals, said Abdoun.
Abdoun works at Temple Street Children’s Hospital, where being around kids makes him forget his own pain, he said. “It’s healing.”
He donates to charity, volunteers his time, and has learned English from scratch here. “To integrate,” he said.
All the guys he knows who ended up in jail had tried just as hard to fit in, said Abdoun.
They don’t deserve to go to prison, said Abdoun. “I’ve never ever ever seen the inside of a jail.”
Mihi, the man who was jailed in Cloverhill, says he’d asked his boss at the chicken factory to sponsor a work permit for him outside the asylum system, but they wouldn’t.
Now, in the deportation queue, he’s not allowed to work legally. “I had a permanent contract, my employer was relying on me,” he said, his voice wavering.
His colleagues still ask if he can ever come back, he said. They wrote character references for him, which he’s sent to immigration officials, alongside letter after letter, Mihi said, charting the map of how hard he has tried.
Like Abdoun, he has learned English, worked long hours at the meat plant and paid taxes, said Mihi. He even left the asylum accommodation system to make room for others, he said, to avoid being a burden.
But none of that mattered; now he’s left with that empty feeling that he’s unwanted here, he said.
“I don’t consider myself the best, but like, you know, we shouldn’t be treated like this,” Mihi said.
CORRECTION: This article was updated at 9.31am on 13 August 2025 to reflect that Emily Cunniffe is a former researcher at ESRI, not a current one, and at 10.52 on 13 August 2025 to fix a typo to reflect that it's since 2014 – not 2024 – that 32,435 people have died in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach Europe according to the IOM's Missing Migrant's project. We apologise for the errors.
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