On East 9th Street, just a few doors down from Tompkins Square Park, in Manhattan, stands Bonitas House, an imposing yet otherwise nondescript brownstone building with a tattered Irish tricolour in the window.
The door creaks open, revealing a smiling priest draped in a dark cassock.
A kalimavkion – the clerical headdress of the Eastern Catholic Church – sits atop his head.
A heavy crucifix hangs from his neck.
“When I first came, it was like an Eastern European village,” he says. “Not a word of English was spoken.”
Fr Patrick Maloney, an Irish priest from Limerick who recently turned 94, offers legal assistance to fellow immigrants at Bonitas House.
He cites the seal of Confession as the source of his confidentiality, maintaining that a lawyer can be subpoenaed but a priest cannot.
Though not a legal practitioner, he has navigated the complexities of the immigration system for decades.
“My major expertise is knowing what to get for whoever needs it at any given time,” he says. “I always know where to refer somebody, and get them on the right track.”
Inside his office-cum-bedroom, vast stacks of crumpled documents line the walls, not a filing cabinet in sight. “Just piles upon piles of work from over the years,” he explains.
Post-it notes with immigration lawyers’ phone numbers form a paper tapestry above his headboard.
The handwritten digits crudely enlarged to account for his diminishing eyesight.
A mobile phone attached to a drawstring dangles precariously from his neck, bristling with each incoming call.
“My clients can ring me whenever they want,” he says. “Even if it’s just for some reassurance.”
New York’s Irish community faces ongoing uncertainty following president Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, with deportations of Irish nationals having increased by 330 per cent between 2024 and 2025.
Maloney works closely with just a handful of the estimated 10,000 undocumented Irish in the US.
“Some have been here for 30 or 40 years,” he says. “They own their homes and pay their taxes.”
He works to secure their status so they can freely return to and from Ireland. “People have been stranded here for decades,” he says. “Imagine not being able to go back for your own mother’s funeral”.
Though Maloney has welcomed Trump’s anti-abortion measures, he has appealed for humanity amid mass deportations.
“Immigrants are the whole foundation of America,” he asserts. “How can you turn around and then persecute those people?”
Trump’s recent spat with Pope Leo XIV – in which he described the pontiff as too liberal and “weak on crime” – indicates a widening rift with senior Catholic clergy.
Vice-president JD Vance also stoked the flames when he suggested the pope should “be careful” when discussing theology.
“I thought it was very disrespectful,” says Maloney. “Let’s face it, they’re not the most scholarly bunch.”
Born in Limerick City in 1932, the priest spent his early years in a one-room tenement flat without electricity or running water.
He grew up alongside Frank McCourt, who went on to document the destitution of his childhood in Angela’s Ashes. Though some of McCourt’s memories have been disputed, Maloney attests to their veracity.
“A lot of people didn’t like it because it told the truth,” he says. “People were ashamed to admit how poor we were.”
I thought there would be gold in the streets, and I was quickly disillusioned. People were as poor as we had been back in Ireland
Maloney’s entry into religious study began at Cistercian College Roscrea, where he secured a scholarship.
After graduating from secondary school, he went on to pursue life as a hermetic monk with the Carmelite order.
While studying at a monastery in Wales, Maloney decided to withdraw from the priesthood.
“I realised that I wanted to encounter life beyond the walls of the cloister,” he recalls. “Though I have never given up my contemplative feeling and commitment to prayer.”
Outside of the priesthood, 1950s Ireland offered few economic opportunities. “There was absolutely no work,” he recollects. “Anybody who could get out did.” He decided to emigrate, travelling by boat to New York in 1955.
Though amazed by his first sight of television screens and skyscrapers, Maloney soon came to recognise the sobering reality of New York’s inequality.
“I thought there would be gold in the streets, and I was quickly disillusioned,” he remembers. “People were as poor as we had been back in Ireland.”
Inspired by the activism of Dorothy Day, whom he had met through the Catholic Worker movement, he launched Bonitas House in 1961.
After purchasing the property with a $1,500 downpayment – a fraction of its current value – he established it as a refuge for the poor and hungry, taking in orphans off the street.
“I gave them shelter and help until they were able to get back on their feet,” he says. The house today still houses a number of lodgers. “They’re like my sons.”
Maloney waited until Bonitas House was fully up and running before making his official return to the priesthood. In 1977 he was ordained as a Melkite Catholic priest – a church of the Eastern Rite.
The more communal and less hierarchical structure of the church greatly appealed to him. “I wanted a dialogue with my parishioners throughout,” he explains.
The height of his legal assistance came during Ronald Reagan’s immigration amnesty in the 1980s.
He helped secure status for many Irish and Polish immigrants who had come to New York illegally.
“All they had to do was prove they were here for a certain period of time,” he recalls. “It still took a lot to get them to come out of the woodwork.”
He also assists fellow priests in their applications for religious worker visas – one faction of his clients for whom a green card marriage is definitely off the cards.
A self-styled “fixer”, he says he always knows how to operate within the bounds of the law.
Maloney’s experiences with the justice system, however, go well beyond immigration assistance.
In 1995, a judge sentenced him to four years in prison for involvement in the theft of $7.4 million from a Brink’s truck in Upstate New York – the fifth largest robbery in US history at the time.
The Manhattan safe house used to stash the cash belonged to his network of local rehabilitation centres.
The prosecution identified the robbery as part of a wider conspiracy to raise funds for the IRA.
Maloney, well known in Irish republican circles in New York, had helped organise demonstrations outside the British consulate during the hunger strikes in 1981.
“We used to carry a coffin outside the consulate, and I would say a mass for our boys.”
In New York, he emerged as a central figure in the Northern Irish Aid Committee (Noraid) which helped fundraise for the families of Irish republican prisoners.
In 1982, he and his brother John were arrested in Dublin for alleged involvement in gun smuggling.
Charges against him were dropped, while his brother went on to serve two-and-a-half years in Portlaoise Prison.
During the investigation, a Garda special branch officer identified the priest as the “underground general” of IRA gun running.
He admits to having housed fugitives from the IRA and other resistance movements at Bonitas House. “I have always been unapologetic in my support for the movement,” he insists.
Nonetheless, he maintains his innocence, insisting his conviction was politically motivated. “I was not sent to prison for anything at all to do with the Brink’s robbery.”
Suspected paramilitary connections consigned him to maximum security, where a helicopter monitored his daily walks through the prison yard. “It gave me a certain level of clout among the mob bosses in my wing,” he admits.
Despite his old age, Maloney continues to work for his clients, taking calls and filling forms throughout the week.
He has one eye on the future – already considering clerical successors to take over his duties. With the slow progress of his immigration cases, he knows he may not live to see them all through.
Last month, Maloney threw a birthday party at Bonitas House. The livingroom came alive with a bustling cast of characters from across the world – many of them indebted to him for his help over the years. Bedecked in a shiny birthday sash, the priest ended the night with a rousing speech.
“Perhaps my best years are gone,” he surmised. “But I wouldn’t want them back, not with the fire in me now.”