Rosie O’Donnell won’t be coming back to America anytime soon. Federal officials say the comedian entered the country illegally this summer so she could fill in as guest host on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” for a week. Customs found out, and now she’s been barred from returning.
“She entered America by boat from Nova Scotia to Maine without any documents and hence was illegally in the country,” said Alex Bruno, US Attorney for the Eastern District of Maine. “She is not allowed to enter any port in America anymore.”
Officials say O’Donnell made the trip in July. She reportedly boarded a private vessel in Nova Scotia, crossed into US waters, and came ashore in Maine with no passport and no visa. From there, she traveled to Los Angeles and took over Kimmel’s chair while he was away.
Viewers had no idea anything was wrong. O’Donnell joked with guests, did her monologues, and went back across the border when the week was done. For a while, it looked like nobody noticed.
Then Customs and Border Protection started piecing it together. Without any record of her crossing, investigators traced her travel back to the coast and to the boat that brought her in.
Why didn’t she just fly? Because she couldn’t. O’Donnell had already renounced her American citizenship and destroyed her passport over the internet, posting the moment for her followers after moving to Ireland. She called it a statement against the direction of the country.
That statement came with consequences she apparently didn’t think through. “Once you renounce, you’re a foreigner,” said a former immigration official. “You follow the same rules as everyone else. That means papers.”
Bruno said his office takes illegal entry seriously, no matter who it is. “Celebrity is not a travel document,” he said.
O’Donnell’s options are shrinking. She has been living in Ireland, but her residence there isn’t permanent, and Irish immigration officials have made it clear she doesn’t get to stay forever just because she wants to. Long-term residency usually requires work, money, or family ties to the country.
“Now she knows that Ireland is not going to give her residence forever,” a person familiar with her situation said.
O’Donnell responded online, saying she was being targeted for her politics and calling the ban “cruel.” Her supporters said the punishment was too harsh for a week of television.
Plenty of others weren’t so sympathetic. Many pointed out that she chose to give up her passport and then broke the law to come back for a TV job.
“She burned the bridge and then swam across the river,” one commenter wrote. ABC said it had no role in her travel and declined to comment further. For now, O’Donnell is on the outside looking in, with no American passport and no guarantee of a future in Ireland.
No skill, no country.
