A former IRA prisoner fighting deportation after 25 years in the US recounted his escape from Northern Ireland's Maze prison and entry into America with the help of sympathisers on both sides of the Atlantic.

But while the story of Pol Brennan's unusual path from a tumultuous Belfast to a US government immigrant detention centre in South Texas is riveting, some of the steps may weigh against him as he argues for political asylum or permanent residency.

Brennan, now 55, was serving a 16-year sentence for transporting explosives and a revolver for the IRA in Belfast when he escaped from the Maze.

He denied being a member of the organisation, but said he did the IRA favours and probably delivered explosives for the group about six times.

"I have supported the IRA morally and sometimes actively," Brennan told an immigration judge in Raymondville, Texas.

Brennan said Irish republican sympathisers acquired a false passport, birth certificate and plane ticket for him in 1984, a year after he and 37 other republican prisoners escaped from The Maze outside Belfast - at the time reputed to be Europe's most secure jail.

Brennan flew to New York and then on to San Francisco, where he quickly settled with a large Irish expatriate community. He arrived under the alias Patrick Joseph Morgan, but obtained a California driving licence and married his current wife in 1989 as Pol Morgan.

He had also brought an American birth certificate from Ireland in the name of Richard Earl Martin and used it later to have a California court legally change his alias to Pol Morgan.

Brennan went unnoticed until 1993 when he applied for a US passport using the Richard Earl Martin birth certificate and court documents showed his legal name change to Pol Morgan.

The FBI arrested him in Berkeley, California, for fraud on a passport application. A few days later they discovered Brennan's true identity and past, as well as a pistol he bought under his alias.

Brennan's whose website offers writings and radio interviews in which he rails against his US detention, bad food, guards, restrictions on reading material and what he says is racist immigration policies, spent several hours telling his story to immigration judge William Peterson.

But when the prosecutor assistant chief counsel Lessa Whetmough, asked who helped him apply for the US passport, Brennan refused to answer. His lawyer, Jim Byrne, said that while Brennan very much wanted to remain in the US, he did not want to incriminate anyone who helped him.

Britain dropped its extradition demand in 2000 and Brennan was allowed to stay in the US, albeit with murky immigration status. Since then, Brennan has routinely applied for and received work permit renewals and lived an apparently normal life. He worked as a carpenter in the Bay Area of Northern California and helped his wife, Joanna Volz, raise her daughter.

The only recent black mark, Brennan says, is a 2005 misdemeanour assault charge for a scuffle he had with a contractor he claimed owed him wages.

But Ms Whetmough said a search of Brennan's fingerprints turned up two other arrests in 2005 - one for battery on emergency personnel and the other an assault with a deadly weapon. Brennan denied committing those crimes or knowing anything about them.

Brennan hopes to convince Judge Peterson that he should not be deported, but instead granted political asylum or given permanent residency.

"I've actually lived longer in the US than I did in freedom in Northern Ireland," Brennan said.

If deported, Brennan, who holds an Irish passport, would be sent to the Republic.

The last IRA parolee to be killed was in December 1997, before the landmark Good Friday peace deal the following year. Since then, several hundred IRA inmates have been freed from prison or returned home from abroad without incident.