Last April, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Maribel Trujillo, the Ohio mom of four U.S. citizens, despite having no criminal record. In August, ICE deported California nurse Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, along with her husband Eusebio, after two decades in the U.S. Neither of them had criminal records. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day this year, ICE deported Michigan dad Jorge Garcia, who had spent $125,000 over the years in his unsuccessful attempt to adjust his status. He didn’t have a criminal record either. Jakiw Palij, the last surviving Nazi war criminal living in the U.S., received a deportation order nearly 15 years ago but ICE has yet to deport him:
Palij served as a guard during World War II at the Trawniki forced labor camp, which also trained those participating in “Operation Reinhard,” a plan to exterminate every Jew in German-occupied Poland. He entered the country in 1949 without divulging his past and was later awarded citizenship, of which he was stripped by a federal judge in 2004 and ordered deported.
“During a single nightmarish day in November 1943, all of the more than 6,000 prisoners of the Nazi camp that Jakiw Palij had guarded were systematically butchered,” Eli Rosenbaum, head of the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (OSI), said after the ruling. “By helping to prevent the escape of these prisoners, Palij played an indispensable role in ensuring that they met their tragic fate at the hands of the Nazis.”
“But Palij, now 94, remains a free man because no one else wants him, either,” reports the Daily Beast. “As Rosenbaum told The Daily Beast in an email, ‘Unfortunately, the governments of Germany, Ukraine and Poland have declined to admit Palij and no other nation has agreed to accept him.’” So, the United States remains stuck with an actual Nazi war criminal—“guards at Trawniki were used by authorities to clear out ghettos in German-occupied Poland,” as well as “used as escorts for trains carrying Jews from ghetto to death camp”—who lied in his citizenship forms, while immigrants like Trujillo, Mendoza-Sanchez, and Garcia are cast out:
Every November, on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind leads a rally outside Palij’s house.
“You know, we’re throwing people out of this country who have been living here for 20 years and have families, and here we have a Nazi living in Queens,” Hikind told The Daily Beast. “How can that be? How is this possible?”
Last September, “every member of the New York congressional delegation penned a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, demanding that he step in before Palij dies here,” a report noted. "The 13 years that Mr. Palij has stayed in this country since he was stripped of his U.S. citizenship and ordered to be deported is 13 years too many," said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. "The State Department and the entire Trump administration ought to treat this with the attention it deserves and try everything at their disposal to carry out the court order and remove this former Nazi guard from our country”:
Hikind, whose parents both personally survived Holocaust concentration camps, has called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take Palij into custody as an illegal alien and hold him in detention while his deportation case continues to wind its way through the system. Hikind says he has been “pushing every button imaginable, there have been many attempts over the past six months to make something happen—we even got in touch with the son-in-law [Jared Kushner].”
A government source pointed a finger at Germany, telling the Daily Beast that “this has been over a decade now since he was ordered removed, but we haven’t gotten Germany to comply” with the deportation. But then again remember, we’re now in an administration that defended neo-Nazis and white supremacists as “some very fine people,” and that has had no issue going to extraordinary lengths to hunt immigrants that are brown. Stephen Paskey, a former senior trial attorney with the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations, said “the real issue is whether it’s a priority for anyone at the State Department, and generally I don’t think it has been. I don’t know for certain what they’ve done, but I think the results speak for themselves.”