Man shielded from deportation effort

The government initially claimed he was the
notoriously sadistic guard known as Ivan the Terrible.

CINCINNATI (AP) — The family of an elderly, former Ohio autoworker facing deportation over accusations that he was a World War II Nazi death camp guard and falsified his immigration application is doing its best to shield him from the controversy swirling around him.

“He is, in a way, oblivious to what’s going on in the courtroom, and we kind of make it that way so he doesn’t sit there and worry about this,” Ed Nishnic, John Demjanjuk’s former son-in-law, said Thursday.

“The man was sent to Israel and sentenced to death for something he clearly didn’t do, that the government knew he didn’t do, and they got away with it — the government — so now we’re just coming back to our courts and trying to stop this proceeding,” Nishnic said.

Three decades after the U.S. government began trying to deport Demjanjuk, a federal court panel heard oral arguments Thursday on his challenge to a final removal order. The judges’ decision will involve parsing the job description of the nation’s chief immigration judge.

“The chief immigration judge is purely an administrative official,” Demjanjuk’s Washington lawyer, John Broadley, told the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel. “The attorney general did not specify that the chief immigration judge was entitled to hear removal cases.”

Justice Department lawyer Robert Thomson told the court that contention was absurd.

“In plain language, the title chief immigration judge means he’s a judge,” Thomson said. “Why would that be the title if he wasn’t to be a judge?”

Demjanjuk, who lives in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, has steadfastly maintained that he was a Nazi prisoner himself, forced to work as a guard, and that he hurt no one.

His son, John Demjanjuk Jr., watched the arguments, but declined to comment.

Nishnic has long been the family spokesman and has remained close to his former father-in-law and protective, despite his divorce. He said he had not spoken with Demjanjuk about Thursday’s hearing.

“He’d old — he’s 87 years old, he’ll be 88 [in April] — he’s not in good health and we just told him, ‘Let us do the worrying and you just stay well, and we’ll get justice at the end of the day,’” Nishnic said.

The Justice Department first brought charges in 1977 seeking to revoke Demjanjuk’s citizenship and to deport him for falsifying information on his applications when entering the U.S. in 1952 and to become a citizen in 1958.

Demjanjuk’s U.S. citizenship was revoked in 1981, restored in 1998 and revoked again in 2002. The government initially claimed he was the notoriously sadistic guard at the Treblinka camp known as Ivan the Terrible.

He was extradited to Israel in 1986 and was under a death sentence, until Israel’s Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that he was not the same man as the guard known as Ivan.

The current deportation case is based on evidence uncovered by the Justice Department that Demjanjuk was a different guard. That evidence led courts to again strip Demjanjuk of his citizenship on the basis of the original falsified information.

Broadley disputes whether a former chief immigration judge, Michael Creppy, had authority to rule in December 2005 that Demjanjuk could be deported to his native Ukraine or to Germany or Poland.

Broadley contends that Creppy should have appointed an immigration judge to hear the case, rather than handle it himself. He wants the deportation order tossed out and a new hearing held.

The Board of Immigration Appeals refused to set aside Creppy’s ruling last year, so Broadley asked the 6th Circuit to review that denial.

The three-judge panel didn’t say when it would rule, but usually issues a decision several months after arguments.

“Hopefully, the judges will rule in our favor. If not, we’ll take the next legal step that we can take,” Nishnic said, promising to continue the family’s fight.

Broadley said whichever way the decision goes, the losing side likely would appeal, asking either for a hearing by all the judges of the 6th Circuit or by the U.S. Supreme Court.