Thursday, January 31, 2008
Demjanjuk is almost 88 and is in poor health, a family spokesman said.
CINCINNATI (AP) — A former autoworker from Cleveland who is accused of being a Nazi death camp guard lost another battle Wednesday in his 30-year fight to maintain his U.S. citizenship and residence.
A federal appeals court on Wednesday rejected John Demjanjuk’s challenge to a final deportation order of the nation’s chief immigration judge.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled there was no reason to review the 2005 ruling that says Demjanjuk can be deported to his native Ukraine or to Germany or Poland.
The efforts of former U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr. of Poland helped free Demjanjuk from Israel, where he’d been convicted and sentenced to hang as “Ivan the Terrible,” a Nazi death camp guard. Traficant helped prove Demjanjuk was not the prison guard.
Demjanjuk’s attorney, John Broadley, said he had no comment on Wednesday’s ruling and would not be able to respond until he reviews it. He would not speculate on what legal options remain.
Justice Department attorney Eli Rosenbaum did not immediately respond to an e-mail request to comment.
Broadley said in November that whichever way the decision went, 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.
Demjanjuk, who has steadfastly denied that he ever helped the Nazis, was told of the panel’s decision, said Ed Nishnic, his former son-in-law.
“He’s been made aware if it,” said Nishnic, who is divorced from Demjanjuk’s daughter but remains involved in his defense and acts as a family spokesman. “He’s basically used to decisions that don’t go in our favor, and he’s pretty much oblivious to the details. We’d like him to have peace in his life as much as possible.”
Demjanjuk, who will turn 88 in April, is generally in poor health, Nishnic said.
“Certainly, we are disappointed but not disheartened,” Nishnic said. “We will review the decision with our lawyer and then we will move forward within the court system.”
Nishnic said the family doesn’t think deportation is imminent.
“Government isn’t going to seize him. To our knowledge there is not a country, as far as we are aware, which is willing to take Mr. Demjanjuk. Then what can they do? They can’t deport him to the moon. They will have to let him live out his life in America.”
Demjanjuk, who lives in the Cleveland suburb of Seven Hills, contends that he served in the Soviet Army and was captured by Germany in 1942 and became a prisoner of war.
In his latest attempt to avoid deportation for Demjanjuk, Broadley argued that Michael J. Creppy, the chief immigration judge who made the 2005 deportation order, was purely an administrative official and not entitled to act as an immigration judge.
The appeals court panel rejected that argument and refused to review Creppy’s ruling, which was upheld by the Board of Immigration Appeals in 2006.
Broadley had argued in briefs filed in July 2007 that Demjanjuk likely would be tortured in Ukraine if sent back there because the U.S. government never sufficiently disavowed its previous claim that Demjanjuk was the notoriously sadistic guard. The government contends there is no basis for the argument.
The Justice Department first brought charges in 1977, claiming he was Ivan the Terrible and seeking to revoke his citizenship and to deport him for withholding his association with the Nazis on his applications to enter the U.S. in 1952 and to become a citizen in 1958.
Demjanjuk’s citizenship was revoked in 1981, restored in 1998 and revoked again in 2002.
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.
In 1999, the Justice Department again sought to revoke citizenship, alleging that, although not Ivan the Terrible, Demjanjuk had been a Nazi guard.
A U.S. judge ruled in 2002 that documents from World War II prove Demjanjuk was a guard at various Nazi death or forced labor camps.
That led courts to again strip Demjanjuk of his citizenship on the basis of the alleged falsified information on his applications for U.S. entry and citizenship.