The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service has been seeking to deport Andrija Artukovic, the Yugoslavian charged with participation in wartime Nazi crimes in that country, to a country other than Yugoslavia, according to a reply received by a Detroit resident who had inquired about the status of the case.
Saul Karpf wrote to the United States Attorney General and received a reply from the immigration and Naturalization Service Office in Los Angeles, reporting that the Federal agency had had a final order for Artukovic’s deportation since April 1953 but that action was deferred pending the outcome of extradition hearings. The reply also noted that a United States Commissioner in California had ruled in 1959 that the crimes charged against Artukovic were political and that he was therefore not extraditable.
The Federal agency’s office in San Pedro then granted Artukovic’s application for a withholding of his deportation to Yugoslavia based on his claim that he would be physically persecuted in that country. At the same time, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service “has continued its efforts to obtain a travel document for deportation to some other country but to date has been unsuccessful,” the reply stressed.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
