The United States on Tuesday implemented a 2004 order of deportation to Germany of Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi SS labor camp guard in German-occupied Poland, the White House said in a press release.
After the war, Palij had moved to Queens, New York.
U.S. President Donald Trump commended the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency's "comprehensive actions in removing this war criminal from United States soil."
Despite a court ruling ordering his deportation in 2004, past administrations were unsuccessful in removing Palij.
"To protect the promise of freedom for Holocaust survivors and their families," the White House statement continued, Trump "prioritized the removal of Palij."
Palij had lied about his Nazi past and remained in the U.S. for decades, according to the White House. His "deportation sends a strong message" that the U.S. "will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on American soil," the press statement said.
Palij was born in what was then Poland and is now Ukraine. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1949 and became a citizen in 1957. During the immigration and naturalization process, he concealed his Nazi service and his participation in human rights abuses. Palij lied to immigration officials, claiming he had spent World War II working on a farm and in a factory.
In 2001, Palij admitted to Department of Justice officials that he had trained in 1943 at the Nazi SS Training Camp in Trawniki, in German-occupied Poland.
Court documents demonstrated that men who trained at Trawniki participated in "Operation Reinhard" – a code name for the Nazi regime's plan to murder Jews in Poland. Palij also served as an armed guard at the adjacent Trawniki Labor Camp. On November 3, 1943, approximately 6,000 Jewish children, women, and men who were incarcerated at the Trawniki labor camp were shot to death in one of the single largest massacres of the Holocaust.
In August 2003, a federal judge revoked Palij's U.S. citizenship based on his wartime activities, human rights abuses, and postwar immigration fraud. He was ordered deported in 2004, and his administrative appeal was denied in 2005.
In November of 2017, teens from an Orthodox Jewish school demonstrated outside Palij's New York City home.
He did not come out as they shouted: "Your neighbor is a Nazi."
