Former Nazi Labor Camp Guard Who Lied About Crimes to Become U.S. Citizen Deported to Germany

A 95-year-old former Nazi labor camp guard living in New York has been deported, according to the White House.

On Tuesday, Jakiw Palij, a resident of Queens, was wheeled from his home by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. “President Trump and his team secured Palij’s deportation to Germany,” the White House said in a statement.

Palij was moved to a nursing home upon arrival in the city of Düsseldorf, Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper reported.

“ICE carried out a 2004 order of deportation for Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi SS labor camp guard in German-occupied Poland. After World War II, Palij lied about being a Nazi and became a resident of Queens, New York,” the White House statement said.

“To protect the promise of freedom for Holocaust survivors and their families, President Trump prioritized the removal of Palij. His long-overdue deportation sends a strong message: The United States will not tolerate those who facilitated Nazi crimes and other human rights violations, and they will not find a safe haven on U.S. soil,” the statement said.

In 1949, Palij immigrated to the U.S.and became a citizen in 1957 by hiding his Nazi service and telling U.S. immigration officials that he had spent the war years working on his father’s farm in his Polish hometown — now part of Ukraine, according to an ICE bulletin.

However, in 2001, Palij admitted his involvement with Hitler’s paramilitary organization and his 1943 training at the SS camp in Trawniki. According to the White House, “Court documents demonstrated that men who trained at the SS Training Camp in Trawniki participated in executing ‘Operation Reinhard,’ a code name for the Third Reich’s plan to murder Jews in Poland.”

According to both releases, Nazis massacred 6,000 Jewish men, women and children who were incarcerated at the Trawniki labor camp — where Palij served as an armed guard — that year.

In 2003, U.S. officials stripped Palij of his citizenship, and the government placed him in immigration removal proceedings. His deportation was ordered the following year.

On Tuesday, U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell revealed that President Trump had taken a personal interest in Palij’s case.

“I don’t know how he learned of the case, but it was very clear that he knew this individual as a Nazi guard and wanted him out of the United States,” Grenell told the Washington Post.