John Lennon arrives for a concert in Houston in August 1965. Ferd Kaufman/AP file photo
A Beatle’s Role in Obama’s Immigration Order
Expanded deferred action has its roots in John Lennon's 1970s deportation battle, attorney says.
While conservatives continue to attack the constitutionality of President Obama’s recent immigration executive order, a voice from the past has emerged to take credit for some of its legal underpinnings.
Michael Wildes, a New York City attorney whose father represented the late ex-Beatle John Lennon in his famous early 1970s battle to avoid deportation by the Nixon administration, has weighed in with an essay bound to thrill the average music-loving Baby Boomer.
“The recent steps announced by President Obama to expand the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and now to offer deferred action to certain parents of U.S. and permanent residents have their roots in the John Lennon case,” Wildes wrote in a Dec. 2 op-ed in the North Jersey Record.
British citizen John Lennon and his Japan-born-but-American-raised wife Yoko Ono “were placed in deportation proceedings precipitously in 1972 when their request for an extension of their visitors' stay was summarily denied,” the essay said. The reason “was not because they had broken any American law, but simply because then-President Richard Nixon felt that their presence in the United States could adversely affect his chances for reelection.”
During the five-year battle, immigration officials publicly said they were treating the Lennons no differently than any other undocumented person and that the then-Immigration and Naturalization Service had no option other than to deport every illegal alien. But “nothing was further from the truth,” said Wildes, who worked with his father “to prove that the government had full discretion and authority to withhold deportation in appropriate cases.”
The immigration judge refused to allow the INS staff familiar with such cases to be questioned, so a lawsuit was filed under the Freedom of Information Act to secure the data, he wrote. “In response to the lawsuit, we were furnished with 1,843 case files describing persons who, though fully deportable, had been permitted to remain indefinitely for one reason or another.” At Lennon’s request, his attorneys published law journal articles showing that the INS “gradually began to focus its energy on its most serious cases and, through its prosecutorial discretion, deferred action in meritorious cases similar” to cases cited in the journals.
In 1976, Lennon was actually granted "non-priority" status (now referred to as "deferred action") and soon a U.S. Court of Appeals had overturned Lennon's deportation order, and he was granted lawful permanent residence status.
“As a result, the Department of Homeland Security, which replaced the INS, makes use of its prosecutorial discretion today to consider deferred-action cases,” Wildes wrote. “It recognizes that like all law enforcement agencies, it has finite resources and it is not possible to investigate and prosecute every immigration violation…. Lennon's contribution to the development of this program of prosecutorial discretion should be recognized as a legacy of immense value that he bequeathed to his adopted homeland.”