Linnas v. Immigration and Naturalization Service

Karl Linnas entered the United States in 1951 claiming to have been a student during 1940-1943 and never involved in persecution, gaining citizenship in 1960; a federal court later denaturalized him after discovering he had actually been Chief of the Nazi concentration camp in Tartu, Estonia, and had committed atrocities there, concealing this history to obtain naturalization. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) (defendant) began deportation proceedings, and Linnas chose an office building housing representatives of independent Estonia as his deportation destination, since Estonia had been absorbed into the Soviet Union; he had already been tried in absentia by the Soviet Union and sentenced to death, and ultimately only the Soviet Union was willing to accept him. Linnas appealed the immigration judge's deportation designation, and the Board of Immigration Appeals remanded for consideration of the U.S.'s non-recognition of Soviet Estonian annexation and the statutory basis for the deportation-country designation.