American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [207]
Mezei was not a random immigrant to America. He had made his home in Buffalo for a quarter century before returning to Europe in 1948 to visit his dying mother in Romania. However, he ended up detained in Hungary and never managed to make it to see his mother. While in Hungary, his common-law wife, Julia Horvath, arrived from America and the two of them officially married. They then returned to the United States in 1950. While Horvath was allowed to return to Buffalo, Mezei was detained at Ellis Island and ordered excluded. He was denied a hearing and not allowed to see the specific charges against him. The basic accusation was that he had been a member of a Communist-affiliated group while residing in America.
Mezei was ordered deported, but to where? As a court would later declare, “there is a certain vagueness about [Mezei’s] history.” He had arrived in the United States illegally in 1923, having gone overboard in New York Harbor from a ship on which he served as a seaman. He was born in 1897 on a ship off the Straits of Gibraltar, but raised in Hungary and Romania. In his twenty-five years in the United States, Mezei had never become a naturalized citizen. All of this left his actual citizenship uncertain.
This was a dilemma for U.S. officials deciding where to send Mezei. When the government deported him back to France, that nation turned him away. The same thing happened when Mezei was sent to England. The State Department then asked the Hungarian government to take him, but it refused. Mezei wrote to twelve Latin American countries asking for entry, but not one would accept him. Ignatz Mezei was stuck at Ellis Island, a man without a country.
The next step was for Mezei to file a habeas corpus petition. Eventually, his case reached the Supreme Court. While the judicial process unfolded, Mezei was released on a bond in May 1952, after nearly two years imprisoned at Ellis Island. He returned to Buffalo and tried to earn a living as a cabinetmaker while the courts untangled his case.
In March 1953, the Court came to a decision. In a 5-4 ruling that relied heavily on Knauff, it declared that the exclusion without a hearing and subsequent detention of Ignatz Mezei at Ellis Island was constitutional. The Court agreed with the Justice Department that Mezei was not actually imprisoned at Ellis Island, since he was free to leave at any time to any country that would accept him. “In short, respondent sat on Ellis Island because this country shut him out and others were unwilling to take him in,” wrote Justice Tom Clark.
The Court again reiterated the plenary power doctrine that recognized that “the power to expel or exclude aliens” was “a fundamental sovereign attribute exercised by the Government’s political departments largely immune from judicial control.” Even though Mezei had previously lived in the United States and was currently on American soil, the Court recognized the legal fiction that Mezei had not formally and legally “entered” the United States and was therefore not eligible for constitutional protections such as due process. “Neither respondent’s harborage on Ellis Island nor his prior residence here transforms this into something other than an exclusion proceeding,” Clark wrote.
In his dissent, Justice Hugo Black complained that Mezei was being excluded at the “unreviewable discretion of the Attorney General,” noting that such powers were more likely found in totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. As he did in Knauff, Justice Jackson also dissented in Mezei. “Because the respondent has no right of entry, does it follow that he has no rights at all,” Jackson asked. “Does the power to exclude mean that exclusion may be continued or effectuated by any means which happen to seem appropriate to the authorities?” If so, what would stop the government from ejecting Mezei “bodily into the sea or to set him adrift in a rowboat?”
A defeated Mezei returned to Ellis Island in April 1953. His only hope was that