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INS has stressed to BUREAU that if LENNON were to be arrested in US for possession of narcotics he would become more likely to be immediately deportable.
—FBI Confidential Memo, July 29, 1972
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Shortly after my father completed his term in office as president of the AILA, he received a call to consult with former Beatle John Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon about an immigration matter. The year was 1972. I was eight years old at the time, but even I knew the nation was involved in a special, historic event—the presidential election that was to take place that year. Richard Nixon was running for a return to office, and this would be the first election in which eighteen-year-olds were permitted to vote.
My father, bless him, was not exactly tuned into the rock music scene. He had no idea who John and Yoko were when he first met them and, as he has often related the story, when he returned home to our mother, he told Ruth about talking with “Jack Lemmon & Yoko Moto.”
Even though Dad wasn’t so firm on his clients’ fame, he understood the facts of the case. John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono had arrived as visitors in August 1971. The purpose of their trip was to try to locate Yoko’s eight-year-old daughter Kyoko, whose father, Tony Cox, had absconded with the child while visiting with her and had whisked her off to parts unknown. Yoko had custody orders from courts in two jurisdictions, and her former husband was held in contempt of those orders.
Lennon, who had a conviction for possession of marijuana, had secured a waiver of his excludability for that visit. The waiver was available only for a temporary admission. There was no waiver whatsoever for permanent residence at that time.
What ensued was a historic abuse of our immigration laws. My father applied for an extension of Lennon’s stay for the purpose of helping his wife locate their child. During his time in this country, however, Lennon had made public appearances urging Americans to get out of Vietnam. Inflaming the new eighteen-year-old voters got Lennon on President Nixon’s enemies list—and made him a target for dirty tricks.
The president felt he possessed imperial powers and used a slush fund of cash, distributed out of the White House itself, to cover the costs of an undercover group of former government operatives who conducted burglaries, illegal break-ins, and clandestine surveillance operations, some of which involved clearly criminal activity. Richard Nixon believed that if the president authorized such actions, that itself would render them completely legal. He also saw no problem with using the federal immigration system to force Lennon out of the country.
After consulting with the Commission of Immigration, the New York district director told my father that the extension of stay he had requested would be granted for only a month, and that was due only to the long and friendly relationship my father enjoyed with the officials. “Because of you, Leon, but tell your clients to get out of the United States.” The Lennons were given a two-week period of time to depart thereafter and, within that two-week period of time the authorization previously given was revoked, and they were declared overstays from the date of revocation. Thus, an entirely phony ground for deportation was set up, along with an “order to show cause.”
Moreover, the INS wasn’t the only arm of the government used against the Lennons. The FBI conducted continuous surveillance on John and Yoko, and the director, J. Edgar Hoover, reported personally to Richard Nixon’s attorney general, his former law partner John Mitchell, with regular accounts of the Lennons’ activities. In the face of open surveillance on his clients and wiretaps of his phone calls, my father resorted to discussing the case with my grandfather in Yiddish—at the very least, Dad reasoned, the feds would have to hire a Yiddish speaker to translate.
But there was, unfortunately, very little humor to be found in the situation. The president and his henchmen simply ignored the fact that aliens in the United States had First Amendment rights, which included speaking out against government actions. It took three years of litigation in federal court to secure several documents showing a cover-up and a concerted effort to have the famous Beatle removed for political purposes.
At the time, immigration law prescribed that anyone who was convicted of any offense with respect to narcotic drugs “or marijuana” was both excludable and deportable from the United States with no waiver possible. Accordingly, the government was certain that Lennon would leave because he was not eligible for permanent residence in the United States and that was the only meaningful option he would have in deportation proceedings. In that way, the Nixon administration was convinced that they had put Lennon in an impossible position: he would either leave voluntarily or be deported.
When my father first met the Lennons, John showed my dad his criminal conviction in Britain. The substance he admitted possessing was described as “cannabis resin.”
My father asked John, “Was it marijuana?”
“No,” John replied, “it was much better than marijuana, cannabis resin is hash.” Not only that, but he also stated that the substance had been planted on him by a rogue drug chief at Scotland Yard who had similarly bagged other rock musicians before John’s own arrest went down.
John could not explain why his attorney had advised him to plead guilty to an offense he did not commit, so my father became suspicious that the British criminal statute would bear some investigation and research. Finally, Lennon stated that under the British Uniform Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, the conviction would be removed as a matter of law in another year, five years having passed since his conviction.
He had apparently consulted with other immigration lawyers before my father had the privilege of meeting him, and John told him that he understood that he could never apply for residence in the United States, although actually being able to live here was a dream of his. Lennon especially loved New York City.
Without any assurances that he would succeed in his efforts, my father indicated that there was a “chance” that John could qualify for permanent residence if his case reached a federal court. Dad also explained to Lennon that if he could show that the substance John was convicted of possessing was not marijuana, he might be successful; also, if British law were such that for some reason John had to be convicted although he was innocent of the charge, that might be useful as well, and ultimately even the statutory commutation of his conviction might be something that could be used in his behalf.
All in, the case was aggressively litigated for five and a half years. Dad lost before the Immigration Service, the Immigration Judge, and then before the Board of Immigration Appeals. But all these legal setbacks were essentially delaying actions while my father unlimbered a new weapon—the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). This law had only gone into effect in 1967, and Dad made the first use of it in immigration proceedings, going to court to unearth the formerly confidential INS operations instructions on what was called “deferred action”—the use of prosecutorial discretion in trying deportation cases.
My father wielded FOIA as a weapon several times, litigating to look into INS and other government files to prove that members of the Nixon administration had undertaken a selective prosecution to get John Lennon out of the country and then attempted a cover-up of their actions. Dad succeeded in laying bare a conspiracy that apparently began with a note from Senator Strom Thurmond. Passing on information regarding John’s antiwar activities, he suggested that “many headaches might be avoided if appropriate action be taken in time.” Within days, the machinery started to revoke Lennon’s visa status.
Armed with all this new information, Dad was able to prevail in the Court of Appeals—where Chief Judge Irving Kaufman entered a decision in Lennon’s favor. The amazing thing about John Lennon is that notwithstanding the pressures placed upon him by the Nixon administration he continued to speak out for the things he believed, including ending the war in Vietnam.
More than forty years have passed since my father won the deportation cases of John Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon. Their fight against the United States government has become one of the most high-profile and legally important immigration cases in U.S. history. As an immigration attorney myself, I witness both the legacy and the limits of that groundbreaking decision. John and Yoko became two of our nation’s most famous immigrants. They were selectively prosecuted for political reasons despite a tremendous outpouring of public support, highlighting their exceptional artistic talent and contributions to our culture. Numerous celebrities testified on their behalf before a courtroom packed with media.
Though stonewalled by the government, my father successfully unearthed the arcane workings of the immigration service. The successful application for “deferred action” that my father filed is heralded today as setting the groundwork for President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, wherein the president applied the use of prosecutorial discretion to protect from removal those “Dreamers” who had been brought onto American soil by no act of their own.
The Lennons won their battle, but our government continues to enforce many of the same unfair laws and policies that John and Yoko fought against. First, Congress has failed to pass meaningful legislation designed to keep families together. Second, foreigners are still penalized over petty matters committed abroad that would be deemed unconstitutional in the United States. To curtail talented immigrants or refugees cuts against the hospitality and entrepreneurial spirit that our nation was founded upon. From Alexander Hamilton to Albert Einstein, we have benefited from the sheer genius and skills of those “huddled masses” that have come to our shores.
John and Yoko were lucky—and had a great advocate. Let us remember that they were and continue to be two of the most recognizable artists of all time. Yet the government still tried to deport them. History is indeed repeating itself. The pendulum has swung back again to the place it was forty years ago. At this time, we do not have that courageous, noble young dreamer at our side, speaking out against the government’s abuse. There is a deafening silence in Congress, and the critical changes needed in our immigration laws are no longer being considered.
I recall meeting the former Beatle at his final immigration hearing. I was twelve years old by then, and it was my brother Mark’s ninth birthday when we met the music legend. John was sporting a smile, a new suit, and a fresh green card grasped in his hand after a long, bravely fought legal battle. Our mother brought us to this very important hearing, and it remains a surreal scene etched in my memory: “You can have your father back now,” Lennon quipped as all the cameras were focused on him. The case revolutionized immigration law; developed my father’s international reputation; and introduced us to a long-standing relationship with the Lennons that continues to this day.
Not many kids from Forest Hills almost had John Lennon at their bar mitzvah—John was invited but had to beg off at the last moment because his young son Sean had an earache. In 1980, barely a week before he was murdered by a mentally unbalanced young man, John sent our family a basket of kosher delicacies with a handwritten note offering his best wishes for the new decade. His passing had a deep effect on our family, and when we lost my mother, Ruth, in 1995, Yoko was quick to offer condolences honoring a long-standing bond of trust and friendship.
In return, my family has always admired John and Yoko as a remarkable pair of human beings. We’re not alone in that opinion, of course. The government’s deportation attempt unleashed a storm of public protest. You only have to go online to see the myriad videos and efforts that were made to protect John Lennon’s ability to remain on U.S. soil. Imagine, if Lennon had been deported, we would have been deprived of his New York City experience, memorialized in his art throughout the remaining years of his life.
Our family forged a deep friendship with John and Yoko, and I still enjoy many referrals thanks to that relationship, not to mention having the privilege of representing Yoko myself over the decades.