ARCHIVE: JOHN’s IMMIGRATION CASE

Following the impact of "Give Peace a Chance" and "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", both strongly associated with the anti–Vietnam War movement, the Nixon administration, hearing rumours of John's involvement in a concert to be held in San Diego at the same time as the Republican National Convention, tried to have him deported. Nixon believed that John's anti-war activities could cost him his reelection; Republican Senator Strom Thurmond suggested in a February 1972 memo that "deportation would be a strategic counter-measure" against John.The next month the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) began deportation proceedings, arguing that his 1968 misdemeanor conviction for cannabis possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the United States. 

John spent the next three and a half years in and out of deportation hearings until 8 October 1975, when a court of appeals barred the deportation attempt, stating "... the courts will not condone selective deportation based upon secret political grounds." While the legal battle continued, Lennon attended rallies and made television appearances. 

John and Yoko co-hosted The Mike Douglas Show for a week in February 1972, introducing guests such as Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seale to mid-America.In 1972, Bob Dylan wrote a letter to the INS defending John, stating:

John and Yoko add a great voice and drive to the country's so-called art institution. They inspire and transcend and stimulate and by doing so, only help others to see pure light and in doing that, put an end to this dull taste of petty commercialism which is being passed off as Artist Art by the overpowering mass media. Hurray for John and Yoko. Let them stay and live here and breathe. The country's got plenty of room and space. Let John and Yoko stay!

On 23 March 1973, John was ordered to leave the US within 60 days.Ono, meanwhile, was granted permanent residence. In response, Lennon and Ono held a press conference on 1 April 1973 at the New York City Bar Association, where they announced the formation of the state of Nutopia; a place with "no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people".Waving the white flag of Nutopia (two handkerchiefs), they asked for political asylum in the US. 

 

The press conference was filmed, and would later appear in the 2006 documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon. Lennon's Mind Games (1973) included the track "Nutopian International Anthem", which comprised three seconds of silence.Soon after the press conference, Nixon's involvement in a political scandal came to light, and in June the Watergate hearings began in Washington, DC. They led to the president's resignation 14 months later. Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, showed little interest in continuing the battle against Lennon, and the deportation order was overturned in 1975. 

After years of legal and politial battles, John finally receives his Green Card: number A17-597-321. 

The following year, his US immigration status finally resolved, John received his "green card" certifying his permanent residency, and when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated as president in January 1977, Lennon and Ono attended the Inaugural Ball.

 

FBI surveillance and declassified documents

 

After John's death, historian Jon Wiener filed a Freedom of Information Act request for FBI files documenting the Bureau's role in the deportation attempt. The FBI admitted it had 281 pages of files on John, but refused to release most of them on the grounds that they contained national security information. In 1983, Wiener sued the FBI with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It took 14 years of litigation to force the FBI to release the withheld pages. The ACLU, representing Wiener, won a favourable decision in their suit against the FBI in the Ninth Circuit in 1991.The Justice Department appealed the decision to the Supreme Court in April 1992, but the court declined to review the case. In 1997, respecting President Bill Clinton's newly instigated rule that documents should be withheld only if releasing them would involve "foreseeable harm", the Justice Department settled most of the outstanding issues outside court by releasing all but 10 of the contested documents.

 

Wiener published the results of his 14-year campaign in January 2000. Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI Files contained facsimiles of the documents, including "lengthy reports by confidential informants detailing the daily lives of anti-war activists, memos to the White House, transcripts of TV shows on which Lennon appeared, and a proposal that Lennon be arrested by local police on drug charges". The story is told in the documentary The U.S. vs. John Lennon.

 

The final 10 documents in Lennon's FBI file, which reported on his ties with London anti-war activists in 1971 and had been withheld as containing "national security information provided by a foreign government under an explicit promise of confidentiality", were released in December 2006. They contained no indication that the British government had regarded Lennon as a serious threat; one example of the released material was a report that two prominent British leftists had hoped John would finance a left-wing bookshop and reading room.

 

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Attorney Leon Wildes said:

“I had never seen anything like it in 50 years of practice before or after, I was served with papers and they were served with papers at home, and that’s never done in immigration proceedings.

[John] asked me personally, ‘Not everybody can afford lawyers like you. Can we publicize this so everybody eligible can try to get it?’ And that’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since”

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