A years-long deportation nightmare from a past generation as John Yereb, Belleville, Illinois radical miner and naturalized citizen is jailed, deported, clandestinely returned, jailed again, and finally freed after a campaign by his unions comrades.

‘Innocent American Citizen Released After Three Years Government Hounding’ by Martin A. Dillmon from Truth (Duluth). Vol. 5 No. 43. October 25, 1922.

Belleville, Ill. “I am free. Wire me money–John.” The foregoing telegram from her husband brought joy to the little home in this city of Mrs. Lura Yereb, where for many weary months there has been distress, despair and anxiety while the husband, John Yereb, a coal miner, was suffering under themailed fist of the department of Justice at Washington.

Yereb was first deported from this country and then thrown into jail after he had made his way back. The department of labor came limping into the case after a lapse of more than two years, with a decision that Yereb, who was deported last April as “an undesirable alien,” is in fact an American citizen, and it has wired to the immigration authorities at Portland, Me., to release Yereb from jail, where he had been held since July 30. The decision to free Yereb is an inferential admission of guilt on the part of federal authorities who under the Wilson administration, and again under the Harding regime, compelled him to leave the United States.

More than two years ago the Yereb home was raided by government agents and he was arrested after a membership card in the I.W.W. and some of the literature of that organization is alleged to have been found. Yereb’s statement was that when he was in the west it was necessary to join the I.W.W. in order to get employment; that his membership had long since lapsed and he had taken no part in the organization’s propaganda. His statement was cast aside as the long arm of the federal government reached into the little Belleville home, put him on board a train for New York and there hustled him on the S.S. Wuertemburg. bound for Germany.

Following his arrest Yereb was taken to St. Louis and kept in jail for about two weeks, and after a hearing, he was placed under bond and allowed to return home. Last April, nearly two years afterwards, and when Yereb had concluded that charges against him had been dropped, his bondsmen were instructed to surrender him. When, at the direction of his attorney, he presented himself at St. Louis, he was hurried to a train and taken to Ellis Island, from where he was deported.

Baby Helen Marie was born shortly after her father’s deportation. Mrs. Yereb’s eagerness to apprise her husband of the event was so great that friends paid for a cablegram to him. “A stone fell from my heart” he wrote back,” “because I feared our baby would not live.”

After the birth of the little one, the deportation order of the United States government failed to keep the father out. He contrived to obtain a passport, but it took his last dollar. He shipped as a coal passer on a German steamer, went to Tampico and there shipped as a mess-man on S.S. Dean Emery after the list of the ship’s crew had been vised by the American consul. When he landed at Portland, Me., he was immediately seized by immigration inspectors, who recommended to the bureau at Washington that he again be deported. Action was deferred. Now, after more than two years of hounding, persecuting, jailing and deporting an innocent American citizen who violated no law, is free to hurry to his wife and look upon his baby girl for the first time.

The decision of the federal authorities finds that the claim set up by Yereb’s attorneys was valid that Yereb had been an American citizen since he was 17 years old, by reason of the naturalization of his step-father, Friedrich Yedloutching, now a North Dakota farmer. The order for Yereb’s release, evidently, is the sole restitution for the injustice done him when he was unlawfully torn from his home and family and driven from American shores.

When the telegram from her husband came, Mrs. Yereb, who was penniless, went to the union miners and they furnished the money for his return.

It was largely through the efforts of the miners that Yereb has been freed. At their solicitation hundreds of telegrams were sent to Washington in his behalf.

Truth emerged from the The Duluth Labor Leader, a weekly English language publication of the Scandinavian local of the Socialist Party in Duluth, Minnesota and began on May Day, 1917 as a Left Wing alternative to the Duluth Labor World. The paper was aligned to both the SP and the IWW leading to the paper being closed down in the first big anti-IWW raids in September, 1917. The paper was reborn as Truth, with the Duluth Scandinavian Socialists joining the Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. Shortly after the editor, Jack Carney, was arrested and convicted of espionage in 1920. Truth continued to publish with a new editor JO Bentall until 1923 as an unofficial paper of the CP.

PDF of full issue: https://www.mnhs.org/newspapers/lccn/sn89081142/1922-10-27/ed-1/seq-1