DEPORTATION CHARGES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23858, 12 July 1939, Page 11

DEPORTATION CHARGES

TRIAL OF HARRY BRIDGES GREAT INTEREST AROUSED SAN FRANCISCO, July 11. (Received July 12, at 0.15 a.m.) The Harry Bridges case is front page news throughout the United States. The defence counsel. Miss Carol King, alleged it was a case of conspiracy against Bridges, who was “a symbol of labour strength.” She added that testimony had been falsely manufactured outside the Department of Labour by those who are trying to break the Labour movement.

On April 21 it was announced that Miss Frances Perkins, Secretary of Labour, had notified Mr James I. Houghteling, Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalisation, to proceed promptly in the case of Harry R. Bridges, West Coast longshoremen’s leader, and to hold hearings as soon as possible on charges that he was deportable because he believed in or was a member of an organisation which advocated the overthrow of the Government by violence. Instructions were sent to the immigration officials at San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle to bring together all the evidence they have in order to hold hearings in the case of the Australian-born representative of the C. 1.0. Miss Perkins said at a press conference that she acted as soon as the Supreme Court had handed down its decision in the case of Joseph G. Strecker, Austrian-born Hot Springs (Arkansas) restaurant owner. The court held that past membership in the Communist Party was not sufficient cause for deporting an alien. While the secretary said that she did not know what the exact effect of the Strecker decision would be. she believed that, in order to deport Mr Bridges, it would have to be proved that he was a member of an organisation, alleged to be the Communist Party, at the time the deportation warrant was issued in March, 1938, and that the Communist Party advocated overthrow of the Government by force or violence.

According to her, there was no evidence in the Department of Labour’s files which showed that Mr Bridges advocated overthrow of the Government “ I y force or violence.” He has denied that he is or was a member of the Communist Party. Eleven other cases alleging membership in the Communist Party as a deportable offence, and which have been delayed pending the outcome of the Strecker case are to be reopened, under Miss Perkins’s order, as “active” cases similar to that of the West Coast union leader. When the warrant of arrest was issued by the immigration authorities for Mr Bridges last year it was tantamount to an order on him to show cause why he should not be deported. The case was “ suspended ” and hearings were delayed when the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans held that an alien who was acknowledged to have been a member of the Communist Party was not, on that ground, deportable under the immigration laws.