Round Trip to Helsinki

On his way home at quitting time, Finnish-born William Heikkila, 52. found two men waiting for him outside the offices of the San Francisco engineering firm where he worked as a draftsman. One flashed a badge. "Call my wife," Heikkila yelled to a fellow worker. "Tell her Immigration has picked me up."

For ten frustrating years, District Director Bruce Barber, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service's chief in San Francisco, had been waiting for a chance to deport sometime Communist Heikkila to Finland. Under the law, he seemed to be clearly deportable. His Finnish parents had brought him to the U.S. when he was three months old, but he had never become a U.S. citizen. And by his own admission, he was an active Communist Party member in 1929-39.

Promising Oversight. Heikkila fought off deportation with a ten-year series of habeas corpus writs, court restraining orders and appeals, including one appeal to the Supreme Court. But in handling Heikkila's latest delaying action in San Francisco's Federal District Court, his lawyer neglected to get a restraining order to curb Immigration's Barber. That oversight caught Barber's watchful eye. Letting his heaped-up frustrations overpower his judgment, he sent Immigration Service agents to grab Heikkila and haul him away.

Barber's men drove their prisoner straight to the San Francisco airport. A U.S. Border Patrol plane sped him to Vancouver, where cooperative Canadian authorities locked him in jail to await a Europe-bound plane. Three days after his arrest, Heikkila landed at chilly Helsinki with $11.50 in cash, no luggage, no topcoat, found that he had suddenly become internationally famous.

Stalling Nogoodniks. San Francisco's Federal District Judge Edward Murphy thundered that Barber's treatment of Heikkila smacked of "the Gestapo, the thumbscrew and the rack." Bowing to Murphy's contempt-of-court threat and shocked public opinion, the Justice Department ordered Heikkila brought back to the U.S. By week's end, smiling happily, he was home in San Francisco again, reunited with his U.S.-born wife Phyllis. Scheduled for this week in Judge Murphy's court is a hearing to decide what happens next.

In Washington, Immigration Commissioner Joseph M. Swing insisted that the service has to use force sometimes to get rid of "nogoodniks." Most of the 7,000 aliens the U.S. deports each year are allowed time to pack up and say their farewells, said Swing, but "there is about 3% of these nogoodniks" who keep on stalling in the courts. Leathery West Pointer Swing (classmate: Dwight Eisenhower) vowed to deport Staller Heikkila "if it takes from now until I get kicked out."

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