Mykola Wasylyk, 79, a resident of Ellenville, NY, has been ordered deported from the United States because he served as an armed guard at the Trawniki and Budzyn forced labor camps in Poland from April 1943 to November 1943. Wasylyk was found deportable by a federal immigration court in Manhattan after it found that he as an armed guard at the two SS slave-labor camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Wasylyk has requested that he be deported to Ukraine.

Wasylyk had his US citizenship stripped last year by a federal court in Syracuse, NY. Judge Mirlande Tadal explained in his deportation ruling that the purpose of the Trawniki and Budzyn camps "was to warehouse, incarcerate, exploit and kill Jewish persons" because of their Jewish heritage. The judge added that prisoners in the two camps "were subjected to inhumane treatment, including physical abuse and death."

Eli Rosenbaum, Director of the Justice Department's Office of Special Investigations (OSI), which argued the government's case, noted that "Armed guards like Wasylyk ensured that Jews and other prisoners could not escape the starvation, disease, overwork, and murder to which they were subjected on a daily basis in the Nazi camps."

Since 1979, the OSI's efforts have led to 71 Nazi persecutors being stripped of their US citizenship and 57 of them being deported. Another 165 suspected Nazi persecutors have been prevented from entering the US under the OSI's "Watch List" border control program.