The US Department of Homeland Security's Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced the arrest of Johann Leprich, an accused World War II Nazi concentration camp guard. Leprich was arrested in Clinton Township, Michigan.  Leprich is the latest in a long string of cases of Nazis stripped of their citizenship and deported. Since 1979, 71 Nazi persecutors have been stripped of U.S. citizenship and 57 have been removed from the United States.

Leprich immigrated to the US in 1952 and naturalized in 1958.  Efforts to deport Leprich began in the 1980s. In 1987, a US District Court revoked his citizenship finding that he had worked as a SS Death's Head guard at Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria from 1943 to 1944. The court found that Mauthausen inmates were used as slave laborers in a quarry at the camp and many inmates were starved, tortured, beaten and murdered by methods such as gassing, hanging, eloctrocution, burning, starving and shooting.

Leprich's lawyers claimed he left the US after the decision. In 1997, reports surfaced that Leprich had been living in Canada.  BICE authorities later established that Leprich had turned up again in Michigan.

Leprich is being deported on grounds of participating in Nazi atrocities as well as for not reporting his address to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services.

“People who took part in these horrific crimes against humanity should know that we will never stop looking for them.  There is no statute of limitations on evil,” stated BICE's Acting Assistant Secretary Michael J. Garcia, “our agents remain committed to ridding our communities of criminals who have no right to remain in this country.”

“This arrest makes clear that those who participated in the atrocities of the Holocaust will not escape the determined reach of U.S. law enforcement, regardless of how much time has passed,” said Attorney General Ashcroft. “Nazi collaborators will not find a safe haven in the United States.”