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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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came to him from the Department of the Justice and the FBI, that the Immigration Service should be taken out of the Department of Labor at once. I agreed. I had been telling him right along that it should be.

What's more, I had been very much alarmed because of the fact that we were running into very complicated political situations in some of the illegal entrants which we picked up, or heard about and tried to pick up. I think I've gone into that already. It ran to high political policy. Here's a man of good personal reputation who wouldn't ordinarily be excludable, but we have reason to believe he may be a Nazi, a spy, but no proof of it. That was something which the Immigration Service was not equipped to handle. Nor did we have enough information of the kind of secret underground information, nor should we get it - I didn't think it belonged with the Immigration Service, to deal with the problem.

I had recommended before that it be transferred and I recommended it then. Apparently, Francis Biddle, who was then Solicitor General, learned something very disturbing about entrances or attempted entrances into the USA by Nazi agents. I don't know exactly what he learned, but when he told it to the President, it was alarming to the President, as it hadn't been when I told him only the very small cases that I knew about. He told him that he thought the Immigration Service ought to be transferred to the Department of Justice, because certainly





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