By KEN THOMAS, Associated Press Writer
MIAMI – The U.S. Supreme Court (news – web sites) blocked the deportation Tuesday of a former Hungarian secret police officer who has been held at a South Florida immigration detention center for more than two years.
Zsolt Kenyeres, 38, a Hungarian citizen, has sought political asylum since he was taken into custody by the Immigration and Naturalization Service in September 2000. Kenyeres has said he fears for his life if he is returned to Hungary.
Justice Anthony Kennedy (news – web sites) issued the unusual postponement of deportation, forcing the government to respond to Kenyeres' claims. Kenyeres, who faces embezzlement charges in Hungary, has been held without bond at the Krome Detention Center in Miami.
Kenyeres went into hiding in the mid-1990s because he feared retribution from government officials he said he had investigated as a member of the Intelligence Agency of Hungary.
A former boss and a close associate were killed in 1995 and Kenyeres said he and his family received death threats. They later fled to the Czech Republic and Holland.
"His superior was killed — was found murdered on the street and he's afraid the same thing would happen to him," said Robert Sheldon, Kenyeres' Pompano Beach-based lawyer, Tuesday.
Kenyeres arrived in South Florida in January 1997 on a tourist visa and stayed on after its expiration, hoping to keep the matter secret and to put it behind him.
"I terribly feared for my life and did not know what to do," Kenyeres told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in a July 2001 interview. "The only thing I knew was that I could not return to Hungary and that I have to stay."
Following his arrest, Immigration Judge Neale Foster ruled in January 2001 that Kenyeres was ineligible to apply for asylum because he was wanted for a "particularly serious crime" in Hungary — 166 counts of embezzlement — before arriving in the United States.
INS prosecutors had argued that Kenyeres tried to drag out the asylum process to avoid criminal prosecution in Hungary. Dan Kane, a U.S. Department of Homeland Security spokesman, said the agency would be reviewing Kennedy's ruling.
