Biography
Ernesto Mangaoang was a business agent and leader of ILWU Local 37, the Seattle-based Filipino cannery workers' union. Arrested by federal immigration authorities in the late 1940s and held under the McCarran Act, he faced years of legal battles over the government's effort to deport him as an alien. His fight produced the landmark case Mangaoang v. Boyd and the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision International Longshoremen's & Warehousemen's Union v. Boyd, which held that Filipinos who had come to the United States as U.S. nationals before Philippine independence could not be deported as aliens — clarifying the immigration status of some 70,000 Filipino Americans.
