Biography
Frank Borich was a Croatian-born coal miner and Communist labor leader who served as general secretary of the National Miners Union, the militant union that led the 43,000-strong coal strike across Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia in 1931. He immigrated to the United States around 1913 as a teenager; sources place his age on arrival at 13 to 15, so he was probably born about 1898 to 1900. From the early 1930s the federal government repeatedly sought to deport him for his labor activity. On March 31, 1932 immigration officers raided the National Miners Union office in Pittsburgh and held him for deportation to Yugoslavia; he was released on a heavy cash bond. He was detained again in July 1949, held for about a month at Ellis Island in the autumn of 1950, re-arrested soon afterward when the government refused to recognize bail posted through the Civil Rights Congress, and from 1952 into early 1953 confined at Ellis Island for roughly four months while no country would admit him after Yugoslavia declined. He was finally released under indefinite, so-called lifetime supervisory parole that at first required weekly and later monthly reporting to Ellis Island and interfered with his ability to hold steady work. Borich was a named appellant in Nukk, Borich, Siminoff v. Shaughnessy, the Supreme Court challenge to the supervisory-parole provisions of the immigration law. A 1933 profile reported that he had already been arrested more than a score of times for strike and unemployment organizing, including an arrest in Chicago on robbery, weapons and sedition allegations. His exact birth and death dates have not been documented.
