Biography
Ervin Muhlman was a German seaman and former salesman, twenty-seven, whose letter from a Yuma jail was published in the July 20, 1936 Western Worker. He said immigration officers initially mistook him for another German man, then detained him after discovering that he lacked a United States visa. He appealed to the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born to stop deportation to Nazi Germany, fearing imprisonment for twice deserting German ships and exclusion from work as a nonmember of the Nazi Party. He expressly said he was neither Jewish nor Communist. His account of one month already jailed is an approximate elapsed interval, not a completed term; a preference for five years in America rather than return to Germany is not a sentence. No precise arrest or release day or completed deportation is established. Source: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/westernworker/1936/v5n58-w319-jul-20-1936.pdf#page=6
Under the spelling Ervin Muhlmann, the article identifies the same twenty-seven-year-old anti-Nazi refugee and reports his transfer from Yuma imprisonment to the deportation station at Galveston, Texas. It describes two months in Yuma, while his letter published in the later July 20 Western Worker described one month already held; these are source-bound elapsed estimates and publication sequence does not establish a return to Yuma. The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born sought asylum to prevent threatened deportation. No completed removal, exact transfer day or complete detention total is established.