In 1954, Abner Green, executive secretary of the American Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB), was sentenced by a New York State grand jury to serve six months in a federal prison.

His crime? Green refused to turn over financial records, including lists of contributors to both the ACPFB, an immigrant rights organization serving foreign-born people around the country, and the Civil Rights Congress (CRC), an advocacy group for racial justice where he served on the board of directors. The grand jury also imposed an extra six-month sentence on Green because he declined to turn over records for the ACFPB’s bail fund.

The investigation of the ACPFB was facilitated by the Internal Security Act of 1950. Part of the anti-communist mobilization known as McCarthyism, the bill created a Subversive Activities Control Board, the organization that initially subpoenaed the organizational records from Green. Organizations like the ACPFB were investigated by the board and, if confirmed to be “Communist fronts,” organizations that weren’t officially Communist but were backed by the party, had to register with the federal government, limiting their political activities. Additionally, the law made it a felony to support what it described as “totalitarian dictatorship” and authorized the president to arrest and detain those suspected of espionage or subversion.

Deployed exclusively against leftist organizations, the Internal Security Act eroded civil liberties and threatened any advocacy groups that could be tarred as a Communist front. As a result, many longtime supporters of the ACPFB withdrew their annual contributions, citing fear of persecution.

Also called the McCarran Act after its chief sponsor, anti-communist senator Patrick McCarran, the bill authorized the president to detain those deemed a threat to national security in camps built specifically to hold dissidents. The text of the act invoked the dangers posed by a “Communist movement which . . . is a world-wide revolutionary movement whose purpose it is, by treachery, deceit, infiltration into other groups (governmental and otherwise), espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and any other means deemed necessary, to establish a Communist totalitarian dictatorship in the countries throughout the world.”

With its leader jailed and its funding stream reduced, the ACPFB struggled. It survived briefly only because of the brave work of organizers, many themselves foreign born. The CRC disbanded in 1956. Many in leadership in these groups did at some point affiliate with the Communist Party. But the notion that their organizations were mere “fronts” for Moscow is laughable: these were organizations focused on ending racial violence and what the ACPFB referred to as the “deportation terror” in the United States.

These Internal Security Act allegations ring familiar in the current climate of federal repression against dissent. Contemporary efforts against the popular movement in solidarity with Palestinians bear a striking resemblance to McCarthyism in both tactics and ideology.

Like McCarthyism, the current wave of repression assumes the existence of a vast anti-American international conspiracy. Ill-defined by those supposedly determined to eradicate it, this conspiracy is sometimes associated with Antifa (whatever that is, exactly) and other times with foreign terrorism or a shadowy and mostly imaginary Hamas support network. As was the case during the McCarthyist Red Scare, contemporary policy focuses exclusively on purported threats from leftist and Muslim groups, ignoring abundant evidence of homegrown, white-nationalist terrorist activities.

In November 2024, the House of Representatives passed HR 9495, the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act. Known to opponents as the “Nonprofit Killer” bill, this law provides for the termination of tax-exempt or 501(c)(3) status for any organization deemed by the Internal Revenue Service of providing “material support” to “terrorism.” If it becomes law, this bill will allow the president to decide which groups to target without even the shred of procedure afforded by the Subversive Activities Control Board.

Spencer Ackerman explains that the “material support” clause undergirding policies like the Nonprofit Killer bill is part of a constellation of repression that has legitimized Islamophobia and xenophobia in the name of national security since 2001. Like the shadowy “Communist front” designation so crucial to McCarthyist demonology, the notion of material support is vague enough that it has been used against a wide range of individuals and organizations, from community organizers to charities supporting orphans.

The Nonprofit Killer bill combines repression against advocacy organizations with an increase in protection for US citizens taken hostage abroad. This combination likely confused or cowed many elected officials eager to demonstrate their support for Israel. On the initial vote, fifty-two Democrats voted for the bill. After advocacy efforts to educate Democratic representatives about all its aspects — organized, in part, by groups likely to be the bill’s targets — only fifteen Democrats ultimately supported it when the House passed it later that month.

By the time sanctions against the ACPFB were lifted in 1965, Abner Green had died of cancer. The ACPFB’s status as a registered “Communist front” organization, commuted in 1965, prevented the group from participating in the lobbying that led to the landmark immigration act of that same year. We will never know how their efforts might have altered that legislation.

Meanwhile, the emergency deportation protocols put in place by the Internal Security Act in 1950 are still on the books, ready to be deployed by the new administration in its promised assault on communities of foreign-born people.

The Palestine solidarity movement is the new Communist Party — the shadowy and ubiquitous internal enemy that justifies brutal federal repression. The incoming administration will continue to equate international solidarity and human rights advocacy with terrorism, justifying the bipartisan repression levied against progressive and Muslim advocacy groups since 9/11.

We will need many more Abner Greens, many more courageous organizers exhibiting grace under gathering pressure.