The Palmer Raids

On November 7, 1919, agents with the Bureau of Investigation (what would later become the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI) fanned out across American cities in pursuit of radicals. They raided the offices of the Union of Russian Workers, which they had been gathering evidence were anarchists.

As a result, the bureau argued the union’s members were deportable under US immigration law. Although they had received several hundred warrants, the agents arrested everyone they found. Thousands of people were taken into custody in a single day, the vast majority without warrants. In some cases, the agents applied for warrants after the arrest via telegram.

Warrant or no warrant, those arrested were held for extended periods of time, often in harsh detention centers and in some cases subjected to torture. Two months later, the Bureau of Investigation repeated the raids again, this time targeting the United States’ two Communist parties. These raids were even bigger with upwards of seven thousand people arrested as part of the nationwide dragnet.

The raids were personally supervised by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, hence why they came to be known as the Palmer Raids. Palmer had claimed the country was on the verge of revolution like the one that had happened in Russia. He had a key ally, a young talented bureaucrat named J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover had previously worked for the Library of Congress and the Alien Enemy Bureau. In 1919, the Bureau of Investigation created an intelligence section called the Radical Division. Hoover was put in charge.

As head of an intelligence division dedicated to political policing, Hoover gathered evidence of radical politics across the country. He looked for a hidden hand behind racial uprisings or labor strikes. He kept indexes of supposed radicals and radical publications. And he looked for a weapon with which to strike at the radical threat.

While the US government had used the Espionage Act to criminalize criticism of World War I and states had begun passing criminal anarchy laws, Hoover lacked a federal criminal statute that could be readily used in peacetime. In 1903, Congress passed an immigration law declaring foreign anarchists were inadmissible to the United States. In 1918, they amended the law to allow the deportation of noncitizen anarchists.

At that time, immigration enforcement was the domain of the Department of Labor. Neither the Bureau of Investigation nor Hoover’s anti-radical intelligence division had any power to enforce immigration laws. Yet Congress had appropriated very little money for deportations, allowing Hoover and Bureau agents to take over and essentially direct deportation proceedings.

In the fall of 1919, Hoover orchestrated deportation proceedings against Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. He then moved on with his mass raids, catching around ten thousand people in dragnet arrests hunting for supposed radicals. In spite of the large number of arrests and detentions, only several hundred people, a fraction of the arrests, were ever deemed eligible for deportation.

As historian Regin Schmidt has argued, the Palmer Raids were not the government’s response to mass hysteria about radicals — they were designed to create such hysteria. The raids, the deportation of Goldman and Berkman alongside other radicals on a ship dubbed the Soviet Arch, along with government press releases were all deliberate acts of propaganda designed to foment a red scare. The second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution was chosen as the date of the first raid.

Hoover was a deeply racist and reactionary man. But in turning to immigration law, Hoover was using it as a means to an end. As Hoover’s extensive career of domestic spying shows, his fears were never limited to the foreign-born. In the Palmer Raids, Hoover turned to immigration law because it was the best federal law available for his Red Scare agenda. And because immigration procedures were civil, not criminal matters, constitutional legal protections were lesser. There was nothing Hoover desired more than being able to purge the country of political undesirables without those outside his bureaucratic fiefdom imposing civil liberties constraints on him.

Harry Bridges

On July 16, 1934, workers across industries went on strike in San Francisco. While general strikes are a fact of political life in many parts of the world, they are exceptionally rare in the United States. The longshoremen, led by the Australian-born labor organizer Harry Bridges, had been trying to organize a union. Struggling for recognition from the bosses, they went on strike. As was often the case, the police murdered two striking workers. The outrage at these killings led to an act of citywide solidarity, a four-day general strike. At the end of it, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) won union recognition up and down the West Coast.

The ILWU was not only one of the country’s most politically bold unions (Bridges was clearly a man of the Left). It also controlled one of the nation’s key industries. Businessmen, private red hunters, and others began waging a campaign that Bridges was a secret member of the Communist Party and must be deported.

These concerns made their way to the top of society. During a 1936 meeting between President Franklin Roosevelt and Hoover, now head of the FBI, Hoover appears to have mentioned Bridges by name when telling Roosevelt about unions Hoover claimed had Communists in control or vying for it. Hoover warned if the Communists controlled the ILWU, the United Mine Workers Union, and the Newspaper Guild, they could effectively paralyze the country.

At this time though, immigration enforcement was still the domain of the Department of Labor. And the secretary of labor was Frances Perkins, a progressive stalwart and part of the backbone of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Nonetheless, after years of the nationwide crusade to expel Bridges from the country, in 1938, Perkins would officially initiate deportation proceedings against Bridges. They would take place under the same anti-anarchist immigration provision used during the Palmer Raids. After formal hearings during the summer of 1939 weighing evidence that Bridges had been associated with the Communist Party, Bridges was deemed non-deportable.

The anti-Bridges forces were far from satiated. They continued to dream up ways to get Bridges, and in 1940, Congress passed the Alien Registration Act. The Alien Registration Act is frequently referred to as the Smith Act. Today it is remembered as the abusive law used to criminalize the speech of members of the Socialist Workers and Communist Parties, an assault on the First Amendment going far beyond immigrants. But it also expanded when an immigrant could be expelled for having the wrong political views, allowing the US government to again begin deportation proceedings against Bridges.

After a lengthy and convoluted legal process, the government would again fail to deport Bridges after the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bridges in 1945. The Supreme Court would again hear a case about Bridges in 1953 and again rule in his favor, finally ending the fifteen-year legal saga.

When the government attempted to deport Bridges under the Smith Act, immigration enforcement had been transferred to the Department of Justice as part of the general securitization of immigration. And Hoover had again amassed political policing powers.

In 1924, then attorney general Harlan Fiske Stone had informed Hoover that there were no laws against being a Communist or radical. He limited the bureau to investigating criminal activities and shut down the General Intelligence Division. Yet in the run up to World War II, concerns about spies and saboteurs led to renewed buildup of domestic intelligence capacity. Perversely, Hoover cited the abuses of the First Red Scare as the need for a professional intelligence led by him. Omitting his role in the repression, he portrayed the civil liberties abuses as the results of entrusting domestic security to unqualified amateurs.

In 1939, Roosevelt reestablished the General Intelligence Division within the FBI. In the early days of the reborn FBI intelligence program, Bridges was clearly one of their main targets. When Bridges discovered listening devices planted on him in 1941, the attorney general was forced to come clean that the FBI was now authorized to carry out wiretaps. Yet the revived General Intelligence Division went well beyond Bridges.

Hoover made the legally dubious claim that Roosevelt had given the revived intelligence division not just the power to police sabotage, subversion, and violations of the Neutrality Act, but broad powers to investigate “subversive activities.” Under this questionable power, Hoover not only initiated domestic security investigations into individual Americans but created a list of tens of thousands of American citizens to be detained without trial in the event of a national emergency. These programs continued well into the 1970s, by which point they were overwhelmingly targeting the Left.

The Los Angeles 8

FBI political policing did not die with Hoover. And in spite of reforms put in place in the 1970s designed to prevent the Hoover-era practices from continuing, the FBI continued spying on Americans’ speech.

As the rationale for the FBI’s domestic surveillance shifted from counter-subversion to counterterrorism, the FBI’s eyes increasingly set on Palestinians and their supporters. In the mid-1980s, FBI special agent Frank H. Knight was actively surveilling Palestinian political, humanitarian, and cultural events in the Los Angeles area. One such event was a fundraiser attended by 1,200 at the Glendale Civic Auditorium. The programming was mostly in Arabic, a language Knight did not understand. Nonetheless, Knight, who was hiding in a sound engineering booth narrating the event into a tape recorder, concluded that if he could understand the words, he wouldn’t like them very much.

Unfortunately for Knight, he had uncovered nothing more than speech. An agent at the Immigration and Naturalization Services informed him of a provision in a McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act that made it a deportable offense to belong to an organization advocating the doctrine of “World Communism.” Knight accused the people he was trailing of being supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist faction within the Palestinian Liberation Organization that advocates the creation of a single socialist state in all of historic Palestine.

In 1987, the FBI orchestrated the arrest of seven Palestinian and one Kenyan immigrants, known as the LA 8. Two of the LA 8 were legal permanent residents. A headline in the Los Angeles Examiner read, “War on Terror Comes to Los Angeles.” FBI director William Webster told Congress that the LA 8 had committed no crimes, and had they been citizens, there would be no basis for government action.

The FBI possibly had help from the Alien Border Control Committee, a secret body that brought together the FBI, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Seeking to turn immigration enforcement into the front lines of counterterrorism, the committee created a secret plan for the mass detention of Middle Eastern immigrants at a camp in Louisiana. Its relationship to the LA 8 case is unclear, but a whistleblower thought it was relevant enough to anonymously mail a copy of their plans to the LA 8’s legal defense, exposing the existence of the Alien Border Committee.

The LA 8 case twisted its way through the courts for decades in a way that makes the Bridges deportation saga seem straightforward by comparison. Although the anti-communism provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act were repealed, the government was able to use new laws against terrorism to keep the case going. The LA 8 deportation effort would begin under Ronald Reagan using a McCarthy-era law about communism; it would end under George W. Bush with the government relying on the Patriot Act. It also became not just a major legal battle about what First Amendment rights immigrants have, but all Americans.

By the Bill Clinton years, the government was arguing that political and humanitarian activities lost their First Amendment protections if the government declared them to be material support for terrorism. The Clinton-era Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act not only made it easier to deport immigrants accused of associating with terrorist groups but made it a crime to provide material support for foreign terrorist organizations.

Prior to this law, it was a crime to support actual terrorism, and those involved in terrorism were barred from immigrating to the United States. The law allowed the secretary of state to create a blacklist of foreign terrorist organizations. Any support for these groups, including for otherwise lawful humanitarian or political activities, became a crime. Activities once believed to be squarely protected by the First Amendment were transformed into serious felonies.

Ultimately, the LA 8 were not deported. But it showed how counterterrorism was replacing anti-communism as the government’s weapon of choice against the First Amendment.

Political Policing

When looking at the long history of using abusive immigration enforcement as a pretext for political policing, one cannot ignore the role of xenophobia. Nativism, like racial supremacy, often goes hand in hand with the “counter-subversive” project. And the underlying belief that unwelcome ideas, be they support for workers’ rights or Palestinian liberation, can only be the products of foreign interlopers corrupting our native politics is nakedly xenophobic. But those who wish to purge our country of “undesirable” politics seldom limit their sights to the foreign born. They may turn to immigration law out of prejudice or expediency, but left unchecked, they will ultimately cannibalize the First Amendment.

The Trump administration has not only announced more deportations of political activists are coming. It has openly sought to pervert civil rights law to silence Palestinian solidarity activism on college campuses. And it has announced it is looking into whether Columbia violated US terrorism laws, laws that apply to citizens and noncitizens alike. If the Trump administration is able to transform any criticism of Israel or support for Palestinian liberation into legally actionable forms of terrorism, the effect will be felt well outside the immigration context.

Mahmoud Khalil is a political prisoner. He deserves our support and solidarity. But it is not merely one man’s freedom at stake. The entire future of the First Amendment hangs in the balance right now.