Old Playbook, New Deportations

One executive order issued by Trump expands the use of “expedited removal,” which denies court hearings in deportation cases unless a person can prove they’ve been here for more than two years. Another revives the Alien Registration Act of 1940–44, but takes it much further by making it a felony for any noncitizen to fail to register. Undocumented people would not be able to register without being immediately held for deportation, but failing to register would also be a crime. According to the American Immigration Council, “By invoking the registration provision, the Trump administration is threatening to turn all immigrants into criminals by setting them up for the ‘crime’ of failing to register.”

In the immigration raids that followed the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act, agents rounded up people at work, on the street, and seemingly everywhere. In 1954, over a million people were picked up in the notorious “Operation Wetback.” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who headed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in the last Trump administration, announced at his recent appointment that mass immigration raids will begin anew. Raid sites will now include schools, churches, and hospitals, while earlier priorities directing enforcement to concentrate on “criminals” rather than families have been ended.

The portrayal of immigrants as threats to social order, a constant refrain in today’s political discourse, echoes the rhetoric of the Cold War. The MWA barred entry of people guilty of “moral turpitude,” which included homosexuality and even drinking too much. A political ban (only overturned in 1990) prevented accused communists from entering the United States and was applied with special ferocity to poets — from South African poet Dennis Brutus to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude has been adapted into a Netflix hit, was banned from the United States as a communist after he received the Nobel Prize.

Noncitizen communists, anarchists, and other accused “subversives” in the United States became deportable. That included people guilty of teaching, writing, or publishing in support of “subversive” ideas. In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld the deportation of Robert Galvan, who’d been brought as a seven-year-old from Mexico in 1918, married a US citizen, had four children, and worked at the Van Camp Seafood plant in San Diego. During World War II, when the United States was an ally of the Soviet Union, he belonged to the Communist Party for two years, then a legal political party. He was nevertheless deported under the MWA’s ban.

Part of that ban has never ended — being a Communist Party member is still grounds for denying a citizenship application. Repeating this history and using similar language, Trump’s executive orders allow a wide range of organizations to be declared “foreign terrorist organizations,” opening the door to prosecution of any organization with radical politics and relationships with an organization outside the United States.

Much of McCarran’s Internal Security Act was eventually declared unconstitutional or repealed, but this took years in some cases. Meanwhile, it was enforced with a vengeance. It required “Communist organizations” to register, set up the Subversive Activities Control Board, and authorized the construction of concentration camps like those used against the Japanese during World War II. The FBI made lists of people to be detained in them. Even picketing a federal courthouse became a felony. When Trump called out federal troops to prevent Portland protesters from demonstrating in front of the federal building there, during his first administration, he leaned on the same prohibition.

Using the national security pretext, the United States barred the entry of over 100,000 people in 1950. The Trump orders focus similarly on finding rationales for denying entry. In its last year, the Biden administration had already made policy changes that stopped people from simply arriving at the border, crossing it, and asking for asylum. In his first week, Trump entirely closed off the ability of people to apply from the Mexican side, shut down the app that set up appointments for applicants, and stopped processing asylum applications. Under another order, from now on, anyone applying for any type of visa from anywhere must support US “ideological values,” again setting the basis for political exclusion.

Quotas, Bans, and Political Control

The McCarran Report’s stated purpose was to “preserve the sociological and cultural balance of the United States.” Its method, as established by the MWA, was immigration quotas.

During World War II, the United States had to drop its blanket prohibition on Asian immigration, which was the heritage of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 (nicknamed the Japanese Exclusion Act). Quotas were then set in 1952, country by country, to accomplish much the same end. China, India, and each Asian country had a quota of one hundred people annually. Germany, which had just been defeated in the war, had a quota of 25,814, and Great Britain had the biggest at 65,361. Quotas for European countries were so large that they were rarely filled.

The quotas have their modern echo in Trump’s executive orders. In his first administration, he restricted entry of people from seven Islamic countries in the “Muslim ban.” Huge crowds of protesters shut down airports across the country to free migrants caught by the government’s action. The Supreme Court, however, upheld the government’s ability to implement a modified ban. A new Trump executive order again enables the president to bar entry to people from specific countries.

The virtual ban-by-quota of people from China was part of the anti-Chinese hysteria fomented after the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949. Again political repression was linked to immigration enforcement. As mass deportations spread against Mexicans in the Southwest, agents of the Immigration and Naturalization Service fanned out through Chinatowns during the 1950s. They accused families of falsifying the documents of “paper sons” and “paper daughters” many years earlier and then revoked their residence visas.

Maurice Chuck, a progressive activist in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was sent to federal prison. Politically motivated deportation proceedings targeted other left-wing activists, from Harry Bridges to Ernesto Mangaoang to Claudia Jones and many others. Some won their appeals at the Supreme Court, while others were expelled from the country. Today when the Trump administration threatens to classify organizations as “foreign terrorists,” to invoke the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and to revoke the tax-exempt status of nonprofit solidarity groups, its actions are direct descendants of this earlier Cold War repression.

The McCarran-Walter Act and the Internal Security Act were two legal battering rams used against immigrant communities and progressive organizations, the alliance of which had helped organize unions in the 1930s and ’40s and defended communities under attack. The 1981 movie Zoot Suit dramatizes the work of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, founded by the Communist Party, in fighting the police frame-up of Mexican youth in Los Angeles in the Sleepy Lagoon case. Left-wing Mexican organizations — the Congreso del Pueblo de Habla Española and the Asociación Nacional México-Americano — fought earlier deportation waves as well. Min Qing, also known as the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, spread radical ideas, promoted progressive community politics, and defended immigrant families. All were attacked by the anti-communist juggernaut.

The history of the 1950s is also a history of deportation cases fiercely fought. The alliances people were able to preserve became seeds of the civil rights movement that grew as the McCarthyite era sputtered to a close. The American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born helped found the Civil Rights Congress, which protested lynching in the South, and sent a petition calling it out to the United Nations titled “We Charge Genocide.” Today’s Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, founded by members of the state legislature’s Black Caucus to oppose George W. Bush’s immigration raids, walks in these footsteps.

It is essential for today’s social movements to understand this Cold War history. We’ve been here before, but the lesson isn’t just about historical repetition. Trump’s executive orders, and the hysteria they feed beyond the MAGA base, share the same purpose as McCarran’s laws: to frighten communities, people of faith, and unions into paralysis, and to break the alliances between immigrants and progressive movements. But MAGA is not new. Just as a growing civil rights movement ended the Cold War assault, today’s social movements — including immigrants, unions, churches, and legal activists — armed with historical knowledge, can defeat this one too.