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THE DARK, MCCARTHYIST HISTORY OF DEPORTING ACTIVISTS  
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Michelle Chen
March 21, 2025
The Progressive
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_ Donald Trump is using decades-old laws to expel critics and
opponents. _

Newspaper clippings taken from the Los Angeles Committee for the
Protection of Foreign Born archives at the Southern California
Library.,

 

When immigration agents accosted
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Mahmoud Khalil and his wife in the lobby of their apartment building
in New York City in early March, the Palestinian solidarity activist,
former Columbia University graduate student, and expecting father
became the symbolic target
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of the Trump Administration’s crusade to expel noncitizen activists
who have participated in nationwide campus protests against Israel’s
genocide in Gaza. Yet Khalil’s detention in Louisiana
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and pending deportation reflect a history of politicized immigration
enforcement that extends far beyond the political maelstrom around
Palestine.

In some ways, Khalil’s case seems exceptional: The removal of legal
permanent residents is relatively rare, especially as Khalil has not
been convicted
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of any crime. His main offense, according to
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Homeland Security, is engaging in “activities aligned to
Hamas”—the administration’s shorthand for peaceful pro-Palestine
protests. Although he has been spared deportation while his case is
pending
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in immigration court, his detention—coupled with Donald Trump’s
threat to slash
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federal funding for any school or university that allows “illegal
protests”—reveals that this administration is focused on targeting
anyone deemed politically undesirable, even if they are a legal
permanent resident.

Yet Khalil’s case is not so unique. First, he is one of several
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academics who have been
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threatened with deportation
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in recent months in the backlash to the pro-Palestine protests. Days
after his arrest, the Trump Administration revoked the visa of another
Columbia graduate student
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who participated in last year’s protests. Khalil’s case also folds
into a long history of the U.S. government wielding political
deportation as a tool of repression. Secretary of State Marco Rubio
claims he is deportable under an arcane provision of the Immigration
and Nationality Act of 1952
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as the McCarran-Walter Act, a product
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of Cold War anticommunist hysteria, which states that a noncitizen can
be deported if the Secretary of State believes their “presence or
activities in the United States . . . would have potentially serious
adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” In
publicly demonizing
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human rights activists like Khalil as violent extremists, the White
House draws on the ideological mythmaking of the 1950s Red Scare.

Seventy-five years before Khalil was shunted into a detention center
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Louisiana, Black Trinidadian-born Communist Party leader Claudia Jones
looked out over New York harbor from the prison at Ellis Island, where
she was imprisoned in 1950, awaiting deportation. Jones, whose blend
of Marxist feminism and militant racial justice activism had made her
a target [[link removed]] of
the federal government for years, wrote a letter
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1950 contemplating her experience as a radical en route to exile,
observing that the Statue of Liberty “literally stands with her back
to Ellis Island.” 

Jones mused that America’s global image as a beacon of freedom and
refuge for immigrants was betrayed by the way the country treated
immigrant activists like her. She, like many other political
activists, had been denied bail under the 1950 Internal Security Act
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which gave the President “emergency” powers to use preventive
detention against someone suspected of espionage or sabotage. For
Jones and her fellow detainees, including trade unionists and civil
rights activists, deportation—which is a matter of civil, not
criminal, law—had become a weapon of persecution that felt utterly
disconnected from the United States’s reputation as the world’s
preeminent democracy.

“The ridiculous part of it,” Jones wrote, “is that the American
people are supposedly asked to believe that we are ‘awaiting
deportation hearings’—a ‘normal procedure.’ ” She continued,
“The truth, of course, is that this is a clear violation of the
American Constitution [and] the Bill of Rights, both of which
guarantee the right of bail and the right of habeas corpus.”

Around the same time, Harry Carlisle, a British-born writer and
founding member of the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of
Foreign Born, was penning his own observations from the Terminal
Island detention facility near Los Angeles, an immigration prison off
the coast of California. Carlisle was being held with three other
noncitizen leftists who alongside him became known as the Terminal
Island Four
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Korean-born architect David Hyun, Polish-born communist educator Frank
Carlson, and British dance instructor Miriam Stevenson. Comparing the
the unilateral and undemocratic authority with which the state had
detained him to the allegations against Carlisle and his fellow
immigrants, he wrote in an open letter to then Attorney General Howard
McGrath: 

_“Your department terms us ‘undesirable.’ Yet all four of us
have been residents of the United States or its territories for
decades, some of us since early childhood, and we have no criminal
records. . . . Yes, we are part of the millions of foreign-born
non-citizens, whom you now threaten with jail and deportation in order
to coerce them into compliance with beliefs and policies leading to
war and fascism.”_

While it was framed
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as an immigration reform law, McCarran-Walter actually built on a
series of national security policies clamping down on leftwing
political activity in the preceding years. There was the 1940 Alien
Registration Act
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required immigrants to register with federal authorities and
criminalized any movement or organization deemed to be advocating the
“overthrow” of the government. A decade later came the Internal
Security Act of 1950
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which established a Subversive Activities Control Board to surveil and
suppress leftist organizations and gave the President emergency powers
to detain those suspected of espionage or sabotage.

McCarran-Walter also maintained draconian immigration restrictions
that had sharply limited migration
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from Eastern and Southern Europe, while imposing political strictures
targeting the left. In turn, foreign-born Americans, even naturalized
citizens, who had been involved with labor and political activism
since the Popular Front mobilizations of the 1930s, became more
vulnerable to being investigated, detained, and removed from the
country on political grounds. Some immigrants were surveilled
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put into deportation proceedings
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“subversive activity” that dated back decades. 

According to a survey [[link removed]] by the
National Lawyers Guild published in 1955 of more than 200 people
arrested for deportation on political grounds between 1944 and 1952,
nearly all had resided in the United States for at least twenty-one
years; two out of three had lived in the United States for more than
thirty-one years. A large majority were also more than sixty-five
years old. Nearly half hailed from Eastern Europe or the Balkans.
Nearly half had applied for citizenship at least once, and a similar
portion were parents of children who were U.S. citizens. About one in
ten had been officers of trade unions, underscoring how being a
visible labor activist could expose one to political persecution via
immigration enforcement. 

James Matles
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the Romanian-born director of organization for the leftwing United
Electrical Workers Union (UE), faced denaturalization based on
allegations that he had been a communist prior to becoming a citizen.
A pamphlet issued by UE described
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Matles as a victim of both the state and the corporations he had
challenged as an organizer, like Westinghouse and General Electric,
noting that the Justice Department had previously attempted to indict
him under the anti-communist provisions of the conservative
Taft-Hartley
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labor law. “If the corporations succeed in taking away his
citizenship because of his effectiveness as a labor leader,” the
pamphlet read, “Matles and his American-born wife and child won’t
be the only ones hurt in the process . . . . Foreign-born workers,
whether non-citizens, naturalized, or first-generation, would see this
as a threat to their own [status] if they stand up to rate-cuts, speed
up, and seniority violations. It would disorganize electrical and
machine workers.” (Matles ultimately took his fight
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citizenship to the Supreme Court, which threw out the case in 1958.) 

The zeal for political deportation faded largely by the early 1960s.
The McCarthyite climate of repression had dissipated
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due to political backlash and courts invalidating some of the most
draconian anti-communist restrictions. But the intersection of
political persecution and immigration enforcement has resurfaced in
more subtle ways in recent years. 

In 2018, Ravi Ragbir, a Trinidadian-born immigrant rights advocate who
had been a prominent deportation defense advocate with the New
Sanctuary Project in New York City, was abruptly detained
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by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on a long-pending
deportation order. He claimed in court
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that ICE was punishing him for his activism, violating his First
Amendment rights.  Ragbir was later pardoned by the
Biden Administration. 

Another chilling precursor
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to Khalil’s experience was the case of the 1987 Los Angeles Eight
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in which a group of young activists in California—seven Palestinians
and one Kenyan—were charged
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with being members of the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the
Liberation of Palestine. Years later, with the passage of the
post-9/11 USA PATRIOT Act, the government doubled down
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additionally charging Los Angeles Eight members Khader Hamide and
Michel Shehadeh, both green card holders, with giving “material
support” to a terrorist organization. The case was finally dismissed
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later, after the government failed to present evidence of their
membership in the named organization. By then, the activists had
settled into fairly ordinary lives as naturalized citizens and
permanent residents of the United States.

Hopefully, Khalil and his young family will not have to wait another
twenty years for justice. But their allies, in rallying to demand his
release, are already writing the next chapter in an old story of
political deportation and resistance. 

In 1953, Abner Green, the leader of the American Committee for the
Protection of Foreign Born
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growing concern that foreign-born U.S. residents faced unprecedented
threats amid the nationwide rise of anti-communist and anti-immigrant
sentiment, ongoing conflict with Communist China in the Korean War,
and an intensifying atmosphere of repression. But so, too, did all
other Americans. 

“Congress is anti-alien. The Justice Department is anti-alien. The
courts are anti-alien,” Green warned at a national conference for
immigration advocates. The group, he argued, would have to defend
equal justice for immigrants by centering universal values enshrined
in the Bill of Rights, for U.S.- and foreign-born people alike. “We
have one advantage,” he said. “We speak of and for the people of
this country. We are with the millions of Americans who want peace and
who want security. To them we say the deportation of non-citizens is
part of this attempt to destroy the liberties of the American people,
to impose police-state conditions of living for all persons in the
country in order to prevent a united people’s fight for peace.” 

The committee’s movement defended noncitizens’ rights under the
banner of defending all Americans’ right to due process and dignity.
In many cases, they were successful—of those investigated and
ordered deported, only a small percentage were actually removed,
thanks to a robust legal defense from civil liberties advocates, and
courts that were at least somewhat sympathetic to their free speech
arguments. In the National Lawyers Guild study, only about five
percent of the cases studied ended with an actual removal. The main
hardship most of the targeted dissenters endured was not expulsion
itself, but the burden of detention, surveillance, and protracted
legal limbo. 

Nonetheless, the failure of the government’s postwar deportation
drive suggests that a fierce defense of the First Amendment and due
process rights for noncitizens helped many activists and their
families avoid the worst of the xenophobic political persecution under
McCarthyism.

As Claudia Jones put it in her 1950 letter, deportation resistance is
not about what happens in the courts. “Legal struggles, important as
they are . . . are incidental to the mass struggle to free us . . . .
No law or decree can whittle away or pierce by one iota our
convictions and loyalty to America’s democratic and revolutionary
traditions.” She continued, “What we want is aid—aid morally,
financially, and above all by mass protests and action, to the mass
campaign of the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born,
by the trade unions, the Negro people, the women, the youth, national
groups, and all labor progressives who love peace and cherish freedom,
lest all face the bestiality and tormented degradation of fascism.”

A new mass struggle may now be emerging once again to defend
politically persecuted immigrants. We are seeing the beginnings of it
in recent demonstrations
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in New York City, with Columbia activists calling for Khalil’s
release and Jewish protesters declaring
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“Not in our name.” A few months ago, Khalil himself was protesting
alongside them, calling for peace and Palestinian freedom. Now, the
activist has written from detention, like many before him, declaring
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“At stake are not just our voices, but the fundamental civil
liberties of all.” His own freedom will rely on his allies taking up
the struggle where he left off, demanding justice everywhere, without
borders.

Michelle Chen is a contributing writer for The Nation, a contributing
editor at Dissent magazine and a co-producer of Dissent’s
“Belabored” podcast. Find her on Twitter at @meeshellchen

* Immigration
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* political activists
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* Trump
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