When President Donald Trump emphasized earlier this month that “Homegrowns are next” for illegal disappearance to prisons in El Salvador, critics were horrified at the blatantly unconstitutional ideas being thrown around by the president. After this administration blatantly ignored a Supreme Court order to bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home, many are questioning whether there is any line the Trump administration will not cross. This isn’t the first time the deportation of citizens has been a hot-button issue within the US. As much as it is being treated as a final destination, a potential crossing of the Rubicon for this administration that is somehow both unimaginably impossible and dreadfully unstoppable, it really is not that far out of the norm for this nation.
The plan Trump has based his immigration enforcement on, the Einsenhower administration’s Operation Wetback was responsible for the expulsion of many US citizens through simply racial profiling them. All it took was being “Mexican-looking” and unlucky enough to get stopped without proper identification in one of the common raids of businesses, private homes or even street sweeps. In many cases, these people were detained and forced to board outgoing buses, planes and even some boats that resembled slave ships, according to historian Mae Ngai’s book Impossible Subjects.
This isn’t the worst of it either, as this operation pales in comparison to what happened during the “Mexican Repatriation” of the 1930s. In this directive from the Hoover administration, which has been looked back on as an act of ethnic cleansing, it is estimated that over one million US citizens were deported without due process. The purpose was to secure “American jobs for real Americans,” during the Great Depression when Mexican farm workers were seen as scapegoats for shrinking government benefits. Yet, if this campaign did not care whether its targets were citizens, naturalized or not, then its only criteria for a “real American” was not being of Mexican descent.
So, it’s clear this country has had no issue getting rid of citizens, including so-called “homegrowns,” from this country because they have the wrong skin color and heritage, but that’s only half of the issue currently being threatened by the Trump administration. The other half is undoubtedly a matter of free speech, and whether or not this administration will be able to get rid of citizens simply for speaking out against it, as it has attempted to do so far with legal residents like Mahmoud Khalil. In this respect, this country also has significant history.
In the aftermath of World War I, the U.S, was in the midst of the First Red Scare, spurred on by the successful Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. There was a deep-seated fear of radicals and those who sympathized with their beliefs. Especially, American politicians feared the potential of revolt from militant unionists in the industrial sector, which was largely made up of eastern-European immigrants. Steadily, these fears became intertwined, and so immigrants from certain countries were stereotyped as being leftist radicals. The US Attorney General at the time, a Democrat named Mitchell Palmer, authorized raids across the nation capturing thousands. They went after political groups, but also cultural organizations, detaining their members and shipping them off on boats to Russia called the “Soviet Ark.” There were citizens rounded up in these shipments, as well as other legal residents. In one case, there was a married couple of famous activists, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, who had their naturalized citizenships revoked so that they could be sent off. Senator Kenneth McKellar, a Democrat from Tennessee, captured the air of the time when arguing that if native-born Americans were acting un-American, they ought to “be deported permanently to the Island of Guam.”
So, when looking at the current political situation, it is clear that nothing happening now is uncharted territory for the US. In fact, as of 2013, Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor from Northwestern University, concluded that, on any given day, roughly 1% of ICE’s tens of thousands of prisoners are US citizens. She has personally documented in her career the story of over 40 citizens who were deported throughout the past few decades.
Now, an important clarification to make is that nothing in this article is meant to make an implicit argument about deportations that do not happen to citizens. It is not to say that those deportations, if they only happened to those who truly “deserved it,” are better or more just than a deportation that does not go along with the rules.
The value of understanding this history is to see that despite the current political upheaval, the deportation of citizens has long been a practice within this country afforded to those deemed undesirable. Trump is not an anomaly for performing, or attempting to perform, such acts, but only in his marketing of them. On one front, it sets a different expectation about how realistic this outcome is. If leaders in the past could get away with it, then it is worth really considering the fact that he most likely will attempt this. He is saying exactly what he wants to do, and history shows people ought to believe him. Additionally, it shows there needs to be consistency, and knowledge of the fact that this is a systemic issue. Immigration enforcement, whether wielded by Trump or others, has always been doing what people are seeing for the first time now. Now, it’s time to put an end to it.
“[M]ilitant unionists in the industrial sector, which was largely made up of eastern-European immigrants” is a strange way to say “Jewish labor activists.”