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Deporting Dissent

Under the Trump administration, the United States expand to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has detained or deported several prominent immigrant activists across the country.

In Jackson, Mississippi, ICE arrested and detained Daniela Vargas, an undocumented immigrant, after she spoke out about immigration issues at a conference.77 In Vermont, around the same time, ICE detained José Enrique Balcazar Sánchez, Zully Victoria Palacios Rodríguez, Yesenia Hernández-Ramos, and Esau Peche-Ventura—four organizers with Migrant Justice, a workers’ rights organization.78 In Tucson, Arizona, a federal judge ordered the deportation of Alejandra Pablos, a well-known immigration and reproductive rights activist, after denying her case for asylum.79 In Seattle, Washington, Maru Mora-Villalpando, an activist who heads the Northwest Detention Center Resistance (NWDCR), received a Notice to Appear in removal proceedings because of her continued resistance to the deportation regime.80 These cases are not unique. Indeed, federal lawsuits document over twenty cases of undocumented immigrant activists arrested nationwide in the last couple years.81

News of these arrests and detentions of migrant activists sent shockwaves through immigrant communities, even though ICE publicly denied targeting them for their political activities.82 Noncitizens with some level of protection, such as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), no longer felt safe, let alone those who have no protection from deportation. But in almost every instance, people visited their loved ones, shared the news on social media, scrambled for legal assistance, and made calls to authorities requesting them to free the advocate facing deportation. Advocates urged people not to let their immigration status lapse, and to not speak out publicly about their immigration statuses. However, putting the onus on those who have taken great risks to advance their cause hardly seems like an adequate answer to the Trump administration’s continued assault on immigrant rights.

Deportation as a form of silencing political dissent is hardly a new tactic of the nation state. Donald Trump is making headlines for his proposals to impose ideological tests on immigrants, but the fear of foreigners and their political ideologies has defined US immigration laws for generations.

The United States has long used the threat of deportation as a tool of political control. The horrific assassination of President William McKinley in 1901 at the hands of a self-proclaimed anarchist, Leon Czolgosz, set the stage for congressional action to curb immigration based on ideology alone.83 Even though Leon Czolgosz was born in the United States, people presumed he was an immigrant because of his surname, triggering a legislative overreaction with the goal of stopping foreign-born anarchists from coming to the United States. Congress responded with the Alien Immigration Act of 1903 (“Alien Act”) permitting the exclusion of “…anarchists, or persons who believe in or advocate the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States or of all government or of all forms of law, or the assassination of public officials.”84 But the law was not about national security or taking action against those who threatened public safety. Rather, the new law reflected broader concerns about social and progressive movements that threatened the status quo of United States politics.

For years to come, under the guise of national security and public safety, the US government would use deportation as a way to target political activists, from John Turner, Emma Goldman, and Marcus Garvey, to Tam Tran and other contemporary immigrant rights leaders.

The past and present efforts of the United States government to detain and deport noncitizens base their legitimacy on claims that their targets lack lawful status or are threats to the security of the United States. But as we take a closer look in this chapter, we’ll find that at the core of these efforts is an attempt to take away the rights of people who were not born in the United States, including the right to freedom of speech and to organize for social change.

John Turner

Between 1904 and 1916, twenty anarchists were excluded and deported under the new Alien Act.85 The first one was John Turner.

“If no work was being done, if it were Sunday for a week or a fortnight, life in New York would be impossible, and the workers, gaining audacity, would refuse to recognize the authority of their employers and eventually take to themselves the handling of the industries… All over Europe they are preparing for a general strike, which will spread over the entire industrial world. Everywhere the employers are organizing, and to me, at any rate, as an anarchist, as one who believes that the people should emancipate themselves, I look forward to this struggle as an opportunity for the workers to assert the power that is really theirs.”

—John Turner, excerpt from speech that led to Turner’s Deportation

John Turner was an English trade unionist and a philosophical anarchist. He visited the United States in 1896 and lectured extensively on the rights of workers.86 He then returned in October 1903, purportedly through Canada instead of Ellis Island, though he never revealed how exactly he entered the United States. Immigration agents arrested him after one of his political speeches and sent Turner to Ellis Island for detention pending deportation.87 Under questioning at Ellis Island, Turner admitted that he was an anarchist, at which point immigration officials informed him that under the 1903 Immigration Act, he would be deported from the United States. The Free Speech League (a predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union), an organization at the turn of the last century that focused on combating government censorship, rushed to his aid.88

Pending his forced deportation, Turner was allowed to voluntarily leave the United States and return to England, but US anarchist leaders, such as Emma Goldman, asked him to remain in detention on Ellis Island so that they could challenge the constitutionality of his deportation and the constitutionality of the Immigration Act itself, which seemed to encroach on the First Amendment. Turner agreed to endure the indignity of detention in order to fight for his values.

The Free Speech League argued that Turner was a nonviolent, philosophical anarchist, who posed no threat to the United States or its residents. Deporting him for his beliefs would violate the First Amendment’s protection of free expression. Lawyers for the United States argued that as a foreigner, Turner had no First Amendment rights, and that he should be deported in the interest of self-preservation.

Overnight, Turner became a celebrity for a cause that brought together immigrants, trade unionists, and free speech advocates. Protesters filled Cooper Union in New York to object to Turner’s deportation. But the Supreme Court agreed with the US government and affirmed his deportation.89 In doing so, the Court upheld the Alien Act’s constitutionality, deferring to Congress’s plenary power to exclude foreigners as it wished, and declaring that foreigners held no rights under the US Constitution.

The use of immigration law to effectively punish radicalism reflects the frustration felt by many policymakers of the time that criminal laws were incapable of quashing community organizing. Anarchists and those deemed anarchists by mere affiliation could not be prosecuted criminally for their beliefs, so to assert political and social control, the government inserted anti-radical clauses in the law through the Immigration Act of 1903, which the US Supreme Court upheld as part of the powers granted to Congress.

Over a hundred years after the Turner case, the United States government has continued to claim that people who are not legally admitted to the United States do not have First Amendment rights.90 When a group of Central American mothers protested their continued detention by launching a hunger strike at Karnes in 2014, ICE officials responded by threatening to take their children away, throwing the leaders into solitary confinement, and firing the hunger strikers from their jobs at the detention center, which they relied on to pay for phone calls, sanitary pads, and other necessities.91 The Department of Justice under the Obama administration asserted that much like John Turner, these immigrants had no First Amendment rights because they had never been admitted to the United States.92

The historical context surrounding the Immigration Act of 1903 and the Turner case demonstrates a pattern in US political history: a tragedy, like the murder of President McKinley, is wrongfully attributed to people of color or immigrants; and the response to that tragedy puts a bull’s-eye on the wrong culprit, triggering the passage of laws and actions that scapegoat immigrants and that have deeply harmful consequences. Perhaps the most significant example of this pattern is the 9/11 terror attack, perpetrated by lawfully present foreigners on American soil, which the US government utilized to round up, detain, and deport fourteen thousand Muslim immigrants who had no ties to the attackers nor to any other terror group.93 As a presidential candidate, Trump was quick to blame “radical Islamic terrorism” for one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida.94 Even as president, Trump continues to invoke terrorism in order to advance his plans to build a wall along the southern border of the United States, despite a total lack of evidence that terrorists are trying to gain entry into the United States disguised as asylum seekers.95

John Turner’s case also set the stage for the 1919 Palmer Raids, during which the US government hunted down, interrogated, detained, and deported many Jewish immigrants and union organizers under the guise of anarchism.96 And the case also formed the basis to exclude and deport alleged socialists, communists, anarchists, leftist labor organizers, and war resisters from the United States for decades to come.

Emma Goldman

Towards the end of World War I, a great period of labor unrest began in the United States. Following the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, American politicians started to fear that a foreign revolution might find support and spread to the United States through new immigrants from Eastern Europe, and they particularly began to target Jews, many of whom were working class immigrants. One such immigrant was Emma Goldman, whose notoriety was unparalleled by any other woman at the time, and even to this day.

Born in 1869 in Kovno, Russia (present day Kaunas, Lithuania), Emma Goldman immigrated to the United States in 1885 at the age of sixteen.97 As a child, her family had been displaced from Kovno to Germany by anti-Semitic violence. Her own migration from Germany to the United States was in response to her father’s belief that Goldman did not need further education as a girl. Together, her experience of anti-Semitic violence and the restrictions placed on her as a woman informed her lifelong advocacy.

An influential feminist and well-known anarchist of her day, Emma Goldman was an early advocate of free speech, reproductive rights, women’s liberation, and workers’ rights. The United States alleged that her speeches led to the assassination of President McKinley, and wanted to deport her, but Goldman had been naturalized through her marriage to a US citizen, and hence the Bureau of Immigration could not deploy the Turner precedent against her for being an anarchist, because US citizens could not be deported for their ideology.

Goldman frequently gave incendiary speeches in support of anarchism and she was often arrested and indicted for them.98

“It is ridiculous to think that society cannot get along without government. We will say to the government: ‘Give us what belongs to us in peace, and if you don’t give it to us in peace, we will take it by force.’ As long as I live, and am able to explain myself, I will be opposed to government, and as I live and as my brain dictates, will use force against the government.”

—Emma Goldman, excerpt from her speech in 190799