Deportation’s Origins
The targeting of political enemies by Donald Trump’s DHS might seem totally new to some, but the practice is as old as deportation itself. Indeed, the modern deportation system was invented to target dissidents. The law that the Trump administration has cited to strip Khalil of his permanent residency in the United States, for instance, is the Cold War–era Immigration and Nationality Act used to target communists for deportation.
But the practice of modern deportation goes back significantly further, to nineteenth-century Europe, when capitalist governments rolled out widespread expulsion laws in order to sweep away unsightly masses of poor foreign workers, most of whom were former peasants uprooted by industrialization. These new laws also specifically targeted growing numbers of socialists and communists attempting to organize those very same workers to demand better labor conditions. The message was clear: become the exploitable labor that the capitalist requires or disappear.
Within decades, similar laws made their way to the United States. As Adam Hochschild has written, in 1919 the US deported 249 men and women in what was the country’s first mass deportation of political dissidents. The deportations were the culmination of the Palmer Raids, a series of brutal immigration sweeps overseen by then attorney general William A. Palmer. Ten thousand people were arrested across the United States between 1919 and 1920, the vast majority of them workers involved in labor organizing.
The raids placed all immigrants — but especially Russians and Italians, who were presumed to be the most militant — under suspicion of polluting the nation’s capitalist, Christian values with dangerous socialist ones. Emma Goldman was their most famous deportee. Afterward, in a statement whose syntax feels eerily proto-Trumpian, Palmer promised New Yorkers that they would see many more deportation ships “sailing down their beautiful harbor in the near future.”
ICE’s “War on Terror”
ICE is the twenty-first-century instantiation of that promise. In the aftermath of 9/11, the George W. Bush administration claimed terrorists were trying to enter the United States through its southern border, a threat so great that it required a state of exception at home — the erosion of asylum law, the militarization of the border, and the hypersurveillance of everyday life.
The timing was critical. After the end of the USSR in 1991, and with the Soviet spy now extinct, the United States was in search of a new ideological boogeyman. The attack on the Twin Towers gave America a new national enemy in terrorism, and ICE — along with DHS — was invented to fight the terrorists supposedly infiltrating our home. The only problem, of course, was that these terrorists slipping through the border didn’t exist.