People leave things behind when they are deported. When the prominent anarchist activists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were ejected from the United States in 1919, Goldman left all her books at the apartment of her friend Ida Diamond in New York City. In a 1983 interview with the historian Paul Avrich, Diamond’s daughter—the designer Freda Diamond—recalled that “they were stacked up in high piles.” Freda and her sister took Goldman’s books to a shop on Fourth Avenue’s “Book Row,” and sold them for twenty dollars. When Ida found out the children had sold the books, she cried.
Goldman and Berkman were the most well-known of the 249 dissidents deported from the United States to the Soviet Union (via Finland) on the former U.S. military ship USAT Buford. As the historian Mark Greuter documents, nearly 200 of the deportees on the ship were members of the anarchist labor federation, the Union of Russian Workers of the United States and Canada (UORW). This mass deportation of the Buford’s passengers was a defining act of the wave of post-World War I reactionary repression known as the First Red Scare. Greuter notes, “Present at its departure was the young J. Edgar Hoover, a key behind-the-scenes engineer of the events, who taunted the anarchists as they left.”
Goldman wrote of the experience of floating away from New York city in her memoir, Living My Life: “Through the port-hole I could see the great city receding into the distance, its sky-line of buildings traceable by their rearing heads. It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed, America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up—the Statue of Liberty!” This image is particularly heartbreaking to those of us who have come, or whose families have come, to New York City as immigrants.
Hundreds of others were deported in the wake of the Buford. As the historian Kenyon Zimmer documents, the 760 radicals expelled for their political beliefs in the two years following the Buford’s departure “accounted for more than 10 percent of deportees removed from the United States” in 1920 and 1921. Further, the expulsions had a “chilling effect” by defining a wider population of immigrant radicals as “potentially deportable.”
The journey of the Buford is described by historians as the only mass deportation of political dissidents in U.S. history. So far, this has held true. However, the current wave of politically motivated detainments of foreign-born Palestine solidarity and anti-genocide activists threatens to build toward another round of mass deportation of dissidents by a violent, nativist state.
There is of a course a limit to parallels between two historical moments; still, it is illuminating to view the current suppression as part of an authoritarian genealogy stretching back more than a century. The U.S. government piloted modern enforcement strategies like surveillance, infiltration, deportation, imprisonment, and execution on anarchists and radical unionists at the turn of the twentieth century. These methods were further developed during the mid-century Second Red and Lavender Scares, and were later used to brutally suppress the Black Power and anti-war movements in the 1960s, as well as against environmentalists during the 2000s Green Scare.
The First Red Scare was a coordinated campaign of repression against radicals, justified by the U.S. WWI mobilization, the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and the subsequent Russian Civil War (1917-1922). American authorities framed their repressive steps, including mass arrests and deportations, as necessary to protect U.S. democracy from the destabilizing threat of the Russian Revolution.
The Trumpist scare similarly deploys the events of the October 7th Hamas attack on Israel, and the subsequent—and, horribly, ongoing—genocide in Gaza. In both cases, the specter of distant, violent Octobers swallowing the U.S., and New York City in particular, was used to justify the suspension of free speech and due process of non-citizens.
During the last two Red Scares, the foreign threat was often coded as Jewish. In the current scare, antisemitism is often evoked—with “Jewish safety” cynically offered as the ostensible reason for the crackdown. The specter of antisemitism is even used to attack protests and encampments, like those on Columbia and other campuses, that heavily involve Jewish anti-genocide protestors. The result is that Jewish people are employed once again as symbolic props, though in this case as fetishized victims to be “protected,” rather than racialized threats to be removed.
While no mass deportation of dissidents has yet taken place under the Trump regime, the U.S. government has deemed pro-Palestinian activists organizing against a U.S.-backed genocide to be potentially deportable as punishment for their political speech. High-profile detentions of activists like Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil in early March 2025 are part of a broader campaign by the government to revoke student F-1 and J-1 visas en masse. In April 2025, over 1,800 students lost their visas in 280 schools, most without any explanation. While dozens of coordinated lawsuits have forced the Trump administration to begin reversing these cancellations, the Trump regime has also tried to expand ICE’s power to deport students “practically at will.”
These visa revocations are set up to boost the regime’s deportation numbers, part of a wider destructive performance of the state’s power to exclude. But they also serve overlapping functions: to discipline scholarly institutions into conforming to the regime’s ideology, and to silence pro-Palestinian speech. Since March, the administration has targeted students expressing support for Palestine, sometimes with collusion from non-governmental rightist organizations and compliance from their universities. Some of the targeted students, like Khalil, Cornell graduate student Momodou Taal, and Columbia undergraduate student Mohsen Mahdawi, were visible pro-Palestinian campus organizers.
Others, like Ranjani Srinivasan, a Fulbright scholar at Columbia, and Rümeysa Öztürk, a graduate student at Tufts were only more tangentially involved in campus activism. Srinivasan was swept up in a chaotic mass arrest on Columbia’s campus, while Öztürk was detained for six weeks simply for co-authoring a pro-Palestine op-ed in a student newspaper (an act comparable to what we are doing be co-authoring this essay, except that we are protected by citizenship). Aside from this one act, Öztürk was “not a prominent activist or a fixture at campus protests” according to her friends and attorneys.
In a statement following his release on bail, Mahdawi himself outlined the ways in which these various cases constitute a singular wave of repression with global ramifications: “You might think I am free, but my freedom is interlinked to the freedom of many other students, including Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil…what is going to happen in America is going to affect the rest of the world.”
The current immigration arrests are enabled by the existence of the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) apparatus, which was created under the Department of Homeland Security in the post-9/11 surge of nationalism and the attendant violent, xenophobic securitization of American society. Essentially, ICE is a militarization of the preceding U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. ICE has been maintained under the Bush and Obama/Biden administrations, so it is not unique to the Trump administration. However, the Trump administration’s intensification of one of ICE’s core functions—i.e. internal political repression—harks back more to the Wilson presidency than to the Obama years (though, of course, the Obama administration was also quite enthusiastic about the forced removal of migrants).
The central outward reasoning behind these arrests is that targeting and deporting subversive agents will cleanse educational institutions of the outside infiltration that has turned them into hotbeds of subversive, leftist thought. Certainly, these students and scholars are vulnerable targets because of their non-citizen status. However, they are targeted not just because of their vulnerability, but because their foreignness codes them, in the xenophobic framing of the state, as carriers of contagious, seditious ideas. During his 2024 presidential run, Trump often alluded to the “enemy from within,” a reference to a speech by the instigator of the Second Red Scare, Joe McCarthy.
In 1950, McCarthy sermonized about a war between “communistic atheism” and “Christian democracy,” which the US was losing “not because our only powerful, potential enemy has sent men to invade our shores, but rather because of the traitorous actions of those who have been treated so well by this nation. It has not been the less fortunate or members of minority groups who have been selling this nation out, but rather those who have had all the benefits that the wealthiest nation on earth has had to offer—the finest homes, the finest college education, and the finest jobs in government we can give.” This domestic “war” was waged in parallel to the U.S.’s brutal anti-Communist foreign interventions, including the burgeoning Korean War.
In 1950s America, the enemies of Christian democracy that McCarthy was aiming to hunt were, more often than not, Jews who had shed their Yiddishkeit to assimilate into American whiteness. For McCarthy and other nativists, assimilation was cover for coordinated infiltration of American institutions by foreign agents with dual loyalties. McCarthy’s campaign to expose converso communists in government, as well as academic and cultural institutions, conjured up tropes of Judeo-Bolshevism, an antisemitic conspiracy theory rooted in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
As he gained political power for his anti-communist crusade, McCarthy hired Roy Cohn as his chief counsel. At 24, Cohn had already helped seal the case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Much later, in his mid-40s, he would become a mentor figure to a young Donald Trump. As McCarthy, Cohn, and J. Edgar Hoover (now at the helm of the FBI) continued their search for enemies within, Congress was in the process of reforming U.S. immigration system. In 1952, it adopted the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1952, also known as the McCarran-Walter Act, rolling disparate older immigration laws into one Act and explicitly barring communists from immigrating to the U.S. The Act’s namesake, Senator McCarran, who successfully fought to limit emigration of Holocaust refugees to the U.S. in 1948, authored a bill allowing the government to put communists in concentration camps, and frequently railed against “Jews and Commies” who he blamed for leading his colleagues in government astray.
The McCarran-Walter Act gave the Secretary of State the power to deport “aliens” whose presence in the U.S. can have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences.” In practice, the government used the law to undermine unionization efforts across the U.S., by detaining and deporting Mexican labor organizers in California (which the Trump administration has also done), and by targeting labor leaders with perceived Communist Party ties in New York. When pushed to provide evidence for Columbia student Mahmood Khalil’s detention, Secretary of State Marco Rubio invoked this power granted to him by the 1952 law. His memo to the court stated “The foreign policy of the United States champions core American interests and American citizens and condoning antisemitic conduct and disruptive protests in the United States would severely undermine that significant foreign policy objective.” In late March, Rubio gleefully told a room of reporters that he was revoking visas of students engaging in pro-Palestinian speech on a daily basis.
McCarthy’s witch hunts and McCarran’s plans for communist containment were a byproduct of an earlier generation of authoritarianism: the First Red Scare, the period when the US government first delineated the process for identifying and deporting foreign-born radicals. The First Red Scare successfully eviscerated hundreds of anarchist, socialist, and radical unionist groups. The parameters of the Second Red Scare were defined by the First, which culminated in a near ban on legal immigration that began in the 1920s and lasted until the 1960s (with key exceptions like the Bracero Program, which allowed Mexican citizens to temporarily work in the U.S.). A generation later, many radicals were American-born. In the 1950s, The Second Red Scare’s targets were primarily U.S. citizens, including figures associated with the emerging post-war Civil Rights movement. While both Red Scares were inward looking, they reverberated with the U.S.’s foreign interventions—into the First World War and the Korean War, respectively—using war abroad as a pretext for suppression at home.
Half a century before McCarthy’s “enemies within” speech, America was hunting for anarchists. In 1903, the US government enacted the Anarchist Exclusion Act. It built on the exclusion of Chinese immigrants a quarter century earlier and was the first time the US restricted immigration based on political affiliation. As Zimmer writes, the 1903 law did not yield immediate mass deportations, but did establish the legal and institutional framework that kicked into high gear fourteen years later, when revolutions abroad and US involvement in WWI provided a rightist government with an excuse to crack down on dissidents.
The U.S. Justice Department used its expanded power associated with US involvement in WWI to round up and arrest suspected radicals, with each raid publicized and celebrated by the mainstream press. On September 5th, 1917, for example, federal and local police raided four-dozen Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) offices across the United States, confiscating tens of thousands of posters, flyers, meeting notes, and membership rolls. According to historian Adam Hochschild, the printed matter was used as evidence in a mass show trial in Chicago of one hundred and one IWW leaders, who were all found guilty of conspiring against the war effort and sentenced to long prison terms in the summer of 1918. The confiscated written materials used to incriminate them were later burned by the U.S. government.
And as historian William Preston Jr. has argued, the U.S. government began to zero in on deportation as an anti-dissent tool because immigration policy allowed the government to deport foreign-born people through a simple administrative hearing, without the burden of due process granted in criminal trials. While continuing to round up IWW members, the Justice Department began to track and detain Union of Russian Workers (UORW) members and Italian anarchists associated with Luigi Galleani’s Italian-language newspaper, Cronaca Souversiva. In his research, Zimmer found that existing immigration law was ill-suited to the government’s drive for quick deportations. So in the summer of 1918, the Justice Department drafted a new law that expanded the legal definition of deportable offenses to include affiliation with anarchist, anti-war, socialist and communist organizations, as well as radical labor unions. The law also explicitly named dissident speech and scholarship as a reason for deportation.
Zimmer writes that the Justice Department began to prepare for a mass expulsion of foreign-born anarchists two months before the new immigration law went into effect. The UORW was less well known than the IWW or the insurrectionary Galleanisti, but they became the government’s primary target—the group’s syndicalist politics and Russian-speaking membership fit a paranoid delusion that fused older fears of bomb-throwing anarchists with a newly developing Russian Bolshevik target. Palestinian students and scholars, including Kalil and Mahdawi, are similarly persecuted for both their identities and their political speech. Additionally, tactics used against pro-Palestinian organizers—including mass arrests and targeting of visible organizers—also mirror those used against the UROW.
On the second year anniversary of the October Revolution, a 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover was orchestrating another major multi-city raid. In New York City, the Police Department busted into the UORW headquarters at 133 East 15th Street, indiscriminately searching students taking an evening math class, working in the auto-repair workshop, and using the chapter’s library. The 360 people who were unable to produce proof of U.S. citizenship were arrested.
Simultaneously, raids targeting Detroit’s five UORW branches yielded close to 1,000 arrests. Another major raid followed on January 2nd, 1920, with arrests across 30 cities numbering in the thousands, including per Hochschild, everyone dining at the Tolstoy Vegetarian Restaurant in Chicago, 39 bakers in the midst of a worker cooperative meeting in Lynn, Massachusetts, and all the members of the Lithuanian Socialist Chorus in Philadelphia.
The omnipresence of ICE throughout the country as well as the scattered nature of today’s leftist organizations means that that large, spectacular raids have been replaced by near constant small-scale actions. The effect is perhaps more chilling than before—with actions like the raids on activists at the University of Michigan or the regular detention of immigrants by masked agents creating a diffuse atmosphere of fear.
The Buford’s passenger list included UORW members picked up during the splashy November 7th raid—only 44 days separated their arrest and deportation. This raid, and the First Red Scare generally, required new levels of coordination between a still nascent federal internal security apparatus and local police departments in the midst of their own professionalizing campaigns.
As we explored in a 2023 piece for Jewish Currents, the logistics of the First Red Scare—mass surveillance, infiltration, as well as the use of new technologies to collect, catalogue and archive printed matter—were performed by state and local actors. In Chicago, the police department and the Illinois National Guard cracked down on Black resistance to white violence in the summer of 1919. Hoover and the Justice Department coordinated with state and local agencies to look for fictitious communist instigators, and disarm and arrest Black protestors (primarily WWI vets).
In New York, that work was coordinated by the Joint Legislative Committee to Investigate Seditious Activities, colloquially known as the Lusk Committee, after its chairman, State Senator Clayton R. Lusk of Cortland County, NY. Formed in 1919, the New York State legislature gave the Committee extraordinary powers to work with federal agencies like the Justice Department as well as local police departments, and to subpoena people under the auspices of New York State’s own criminal anarchy code. Over the course of about two years, the committee infiltrated hundreds of meetings in New York City, Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, and Utica, seized and catalogued tens of thousands of documents, subpoenaed hundreds of witnesses, and assisted with thousands of arrests. Tracking Yiddish, Italian and other non-English speaking dissidents and organizations, the Committee made liberal use of in-community informers and interpreters.
One of the Lusk Committee’s primary targets was The Rand School for Social Science, a Socialist Party of America-affiliated workers’ school in lower Manhattan. The Rand School’s publishing arm had run afoul of the Espionage Act in 1917 when they produced an anti-war pamphlet by Scott Nearing. In 1919 the Lusk Committee sent a raiding party of 55 city and state police officers to cart away radical material from the school.
The Rand School survived the First Red Scare, primarily in the form of a library. The Rand School Library was eventually renamed the Tamiment Library, and since 1973 it has been housed at New York University’s Bobst Library (now combined with the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives). Unfortunately, NYU did not absorb the lessons of the Rand School’s history along with its library holdings: NYU’s leadership has done nothing to protect their own students whose visas have been revoked as part of the current wave of repression.
The Lusk Committee published a four volume report in July 1920, entitled “Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics.” One of its key findings was the need to re-educate teachers and “the educated class”—those in colleges and universities and with advanced degrees—by reorganizing and exerting control over the educational system. The Committee pushed through a series of bills which required teachers to sign loyalty oaths—a measure that presaged state anti-BDS legislation—and expanded school licensing. Even though the loyalty oath law was quickly repealed, Stephen Leberstein, of the PSC-CUNY Academic Freedom Committee noted: “requiring public school and college teachers to sign loyalty oaths as a condition of their employment became common across the country. In New York, the Ives Loyalty Oath Law was imposed in 1934, and at least 22 states had such laws on the books by 1936.”
Like the authoritarians in Albany of the early 1920s, the Trump regime has fixated on the education system, ranging from elite institutions of higher learning like Harvard and Columbia to primary school curricula. And, just as it did in the 1920s, contemporary authoritarianism relies on support from non-state fascist organizations and individual bootlickers. In early March, the U.S. Department of Education launched a snitch line, where concerned parents can report “reverse racism” and other DEI-related activities in their school. As reported by Mother Jones, the only person quoted in the press release is a Moms for Liberty co-founder, who has enthusiastically promoted the line on her social media.
Snitch lines, and other low-rent methods to engage volunteers in state violence, frighteningly, work. Some of the people recently-detained for association with pro-Palestinian activists were first brought to the state’s attention by non-state right wing social media accounts. Badar Khan Suri, a Georgetown University postdoctoral fellow, was detained because right-wing journalists targeted his wife, a Palestinian U.S. citizen.
There are organized efforts to effect detainments and deportations by non-state right wing groups with direct access to the state as well. As Mahmoud Khalil’s legal team has recently outlined, Khalil was targeted by right-wing pro-Israel groups—including Canary Mission, Shirion Collective, and Betar USA—who brought Khalil to the attention of Rubio and the Department of Homeland Security. Further, representatives of Betar claim to have met with Sen. John Fetterman and aides to Sen. Ted Cruz to discuss their “deportation list.” Prominent pro-Palestine voices targeted by Betar also include the writer Mosab Abu Toha. Betar USA is the newly-reorganized domestic wing of the extremist Zionist group founded by the fascist Ze’ev Jabotinsky a century ago. It is worth noting that the historian Benzion Netanyahu, the father of génocidaire Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, served as Jabotinsky’s personal secretary in the United States.
The First Red Scare was undoubtedly a tragedy. It destroyed individual lives, fractured families and communities. In addition to the fracture and displacement of deportation, many of the anarchists deporting to the Soviet Union were persecuted, imprisoned, and killed by the authoritarian, anti-anarchist Bolshevik regime.
Further, The First Red Scare hobbled the American anarchist and socialist movements, which both undermined labor organizing and other causes that anarchists and socialists contributed to, and contributed to a leftist organizing vacuum that the Soviet-backed Communist Party of the USA would soon fill. Further, as we are continuing to see, it helped establish the precedent and legal framework for subsequent waves of repression.
Still, it should be noted that the horrors of the First Red Scare were, in some cases, mitigated. The Justice Department had planned to deport thousands of people, tens of times more than the hundreds that it actually managed to. Part of this discrepancy is due, no doubt, to state inefficiency. More importantly though, The First Red Scare faced active and successful organized and improvised resistance.
For example, Zimmer writes that members of the Union of Russian Workers were careful to avoid self-incrimination by “[declaring] themselves believers in ‘politics’ and ‘industrial’ freedom rather than anarchism and revolution,” and some branch recording secretaries went as far as to claim illiteracy and ignorance of the UORW’s principles. Zimmer notes one instance when a Russian man “who claimed he had only stopped by the Newark UORW offices for some tea proved to be that branch’s chairman.”
While these examples are almost-comically over-the-top (and history is funny, even when it’s tragic) they are good reminders that people don’t have to tell on themselves. Indeed, you have the right to keep your mouth shut instead of talking to ICE. Whether or not one is a citizen or politically active, normalizing this refusal to share information makes everyone safer.
As we discovered in our own research on the Lusk Committee archives, the Red Scare relied heavily on both paid agents and in-community informants. Sometimes, these methods failed. There were plenty of times when state agents could not understand a target’s language and had no one to translate for them, or went home without writing a full report because they couldn’t actually locate an active meeting. These are good reminders to be careful whom you share information with. In other words, anyone involved in activist work—whether newly-radicalized by Trump, or a seasoned organizer—should practice security culture for the safety of themselves and those around them.
Further, those with greater institutional power can use it to protect others: As Hochschild discusses, a septuagenarian named Louis F. Post, a temporary acting Secretary of Labor in 1920, who had begun his career during Reconstruction, worked to invalidate illegal Palmer Raids arrests, release detained immigrants, and prevent deportations. Over the past couple months, Mahmoud Khalil, Mohsen Mahdawi, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Badar Khan Suri have been released from immigration detention, because the judges overseeing their cases were willing to push back against the Justice Department. Those of us who work in institutions such as government offices, government-adjacent nonprofits, or universities should consider how we can use our institutional power to protect those who are vulnerable due immigration status.
Two years before their deportation on the Buford, Goldman and Berkman were tried and convicted by the federal government under the 1917 Espionage Act for protesting conscription as America entered World War I.
In her final address to the jury, Goldman defiantly stated:
“Whatever your verdict, gentlemen, it cannot possibly affect the rising tide of discontent in this country against war which, despite all boasts, is a war for conquest and military power. […] Least of all will your verdict affect those to whom human life is sacred, and who will not become a party to the world slaughter.”
Her words are, sadly, relevant today, as activists stand in federal immigration courts for the crime of holding life sacred, of demanding that their institutions end their complicity in the slaughter in Gaza.
“Your verdict,” Goldman told the twelve men who would soon after send her to Missouri as a federal prisoner, “can only add to the opinion of the world as to whether or not justice and liberty are a living force in this country or a mere shadow of the past.” ♦
