The detention of and planned deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University protest leader, has shocked even some of the Trump administration’s most jaded critics. But such aggressive tactics have a long history in the United States—look no further than the case of yet another strident left-wing activist, the labor leader Harry Bridges, who fought efforts to deport him to his native Australia for some twenty years, starting in the late 1930s. Bridges’s story is worth recounting at length, not only because it so closely parallels the present—and hints at where the administration may go next—but because it also suggests how a new wave of similar government overreach might be avoided.
Born in Melbourne and a seafarer from his early teens, Bridges had traveled the world before walking down a gangplank in San Francisco in 1920. He immersed himself in the radical labor politics of the city’s waterfront, and in 1934 led a general strike all along the West Coast, calling for better pay in the depths of the Great Depression. The strike had mixed results, but it established Bridges as a leading voice of West Coast labor.
But he wasn’t just an energetic and radical labor leader—he was also a cooperator with, and possibly a member of, the Communist Party. Like loyal party members, he backed American involvement in the fight against fascism in the 1930s, then reversed himself in 1939, when Hitler and Stalin signed a non-aggression pact, then flipped again after Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Years later, he opposed the Marshall Plan and NATO, and backed the third-party presidential campaign of Henry Wallace, a progressive who received significant help from the Communists. Bridges’s degree of affiliation with the Communist Party USA or with Moscow was repeatedly a point of legal contention, including in multiple Supreme Court cases, and the main impetus for the attempts to deport him. The exact nature of his relationship with the Communists remains unclear. In 2023, Emory University historian Harvey Klehr recounted having seen a document in the Russian archives in the 1990s seeming to list Bridges as a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party USA. But even amid the true spy scandals and anti-Communist hysteria of the 1950s, the rule of law held and Bridges’s rights were protected.