Nearly forty years ago, immigration officials in Los Angeles arrested eight young immigrants—seven Palestinian men and the wife of one of them, a Kenyan. The immigrants were mostly students. Two were permanent residents; the others were on student visas. They had been involved in pro-Palestinian activism. The government charged them all with being associated with a group that advocated the doctrines of world Communism, a justification for deportation dating back to the McCarran-Walter Act, of 1952, a Cold War relic.
I agreed to join the team representing the group, who became known as the L.A. Eight. At the time, I was one of the few practicing attorneys in the country with experience defending a communist deportation case. (This was, after all, the nineteen-eighties, not the nineteen-fifties.) I had recently represented the writer Margaret Randall, a U.S.-born citizen who had obtained Mexican citizenship while married to a Mexican poet, thereby losing her American citizenship, according to the U.S. government. In 1984, after their divorce, she returned to the United States, got remarried, and applied for permanent residency in America. The government denied the application and sought to deport her under the McCarran-Walter Act, arguing that her writings—she was a prolific author of oral histories, journals, and poetry—advocated the doctrines of world Communism. After a trial in which Randall was cross-examined about a literary magazine that she co-edited and a piece of writing in which she praised her three-year-old son for becoming “communist” as he had learned to share his toys, an immigration judge ordered that she be deported. But we won the case on appeal, when the Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that Randall had not, in fact, lost her U.S. citizenship when she became a Mexican citizen. As a U.S. citizen, she could not be deported, no matter how many “doctrines of world Communism” she advocated.
The arrests of the L.A. Eight, on a similar charge, followed a three-year F.B.I. investigation that had begun as the city prepared to host the 1984 Olympics. Looking for potential terrorist threats, the F.B.I. identified a group of young Palestinian activists. F.B.I. agents reported on their teach-ins and protests, monitored the literature they distributed, recorded license plates of individuals who attended their meetings, surveilled the activists for extended periods, and sent at least one undercover agent to attend a haflis, or annual public community dinner, that the group helped organize. The agent’s report stated that although he could not speak Arabic, it was clear from the tone of the music and the speeches that the event was a fund-raiser for terrorism. Ultimately, as the F.B.I. director at the time, William Webster, testified, the Bureau concluded that the individuals had committed no crimes, let alone terrorism.