Old Playbook, New Deportations
One executive order issued by Trump expands the use of “expedited removal,” which denies court hearings in deportation cases unless a person can prove they’ve been here for more than two years. Another revives the Alien Registration Act of 1940–44, but takes it much further by making it a felony for any noncitizen to fail to register. Undocumented people would not be able to register without being immediately held for deportation, but failing to register would also be a crime. According to the American Immigration Council, “By invoking the registration provision, the Trump administration is threatening to turn all immigrants into criminals by setting them up for the ‘crime’ of failing to register.”
In the immigration raids that followed the passage of the McCarran-Walter Act, agents rounded up people at work, on the street, and seemingly everywhere. In 1954, over a million people were picked up in the notorious “Operation Wetback.” Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, who headed the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency in the last Trump administration, announced at his recent appointment that mass immigration raids will begin anew. Raid sites will now include schools, churches, and hospitals, while earlier priorities directing enforcement to concentrate on “criminals” rather than families have been ended.
The portrayal of immigrants as threats to social order, a constant refrain in today’s political discourse, echoes the rhetoric of the Cold War. The MWA barred entry of people guilty of “moral turpitude,” which included homosexuality and even drinking too much. A political ban (only overturned in 1990) prevented accused communists from entering the United States and was applied with special ferocity to poets — from South African poet Dennis Brutus to Chilean poet Pablo Neruda to Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Gabriel García Márquez, whose novel One Hundred Years of Solitude has been adapted into a Netflix hit, was banned from the United States as a communist after he received the Nobel Prize.
Noncitizen communists, anarchists, and other accused “subversives” in the United States became deportable. That included people guilty of teaching, writing, or publishing in support of “subversive” ideas. In 1952, the Supreme Court upheld the deportation of Robert Galvan, who’d been brought as a seven-year-old from Mexico in 1918, married a US citizen, had four children, and worked at the Van Camp Seafood plant in San Diego. During World War II, when the United States was an ally of the Soviet Union, he belonged to the Communist Party for two years, then a legal political party. He was nevertheless deported under the MWA’s ban.