6 June 26th - July 2nd, 2025 phoenixnewtimes.com PHOENIX NEW TIMES | NEWS | FEATURE | FOOD & DRINK | ARTS & CULTURE | MUSIC | CONCERTS | CANNABIS | A Long Time Coming How past presidents helped build Trump’s mass deportation machine. BY STEPHEN LEMONS E arlier this month, in Arizona and across the country, masses of people rallied to protest President Donald Trump and his administration’s inhumane, racist and power-hungry immigration poli- cies. Their grievances might as well have been listed as Thomas Jefferson enumer- ated those of the American colonies in 1776 — though the object of Jefferson’s ire was a real king, not a wannabe one. He has terrorized cities with immigra- tion agents, plucking hard-working people from work sites, homes and schools. He has trampled the guarantees of the Constitution, attempting to rewrite the defi- nition of birthright citizenship and targeting immigrants and their advocates for the content of their speech. He has denied due process to those he deems unworthy of being in the United States, defying judicial orders and shipping them to a foreign prison. He has threatened to use the military against American citizens, sending National Guardsmen and Marines to Los Angeles — over the objection of state officials — to quell protests against his regime. All the signs that have been waved and slogans that have been chanted in opposi- tion to Trump’s abuses (minus the torched Waymos) have been righteous. Trump has indeed stoked anti-immigrant fervor and wrenched the levers of the federal govern- ment against migrants to a greater degree than any president in the last half century. As the Arizona Watchdog Project showed last month in a piece by Beau Hodai, Trump’s administration appears to be following a disturbing playbook to dramat- ically reshape and place domestic law enforcement under his thumb, using the bogus threat of undocumented immigra- tion to do it. This, as millennials say, is not normal. But it’s also not unprecedented. Many Americans riled up by Trump’s policies — and particularly the anti-Trump politicians using their opposition to them to burnish their images — could stand for a history lesson. Trump didn’t materialize from the ether, single-handedly turning the United States into a nativist, white supremacist nation that is violently hostile to immigrants. Rather, the U.S. has fostered such malevolent strains for decades, with both Republican and Democratic presi- dential administrations cranking up the pressure on immigrant communities. In other words, Trump didn’t create America’s deportation machine. He’s just revving the engine. And if a majority of Americans are serious about dismantling that machine, they’ll need to reckon with how presidents hallowed and reviled — Roosevelt and Eisenhower, Clinton and Bush, Obama and Biden — helped build it. Our deportation nation It’s tempting and maybe even comforting to see the Trump administration’s war on immigrants as an outlier, a paroxysm destined to fade once he finally leaves the national stage. But truthfully, hating on immigrants is as American as cherry pie. Consider these shameful, all-American precedents. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act banned Chinese workers from entering the country for a decade on the basis of their nationality. In the 1917 Bisbee Deportation, more than 1,000 strikers in the southern Arizona town were forcibly removed to Columbus, New Mexico. In 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt refused to intervene on behalf of 900 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany aboard the oceanliner M.S. St. Louis, known as “the Voyage of the Damned.” Roosevelt also ordered the forcible intern- ment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, using the same Alien Enemies Act that Trump has used to target Venezuelan refugees. Both the First and Second Red Scares took aim at “ideological subversives” who more often than not were immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The former included the so-called “Palmer raids,” named for the attorney general at the time, in which more than 6,000 people were arrested and hundreds of leftist leaders were deported. Nor was citizenship a bar to discrimination. In 1919, the federal government stripped famed anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman of her natural- ized citizenship and deported her to Soviet Russia along with hundreds of others on a passenger ship dubbed “the Red Ark.” In the Joseph McCarthy era in the 1950s, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 deemed aliens affiliated “with the Communist or any other totalitarian party” to be “inadmissible.” The list of those supposedly excluded under this provision included Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, philosopher Michel Foucault and novelist Graham Greene. The Trump administra- tion has invoked that same 1952 law in an attempt to deport pro-Palestine activist Mahmoud Khalil. Nor should one forget the Eisenhower administration’s 1954 mass deportation of Mexican laborers and farmhands, racistly dubbed “Operation Wetback,” in which hundreds of thousands of people were often caged like animals before being “returned” to Mexico. These episodes weren’t aberrations as much as they were products of American democracy. In his seminal 2007 book “Deportation Nation,” Boston Law College professor Daniel Kanstroom wrote that the rights of deportees historically fare poorly when compared to the rights of criminal defendants. In the U.S., immigration law is largely civil and administrative, with federal courts deferring to the executive branch’s unquestioned “plenary” — i.e., absolute — power over immigration. The right to due process is one of the few that immigrants facing deportation regularly enjoy. Like it or not, Kanstroom wrote, immi- gration is “a powerful tool of discretionary social control, a key feature of the national security state and . . . a mechanism of scape-goating, ostracism, family and community separation, and, of course, banishment.” True, most of those episodes occurred decades and even more than a century ago. America is a work in progress, its well- intentioned defenders say, slowly shaping itself into the country it is meant to be. The moral arc of the universe reputedly bends toward justice. Progress just happens. Except that, as horrific as the Trump administration’s shameless and extremist anti-immigrant agenda is, his policies really aren’t all that far removed from those of his immediate predecessors. For decades — and especially in the last 30 years — American presidents have combined to create an immigration and border system that has had devastating consequences for migrants. It also >> p 8 Franklin D. Roosevelt used the Alien Enemies Act to justify the infamous internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II. Donald Trump is attempting to use the same law to deport Venezuelan refugees without due process. (National Archives) Donald Trump didn’t build the system he’s using to terrorize immigrants with threats of mass deportations. He’s just revving the engine that past presidents built for him. (Illustration by Chas Coffman) | NEWS |
