100 Years Ago: The Man Who Singlehandedly Stopped Thousands of Illegal Deportations

In the Spring of 1920, the U.S. government was preparing to deport 1,600 people from America under the Anarchist Exclusion Act. Ordered by Attorney General Mitchell Palmer and directed by a young justice department lawyer named J. Edgar Hoover, the government had rounded up non-citizens in cities across America. As soon as the labor secretary approved the warrants, these people would be loaded onto ships and sent away.

One boatload of deportees had already left. In December 1919, 249 suspects had previously been put aboard the USAT Buford and sent to Russia.

Now a much larger crowd was awaiting their deportation to an unknown destination. All that was needed was authorization by the assistant secretary of labor. And that man — Louis Post —would prove to be a stubborn idealist.

There was no precedent for the government’s mass deportations, but the country had never before been faced with the array of threats before them: terrorist bombings, a deadly epidemic, high labor unrest, and the fear and mistrust left over from the recently concluded world war.

Back in 1917, the government had roused the country’s fighting spirit as the U.S. entered the war in Europe. Americans were encouraged to look for German agents entering the U.S. among innocent immigrants. The country had been strongly supportive of the war when, after 19 months, it suddenly ended. Americans remained on the offensive, though, and continued searching for enemies. And they certainly had them.

Anarchists had been committing bombings and assassinations in Europe and the United States for years. They assassinated the empress of Austria, the king of Italy, and, in 1901, President McKinley.

In 1918, Congress passed the Anarchist Exclusion Act, which made any alien subject to deportation if they belonged to an organization advocating for the forceful overthrow of the government.

Americans’ fear of foreign anarchists had been heightened by the sharp rise in immigration, which peaked in 1910. Many Americans worried they were losing their culture and country to foreign influences. And since many immigrants could only afford to live, or be permitted to live, in run-down areas of cities, they quickly became associated with squalid living conditions.

Then, in in the spring of 1919, dozens of bombs were mailed to leading figures in American business and politics.

On June 2, 1919, nine more officials were targeted with bombs, which were detonated outside of their homes. One of those bombs was intended for U.S. Attorney General Palmer. An anarchist was carrying the bomb up to the front door of Palmer’s house when, apparently, he tripped and fell. The bomb detonated, disintegrating the bomber and damaging the Palmer house. Emerging unhurt, Palmer decided it was time to round up radical foreigners. It also occurred to him that a highly visible campaign against terrorists was good preparation for a presidential campaign.

Investigators found a connection between the bomber and militant anarchists. For them, it was enough to justify a round up of any aliens with radical leanings.

In December 1919, government agents raided gatherings of anarchists and other radical groups in New York in what would become known as the Palmer Raids. More than 600 people were arrested; 249 were put aboard the USAT Buford and shipped off to Russia. The government acted so quickly that some deportees were out on the ocean before their families learned of their fate.

The Justice Department began a second series of raids in January of 1920. They were carried out in over 30 cities in 23 states. Again, arresting agents entered meetings of suspected aliens and rounded up everyone, including citizens and visitors. Three thousand people were arrested and placed in detention centers.

Poor communication, planning, and intelligence turned the raids into a nightmare. Agents were unsure who should be targeted or the number of arrest warrants needed. And legal experts protested that the raids violated the Constitution.

Police and government agents forcefully and sometimes violently detained suspects. Palmer maintained that defending the United States against its destruction justified government actions. There was no time to waste on splitting hairs over personal liberty. The suspects needed immediate deportation.

But in March of 1920, Palmer’s crusade ran up against a Post – Assistant Secretary of Labor Louis Post.

Before Palmer could deport any detainees, he needed the approval from the Labor Department. The department head needed to approve the warrants and issue the deportation orders. But unlike the previous raid, the Labor Secretary was on sick leave. And the department’s solicitor general had recently resigned. For two months, Louis Post was left in charge, which required he review deportation cases.

Palmer claimed the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1918 authorized him to conduct mass deportations. The law said aliens belonging to groups that advocated overthrowing the government by force were subject to deportation. But Post wasn’t ready to concede that all the aliens who had been arrested met those qualifications. He insisted that each case be studied to see if the detainee posed a threat as defined by the Act.

After Post and his staff reviewed thousands of arrest warrants, Post determined that 2,000 warrants had been illegal. The suspects would be freed after having been detained for months. Post also insisted that the aliens were entitled to a fair hearing, a constitutional safeguard that Palmer said didn’t apply to noncitizens. Post did find that the Anarchist Exclusion Act applied to some anarchists, and he dutifully ordered their deportation.

Palmer complained about Post to President Woodrow Wilson. He insisted that Labor Secretary William B. Wilson fire Post, but Wilson refused. He warned the attorney general against provoking anti-radical paranoia in the country. So Palmer then took his case to sympathetic members of congress, asking that they impeach Post, or at least censure him.

Meanwhile, Americans were starting to have second thoughts about the arrests. They read newspaper coverage of the raids, which included reports of arresting officers beating suspects, innocent bystanders being caught up and sent into detention, and the seizure of people whose only crime seemed to be having a foreign accent.

Many suspects were abused. Almost 1,000 men in Detroit were held and starved for almost a week in a small, windowless room. Some were tortured during questioning, including having to watch family members being assaulted.

The stories created support for Post even as J. Edgar Hoover began building a file on him and his political leanings. But nothing could be found that indicated Post had radical connections. Regardless, the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization wrote a report on Post’s deportation decisions. The report was leaked to the press, which broadcast the committee’s misrepresentation of him. It implied that Post had released communists who were “fugitives from justice.” There were suggestions that Post was friends with the radicals, and was working for the communists from within the system.

House members gave speeches condemning Post, but other representatives took the opportunity to support him and criticize the arrests. One supporter said that many of the detainees couldn’t tell Bolshevism from rheumatism. The entire affair had been lawless from the beginning. Officers had bullied friendless aliens, broken into houses, destroyed property, arrested citizens, and even beaten them before throwing them into jail.

When Post heard the House was planning to impeach him for abusing his power, he asked for the chance to address the congressmen. After defending his actions, a senior House member who had strongly supported the campaign against the radicals rose from his seat and said, “I believe you have followed your sense of duty absolutely,” and walked out of the meeting. After a long, shocked silence, the committee took no further action.

In 1923, Post wrote The Deportations Delirium of Nineteen-Twenty: A Personal Narrative of an Historic Official Experience, in which he recounted the Palmer raids. He called the entire anti-radical campaign “a stupendous and cruel fake.”

Attorney General Palmer wrote a long article justifying his position, but he had lost the support of many Americans who had read about the raids’ abuses. His last chance to position himself for a run at the White House died on May 1, 1920. That was the day he predicted a massive communist protest that would shut down the nation and topple the government.  He called out government forces to protect important buildings, but his great revolution never materialized.