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The recent have prompted a of these actions. The Trump administration made no secret that many individuals were .

In recent months, the of foreign students with little explanation. On April 25, 2025, , but warned that the reprieve was only temporary.

Because of their tenuous legal status in the U.S., immigrant activists are vulnerable to a government seeking to stifle dissent.

Critics of the Trump administration have , arguing that they , including freedom of speech and .

The administration asserts that the to remove immigrants. passed during the peak of the nation's Cold War hysteria, , which .

I'm a . The current removal orders targeting student activists echo America's long and lamentable past of jailing and expelling immigrants because of their race or what they say or believe—or all three.

Where it began

The United States' current deportation process traces its roots to the late 19th century as the nation moved to .

The impetus for this shift was anti-Chinese racism, which reached a during this period, culminating in the passage of laws that restricted Chinese immigration.

The during the mid-to-late 19th century, initially fueled by the California Gold Rush, spurred the rise of an influential nativist movement that accused Chinese immigrants of stealing jobs. It also claimed that they posed a cultural threat to American society due to their .

The required Chinese living in the U.S. to register with the federal government or face deportation.

The Supreme Court addressed the constitutionality of these statutes in 1893 in the case of . Three plaintiffs claimed that anti-Chinese legislation was discriminatory, violated constitutional protections prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure, and contravened due process and equal protection guarantees.

The Supreme Court , formulating a novel legal precept known as the plenary power doctrine that remains a .

Court confirms the law

The doctrine included two key assertions.

First, the federal government's authority to exclude and deport aliens was an inherent and unqualified feature of American sovereignty. Second, immigration enforcement was the exclusive domain of the congressional and executive branches that were charged with protecting the nation from foreign threats.

The court also ruled that the deportation of immigrants was a civil, rather than criminal matter, which meant that constitutional protections like due process did not apply.

The government ramped up deportations in the aftermath of World War I, . American officials singled out foreign-born radicals for deportation, accusing them of .

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, who ordered mass arrests of alleged communists, pledged to " that have entangled Americans in their poisonous theories" and remove "alien criminals in this country who are directly responsible for spreading the unclean doctrines of Bolshevism."

This period marked a new era of removals carried out primarily on ideological grounds. from , highlighting the cultural affinities between anti-radicalism and racial and ethnic chauvinism.

'Foreign' agitators

The campaign to root out so-called subversives living in the United States reached its apex during the 1940s and 1950s, supercharged by figures like anti-communist crusader Sen. and FBI Director .

The specter of foreign agitators contaminating American political culture loomed large in these debates. Attorney General Tom Clark testified before Congress in 1950 that 91.4% of the Communist Party U.S.'s leadership were "."

Congress passed a series of laws during this period requiring that subversive organizations . They also expanded the executive branch's power to deport individuals whose views were deemed "," blurring the lines between punishing people for unlawful acts—such as espionage and bombings—and what the government considered unlawful beliefs, such as Communist Party membership.

While deporting foreign-born radicals had popular support, the banishment of immigrants for their political beliefs raised important constitutional questions.

Prosecution or persecution?

In a landmark case in 1945, , the Supreme Court did assert a check on the power of the executive branch to .

, Australian-born president of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen's Union. Bridges was a left-wing union leader who orchestrated a number of successful strikes on the West Coast. Under his leadership, the union also took progressive positions on

The decision in the case hinged on whether the government could prove that Bridges had been a member of the Communist Party, which would have made him deportable under the , which .

Since no proof of Bridges' membership existed, the government relied on that Bridges was the party because he shared some of its political positions. Accusations of "alignment" with controversial political organizations are currently at risk of deportation by the Trump administration.

The Supreme Court vacated Bridges' deportation order, declaring that the government's claim of "affiliation" with the Communist Party was too vaguely defined and amounted to guilt by association.

As the excesses and abuses of the McCarthy era came to light, they invited greater scrutiny about the dangers of unchecked executive power. Some of the more draconian statutes enacted during the Cold War, like the Smith Act, . The federal courts have toggled back and forth between narrow and liberal interpretations of the Constitution's —shifts that reflect competing visions of American nationhood and the boundaries of liberal democracy.

From union leaders to foreign students

There are some striking parallels between the throttling of civil liberties during the Cold War and President Donald Trump's crusade against foreign students exercising venerated democratic freedoms.

Foreign students appear to have replaced the immigrant union leaders of the 1950s as the targets of government repression. Presumptions of guilt based on hyperbolic claims of affiliation with the Communist Party have been replaced by .

As in the past, these invocations of national security offer the pretext for the government's efforts to stifle dissent and to mandate political conformity.