Anti-immigrant sentiment runs high, encouraged in significant measure by the president. In reaction, federal officers, sometimes with the help of local police departments, round up immigrants in American cities by the thousands. Many are detained without clear legal authority; hundreds are deported.
This is a story of 2025, of course. It is also a story from a century ago, when zealous officials pursued immigrants in an uncannily similar fashion, a little-remembered episode that didn’t end well for the federal government. There are strong clues that the Trump administration might face a similar outcome.
Those earlier immigrant roundups, in late 1919 and early 1920, are known in history books as the Palmer raids, after A. Mitchell Palmer, the attorney general who ordered them. He was aided in his efforts by a young Justice Department attorney named J. Edgar Hoover, whose experience helped lead to the emergence of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. President Woodrow Wilson set the table for the actions with his own harsh talk about subversives lurking within America’s borders, while a compliant judiciary gave the executive branch’s leaders every reason to think it wouldn’t stand in the way.
In the present, the White House adviser Stephen Miller has set a goal of arresting 3,000 immigrants a day. President Trump talks of using the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to American cities to help immigration agents fight the “enemy from within.” In the 1920s, government leaders also used incendiary speech to justify their actions. Anti-immigrant sentiment blurred with broader efforts to clamp down on free speech, and judicial due process often was ignored.
Eventually, the Wilson administration overreached, and the Palmer raids came to be seen as folly. Only about 800 of the more than 4,000 people detained were deported. The raids failed to achieve their main law-enforcement goal. The F.B.I.’s own history of the episode refers to them as a “nightmare.” In short, America was here before — and has come to regret it.
The Palmer raids were born of the country’s first big Red Scare — the fear that subversives who migrated from Russia and Eastern Europe would launch an American version of the Bolshevik Revolution. These fears began in the years leading up to World War I, persisted during the war and rolled into the war’s aftermath, when Communists in Moscow talked of global revolution.
The anxiety was fanned by Wilson, and not subtly. As early as 1915, in a message to Congress, he warned darkly of a threat posed by citizens “born under other flags but welcomed under our generous naturalization laws” who posed “the gravest threats against our national peace and safety.”
When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, the Wilson administration proposed to Congress an Espionage Act that would give the government sweeping powers to clamp down on free speech and to broadly censor the press to protect the war effort. The act’s press censorship provisions went too far even for a generally supportive Congress, which dropped them, but the broader law passed.
Soon, the Postal Service refused to deliver materials the postmaster general deemed subversive, and the Justice Department arrested and prosecuted citizens; in one case, nearly 100 union members were convicted of disrupting the war effort. Congress then passed a parallel act, the Immigration Act of 1918, which expanded the government’s powers to deport “undesirable aliens.”
After the war ended, the focus shifted from antiwar activists to those who were deemed to be social “radicals,” a term applied especially to immigrants from Russia and Germany. Certainly, some radical activity was underway. Anarchists openly advocated an end to the capitalist system, and hundreds of strikes were launched across the economy in 1919.
The spark that set off the Palmer raids came in mid-1919, when unknown people mailed bombs to prominent politicians and business leaders, including one that blew off the hands of a U.S. senator’s maid. On June 2, a bomber set off a device at Palmer’s house on R Street in Washington. The bomb destroyed the front of the building, startling a young couple named Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who lived across the street.
Palmer survived, and under public pressure to act, he set out to deport those he considered to be suspicious immigrants. He created a small division within the Justice Department to gather intelligence on the threat. Hoover was put in charge.
Using wartime authorities Congress had provided, federal agents struck in early November, bursting into apartments and meeting houses across 11 cities and arresting more than 1,000 immigrants, many of them Russians, some taken simply because their accent was deemed suspicious (for today, substitute suspicious tattoos). “Sometimes they had arrest warrants, but usually they simply arrested everyone they found,” the author and historian Christopher M. Finan wrote in his book “From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act.”
Some of those detained were later released, but others weren’t so lucky. “In December, with much public fanfare, a number of radicals were put on a ship dubbed the ‘Red Ark’ or ‘Soviet Ark’ by the press and deported to Russia,” according to an F.B.I. history of the episode.
Those raids were just a warm-up act. Weeks later, in January 1920, Palmer and Hoover oversaw a broader wave of arrests and detentions. In pursuit of what Palmer called “alien filth,” an estimated 3,000 people, including citizens and legal residents, were rounded up on suspicion of being members of Communist political parties seeking the overthrow of the government.
Palmer had gone too far. Doubts about the constitutionality of the exercise grew within the Wilson administration, in Congress and in the courts and press. Officials in the Labor Department, who initially were part of the effort, came to see it as legally unjustifiable. They concluded that most of those arrested had no interest in government overthrow and canceled most of the deportation orders. Congressional hearings were called to investigate. The raids also failed in their central mission: The government never found out who was responsible for the string of bombings.
When Palmer’s prediction that there would be a giant May Day insurrection proved unfounded, he and his raids were discredited. He once thought he would be a contender in the 1920 presidential elections, but distaste over his raids put an end to that.
There have been other episodes of government overreach, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. History doesn’t tell us whether a similar fate awaits the Trump administration’s initiatives, but the president would be wise to heed the lessons.
Then, as now, there were legitimate reasons for government action. In 1919, there was indeed anarchist activity; in 2025, the country is grappling with the consequences of the Biden administration’s failure to better secure the southern border. In both cases, a sympathetic Congress was happy to go along, at least at the outset.
History also shows that skirting civil liberties and due process can be effective and even popular in the short run — and tends to produce a backlash eventually. The brief F.B.I. recounting of the episode notes, somewhat cryptically, that “the Palmer raids were certainly not a bright spot for the young bureau.” The courts, led by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., began to look more critically at the broader efforts to shut down protests and free speech.
For the Trump administration, there are similar warning signs. Recent polls have found that Americans generally approve of deporting people who came to the country illegally, but don’t like the lack of due process surrounding deportations or sending immigrants to prisons in other countries. It’s true there is little sign a Republican-controlled Congress has any interest in putting the brakes on Trump policies, but even partisan lawmakers eventually respond to public sentiment, as they did after the Palmer raids.
Meanwhile, courts are putting up more roadblocks. A federal judge recently said that the administration’s push to arrest and deport foreign students for their pro-Palestinian activism was illegal and declared, “We are not, and we must not become, a nation that imprisons and deports people because we are afraid of what they have to tell us.” A Trump-appointed judge blocked the deployment of out-of-state National Guard troops to Oregon.
Palmer didn’t think he had overstepped. Rather, he chided Congress for not giving him more tools to help in the “sweeping processes of arrests and deportation of seditious aliens.” He did succeed in setting off a new national sensitivity to civil liberties. In direct response to the Palmer raids, a small group of lawyers, social workers and activists created the American Civil Liberties Union.
Gerald F. Seib, a former longtime Wall Street Journal reporter and editor, is the author of “We Should Have Seen It Coming: From Reagan to Trump, a Front-Row Seat to a Political Revolution.” He has been a resident fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics and the Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics, and is working on a biography of Robert Dole.
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