The Notorious Palmer Raids
Attorney General Palmer turned to Plan B: use immigration laws to go after alien leftists, who could be deported regardless of whether they were violent or not. A 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover was ordered to investigate and identify the targets. That November, Palmer oversaw a nationwide police dragnet that went after labor activists, socialists, communists, and anarchists. The operation particularly focused on Eastern European Jews and Italian immigrants, and sought to deport them along with other “undesirable” foreigners. Basic civil rights were ignored – Hoover later acknowledged “clear cases of brutality” – as roughly 10,000 were rounded up across the country. Of those, approximately 3500 were held in detention. Eventually, 556 resident aliens and naturalized citizens were deported.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) was founded in response to the raids. It released a report that carefully documented illegal arrests, entrapment, and unlawful detentions. At the time, however, most Americans, still in the grip of panic and a Red Scare, applauded the Palmer raids. Finally, in June, 1920, a federal judge decried the Department of Justice’s actions, and ordered the release of seventeen detained aliens. He wrote: “a mob is a mob, whether made up of Government officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice, or of criminals and loafers and the vicious classes“. That finally brought the raids to an end.
