Donald Trump has promised to deport millions of immigrants on “Day One,” boasting that it will be the “largest deportation operation in American history,” though there are questions about both the legality of his plan and its potentially steep price tag. As history shows us, U.S. mass deportations are nothing new, Politico reports. In fact, to accomplish his goal, the president-elect is promising to invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime law that allows the president to deport non-citizens deemed an enemy of the U.S. On the campaign trail, Trump declared that he would use the law to carry out “Operation Aurora” — arresting and deporting immigrant criminals like the now-infamous Tren de Aragua gang that made headlines in Aurora, Colo. Over the years, the biggest “mass deportations” in the U.S. have been, by and large, high-pressure publicity campaigns that stoked such fear among immigrants that they chose to “self-deport.”
Back in the 1800’s, the United States faced one of its first big immigration crises. The potato famine in Ireland caused widespread poverty, and as Irish immigrants flocked to the U.S. by the millions. Thanks to an anti-poverty law in Massachusetts, state authorities in the mid-1800s were given the legal basis to deport foreigners who relied on state-funded resources or charity-based almshouses. The rationale began as a financial one, but quickly expanded to include ethnic and religious considerations. By the late 19th century, the federal government had taken a more active role with immigration and began redefining who counted as “excludable and deportable.” In the spring of 1919, Carlo Valdinoci, a young radical anarchist from Italy, set off a bomb in front of the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer in Washington, D.C. Reprisal was swift: Under Palmer’s direction, a series of raids and mass arrests were conducted. Palmer made deportations his central focus, declaring that 90 percent of anarchist threats on U.S. soil were “traceable to aliens.” During the Great Depression, increased economic pressure and strained resources stoked xenophobia and accusations that immigrants, particularly Mexicans, were taking jobs needed by U.S. citizens. President Herbert Hoover touted plans guaranteeing “American jobs for real Americans.” Informal raids and sweeps were conducted in major cities in border states like California but also in Michigan and Illinois. It’s estimated that by the mid-1930s, over a million Mexicans were returned to Mexico.
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