6 events in Passaic County with a date

A look back at US' checkered immigration history

By: David M. Zimmer
NorthJersey.com
USA Today Network - New Jersey

..... In his first week in office, President Donald Trump, took swift action on immigration, signing 10 execute orders and issuing several directives aimed at fulfilling his promises of mass deportations and stricter border security.
..... The orders and directives set the stage for a significant increase in raids targeting immigrants who entered the country illegally, with a focus on those with a criminal history. Officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have reported a sharp rise in arrests as daily detentions outpace the highest figures seen during the Obama administration.
..... In America's recent past, there have been other historic raids on immigrant communities to counter political and social unrest and to appease calls to protect national security.
..... Here are a few notable ones:

The Palmer Raids

..... Born during America's first Red Scare a period of intense anti-immigrant sentiment driven by fears of anarchism and Bolshevism after World War I - the Palmer Raids of 1919 ad 1920 were a nationwide crackdown led by U.S. attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer.
..... The campaign kicked off following a series of anarchist bombings, including one targeting Palmer's Washington, D.C., home and another in Paterson in 1919/ Later in 1919, arrests of suspected radicals began under new laws such as the Sedition Act and, near the end of the year, the government deported a group of suspected rascals to Russia abroad a ship dubbed the "Soviet Ark," according to newspaper reports.
..... Palmer escalated the efforts with what became known as the "Palmer Raids." In a nationwide operation led by the federal government," local police in major cities arrested thousands of suspected anarchists and communists. The raids, however, spiraled into chaos. Poor planning and flimsy intelligence led to widespread violations of civil liberties, including warrant less arrests and detentions without due process, according to FBI records.
..... In Paterson, federal agents and local police arrested dozens of suspected anarchists, raided their meeting spaces and confiscated literature in what was one of the most aggressive crackdowns in the country. Kenyon Zimmer, now a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote in "The Whole World is our Country: Mitigation and Anarchism in the United States, 1885-1940." those arrested faced deportation, and many were sent to their countries of origin without trail.
.... The raids disrupted committees, silence activists and left immigrant workers fearful of further reprisals. They also drew criticism. By 1921, public opinion had shifted against the Red Scare's overreach, and many deport ion cases were dismissed for lack of evidence.

Japanese Internment

..... In the wake of the Pearl Harbor bombing, fear and suspicion cast a dark shadow over Japanese Americans. The situation quickly escalated.
..... Under executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, more than 112,000 Japanese Americans - including nearly 70,000 U.S. citizens - were removed from their homes and relocated to internment camps, according to records kept by the National Archives.
..... the order was implemented by Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt and targeted Japanese Americans along the West Coast. There entire families were given mere days to abandon homes, businesses and possessions. Temporary "assembly centers" housed many in re purposed racetracks and fairgrounds. Eventually, they were relocated to isolated internment camps such as Manzanar in California and Heart Mountain in Wyoming, according to federal reports. Conditions were harsh. those interned often had to stay in tar-papered barracks and subsist on limited resources.
..... the program sparked constitutional challenges, most notably from three Japanese Americans: Gordon Hirabayashi, Fred Korematsu and Mitsuye Endo.
..... The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the government's actions in the cases involving Hirabayashi and Korematus but sided with Endo, ruling that loyal citizens could not be detained without case. Justice Frank Murphy, dissenting in Korematsu, condemned the internment as "racial discrimination" foreign to American ideals, federal records show.
..... Despite the injustice, Japanese Americans demonstrated resilience. the 442nd Regimental combat Team, composed entirely of Japanese American soldiers, became the most decorated unit of World War II. In 1988, Congress formally apologized with the Civil Liberties Act. Signed by President Ronald Reagan, the act also awarded reparations to survivors.

"Operation Wetback"

..... In the mid-2oth century, Mexican American organizations such as the American GI Forum and the League of United Latin American Citizen took stance on immigration that seemed at odds with their later advocacy for undocumented immigrants. In 1953, the American GI Forum circulated a report warning of an "invasion" of Mexican laborers that threatened "our economy" and "our American way of life."
..... The pamphlet echoed the social unrest of the era. At that time, the Bracero Program, a temporary labor initiative importing millions of Mexican workers since World War II, was drawing backlash form the GI Forum and others for allegedly depressing wages and fostering illegal immigrants.
..... In 1954, the U.S. government launched "Operation Wetback," a large-scale deportation effort targeting Mexican immigrants. The operation came three years after a report from President Harry Truman's Commission on Migratory Labor warned that illegal immigration was "virtually an invasion." The report blamed undocumented mitigation for low wages and social unrest in the Southwest.
.... the operation started on June 8, 1954, in California and Arizona before expanding to Texas and the Midwest. Relying heavily on publicly and intimidation to encourage voluntary repatriation, it saw thousands of migrants leave on there own, according to record kept by the U.S. House of Representatives archives. In Texas, more than 63,000 individual self-deported, while Border Patrol agents detained another 42,000 in a single month, records show. Nationwide, the federal government reported nearly 1.1 million apprehensions over the course of the operation.
..... While the raids disrupted agricultures in California and Arizona, the federal government reassured farm owners by expanding the Bracero Program, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute. this also softened criticism from the Mexican government, labor unions and even some Mexican American civil rights groups. Undocumented migration nonetheless surged after the U.S. government ended the Bracero Program in 1964 under renewed pressure form U.S. labor advocates and adopted the Mitigation and Nationality Act of 1965, according to Department of Homeland Security records.

Post 9/11 crackdown

..... The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, fundamentally changed the U.S. mitigation system. With all 19 hijackers entering the country on nonimmiggrant visas, immigration enforcement quickly became a primary tool in the :war on terror."
..... The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act expanded grounds for deportation, and those provisions came into play after the attacks. Other measures cane quickly from government officials under the banner of national security.
..... The Department of Justice, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, moved to detain more than 760 foreign nationals as "special interest detaineees." the vast majority of them were Arab, Muslim or South Asian men. Many were held for months without charges, before being deported for minor immigration violations. None was ultimately linked to the attacks, according to U.S. Department of Justice records.
..... The administration of President George W. Bush also launched the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System that required thousands of men form predominantly Muslim countries to register with mitigation authorities, be fingerprinted and check in periodically with the government. The program led to the detention and deportation of thousands, often for technical visa violations, before it was suspended in 2011, according to records kept by the American Civil Liberties Union.
..... Immigration enforcement further expanded. the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 enhanced information-sharing between agencies and gave law enforcement broad powers to detain and deport noncitiizens suspected of terrorism. The 2002 creation of the Department of Homeland Security, meanwhile, led to massive increases in funding for border security and mitigation arrests, according to department records.

Arizona's SB 1070

..... In April 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed Senate Bill 1070 into law, though it was the toughest immigration enforcement measure in the country at the time, the law was officially titled the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.
..... The act required stat and local police to verity the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally.
..... It also made it a state crime for undocumented immigrants to be in Arizona without proper registration documents, state records show.

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