Digital & Print Membership
Yearly + Receive 8 free printed back issues
$420 Annually
Monthly + Receive 3 free printed back issues
$40 Monthly
Trump and McCarthyism
Political Deportations in Context
The Trump administration’s ramping up of political deportations is reminiscent of McCarthyism/Red Scare tactics; this is why the social movement left in this nation must insist on a consciousness of internationalism.
Even among all of Trump’s illegal and repressive acts, his targeting of students who are against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza stands out. It is not too early to say that the persecution of people for their political beliefs is a defining feature of the second Trump administration, as it is for all authoritarian states.
The list of pro-Palestine students singled out by the administration has grown exponentially. It includes multiple Columbia students: Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia are in ICE detention, undergrad Yungseo Chung is fighting deportation, and PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan self-deported to Canada after her visa was revoked. Cornell student organizer Momodou Taal has announced that he has also left the country rather than surrender to ICE and face an arduous legal battle. Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, ambushed by federal agents, is incarcerated in Louisiana, as is University of Alabama PhD student Alireza Doroudi. Georgetown visiting scholar Badar Khan Suri is still in detention after being accused by a Department of Homeland Security official of “spreading terrorist propaganda” due to his wife’s Palestinian identity and his solidarity with the Palestinian cause. As of April 25th, 2025, the Trump administration has reversed its earlier decision to revoke the legal status of thousands of international students yet warns of potential visa revocations for students in the future.
While aspects of this particular sociopolitical moment are unique, this form of state violence is not new to this country. During World War I, those dissenters who criticized U.S. involvement in the war—more often than not anti-draft pacifists, anarchists, and communists—were criminalized for expressing their opposition and faced arrest or imprisonment under the 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act. The politically motivated persecution of leftists further increased amid capitalist anxieties over the establishment of the Soviet Union. Under the 1918 Immigration Act, the government began to arrest alleged “subversive” individuals who had immigrated to the United States. Not long after the passing of that particular legislation, the 1919 Palmer Raids, helmed by J. Edgar Hoover in one of his first assignments at the Bureau of Investigation, led to the mass deportation of hundreds of socialists deemed dangerous agitators by federal law enforcement.
Throughout the Red Scare, foreign-born activists who espoused socialist views and organized against racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism in the United States found themselves particularly vulnerable to repression. The vicious witch hunt against radical leftists in the United States reached its second peak at the height of the McCarthy era in the mid-1950s. Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1954 hearings in which he investigated suspected communists, was also, famously, a young Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor.
At the same time, the Red Scare was a campaign to quash the momentum of the Black freedom struggle during a time of legalized racial segregation throughout the Southern United States. The Smith Act of 1940 required all non-citizen adults to register with the federal government, which then used the law to prosecute hundreds of leftists for allegedly wanting to overthrow the government. Under the Smith Act, Trinidad-born Black radical and Communist Party USA leader Claudia Jones was coerced into a voluntary removal to England in December 1955 after a lengthy legal battle, conviction, and debilitating incarceration. The introduction of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which the Trump administration is using today to justify its targeting of students, led to the rescinding of the U.S. passports of Black activists like Paul Robeson. In response to Robeson’s refusal to sign an affidavit denying membership in the Communist Party, the government prevented him from traveling outside the United States from 1950 to 1958, doing much to destroy his career as an actor and singer.
Although the mass anti-socialist persecution and paranoia receded, the state never stopped surveilling and restricting the political activities of those who advocated for an end to labor exploitation, structural racism, gender oppression, and all other hierarchies of dominance in U.S. society. The current assault on the Palestinian solidarity movement is particularly far-reaching and systematic, and the Trump regime is seeking to sow terror by snatching activists off the street and from their homes. But we should remember that during his first term, Trump dispatched federal agents in unmarked cars to abduct protesters at Black Lives Matter mobilizations. The difference is one of degree, not category.
The U.S. government capitalizes on moments of crisis to expand its capacity for violence, which it inevitably turns against those it perceives as political threats. After 9/11, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the Bush administration created the immigrant enforcement system that Trump is now using both to target students and carry out mass summary deportations. In the following years, the Biden and Obama administrations maintained and employed this system, even as they, unlike Trump, sought to hide from the public the cruel force they used to maintain nation-state borders. In 2012, the federal government spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement, which allowed for the dramatic increase in removals that led to Obama receiving the nickname “deporter-in-chief” from immigrants’ rights advocates. Repressive and racist in their own right, the Democratic Party handed Trump a loaded gun.
Defending the rights of student organizers is not high on the Democratic Party’s agenda. Party leaders have been likewise muted in their defense of deported Venezuelan immigrants as they endure multiple layers of brutality. As always, it falls to the left to resist fascism and stand in defense of the communities bearing the brunt of reactionary ideologies, and we must make it as clear as possible at this moment that we see all our fights as interconnected. The political clarity present in Mahmoud Khalil’s March 18th letter from ICE detention, in which he links his fate to that of a detained Senegalese man, should be internalized; the entire prison-industrial complex is unjust, and it is just one link in a chain of oppression that binds us all.
As the executive order to dismantle the Department of Education demonstrates, this administration wants U.S. citizens to be politically ignorant, isolated, and unable to see the world for what it really is. Historically, when Black organizers have participated in delegations throughout the Global South, they’ve connected their struggles as internally colonized people to those of oppressed people worldwide. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee sent delegations to recently decolonized African nations so that members could learn and exchange strategies for communal self-determination.
Now more than ever, a politics that holds a tenet of internationalism is the antidote to the rising tide of xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and imperialist propaganda in this country. We must insist upon seeing these borders that work to keep us apart as unnatural in the face of the state’s repression and abusive immigration practices. Only through global consciousness and solidarity will we achieve a world in which the autonomy of all living beings is respected, and power is not used to silence those fighting for justice.
More from: maya finoh
Keep reading:
Global Echoes of Resistance:
Artists Harnessing Art, Culture, and Ancestry
Nybé Ponzio
Global Echoes of Resistance:
Artists Harnessing Art, Culture, and Ancestry
Brea Andy
{
"article":
{
"title" : "Trump and McCarthyism: Political Deportations in Context",
"author" : "maya finoh",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/trump-mccartyism-political-deportations",
"date" : "2025-05-11 12:49:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/mahmoud.jpg",
"excerpt" : " The Trump administration’s ramping up of political deportations is reminiscent of McCarthyism/Red Scare tactics; this is why the social movement left in this nation must insist on a consciousness of internationalism.",
"content" : " The Trump administration’s ramping up of political deportations is reminiscent of McCarthyism/Red Scare tactics; this is why the social movement left in this nation must insist on a consciousness of internationalism.Even among all of Trump’s illegal and repressive acts, his targeting of students who are against the ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza stands out. It is not too early to say that the persecution of people for their political beliefs is a defining feature of the second Trump administration, as it is for all authoritarian states.The list of pro-Palestine students singled out by the administration has grown exponentially. It includes multiple Columbia students: Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia are in ICE detention, undergrad Yungseo Chung is fighting deportation, and PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan self-deported to Canada after her visa was revoked. Cornell student organizer Momodou Taal has announced that he has also left the country rather than surrender to ICE and face an arduous legal battle. Tufts PhD student Rumeysa Ozturk, ambushed by federal agents, is incarcerated in Louisiana, as is University of Alabama PhD student Alireza Doroudi. Georgetown visiting scholar Badar Khan Suri is still in detention after being accused by a Department of Homeland Security official of “spreading terrorist propaganda” due to his wife’s Palestinian identity and his solidarity with the Palestinian cause. As of April 25th, 2025, the Trump administration has reversed its earlier decision to revoke the legal status of thousands of international students yet warns of potential visa revocations for students in the future.While aspects of this particular sociopolitical moment are unique, this form of state violence is not new to this country. During World War I, those dissenters who criticized U.S. involvement in the war—more often than not anti-draft pacifists, anarchists, and communists—were criminalized for expressing their opposition and faced arrest or imprisonment under the 1917 Espionage Act and 1918 Sedition Act. The politically motivated persecution of leftists further increased amid capitalist anxieties over the establishment of the Soviet Union. Under the 1918 Immigration Act, the government began to arrest alleged “subversive” individuals who had immigrated to the United States. Not long after the passing of that particular legislation, the 1919 Palmer Raids, helmed by J. Edgar Hoover in one of his first assignments at the Bureau of Investigation, led to the mass deportation of hundreds of socialists deemed dangerous agitators by federal law enforcement.Throughout the Red Scare, foreign-born activists who espoused socialist views and organized against racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and imperialism in the United States found themselves particularly vulnerable to repression. The vicious witch hunt against radical leftists in the United States reached its second peak at the height of the McCarthy era in the mid-1950s. Roy Cohn, Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1954 hearings in which he investigated suspected communists, was also, famously, a young Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor.At the same time, the Red Scare was a campaign to quash the momentum of the Black freedom struggle during a time of legalized racial segregation throughout the Southern United States. The Smith Act of 1940 required all non-citizen adults to register with the federal government, which then used the law to prosecute hundreds of leftists for allegedly wanting to overthrow the government. Under the Smith Act, Trinidad-born Black radical and Communist Party USA leader Claudia Jones was coerced into a voluntary removal to England in December 1955 after a lengthy legal battle, conviction, and debilitating incarceration. The introduction of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which the Trump administration is using today to justify its targeting of students, led to the rescinding of the U.S. passports of Black activists like Paul Robeson. In response to Robeson’s refusal to sign an affidavit denying membership in the Communist Party, the government prevented him from traveling outside the United States from 1950 to 1958, doing much to destroy his career as an actor and singer.Although the mass anti-socialist persecution and paranoia receded, the state never stopped surveilling and restricting the political activities of those who advocated for an end to labor exploitation, structural racism, gender oppression, and all other hierarchies of dominance in U.S. society. The current assault on the Palestinian solidarity movement is particularly far-reaching and systematic, and the Trump regime is seeking to sow terror by snatching activists off the street and from their homes. But we should remember that during his first term, Trump dispatched federal agents in unmarked cars to abduct protesters at Black Lives Matter mobilizations. The difference is one of degree, not category.The U.S. government capitalizes on moments of crisis to expand its capacity for violence, which it inevitably turns against those it perceives as political threats. After 9/11, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, the Bush administration created the immigrant enforcement system that Trump is now using both to target students and carry out mass summary deportations. In the following years, the Biden and Obama administrations maintained and employed this system, even as they, unlike Trump, sought to hide from the public the cruel force they used to maintain nation-state borders. In 2012, the federal government spent $18 billion on immigration enforcement, which allowed for the dramatic increase in removals that led to Obama receiving the nickname “deporter-in-chief” from immigrants’ rights advocates. Repressive and racist in their own right, the Democratic Party handed Trump a loaded gun.Defending the rights of student organizers is not high on the Democratic Party’s agenda. Party leaders have been likewise muted in their defense of deported Venezuelan immigrants as they endure multiple layers of brutality. As always, it falls to the left to resist fascism and stand in defense of the communities bearing the brunt of reactionary ideologies, and we must make it as clear as possible at this moment that we see all our fights as interconnected. The political clarity present in Mahmoud Khalil’s March 18th letter from ICE detention, in which he links his fate to that of a detained Senegalese man, should be internalized; the entire prison-industrial complex is unjust, and it is just one link in a chain of oppression that binds us all.As the executive order to dismantle the Department of Education demonstrates, this administration wants U.S. citizens to be politically ignorant, isolated, and unable to see the world for what it really is. Historically, when Black organizers have participated in delegations throughout the Global South, they’ve connected their struggles as internally colonized people to those of oppressed people worldwide. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee sent delegations to recently decolonized African nations so that members could learn and exchange strategies for communal self-determination.Now more than ever, a politics that holds a tenet of internationalism is the antidote to the rising tide of xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and imperialist propaganda in this country. We must insist upon seeing these borders that work to keep us apart as unnatural in the face of the state’s repression and abusive immigration practices. Only through global consciousness and solidarity will we achieve a world in which the autonomy of all living beings is respected, and power is not used to silence those fighting for justice."
}
,
"relatedposts": [
{
"title" : "Black Liberation Views on Palestine",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/black-liberation-on-palestine",
"date" : "2025-10-17 09:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/mandela-keffiyeh.jpg",
"excerpt" : "",
"content" : "In understanding global politics, it is important to look at Black liberation struggles as one important source of moral perspective. So, when looking at Palestine, we look to Black leaders to see how they perceived the Palestinian struggle in relation to theirs, from the 1960’s to today.Why must we understand where the injustice lies? Because, as Desmond Tutu famously said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”{% for person in site.data.quotes-black-liberation-palestine %}{{ person.name }}{% for quote in person.quotes %}“{{ quote.text }}”{% if quote.source %}— {{ quote.source }}{% endif %}{% endfor %}{% endfor %}"
}
,
{
"title" : "First Anniversary Celebration of EIP",
"author" : "EIP Editors",
"category" : "events",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/1st-anniversary-of-eip",
"date" : "2025-10-14 18:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/WSA_EIP_Launch_Cover.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent Publishing",
"content" : "Celebrating One Year of Independent PublishingJoin Everything is Political on November 21st for the launch of our End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine.This members-only evening will feature a benefit dinner, cocktails, and live performances in celebration of a year of independent media, critical voices, and collective resistance.The EventNovember 21, 2025, 7-11pmLower Manhattan, New YorkLaunching our End-of-Year Special Edition MagazineSpecial appearances and performancesFood & Drink includedTickets are extremely limited, reserve yours now!Become an annual print member: get x back issues of EIP, receive the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine, and come to the Anniversary Celebration.$470Already a member? Sign in to get your special offer. Buy Ticket $150 Just $50 ! and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine Buy ticket $150 and get the End-of-Year Special Edition Magazine "
}
,
{
"title" : "Miu Miu Transforms the Apron From Trad Wife to Boss Lady: The sexiest thing in Paris was a work garment",
"author" : "Khaoula Ghanem",
"category" : "",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/miu-miu-transforms-the-apron-from-trad-wife-to-boss-lady",
"date" : "2025-10-14 13:05:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_MiuMiu_Apron.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.",
"content" : "Miuccia Prada has a habit of taking the least “fashion” thing in the room and making it the argument. For Spring 2026 at Miu Miu, the argument is the apron; staged not as a coy retro flourish but as a total system. The show’s mise-en-scène read like a canteen or factory floor with melamine-like tables, rationalist severity, a whiff of cleaning fluid. In other words, a runway designed to force a conversation about labor before any sparkle could distract us.From the opening look—German actress Sandra Hüller in a utilitarian deep-blue apron layered over a barn jacket and neat blue shirting—the thesis was loud: the “cover” becomes the thing itself. As silhouettes marched on, aprons multiplied and mutated—industrial drill cotton with front pockets, raw canvas, taffeta and cloqué silk, lace-edged versions that flirted with lingerie, even black leather and crystal-studded incarnations that reframed function as ornament. What the apron traditionally shields (clothes, bodies, “the good dress”) was inverted; the protection became the prized surface. Prada herself spelled it out: “The apron is my favorite piece of clothing… it symbolizes women, from factories through to serving to the home.”Miu Miu Spring 2026 Ready-to-Wear. SuppliedThis inversion matters historically. The apron’s earliest fashion-adjacent life was industrial. It served as a barrier against grease, heat, stain. It was a token of paid and unpaid care. Miu Miu tapped that lineage directly (canvas, work belts, D-ring hardware), then sliced it against domestic codes (florals, ruffles, crochet), and finally pushed into nightlife with bejeweled and leather bibs. The garment’s migration across materials made its social migrations visible. It is a kitchen apron, yes, but also one for labs, hospitals, and factories; the set and styling insisted on that plurality.What makes the apron such a loaded emblem is not just what it covers, but what it reveals about who has always been working. Before industrialization formalized labor into factory shifts and wages, women were already performing invisible labour, the kind that doesn’t exist on payrolls but sits at the foundation of every functioning society. They were cooking, cleaning, raising children, nursing the ill. These tasks were foundational to every economy and yet absent from every ledger. Even when women entered the industrial workforce, from textile plants to wartime assembly lines, their domestic responsibilities did not disappear, they doubled. In that context, the apron here is a quiet manifesto for the strength that goes unrecorded, unthanked, and yet keeps civilization running.The algorithmic rise of the “tradwife,” the influencer economy that packages domesticity as soft power, is the contemporary cultural shadow here. Miu Miu’s apron refuses that rehearsal. In fact, it’s intentionally awkward—oversized, undone, worn over bikinis or with sturdy shoes—so the viewer can’t flatten it into Pinterest-ready nostalgia. Critics noted the collection as a reclamation, a rebuttal to the flattening forces of the feed: the apron as a uniform for endurance rather than submission. The show notes framed it simply as “a consideration of the work of women,” a reminder that the invisible economies of effort—paid, unpaid, emotional—still structure daily life.If that sounds unusually explicit for a luxury runway, consider the designer. Prada trained as a mime at Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, earned a PhD in political science, joined the Italian Communist Party, and was active in the women’s rights movement in 1970s Milan. Those facts are not trivia; they are the grammar of her clothes. Decades of “ugly chic” were, essentially, a slow campaign against easy consumption and default beauty. In 2026, the apron becomes the newest dialect. An emblem drawn from leftist feminist history, recoded into a product that still has to sell. That tension—belief versus business—is the Miuccia paradox, and it’s precisely why these aprons read as statements, not trends.The runway narrative traced a journey from function to fetish. Early looks were squarely utilitarian—thick cottons, pocketed bibs—before migrating toward fragility and sparkle. Lace aprons laid transparently over swimmers; crystal-studded aprons slipped across cocktail territory; leather apron-dresses stiffened posture into armor. The sequencing proposed the same silhouette can encode labor, intimacy, and spectacle depending on fabrication. If most brands smuggle “workwear” in as set dressing, Miu Miu forced it onto the body as the central garment and an unmissable reminder that the feminine is often asked to be both shield and display at once.It’s instructive to read this collection against the house’s last mega-viral object: the micro-mini of Spring 2022, a pleated, raw-hem wafer that colonized timelines and magazine covers. That skirt’s thesis was exposure—hip bones and hemlines as post-lockdown spectacle, Y2K nostalgia framed as liberation-lite. The apron, ironically, covers. Where the micro-mini trafficked in the optics of freedom (and the speed of virality), the apron asks about the conditions that make freedom possible: who launders, who cooks, who cares? To move from “look at me” to “who is working here?” is a pivot from optics to ethics, without abandoning desire. (The aprons are, after all, deeply covetable.) In a platform economy that still rewards the shortest hemline with the biggest click-through, this is a sophisticated counter-program.Yet the designer is not romanticizing toil. There’s wit in the ruffles and perversity in the crystals; neither negate labor, they metabolize it. The most striking image is the apron treated as couture-adjacent. Traditionally, an apron protects the precious thing beneath; here, the apron is the precious thing. You could call that hypocrisy—luxurizing the uniform of workers. Or, strategy, insisting that the symbols of care and effort deserve visibility and investment.Of course, none of this exists in a vacuum. The “tradwife” script thrives because it is aesthetically legible and commercially scalable. It packages gender ideology as moodboard. Miu Miu counters with garments whose legibility flickers. The collection’s best looks ask viewers to reconcile tenderness with toughness, convenience with care, which is exactly the mental choreography demanded of women in every context from office to home to online.If you wanted a season-defining “It” item, you’ll still find it. The apron is poised to proliferate across fast-fashion and luxury alike. But the deeper success is structural: Miu Miu re-centered labor as an aesthetic category. That’s rarer than a viral skirt. It’s a reminder that clothes don’t merely decorate life, they describe and negotiate it. In making the apron the subject rather than the prop, Prada turned a garment of service into a platform for agency. It’s precisely the kind of cultural recursion you’d expect from a designer shaped by feminist politics, who never stopped treating fashion as an instrument of thought as much as style.The last image to hold onto is deceptively simple: a woman in an apron, neither fetishized nor infantilized, striding, hands free. Not a costume for nostalgia, not a meme for the feed, but a working uniform reframed, respected, and suddenly, undeniably beautiful. That is Miu Miu’s provocation for Spring 2026: the work behind the work, made visible at last."
}
]
}