Trump and McCarthyism

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Yungseo Chung is fighting deportation, and PhD student Ranjani Srinivasan self-deported to Canada after her visa was revoked.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.