America's Blueprint for Mass Deportations

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The American people gave President Donald Trump a mandate to carry out the largest deportation of illegal aliens in American history. While unprecedented in 2025, that same history actually shows removing millions of law-breaking foreigners is as American as apple pie. 

The Left insists any and all deportations are un-American and racist. In fact, removing troublesome migrants is one of our nation's great unsung traditions to rival another, more familiar pillar also from the 19th century: Assimilation. In generations past, Americans revolted against agricultural and business elites—who wanted ever more cheap labor—by demanding their government remove burdensome, dangerous, and wage-depressing immigrants.

And elected officials responded, deporting over 57 million people since 1882—more than any country in history. 

Across three specific eras, the U.S. chose different solutions to solve its over-immigration issue, each one with different lessons for America in 2025. In the mid-1800s, low-skilled Irish immigrants created a burden on charities and taxpayers. By the turn of the 20th century, radicalized immigrants from southern and eastern Europe created a national security threat by importing and acting on revolutionary leftist ideologies. And in the 1950s, Mexican immigrants took agricultural and factory jobs that poor Americans needed by flouting the country’s immigration laws. 

In each instance, the American government wisely listened to its own people and established new laws and policies to safeguard against future immigration crises. That's exactly the situation Donald Trump's second administration finds itself in today. 

Americans have deported 57 million people since 1882—more than any country in history.

The open border crisis caused by former President Joe Biden burdens the country in all three ways these previous waves of over-immigration burdened past generations of Americans: Unsustainable poverty, national security threats, and wage depression. 

This is no small challenge. Solving it will require the Trump administration devise a cocktail of these previously time-tested solutions and fight to see them through. But history—and the American people—are on his side.

Wave 1: Putting Americans' Welfare First

The Pilgrim Fathers didn't leave England in search of religious diversity, but unity. Understandably, their New England descendants were none too pleased when masses of poor Irish Catholics began outnumbering them in some Massachusetts communities in the 1850s, earning south Boston the nickname the "Irish Riviera." 

In 1794, Massachusetts passed one of the country's first deportation laws, authorizing officials to remove the foreign pauper to "any place beyond the sea, where he belongs."

Unlike the concurrent wave of German immigration, the destitute Irish fleeing the Potato Famine didn't have enough money to keep moving inland after they landed in America. Although tragic, this was hardly native Bostonians' fault or responsibility. 

Disease, mortality, and crime increased dramatically in the cramped city, as Irish immigrants outpaced available employment. By 1851, over a quarter of the city's population was Irish but owned nearly two-thirds of the liquor shops—an outrage to the temperance-minded New Englanders. 

Until 1875, states—not the federal government—dealt with the admittance, refusal, and deportation of immigrants. As the nation had no equivalent to Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) at the time, Massachusetts embarked on its own massive deportation program in the 1850s. Berkeley historian Hidetaka Hirota credits the state’s deportation of burdensome Irish immigrants as the basis of the federal deportation system today. The Bay State and New York dealt with the immigrant influx based on the English common poor law, which carried over to the American colonies. The poor law allowed communities to ban transients and beggars. 

Massachusetts kept it simple. It deported anyone without permanent residency who applied for welfare or charity. The state's 1788 law already prohibited foreigners likely to become a public burden from coming ashore and required all who did so to register with the local government. In 1794, it passed one of the country's first deportation laws, authorizing officials to remove the foreign pauper to "any place beyond the sea, where he belongs." 

Beginning in the early 1850s, Massachusetts officials regularly raided jails, hospitals, and insane asylums to deport foreign criminals and nuisances, often utilizing family separation as a cudgel. Like the migrant caravans today, many of the Irish entered the U.S. by land, arriving in Canada before entering New England. In these instances, Massachusetts authorities returned the migrants to Canada. The policy worked because of the fear it provoked among Irish and other foreigners in danger of deportation, prompting them to leave Massachusetts for another state or Canada before they heard a knock on the door.

Hirota estimates Massachusetts deported around 50,000 Irish during the middle of the 19th century—a staggering number, considering the state had less than a million residents in 1850 in a comparatively small government era. Today, this would translate to the U.S. deporting roughly 15 million people over a decade—about the number it would take to reduce the current illegal alien problem to irrelevance.

After the federal government took over immigration, Congress mandated health screenings for immigrants entering through Ellis Island to limit the medical burden new arrivals would place on the country. In the 1920s, Congress extended this to points of exit in Europe to double-check immigrants’ health.

Wave 2: Safeguarding the Homeland from Terrorists

The industrial prosperity at the turn of the 20th century helped America absorb more low-skilled immigrants than before. Employers benefitted from cheap labor, consumers from deflationary growth and increased consumer goods, and immigrants from higher living standards than previous waves of newcomers.

American historiography treats this period as one of quick melting pot-style assimilation compared with the alleged salad bowl-style non-assimilation of today. But many Gilded Age immigrants also came to the U.S. as transient laborers with no interest in joining the national melting pot. Had they remained apolitical laborers, only American union members would have objected to their presence, as many employers used them for strikebreakers. 

But even permanent settlers didn't shed their identities at Ellis Island and brought with them Old World views and venoms. In many ways, Eastern Europe—especially the Balkans—foreshadowed the instability of today’s Middle East. This marked an era of rising nationalism and socialism and importing millions from the troubled region quickly created a breeding ground for Europe's burgeoning revolutionary anarchism in American cities.

The Anarchist Melting Pot

According to anarchist Emma Goldman’s biographer Alice Wexler, "Revolutionary anarchism in America was largely an immigrant phenomenon." 

In 1900, the New York Herald wrote, "Anarchy has gained an effectual foothold among the Italian, German, French, Spanish, and other foreign residents" of Paterson, New Jersey and nearby cities. In 1908, the New York Times Magazine observed, "To-day [sic] the anarchistic cafes of the East Side are crowded with the comrades of many nations, and they all resemble Babel as much as a cellar can resemble a tower." 

Europeans did not introduce anarchism into the U.S., but only when dangerous immigrants "poisoned the blood of the country"—as Trump eloquently put it—did it take a violent turn.

The bucolic musings of American anarchists like Lysander Spooner, Henry David Thoreau, and Benjamin Tucker resembled modern libertarianism; while the radical screeds of European anarchists like Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, and Errico Malatesta anticipated the revolutionary overthrow of the state. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the "brains" of Al-Qaeda, even studied the writings of Bakunin, Russia's most prominent anarchist, and a British Home Secretary recommended those wishing to understand Islamic terror look to the anarchist and nihilist terrorists of the late 19th century.

Anarchist readership in the U.S. peaked in 1910 when subscribers to ideological periodicals—including 83 Italian publications in 12 states—reached over 100,000. New York Times journalist Israel Shenker noted that at its peak, the communist-anarchist Yiddish weekly Fraye Arbayter Shtime enjoyed 30,000 subscribers, which he estimated translated to at least 150,000 weekly readers.

After decades of tolerating a few bad apples so big business could have a fresh flow of strikebreakers, the pressure cooker of anarchist propaganda in immigrant communities exploded into mainstream society, prompting generational Americans to demand their government stem over-immigration. 

Like Antifa, foreign anarchists waged war on anything and anyone who represented the capitalist system they sought to destroy.

Luigi Galleani and his Galleanist disciples became the most dangerous anarchist terrorists in the U.S. His life followed a similar pattern of other anarchist immigrants. Exiled from Italy, France, Egypt, Great Britain—and even New Jersey—he fled to Canada before establishing residence in Vermont under a pseudonym. In Barre, Vermont, he published the Subversive Chronicle, which spread terrorist propaganda for 15 years among Italian-speaking immigrants before authorities shuttered it. A federal agent once described it as "the most rabid, seditious and anarchistic sheet ever published in this country." Luigi Galleani

Bombmaker Mario Buda helped Galleani develop a bombmaking manual for his terrorist disciples. The Galleanisti targeted police stations, court houses, and factories. One Galleanist poisoned 200 guests at a Catholic banquet with arsenic. They also waged mail bomb campaigns aimed at elected officials, judges, and industry leaders. Buda carried out the Wall Street Bombing of 1920, which remained the deadliest terrorist attack on American soil until the Oklahoma City Bombing 75 years later. It killed 38 people and injured 400, along with the horses hitched to the carriage containing 45 kilos of dynamite. 

According to Mario’s brother Carlo, "You heard Galleani speak, and you were ready to shoot the first policeman you saw." Wall Street Bombing of 1920

Like Antifa, they waged war on anything and anyone who represented the capitalist system they sought to destroy.

World War I became the catalyst to crack down on disloyal foreigners, as almost all anarchists opposed the war effort, either out of international proletarian solidarity or sympathy with the Central Powers. The Espionage Act of 1917 made it a crime punishable by a $10,000 fine ($270,000 in current dollars) and 20 years in prison for statements intended to harm American military success or aid the country’s enemies during war time. The Sedition Act of 1918 worked like the Alien Enemies Act of 1798—which Trump has cited as a possible tool to remove illegal aliens—proscribing the same penalties for speaking against the American form of government and Constitution or displaying the flag of a foreign enemy. 

The rise of the Soviet Union and the hordes of immigrants sympathetic to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution made acting on these law prescient. Labor unrest in 1919, involving millions of workers, also raised credible fears of a domestic Communist revolution, and some Members of Congress questioned Democratic Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s patriotism for acting timidly.

Palmer’s leniency ended when a bomb destroyed the first floor of his Georgetown home while his family was upstairs. His house happened to be across the street from Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt who were also home. The young assassin failed to escape the blast, and an Italian-English dictionary was found on his mangled body along with a pamphlet warning government leaders that an anarchist empire would soon create a more equitable world. 

The government didn't dally or convene a focus group to understand the cause of angst among Italian immigrant youth. Instead, Congress swiftly removed the three-year statute of limitations on deportations while courts ruled the government could lawfully revoke naturalized subversives’ citizenship. 

From that point on Palmer made deportations his central focus, noting, "fully 90 percent of the communist and anarchist agitation is traceable to aliens." The Justice Department launched dozens of "Palmer Raids" in 1919–20 to round up foreign anarchists. They deported thousands, including Galleani and eight of his associates. 

In a strategic move that Presidents Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower later copied, the government worked closely with the press to ensure deportations received widespread attention. This reassured the public elected officials were acting on their concerns and signaled to the "deportables" they were no longer welcome in America. Deportation agents made some immigrants walk in chains through the streets to the docks in view of newspaper cameras, and the transcontinental "Red Special" transported hundreds of alien radicals from Seattle—a hotbed of Communist activity—back to Ellis Island. From there, they joined their comrades on the "Red Ark" back to the Soviet Union to enjoy the Communism some of them had worked so long to establish in the Russian motherland. 

The Immigration Act of 1924 greatly reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe by setting quotas based on immigration levels from each country in the 1890 census. The effects were immediate. Immigration fell from 707,000 in 1924 to 294,000 just one year later.

President Theodore Roosevelt put it best in a 1903 speech on immigration and assimilation: 

It is urgently necessary to check and regulate our immigration by much more drastic laws than now exist . . . We freely extend the hand of welcome and of good-fellowship to every man, no matter what his creed or birthplace, who comes here honestly intent on becoming a good United States citizen . . . but we have a right and it is our duty to demand that he shall indeed become so . . . . There are certain ideas which he must give up. For instance, he must learn that American life is incompatible with any form of anarchy, or of any secret society having murder for its aim, whether at home or abroad.

Wave 3: Real Jobs for Real Americans

The success of Herbert Hoover's repatriation campaign did not come from Gestapo-style raids and Trail of Tears-style marches to train stations and ports, as the modern Left suggests. Nearly 90 percent came through self-deportation.

The Immigration Act of 1924 did not exclude anyone from the Western Hemisphere, which caused immigration from Latin America to increase. In the Roaring '20s, Mexican immigrants didn’t diminish employment opportunities for many American laborers. During the Great Depression, however, Americans were willing to take any job they could find. This created the need for repatriation until the economy could once again support transient immigrant laborers.

In his 1930 State of the Union, President Herbert Hoover noted, "Under conditions of current unemployment it is obvious that persons coming to the United States seeking work would likely become either a direct or indirect public charge." He touted his administration's reduction of Mexican visas from 4,000 to 250 per month and urged Congress to strengthen deportation laws "so as to more fully rid ourselves of criminal aliens." 

Hoover didn’t just mean aliens who committed violent crimes. He referred specifically to those who "entered the country in violation of the immigration laws," adding, "The very method of their entry indicates their objectionable character, and our law-abiding foreign-born residents suffer in consequence." Census data show that from 1900–1920, roughly 200,000 people from Mexico alone entered illegally.  

Hoover launched a repatriation campaign for Mexican immigrants, which he promoted with the slogan "Real Jobs for Real Americans." Although estimates vary by source, most agree anywhere from 500,000 to 1 million people returned to Mexico during his administration and FDR’s first two terms. This constituted roughly a third of U.S. residents in 1930 of Mexican ancestry.

Source: Brian Gratton and Emily Merchant, “Immigration, Repatriation, and Deportation: The Mexican-Origin Population in the United States, 1920–1950,” International Immigration Review 47, no. 4 (2013): 944, 955, https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12054

The program's success did not come through Gestapo-style raids and Trail of Tears-style marches to train stations and ports, as the modern Left suggests. Nearly 90 percent came through self-deportation. Unlike Trump’s first administration, Hoover faced no opposition at home or abroad for his deportation program. In fact, local governments were often more enthusiastic about it than the federal government and worked closely with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the precursor to ICE. The Mexican government also supported the program, valuing the agricultural and industrial skills its citizens had gained in the U.S. 

Just as modern deportation policy can lean on employers through E-Verify, some states encouraged self-deportation by requiring all public employees to be American citizens and threatening employers with steep fines or jail time if they hired immigrants. Unable to find employment, tens of thousands of Mexicans left voluntarily. 

Source: Brian Gratton and Emily Merchant, "Immigration, Repatriation, and Deportation: The Mexican-Origin Population in the United States, 1920-1950," International Immigration Review 47, no. 4 (2013) 944, 955, https://doi.org/10.1111/imre.12054

World War II created a massive labor shortage, prompting the government to launch the Bracero guest worker program. However, this invited so much mass immigration that by the 1950s, Mexican immigration to the U.S. had reached about a million per year. President Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor called it "virtually an invasion." In 1951, Truman wrote Mexican President Miguel Aleman Valdes that if progress was to be "made toward improving working conditions and living standards for [American] citizens and for the contract workers from Mexico . . . both governments would have to "shut off the stream of Mexican citizens immigrating illegally into the United States."

In 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower's Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner General Joseph Swing launched Operation Wetback, the largest short-term deportation program in American history, in 1954. At the time, the term was not considered offensive, and even the New York Times ran a story in 1952 entitled "House Passes Bill to Curb Wetbacks."

The operation didn't last long… because it didn't take long. Americans had just won a war on two fronts; no one saw solving illegal immigration as too complicated. 

Overall, the operation detained around 1.1 million individuals and returned around 300,000 deep into Mexico, mostly by plane and boat. Like the repatriation program of the 1930s, the operation’s success depended on media cooperation and coordination. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, U.S. Border Patrol head Harlon Carter promised to round up illegal aliens from factories and farms and hold them in detention facilities until deportation. By making the deportations seem larger and more aggressive than they were, the government-media coordination prompted tens of thousands of Mexicans to self-deport. 

A Golden Future Ahead

Illegal aliens pose a financial burden on American taxpayers in 2025 just as over-immigration from Ireland posed a financial burden on Massachusetts taxpayers in the mid-19th century. Using the carrot-and-stick approach, the federal government can empower and coerce local law enforcement to identify and detain those in their jurisdictions illegally. The Trump administration began this approach on day one by withdrawing federal law enforcement funds from sanctuary cities. On January 31, the administration extended this approach to transportation dollars. Continuing to penalize or reward communities based on cooperation with ICE will speed up the deportation of the millions of foreign charity cases the Biden administration let in. 

Just as revolutionary anarchists at the turn of the 20th century sought to overthrow the U.S. government and Constitution, the U.S. faces modern threats like Islamic terrorism and Chinese Communist espionage. The DOJ should crack down on foreign students and radicals who abuse their student visas or work permits to become activists and agitate against the U.S. and its interests as it did during the Palmer Raids. 

Most Americans agree the government should deport and bar those who burden taxpayers or pose a national security threat. But productive illegal aliens who don’t commit crimes—besides entering illegally or overstaying their visas—post the greatest threat to American workers by driving down wages and forming cartels in certain industries, such as farm labor and construction. 

The Trump administration should take a page from the playbooks of Hoover and Eisenhower to prompt massive self-deportation of illegal aliens in the labor force. By staging hundreds of high-profile raids, millions who work in the U.S. illegally will self-deport. The left-wing media will gladly oblige under the mistaken impression that providing deportation coverage will hurt Trump in the 2026 midterms.

We don't face a choice between deportation and assimilation; the choice is between unity and division, national identity or national fragmentation. The Left gave us the rotten fruit of multi-culturalism in the name of "diversity," and American voters soundly rejected it at the polls. It's up to President Trump—and patriots everywhere—to lead the nation into a brighter future. The blueprint's in our past.