Why No “Ashcroft Raids”? By James Fulford

On the evening of January 2, 1920, raids by the Federal Department of Justice took place in 30 cities across the United States.

In all, the Justice Department rounded up and deported about 3,000 people as foreign agitators, bomb-throwing anarchists, Communists and generally a menace to American society.

If you've heard of the Palmer Raids at all, you've mostly heard of them as the outrageous violation of civil rights, paranoia, witch hunt, and so on.

Building on earlier immigration laws, Congress passed the Deportation Act of 1918 with three purposes in mind. This law authorized the deportation of any alien who:

[1] opposed all organized government (anarchism);

[2] advocated the overthrow of the government "by force or violence"; or

[3] belonged to any organization teaching these views. For example, the Secretary of Labor eventually ruled that the Communist Party advocated violent revolution. Therefore, any alien who was a member of that organization could be deported. The Bureau of Immigration (then part of the Department of Labor) often decided who would be deported under this law.

Even though deportation matters were not normally the concern of the Department of Justice, Attorney General Palmer soon created an alliance with officials in the Bureau of Immigration to find and deport alien "reds." J. Edgar Hoover, Palmer's chief investigating officer, ordered Justice Department agents to go undercover and join suspected radical organizations.

By December 1919, Palmer, Hoover, and their allies in the Bureau of Immigration had decided to arrest alien members of the Communist Party and other foreign radicals. Hoover issued the instructions to Department of Justice agents which called for the arrests to take place during a series of raids planned for the evening of January 2, 1920.

In 1921, Attorney General Palmer told a Senate Committee that: 

"I apologize for nothing that the Department of Justice has done.... I glory in it. I point with pride and enthusiasm to the results of that work; and if ... agents of the Department of Labor were a little rough and unkind ... with these alien agitators,... I think it might well be overlooked in the general good to the country."