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Last Saturday, federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested Mahmoud Khalil — a lawful permanent resident with a green card whose wife, a U.S. citizen, is eight months pregnant — over his participation in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University last year. He is currently being held in Louisiana. The Trump administration moved to deport Khalil, but a New York federal judge ruled that he cannot be expelled from the country while his case proceeds.
President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio portrayed the arrest as a defense of Jewish people, condemning the antisemitism of the Columbia protests. “The United States has zero tolerance for foreign visitors who support terrorists,” Rubio posted on X. The official White House account was more blunt: “SHALOM, MAHMOUD,” it posted.
But Rubio’s legal pretense for holding Khalil relies on a provision from an obscure law written by an antisemite that targeted Jewish immigrants — including Holocaust survivors.
The McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, known formally as the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, empowers the secretary of state to expel foreign nationals who pose a threat to the United States. While the government has not yet explained to a judge precisely why Khalil meets that qualification, the president’s spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, said that Khalil had “organized group protests that not only disrupted college campus classes and harassed Jewish American students and made them feel unsafe on their own college campus, but also distributed pro-Hamas propaganda fliers with the logo of Hamas.” Leavitt claimed to be in possession of such fliers but said she “didn’t think it was worth the dignity” of sharing them with reporters and has not provided further evidence.
“This is the first arrest of many to come,” Trump posted on his social media platform, Truth Social.
All Americans should be concerned about that. But American Jews should be deeply alarmed.
The McCarran-Walter Act was designed primarily to detain, deport and otherwise bar entry visas to communists. But while it did not mention Jews specifically, its practical function barred the immigration of many European Jews from entering the United States. Its author, Pat McCarran, a conservative Democrat from Nevada, was a dogged antisemite who likely intended the legislation to keep the United States safe not just from communists, but from Jews. In recent years, his racist and antisemitic record led some Democrats to call for removing a statue honoring him from the U.S. Capitol, and in 2021, the Las Vegas airport was renamed from McCarran International to Harry Reid International, in honor of the late Democratic senator who represented Nevada in Congress for decades.
“This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with,” Rubio said of Khalil — who, again, is a green card holder with a legal right to be in the United States — on Wednesday. “No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card, by the way.” As of this writing, Rubio has not publicly commented on the history behind the law he’s invoked or its exclusion of Holocaust survivors.
That the administration is dusting off this Cold War-era law, purportedly to protect American Jews, is not merely ironic. It’s a disingenuous cover for something much more dangerous, and no one — especially American Jews — should buy it.
The McCarran-Walter Act was a sweeping piece of U.S. immigration legislation that reinforced the country’s existing immigration laws. Passed during the early years of the Cold War, it reflected popular fears of communism, internal subversion and national security threats. It also calcified restrictive immigration quotas per country, which — while they didn’t target Jews specifically —pointedly disadvantaged Jews from Eastern Europe, a region with large Jewish populations. It also significantly expanded the government’s ability to exclude, deport and control individuals based on their political beliefs and affiliations.
McCarran had a history of casting Jews as subversive communist threats to the U.S. He opposed only three of President Franklin Roosevelt’s nominations — Felix Frankfurter for the Supreme Court, Jerome Frank for the Court of Appeals and Gregory Hankin for the D.C. Public Utilities Commission. As Roosevelt aide James Rowe told the president, “These three have nothing in common except they are Jews. There is no question of McCarran’s anti-Semitism. As you may remember he tried to make out Frankfurter to be a communist.”
In a private note to his wife in 1952, McCarran wrote that “the Jews are misleading” Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson in his campaign. And his opponents labeled his earlier legislation, the Internal Security Act of 1950 — which established repressive measures against suspected communists, including detention during national emergencies — the “concentration camp bill.”
The McCarran-Walter Act extended similarly stringent principles to immigration. Although Democratic President Harry Truman vetoed the bill, criticizing it as discriminatory and inconsistent with American democratic values, Congress, operating at the height of anti-communist hysteria, overrode his veto on a bipartisan basis.
The act’s impact on Jewish immigration was particularly severe. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees sought asylum in the United States, but the bill reinforced the national origins quota system originally established in 1924, a scheme that limited immigration from Southern Europe (Greeks, Italians) and Eastern Europe (Poles, Jews) and effectively barred immigration from Asia altogether, while heavily favoring those from Western and Northern Europe. By reinforcing these quotas, the McCarran-Walter act prevented Jews in Soviet-controlled territories from entering the U.S. Additionally, the law’s suspicion of those with leftist political affiliations or past involvement in labor and socialist movements further disadvantaged Jews, even if they hailed from Western Europe.
While it was unfashionable in the aftermath of the Holocaust to voice antisemitic intent openly, the original sponsors of the 1924 act were quite explicit in their disdain for Asians, Jews and other non-Western Europeans. Its sponsor, Sen. David Reed of Pennsylvania, wrote in The New York Times that the quota system was necessary in part because “the races of men who have been coming to us in recent years are wholly dissimilar to the native-born Americans.” Many historians have little doubt that McCarran and other hardliners still maintained this position.
Apart from its immigration provisions, McCarran’s law allowed for the denial of passports to individuals deemed subversive and provided for the prohibition or deportation of non-citizens who were members of communist or totalitarian organizations — even if they had been in the country for years.
The list of notables caught up in McCarran’s dragnet speaks to the odiousness of his legislation.
The actor Charlie Chaplin was denied reentry to the U.S. in 1952 for his alleged communist ties. The Danish labor leader Claus Lauritz Clausen was deported. Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois, left-wing civil rights leaders (in addition to their cultural and scholarly achievements, respectively) were denied passports, as was the playwright Arthur Miller. Pablo Neruda, the poet; Gabriel García Márquez, the novelist; and Pierre Trudeau, the future Labor prime minister of Canada, were all denied entry at certain points due to their alleged communist ties.
At the time of its enactment, Democratic Sen. Herbert Lehman of New York lamented that the bill “directly and cruelly denies all that America is and stands for. That act bristles with hostility against the alien and the foreign-born. It is a law conceived in suspicion and brought forth in fear — fear of the stranger, suspicion of every alien.”
Americans would do well to heed Lehman’s warning — especially American Jews.
The idea that Trump’s White House is primarily concerned about campus antisemitism is risible. Jewish Americans can hardly take comfort in its coziness with advocates of Christian nationalism like retired Gen. Michael Flynn, who in 2021 told a group of conservative Christians that “if we are going to have one nation under God, which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God.”
The administration, and particularly the president, also keeps close company with a number of figures who traffic in antisemitic tropes and conspiracy theories. Trump infamously dined with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist and Holocaust denier. His former chief adviser, Steve Bannon — who denied that the controversial gesture he made at CPAC last month was a Nazi salute — recently claimed that “the number-one enemy to the people in Israel are American Jews that do not support Israel and do not support MAGA.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), one of Trump’s allies in Congress, shared the Jewish Space Laser conspiracy. And then there’s the newly appointed deputy spokesperson at the Department of Defense, who spread antisemitic tropes on social media targeting the memory of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was lynched in Georgia in 1913 over false accusations of raping and murdering a young girl.
In the wake of Frank’s murder, leaders of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith founded the Anti-Defamation League, an organization tasked with fighting anti-Jewish bigotry. Over time, and particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust, the organization’s mandate expanded to address widespread educational, housing and employment restrictions against African Americans, Jews and other ethnic and racial minorities.
But today’s ADL welcomed the news of Khalil’s arrest, viewing it as one of a “bold set of efforts to counter campus antisemitism.” Ignoring the sordid antisemitic history of the very law that the administration invoked to disappear a legal resident for his political activities, the organization has apparently decided to throw its lot in with an administration brimming with hostility toward Jews and other non-Christian minorities.
One does not need to approve of Khalil’s politics, or the Columbia protesters’ willful targeting of Jewish students, to understand what’s really at stake. I certainly don’t: I wrote one of the first articles warning that the left’s obnoxious response to the tragedy of Oct. 7 would lead many liberal Jews to rethink their political allegiances.
But the McCarran-Walter Act was and is a blunt instrument meant to silence political dissent and ethnically cleanse the U.S. population. It’s a relic of the Cold War era that brought shame, not strength, to the country it purported to protect. When the state can knock on your door in the middle of the night, everyone is unsafe. And rarely does it work out well for Jews.
English (US)