Is the crackdown on pro-Palestinian activism the new Red Scare?
Judge Geoffrey Crawford compared Mohsen Mahdawi’s detention to the Palmer Raids and McCarthy era
Mohsen Mahdawi speaks at a protest at Columbia University on Nov. 9, 2023. Photo by Mukta Joshi/Getty Images
By Hannah Feuer May 6, 2025
When a federal judge last week ordered pro-Palestinian activist and Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi to be released from detention, he included in his decision an unusually pointed historical comparison.
“Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids,” Judge Geoffrey W. Crawford wrote. As was the case during the anti-communist crackdowns of the 20th century, the detained students have been charged with no crime and appear to be held on the basis of their political ideology.
The comparison is notable in part because Jewish immigrants were a primary target of the Palmer Raids, a series of crackdowns in 1919 and 1920 in which law enforcement arrested suspected communists and anarchists and deported many of them to the Soviet Union.
Now, the same tactics employed against leftist Jews during the first and second Red Scares — targeting immigrants, creating blacklists, and accusations of disloyalty — are today being used against Palestinian activists in the name of combating antisemitism.
What were the Palmer Raids?
In June 1919, a bomb exploded outside the Washington, D.C., home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. The explosion was one of several attacks carried out by self-proclaimed anarchists that year, including a number of mailed bombs sent to politicians and business leaders across the country just two months earlier.
The attempted bombings stoked fears of a Soviet conspiracy to overthrow the U.S. government. The 1917 Russian Revolution had brought the Bolsheviks to power, and as postwar inflation and labor strikes swept America, public pressure intensified to respond forcefully against suspected radicals.
Under Palmer’s direction and with help from a young J. Edgar Hoover, federal law enforcement raided union offices, leftist bookstores, meeting halls, and, in one case, an algebra class for immigrants while it was in session, with the teacher being beaten by Justice Department agents.
Thousands of people were arrested, often solely based on their membership in leftist political groups. Hundreds were deported, many to the newly formed Soviet Union aboard a ship the press dubbed the “Soviet Ark” — and yes, the reference was biblical. “Just as the sailing of the Ark that Noah built was a pledge for the preservation of the human race,” wrote the New York Evening Journal, “so the sailing of the Ark of the Soviet is a pledge for the preservation of America.”
Authorities zeroed in on immigrants — especially Jewish and Italian activists — after a judge threw out one of Palmer’s early cases, ruling that the defendants had merely exercised their right to free speech. Noncitizens were an easier target under the Immigration Act of 1918, which allowed the government to deport “aliens who are anarchists.” A majority of those arrested were released, but often after being held in detention, sometimes without access to lawyers or even being told the charges against them for some time.
Among those pursued: the famous Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman, who founded the magazine Mother Earth and traveled the country advocating for access to birth control. She was deported to the Soviet Union in 1919.
‘Not our proudest moment’
Mahdawi, a 34-year-old undergraduate and co-founder of Columbia’s Palestinian Student Union, had been held in a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Vermont for two weeks before his release last Wednesday. Immigration authorities arrested the green card holder at what he hoped would be a naturalization interview to become a U.S. citizen.
In his decision, Crawford noted that while friends describe Mahdawi as a peaceful consensus builder, his speech would be protected by the First Amendment “even if he were a firebrand.”
Mahdawi’s arrest followed the detention of a number of pro-Palestinian activists, including fellow Columbia student activist Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk, whose lawyers say she is being retaliated against for an op-ed she co-authored in The Tufts Daily criticizing the university’s response to a resolution passed by the student senate calling on Tufts to divest from companies with ties to Israel.
The Trump administration has invoked the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 to justify the deportations. The McCarthy-era law allows the government to deport individuals who the U.S. Secretary of State “has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”
In Wednesday’s hearing, Crawford pressed the Trump administration’s lawyer about the government’s use of McCarthy-era cases, pointing out that time in history was “not our proudest moment.”
In his decision, he also emphasized the historical role of the courts in pushing back against government overreach, calling the detentions in the name of national security a “persistent modern wrong.”
“The wheel of history has come around again,” he wrote, “but as before these times of excess will pass.”
