Freedom of Speech
9781613108918
418 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The Arrest of American Citizens for Deportation. The American people ought to be startled out of their complacent acquiescence in these raids by the confinement of hundreds of their fellow-citizens in jails, without the slightest charge of crime or possibility of such charge under any law of the United States. The government actually contends that it has the right to issue so-called alien warrants, which state no evidence or facts whatever beyond a perfunctory repetition of clauses of the Deportation Act, and yet are the only substitute for an indictment in these proceedings, against any individuals, whether aliens or naturalized citizens or native-born citizens, arresting them whenever and wherever found, and holding them in custody until the question of citizenship is decided by the immigration authorities. It contends that a court has no jurisdiction to release an American citizen who has never been out of his native country from Deer Island or Ellis Island, or any other deportation jail, until the immigration official and the Secretary of Labor on appeal have denied his citizenship. Experience in the Chinese cases shows that these proceedings frequently last for many months. “It follows that on the theory now urged the right of native-born citizens to liberty, perhaps for months, lies at the mercy of the immigration authorities,” and that even after the order of deportation is finally issued against the citizen, he cannot obtain the right from a court to remain in this country unless the proceedings were manifestly unfair or otherwise illegal. The case of Peter Frank, an American citizen of Swampscott, Massachusetts, is typical. The warrant of arrest, which he never saw, began, “Whereas from evidence submitted to me, it appears that the alien, Peter Frank, who landed at an unknown port on or about the 1st day of January, 1919,” and went on to charge membership in the stereotyped words of the statute in six kinds of violent organizations, without naming a single one or describing it concretely. All the Boston warrants were in just this form. It was impossible for him to tell from it with what he was really charged. Moreover, no address or other identification of Frank was given, so that there was nothing to show that another man of the same name in another city was not intended. In his petition for habeas corpus, which was verified by the evidence, Frank states that he was born in Ohio and was always a citizen; that four days previously immigration officers broke into his house at one o’clock in the morning, arrested him, searched his house and carried off papers, confined him in the Lynn police station and on Deer Island, refused to allow friends or counsel to visit him, and ejected from the immigration office the man who started judicial proceedings in his behalf. Nevertheless, Commissioner Skeffington still contended that Frank was an alien, and that the burden of proof was on him to establish citizenship. The only evidence which was offered to justify his confinement was a questionnaire, on which Frank had answered that he was born in Cincinnati and was not a member of either the Communist or Socialist party or any other organization, but the Shoe Workers’ Union. At the end of this paper the government had stencilled, “I, the under-signed, not a citizen of the United States, on oath depose, etc.,” and Frank had hastily signed without crossing out the “not.” On this flimsy fact the immigration officials kept him five days in jail until against their will he was discharged by Judge George W. Anderson.
