Linking Issues of National Identity and Sovereignty to the Origins of Formal Deportation Policy in the United States
Two cases of deportation, both from the mid-1920s, reveal the disturbing realities of deportation that are often ignored in the political reasoning used in discourse around this form of forced removal. During this time, Captain William M. Hanson, who served as a U.S. immigration agent in Texas, developed a habit of deporting political refugees to the Mexican government: in 1925, he arranged the deportation of Mexican general Abelardo Hinojosa, and in 1926, he arranged a similar deportation of Colonel Manuel Demetrio Torres. These political refugees were taken into custody by Mexican government, and shortly thereafter they were shot and killed (Hester, 2008, 170). While in some ways, the cases of these two men are exceptional given their political status and relationship to the nation to which they were deported, the tragedy of their abhorrent deaths nonetheless enlightens key issues surrounding the issue of deportation at large.
First, it forces us to reckon with a very basic fact that is often ignored when thinking of deportation as national political issue: deportees are not only removed from the U.S. but are also moved to another nation. This international perspective of the issue of forced removal helps us to see what has been called the “deportation regime,” an interlocking network of nations, who work together to ensure that deportation remains a viable option to the government of each (Peutz and De Genova, 2010, 2). The cases of General Hinojosa and Colonel Torres reveal the way that this “regime” can be corrupted and abused at a more localized level by men such as Captain Hanson for personal gain at the expense of deportees’ lives, for it was revealed later in court proceedings that Hanson had had direct contact with the Mexican government and had received economic benefits for his agreement to deport the two political refugees (Hester, 2008, 171).
Even more, the cases of Hinojosa and Torres serve to strip away the basic arguments for deportation and reveal the underlying logic for this form of removal. The basic argument for deportation states that the U.S. government should remove individuals, who threaten the nation or its citizens. As there is no evidence that either Hinojosa or Torres posed such a threat, their removal causes us to question this basic argument and calls attention to the much deeper roots of the U.S. deportation policy. The legal precedent that allowed for the removal of these political refugees dates back to the 1893 Supreme Court case Fong Yue Ting (Hester, 2008, 5). In this case, the Chinese immigrants, who stood before the Court to argue against their own deportation, asked a bold question: Did the federal government even have the right to deport immigrants? On the basis of what it called “plenary power,” the Supreme Court ruled that the power of deportation did, indeed, belong to the federal government as a trait of the nation’s sovereignty (ibid, 5).
While this may seem a basic enough argument, entangling the sovereignty of the U.S. with its ability to forcibly remove certain groups of its occupants requires a complex line reasoning to understand the very nature of the nation. Logically, this assertion by the Supreme Court has placed the U.S. on very uncertain terms, for the nation at one time or another has derived not only political power but, according to the Supreme Court, its very sovereignty from its ability to deport Chinese workers, anarchists, suspected prostitutes, public charges, and contract laborers (Hester, 2008, 1). Such an understanding of U.S. sovereignty would mean that with every revision to its first formal deportation policy, the U.S. government has altered a core part of the nation’s identity, and further that national sovereignty itself has been in flux since 1882, when that first formal deportation policy was enacted (ibid, 1). Therefore, while an argument for the merits of deportation attempts to secure certain powers for the U.S., it counterintuitively strips power from the nation and puts it in the hands of the very people it attempts to target. While political refugees like Hinojosa and Torres may be dependent on the U.S. for their bodily wellbeing, the nation as a whole is dependent on their existence, and ultimately their death as a result of forced removal, for its ability to understand its own identity.
As such, we see in the cases of Hinojosa and Torres both the terrible individual effects that the U.S. policy of deportation can have as well as the unstable logic on which the practice of deportation as a whole relies. On an individual scale, this logic, which underlies every deportation that occurs in this nation, has caused innumerable crises for people, like Hinojosa and Torres who have suffered from its neglectful and compassionless nature. On a national scale as well, this logic has likewise caused crisis for the very nation it alleges to protect as it strips U.S. of the means to identify itself without the aid of the cruel realities of the national deportation policy. As I sit in New Haven, CT, a location whose status as a sanctuary city has inflamed local tensions around the topics of refuge and deportation, I have a heightened appreciation for the historical value of cases like those of Hinojosa and Torres, for beyond the obvious tragedy of their individual deaths, the stories of these two political refugees have revealed in much broader scope, the unstable and dangerous links between U.S. national identity and its fluctuating definitions of deportability.
Works Cited
Hester, Torrie. Deportation: origins of a national and international power. Philadelphia: Univeristy of Pennsylvania, 2008. Print.
Peutz, Nathalie, and Nicholas De Genova. The deportation regime: sovereignty, space, and the freedom of movement. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Print.
