Family Separation and Lives in Limbo: U.S. Immigration Policy in the 1920s and during the Trump Administration

The Southern Poverty Law Center has recently published a series of emails by Stephen Miller, senior advisor to President Donald Trump, praising President Calvin Coolidge and the immigration laws of the 1920s (Hayden 2019). While the racism underlying immigration policy in the 1920s and today has been discussed elsewhere, less has been written about family separation then and now (Morris 2019; Okrent 2019).

By family separation, I do not mean exclusively the zero tolerance policy that led the Trump administration to send parents to criminal court and render their children “unaccompanied.” (Arguably, though, the 1920s had an equivalent to this: unmarried immigrant women with children were assumed to be sexually immoral and economically dependent and could be deported without their children [Gardner 2005, 163–65; Moloney 2012, 45–53) What I mean is a whole litany of polices—adopted in the 1920s and today—that not only keep families apart but keep them in a prolonged state of limbo without any assured refuge or status.

It is important to emphasize this because Miller’s emails promote the myth that halting immigration in and of itself allows for integration of those already in the United States. Indeed, Miller claimed Calvin Coolidge agreed with a right-wing radio host that there should be no immigration for several years “for assimilation purposes” (Hayden 2019). ¹ This has been an obfuscating and misleading argument echoed by cultural commentators from Louis Adamic to David Frum. ² Contrary to this point of view, my research in the historical archive and firsthand interviews I have conducted while working at Refugees International show that restricting the admission of relatives leaves immigrants and refugees in the United States feeling unsettled and divided. Indeed, in the 1920s and over the past three years, the federal government put policies in place that restricted admission and impeded integration. My research shows that policies separating families not only exclude newcomers but also prevent those already in the United States from feeling and becoming American.

In the 1920s, impediments to naturalization abounded, especially on racial grounds (Fox and Bloemraad 2015; Bruyneel 2004; Craver 2009). Moreover, although champions of integration continued their culturally oriented programming for immigrants and the second generation at the local level, many came to them with legal questions about how to reunite with family members under the new quota regime (Selig 2008; Ziegler-McPherson 2009). Today, the Trump administration has sought to block access to permanent residence and naturalization to the foreign born and to deny the rights, entitlements, and benefits of citizenship to their U.S. citizen children (Kerwin and Warren 2019). Application processing delays at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) force many immigrants to wait years for status and citizenship after submitting applications (Chen 2019). Though localities have tried to create sanctuaries (NILC 2019) and litigators stalled implementation of a “public charge” rule limiting legal immigration of relatives (Reichlin-Melnick 2019; Kruzel 2019), fear and rumors about the new rule and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests during appointments at ICE offices, courthouses, and workplaces have upended the lives of immigrant families and impeded the schooling, healthcare, housing, and nutrition of American-born children of immigrant parents (Dias 2019; House Committee on Education and Labor 2019; Capps 2020). On April 22, 2020, the president signed a proclamation that, in the name of protecting American workers, bars admission of the spouses and young children of legal permanent residents (Trump 2020). This proclamation built upon previous executive orders banning immigration from certain mostly Muslim-majority and African countries.

The drastic exclusionary laws of the 1920s stranded many refugees abroad and in transit countries and far from their relatives in the United States. Transatlantic migration was limited by World War I, and, wary that the armistice would usher in waves of refugees from Southern and Eastern Europe, many congressmen and future president Coolidge proposed suspending all migration for several years. This did not come to pass, but the 1921 law imposed the first numerical cap on admissions—drastically reducing the number who could immigrate—without providing exemptions from the quota for family members of those already in the United States. The 1924 quota law lowered admissions further and provided exemptions for immediate family members of U.S. citizens but not for those of legal residents.

The chaotic situation at the port of New York in the summer of 1921 was not unlike that at JFK airport after the issuance of the first Muslim ban of the Trump administration. Refugees languished in boats in the harbor, having arrived just after quotas were already filled. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) admitted some of them temporarily, sent others back to the ports they sailed from, with everything being very ad hoc. ³ For example, a social worker provided the INS with a list of four cases of young Armenians, all coming to the United States to join uncles and siblings, whose cases had been handled differently during the same month; two were excluded as excess quota, one paroled to her brother, and one admitted temporarily on bond (Hurlbutt 1923). The only explanation the Immigration Bureau could provide for this disparate treatment was that “no particular hardship” was felt to be involved in the exclusions because each had a parent remaining abroad (Husband 1923). Immigration officials argued that deportation to relatives remaining overseas was humane—regardless of past experiences or future prospects there.

Most fundamentally, there was a refusal to recognize that the postwar migrants were refugees. Many of the migrants were Jews and Armenians who had experienced almost a decade of war and flight before arriving in the United States in the early 1920s, having fled persecution, lived in camps and in transit for years, and been recently rendered stateless and unable to return “home” at all or without risk of future persecution. Immigration officials and federal judges refused to consider this predicament as meriting any special exception to exclusion. Their definition of persecution was extremely narrow. In 1925, 45-year-old Gulizar Azizian arrived at Ellis Island with her 9-year-old daughter Vartanoosh; they were not permitted even to enter temporarily to stay with relatives because Gulizar was illiterate and had little money. She claimed she had suffered religious persecution between 1915 and 1917 and that she had been “always a refugee” since then, not permitted to work when living briefly in Constantinople, unable to speak the language when living briefly in Athens, and “cheated two or three times” by travel agents when in transit through Marseilles. “I have lost everything, including 22 male persons in our entire family,” Gulizar told an unsympathetic immigration inspector. “I have nobody to go back to” (Azizian 1925). Denied admission, Gulizar and Vartanoosh appealed to a federal judge to no avail. “While common knowledge enables us to recognize in this most unfortunate woman a victim of what are too well known as ‘Armenian massacres,’” the court wrote, “neither evidence nor common report enables us to say that what happened in Urmia in 1917 was a religious persecution, as distinguished from robbery and banditry at a time and in a place of social dissolution” (US ex. rel. Azizian v. Curran 1926).

The same year Gulizar tried to enter the United States, the U.S. Naturalization Bureau directed examiners to prevent the naturalization of men with wives and children abroad on the grounds that the men had chosen to abandon their families. The policy effectively prevented refugee families from uniting in the United States since only citizens could bring over relatives outside the quota. Many turned to smugglers. Under these immigration laws, a case worker observed, “people are realizing more and more the fact that the chance of bringing their relatives to this country is very small . . . compelling them to resort to illegal means” (“Report” 1925; see also Schacher 2013). Those who entered the United States illegally and those who overstayed after being admitted temporarily were left completely in the shadows. As one advocate told Congress in 1929, “To have people here who cannot become citizens and who cannot be deported . . . creates a bad atmosphere in the country . . . they have a Damocles sword hanging over their heads all the time” that “affect[s] their conduct in all other matters” (Kohler 1930).

So much of what happened in the 1920s—what I learned from years of archival research—resembles what is happening now—what I have heard from asylum seekers, refugees, and their advocates over the past year. Between March 2019 and January 2020, I traveled to the U.S.-Mexico border ten times for week-long trips. On each trip I observed proceedings in U.S. immigration court for, or interviewed in shelters and encampments in Mexico, at least a dozen people affected by the Trump administration’s Migration Protection Protocols (or Remain in Mexico) program. In addition, during the summer and early fall of 2019, I conducted fifteen interviews with resettled refugees and others affected by the Trump administration’s Muslim ban. I found that these deterrent and exclusionary policies in no way help immigrants or refugees already in the United States or bring us together as a country.

For example, I spoke to a Somalian refugee who was resettled in the United States a few years ago and then applied for refugee status for her children. Her younger children arrived in the United States in 2018. Her eldest son, now 19, remains in Ethiopia, his application mired in administrative processing, a victim of the Trump administration’s policies toward refugees from countries subject to the Muslim ban. “I worry about him, because of the danger there and my inability to reach him,” or speed approval of his case, she told me. “He is the one who remembers the death of his father, attempts by his uncle to take the younger children. . . . He has nightmares and went through all of this; he’s the one . . . who suffered the most in Somalia” and is most in need of refuge, she said. Beyond feeling guilty, she feels torn and uncertain. “I feel like part of my body is ripped off from me, like an arm. . . . My other children are adjusting and don’t remember as much. They are drifting away—they have a future life here—while my eldest, their own brother, is still back there, afraid for his life. . . . The younger children ask me to bring him and when will he come. And I don’t have an answer” (Schacher 2019).

On my trips to the southern border, I was struck not only by the ways that the Remain in Mexico Policy—which requires asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are adjudicated in the United States—affects those migrants shut out but also those who are in the United States. Most obviously, the policy has led parents living in insecure and unhealthy camps in Matamoros to send their young children into the United States alone (Sieff 2019). Other family separations are less visible: in Tijuana, I met a woman who was too scared to wait there for weeks until her court date, so she returned to Guatemala and will not be able to see her older daughter, who was separated from her at the border and detained in the United States, for years. But separation goes both ways. I met a Salvadoran American—a naturalized U.S. citizen—who traveled to Matamoros from Florida to try to help his wife and kids who were stuck there because of the Remain in Mexico policy.

And then there are the limbo cases. I met a Honduran woman and her four-year-old son in Juarez. The woman was a member of a small indigenous tribe whose leaders have been targeted for assassination. Her husband was shot in broad daylight, the police did nothing, and the killers continued to threaten her family. She fled north with proof of what happened. Soon after she was put in Remain in Mexico, a man tried to take her son. She spent the next several weeks holed up in a rented room, running out of money for food, her son getting steadily sicker. On her third screening with an asylum officer regarding her fear of waiting in Mexico, she was exempted from the program and allowed to remain in the United States with her father who has lived in Texas for more than 20 years with Temporary Protected Status, which the Trump administration is trying to terminate. ⁴ By spring 2020, she had still not been given a court date to proceed with her asylum case. She and her son are on the U.S. side of the border but have no clear path to work authorization, needed services, and secure status.

The Trump administration claims Remain in Mexico is necessary to weed out asylum claims lacking in merit. But the administration is simultaneously narrowing the grounds upon which one can claim asylum in the United States. Previously, the U.S. government accepted that families almost always comprise particular social groups, meaning that asylum seekers had strong claims if they were threatened or harmed by persecutors who wanted to punish their family members. Matter of L-E-A, a recent decision by Attorney General Barr, disputes the designation of most families as social groups and has made it much more difficult for Central Americans to win asylum if their fear of persecution is based on their family members having been directly targeted by gangs (Matter of L-E-A 2019). Lawyers representing families living in Texas are already seeing the effects of the decision, especially on children who arrive with fathers who had been targeted. ⁵ Moreover, beginning in the summer of 2019, the Trump administration began prohibiting those who transited a third country before entering the United States from applying for asylum. As a result, Central American fathers were only eligible for withholding of removal, which did not allow for derivative applications and so provided no relief for an accompanying child. Nor does withholding of removal allow fathers to apply to bring other family members to the United States. It is not a permanent status—but one in limbo. ⁶

One last comparison between the 1920s and today is important to raise. As mentioned, when migrants with relatives in the United States arrived after the quota was exhausted in the 1920s, the immigration authorities would sometimes exclude them so that they would be “reunited” with family members abroad. They even suggested deporting not only the arrivals but also their relatives already in the United States—in other words, deporting entire families who had no remaining oversees relatives. In early 1922, the Immigration Bureau refused to admit a woman and her children who were seeking to join her husband and other children already in the United States. Instead, the bureau suggested that the entire family be deported together. “I cannot understand how the father and the other children got in last April,” an immigration official asserted, insisting “the separation of the family took place at that time and not now. The present act does not separate a family but merely bars the reuniting of the family by bringing the rest of them here. There is no bar to their being reunited by the father returning with them” (Henning 1922). Apparently, this is exactly the kind of family unity the Trump administration supports. The Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) recommends returning any unaccompanied child who arrives in the United States to a parent in their home country (HSAC 2019). Stephen Miller is also trying to deport from the United States any undocumented relative of an unaccompanied child who comes forward to sponsor them (Miroff 2019). Indeed, the administration has insisted on the deportation of critically ill children and their families, as well as the deportation of parents of U.S. citizen children receiving specialized medical care in the United States, thus pushing those children into precarity (House Committee on Oversight and Reform 2019; Matter of J-J-G- 2020). In these ways, the current administration’s policies go far beyond impeding admission of newcomers and mirror the policies of the 1920s.