Donald Trump has run in part on an outrageous proposals to deal with Islamist-inspired terrorism. He wants to ban Muslims from entering this country, as well as ban anyone from coming to this country from an area infested with terrorism and embark on the largest mass deportation in this country’s history.
But Politico recently learned that several Reagan administration officials bandied about a plan that would have been far more draconian than anything Trump has proposed. They seriously considered a proposal to inter and deport dozens of legal Muslim residents.
In 1986, in response to a wave of Islamist-inspired terrorist attacks, the Justice Department directed the Immigration and Naturalization Service to create the Alien Border Control Committee. Later that year, a subgroup responsible for “contingency plans,” known as Group IV, crafted a 41-page memo proposing a wide-ranging plan to round up a trove of legal alien residents from eight Middle Eastern and North African countries.
The memo, viewable here, makes for horrifying reading. It also has disturbing echoes of Trump’s Islamophobic proposals. Thousands of legal residents who were originally from Libya, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, and Morocco would be taken into custody and herded into a large 5,000-bed internment camp in Oakdale, Louisiana–roughly halfway between Alexandria and Lafayette.
Once there, they would be held without bond while immigration judges conducted in camera hearings based on classified evidence. They would then be deported en masse. Under this plan, the president would be empowered to bar the entry of “any class of aliens whose presence…was deemed detrimental to the public safety.”
The memo only came to light in January 1987, when eight Palestinian activists were arrested in Los Angeles and slated for deportation on trumped-up charges of material support to a Communist organization. While the case crawled through the legal system, someone leaked the INS memo to two of the attorneys for the “LA Eight,” Leonard Weinglass and Marc Van Der Hout. They realized that the LA Eight were a likely “test case” for the plan outlined in the INS memo.
Weinglass and Van Der Hout persuaded a federal judge that the LA Eight were being held for political reasons. The Supreme Court overturned the decision in 1998, though the charges against six of them were gradually dropped. Finally, in 2007, the government dropped charges against the last two Palestinians, Khader Hamide and Michel Shehadeh.
By then, however, this fundamentally un-American plan had long been dead. When the Japanese American Citizens League got word of the memo, it rekindled memories of the internment camps of World War II. The league managed to get the memo in the hands of then-Congressman Norman Mineta, who had been interned in one of those camps in 1942. Mineta testified about the memo before a House subcommittee later in 1987 during hearings on a bill for reparations to the survivors. As he saw it, this memo proved that this bill was “for today and the future as well.”
Politico notes that Trump may have “unwittingly” drawn from the ABC Committee’s proposal. However, the idea that anyone on the government payroll could even think this was a good idea at any time should send a chill down the spine of any fair-minded American.
