American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born

AMERICAN COMMITTEE FOR PROTECTION OF FOREIGN BORN. For almost fifty years, the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born (ACPFB) battled the federal government’s attempts to deport and denaturalize foreign-born Americans. Founded in 1933, largely on the initiative of Roger Baldwin of the American Civil Liberties Union, the committee came to specialize in the defense of radical aliens. During periods of political repression, the organization’s caseload increased, but even during the relatively liberal New Deal years the federal government was under pressure to crack down on the Left; and the ACPFB soon found itself defending Harry Bridges and some other Communist and left-wing labor leaders against deportation. The anticommunist furor of the McCarthy period in the late 1940s and early 1950s inundated the organization with business, especially since mainstream civil liberties organizations refused to defend Communists.

The organization was closely allied with the Communist Party and its conception of its mission drew heavily on the Party’s theory of “labor defense,” which required a two-pronged campaign to mobilize public opinion against political deportations as well as challenge them in the courts. The ACPFB’s success, however, depended more on the overall political climate than it did on the organization’s ability to win mass support or on the legal skills of its attorneys. In the early 1940s, during the high point of U.S.-Soviet friendship and tolerance for the Communist Party, the organization was able to win some important legal victories as well as attract the assistance of such eminently respectable Americans as Wendell Willkie, the Republican presidential candidate in 1940, who helped the organization litigate a successful Supreme Court case against the denaturalization of the California Communist leader William Schneiderman.

With the onset of the Cold War, the federal government began an intensive drive against foreign-born radicals. By the beginning of 1947, the Immigration and Naturalization Service had initiated deportation proceedings against more than a hundred people, many of whom it tried to detain without bail. The ACPFB handled most of these cases, litigating several of them all the way to the Supreme Court. The pace of deportation activity increased during the early 1950s with the passage of the McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950 and the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act in 1952. By 1953, Eisenhower’s attorney general, Herbert Brownell, was threatening to deport ten thousand “subversive” aliens.
Though a few hundred foreign-born leftists did have to leave the country, most of the people threatened with deportation for political reasons were able to remain. The ACPFB handled many of their cases, though it is unclear how helpful the organization’s efforts were. Until the late 1950s, the federal judiciary’s reluctance to curb the government’s anticommunist campaign meant that ACPFB attorneys were able to win few victories in the courts. Nonetheless, the slowness of the judicial process and the technicalities that the organization was able to exploit kept many otherwise deportable aliens in this country until changes in the political climate ended the danger.

The committee’s activities as a mass-action organization were less successful. Its leaders, especially its executive secretary, Abner Green, and the heads of its Detroit and Los Angeles chapters, Saul Grossman and Rose Chernin, labored valiantly, lobbying against repressive legislation and organizing support groups for the people threatened with deportation. But because the organization was considered by the federal government and by those mainstream liberals who knew of its work to be a Communist front, it was never able to broaden the opposition to political deportations from its beleaguered enclave on the far Left.

In addition, the organization was severely handicapped in all its activities by official harassment. Individual leaders were called before congressional committees or were themselves threatened with deportation. Abner Green actually spent three months in Danbury Federal Penitentiary for refusing to give a federal grand jury a list of contributors to a bail fund for Communist Party leaders indicted under the Smith Act; and Rose Chernin had to fight off a Smith Act prosecution as well as an attempt to denaturalize her. The organization was harassed as well. Attorney General Tom Clark put it on his list of subversive organizations. The New York State attorney general revoked its status as a charitable organization, and in April 1953 Attorney General Brownell tried to make it register with the Subversive Activities Control Board as a “Communist-front organization.” The ACPFB successfully fought the registration order, but the struggle lasted for thirteen years and severely drained the organization’s resources.

Even so, the ACPFB did not fold. Though the pace of politically motivated deportations did begin to slacken by the late 1950s, there were still enough new cases as well as old ones to keep the ACPFB busy throughout the sixties. By the 1970s, however, the political deportations that had been the ACPFB’s main concern had largely ended and the group shifted its focus to that of organizing opposition to sanctions against employers of illegal aliens. In 1982 it merged with the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committee and went out of business.

Smith, Louise Pettibone. Torch of Liberty. New York: Dwight-King, 1959.

Records of the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born. Guide. Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. http://dlib.nyu.edu/findingaids/html/tamwag/tam_086/bioghist.html

American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born Records, 1926-1980s. Finding Aid. Special Collections Research Center. University of Michigan Libraries. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclead/umich-scl-acpfb?view=text