The deportation of an Iranian student shows the unchecked power of Customs and Border Protection

History shows that on-the-ground officials can make migration policies more restrictive

By Andrew Urban
Andrew Urban is an associate professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick and the author of "Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century."
1/23/2020, 7:16:58 a.m.

College campuses have been gearing up for start of the spring 2020 semester. But this week, Mohammad Shahab Dehghani Hossein Abadi, an Iranian student with a valid visa to study at Northeastern University in Boston, was stopped by Customs and Border Protection, detained and then deported — despite a federal court order that should have delayed his removal. His attorneys have no idea why CBP decided to revoke his visa or why the agency ignored the court order. Judge Richard Stearns of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts urged federal officials to return Dehghani to Boston, but dispiritingly admitted, “I don’t think they’re going to listen to me.”

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Officials at airports, borders and ports have considerable leeway to make decisions about visitors and immigrants. This is not a new phenomenon, unique to either the Trump administration or CBP. Bureaucratic officials have long had the power to shape migration policy on the ground. The career of William Williams, the commissioner of immigration at Ellis Island in the early part of the 20th century, is instructive. He used his considerable power to interpret immigration laws to exclude people he saw as undesirable, but his spitefulness eventually led to censure.

Williams was fond of saying “the law knows no sentiment” and that “favoritism” toward certain immigrants would not be tolerated. Due to such statements, he enjoyed a reputation as a progressive reformer during his two stints in charge of the world’s busiest immigration station from 1902 to 1905 and again from 1909 to 1913, when approximately five million immigrants were processed for entry, rejection or detention.

But Williams was anything but a neutral administrator. He voiced racist theories about the threat that high levels of Eastern and Southern European immigration posed to the United States, and he urged Congress to enact legislation that would more effectively limit their entry. In a 1906 speech in Philadelphia, Williams argued that even “the wildest enthusiast on the subject of unrestricted immigration would hardly claim that the United States could be socially, politically or industrially what it is today had it been peopled exclusively by the races of Russia, Austria, and Southern Italy.” In a 1911 report to Washington, Williams advised organizations that supported the more liberal enforcement of immigration laws to ask whether they would feel the same about “Africans and Hindoos” seeking entry. He implied the danger posed by certain classes of European immigrants was just as grave as this scenario designed to terrify white Americans.

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