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Demonizing Dissent
People forget that hardly anything is scarier to our, or perhaps any, government than political dissent. It seems like peaceful noisy dissent is the most bothersome, perhaps because it's more complicated to stop. This has been true for hundreds of years in the U.S., and well documented from the time of the Palmer raids early in the 20th century. The FBI really was founded to try to go after those pesky immigrants who sought a 6 day work week and an 8 hour work day. The FBI and local police have been doing that kind of work ever since, alongside of fighting actual crime.
Not infrequently, the U.S. gets particularly exercised by international connections. New immigrant groups come to the U.S., and repeatedly have found themselves targeted for various reasons. For Salvadorans, black South Africans, Palestinians and many others, part of what led to their surveillance was their support for a liberation movement in their homeland. Because those particular liberation movements were not consonant with U.S. foreign policy, they were the object of investigation, demonization, deportation, exclusion and worse.
Immigrants (remember Emma Goldman) had been deported earlier in the century for protesting U.S. entry into World War I, and for espousing the then new communist or anarchist ideology. Later, the McCarran-Walter law and other laws led to the deportation of non-citizens for membership in organizations, and outlawed others from entering the U.S. because of similar membership in organizations and beliefs, and was particularly enforced post-World War II.
"Terrorists" Replace "Communists"
After McCarran-Walter was finally abolished in 1994, it was quickly supplanted by the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), signed in 1996. Anti-communism was replaced by anti-terrorism. In the few years before AEDPA was passed, the government had passed executive orders and guidelines and started introducing bills concerning "terrorists" and "foreign terrorist organizations and countries." These laid the intellectual groundwork for the transformation to a focus on anti-terrorism as the Soviet Union was collapsing and therefore the object of our enmity had to be modified.
As part of its modified arsenal against terrorists, the government decided that it should and could finally codify the use of secret evidence in deportation-related proceedings, rather than continue to rely on some slightly off-point cases...