Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched a major national campaign to disrupt any movements sympathetic to socialism, communism, or anarchism in 1919. He relied on new, more restrictive immigration laws that allowed for the deportation of anyone espousing the violent overthrow of the US government. He argued that anyone who was a member of an organization that supported the Soviet Revolution was making such an espousal, even when the group formally adhered to a strategy of nonviolent political change.
