Bisbee Deportation: Phelps Dodge and Vigilantes Illegally Deport 1,300 Striking Miners

At dawn on July 12, 1917, a sheriff’s posse organized by Phelps Dodge copper company rounded up approximately 1,300 striking miners, labor organizers, and bystanders in Bisbee, Arizona, loaded them into cattle cars, and deported them to the New Mexico desert without food or water. The mass kidnapping was orchestrated by Phelps Dodge president Walter Douglas in collaboration with Sheriff Harry Wheeler and the Cochise County Loyalty League, a vigilante group recruited from company employees and local businessmen.

The IWW had organized a strike at Phelps Dodge’s copper mines demanding improved safety conditions, an end to discriminatory hiring against immigrants, and better wages. Companies exploited wartime hysteria, falsely portraying the strike as German-backed sabotage of the war effort. The deportees were abandoned in Hermanas, New Mexico, left in the desert until U.S. Army troops provided food and shelter. Many never returned to Arizona; those who attempted to return were arrested or turned back by armed guards.

Despite clear violations of kidnapping, false imprisonment, and civil rights laws, no significant prosecutions occurred. A presidential mediation commission condemned the deportation, and a federal grand jury indicted 21 participants, but the Supreme Court in United States v. Wheeler (1920) dismissed the case, ruling that the federal government lacked jurisdiction over civil rights violations by private actors. Arizona authorities declined state prosecution. The Bisbee Deportation exemplifies how corporate power could mobilize state violence against labor organizing with complete impunity, setting a precedent for anti-labor terrorism throughout the 20th century.