Palmer Raids Escalate with Coordinated Mass Arrests Across 33 Cities

On January 2, 1920, the Palmer Raids reached their peak with coordinated mass arrests in 33 cities across the United States, targeting alleged radicals, communists, and anarchists. Under the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover, who headed the Justice Department’s General Intelligence Division, federal agents conducted simultaneous raids on suspected radical organizations and meeting places. The operations resulted in thousands of arrests, often without warrants, with many detainees held incommunicado without access to lawyers. The raids were characterized by extreme brutality, with reports of beatings, forced confessions, and wholesale violations of civil liberties.

Acting Secretary of Labor Louis Post emerged as a key opponent of Palmer’s tactics, carefully reviewing deportation cases and reversing more than 70 percent of the 1,600 deportation warrants Palmer sought. Post’s resistance infuriated Palmer and his allies, but Post’s insistence on due process prevented the mass deportations Palmer envisioned. The National Civil Liberties Bureau (which became the ACLU) and other civil liberties organizations publicly challenged Palmer’s actions as unconstitutional. A report by a group of lawyers and legal scholars documented systematic abuses, including arrests without warrants, denial of counsel, prolonged detention, and coerced confessions.

The January raids marked the high point of the First Red Scare but also triggered a backlash that ultimately ended Palmer’s campaign. When Palmer’s predicted May Day 1920 revolution failed to materialize, his credibility collapsed. Federal judges began releasing detainees and condemning the Justice Department’s methods. The Palmer Raids established dangerous precedents for using immigration enforcement and national security rhetoric to justify mass political repression, circumventing constitutional protections by targeting non-citizens. This template—combining anti-immigrant sentiment, national security panic, and surveillance infrastructure to crush political dissent—would be repeatedly deployed throughout the twentieth century, from McCarthyism through the War on Terror. The raids also demonstrated how crisis moments enable the construction of repressive state capacity that outlasts the immediate crisis, as Hoover’s intelligence apparatus would evolve into the FBI’s decades-long surveillance and disruption of political movements.