Against the Deportation Terror

"In Against the Deportation Terror , Rachel Buff brings to light a critical but forgotten legacy of multiracial immigrant rights organizing and advocacy. This compelling and timely history provides lessons and insights valuable to today's efforts to counteract mass detention and deportation of a new generation of immigrants."
—Eunice Hyunhye Cho, immigrant rights attorney and advocate

"Against the Deportation Terror makes a significant contribution to the historiography of immigration, citizenship, and noncitizenship. Buff's revisionist history of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born (ACPFB) provides the framework for her larger argument about the political mobilization of noncitizens within the increasingly repressive immigration regime between the 1920s and the early 1960s. The ACPFB's history is vital to an understanding of the historical roots of the contemporary immigrants' rights movement. This book will play a major role in the burgeoning scholarship on the history of the multinational ‘American Left’ in the twentieth century." —David Gutiérrez, Professor of History at the University of California–San Diego and author of Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity

"Buff has written a daring scholarly effort to reclaim history by exposing a spectrum of initiatives by immigrant advocates across racial, ethnic, religious, income, and social status to demand rights for immigrants.... The volume examines the experiences of less well-known immigrants and efforts to support claims for residency and against deportation. Each vignette is riveting.... Given the current political climate and deportation as immigration policy, the book offers insight into the long game of political mobilization. Summing Up: Highly recommended." —Choice

"(A) deeply researched and fascinating account.... Buff argues convincingly that this self-consciously radical organization... offered a model of how transethnic coalitions of people with disparate backgrounds and experiences could come together around a common opposition to the use of anti-immigrant policies as political instruments. That is a timely conclusion."
— Journal of American History

"Against the Deportation Terror contributes an important chapter to the largely hidden history of immigrant rights activism in the United States. While most immigration history focuses on either immigrants themselves or immigration policy, this book sheds light on immigrants and non-immigrants working together to push back against deportation. It speaks to students of both immigration policy and social movements. And it raises critical questions about the strategy and effectiveness of immigration advocacy. No doubt the conditions in which the ACPFB operated have changed—but still much can be learned from its experience. This is the kind of history book that pushes us to build bridges between seemingly distant historical eras. It is the kind of history book that non-historians will find useful. One cannot read it without wondering what the history of the present-day fight against 'deportation terror' will read like in the future." — Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

"Buff’s book will do much more than fill a gap. This is not a book that could have been written within the framework of traditional history. She has mastered and synthesized debates and theories across a range of disciplines including US history, immigration history, ethnic studies, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology – and has skillfully illuminated the tensions and contradictions among these fields.... Buff’s book makes an important contribution to our understanding of immigration and the relational construction of race."
— Journal of American Studies