According to the United States Department of Justice , Palmer violated his oath of office by misusing the Dept of Justice to illegally go after those advocating for better wages . Strikers became targets of agent provocateurs who infiltrated meetings of " communist labor " and anti-war activists . After the Bisbee deportations became exposed in the press , Americans were divided about the treatment of illegal aliens , who were purported communists . Former President Theodore Roosevelt opined in the press that the Bisbee miners " had it coming , as they were hell-bent on havoc ! " The Dept of Justice went from advocating for persons deprived of rights and liberty by state actors to detaining them under dubious warrants and suspicion of radicalism . The Red Scare that fueled institutional racism in the 1920s against Russian Jews and other Eastern European immigrants was a backlash to the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia and a bombing campaign early in 1919 by Italian anarchists advocating the overthrow of the government . The result was the infamous Palmer raids , ostensibly a deportation measure to remove dangerous aliens . In 1919 Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer began a series of raids cooked up to remove radicals and anarchists from the US . Warrants were requested from compliant officials in the Labor Dept , and a number of foreign nationals caught up in the sweeping raids were eventually deported . As only the department of labor had the legal right to deport aliens , they did object to the methods ; nevertheless , under color of law , the raids began on November 7 , 1919 . It was led by a 24-year-old J. Edgar Hoover heading a new division of the Justice Department 's Bureau of Investigation , called the General Intelligence Division . Armed with responsibility for investigating the programs of radical groups and identifying their members , the raids began with agents of the Bureau of Investigation , together with local police , executing a series of well-publicized and violent raids against the Union of Russian Workers in 12 cities
bombing campaign
1919 United States anarchist bombings
Institutional racism