Qualla: Bisbee Deportation

Bisbee Deportation: Introduction

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They cut the telegraph wires first. Before the sun rose on July 12, 1917, executives at Phelps Dodge seized control of the telephone and telegraph lines running out of Bisbee, Arizona. They blocked Western Union from sending wires and stopped Associated Press reporters from filing stories. Whatever was about to happen in this copper mining town in the Mule Mountains of Cochise County, the company intended to control the narrative. What happened was one of the most brazen acts of corporate-sponsored vigilantism in American history: the forced roundup and deportation of approximately 1,300 men, loaded into cattle cars and shipped across the desert to the New Mexico border, abandoned without food or water in temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit.

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Bisbee Deportation: Before Dawn on Cleopatra Street

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The crisis began with a strike. Over 3,000 miners, roughly 85 percent of Bisbee's mine workers, had walked off the job demanding better wages and safer conditions. Many were affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical labor union known as the Wobblies. Phelps...

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Bisbee Deportation: Sixteen Hours in Cattle Cars

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The arrested men were marched to a local baseball park and held in the desert heat without water. Then they were loaded onto boxcars and cattle cars belonging to the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, a Phelps Dodge subsidiary. The train carried approximately 1,300 men two hundre...

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Bisbee Deportation: The Silence That Followed

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The national reaction was strangely muted. Many newspapers editorialized that the workers must have been violent and therefore deserved what they got, criminalizing the victims without evidence. Former President Theodore Roosevelt declared that no reasonable person could doubt th...

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Bisbee Deportation: Justice Derailed

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On May 15, 1918, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the arrest of 21 Phelps Dodge executives, including Walter S. Douglas, along with several elected leaders and law enforcement officers from Bisbee and Cochise County. Sheriff Wheeler avoided arrest because he was serving in ...

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Bisbee Deportation: A Precedent That Echoes

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Bisbee Deportation was not the last mass removal of people from American soil, but it marked a turning point. Later actions, including the Red Scare deportations of 1919-20, the mass deportation of up to two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, ...

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