Francis Perkins is the prime mover behind the new deal and a true American hero.

8/ Unsurprising Perkins faced political backlash. In 1939, anti-immigrant conservatives unsuccessfully tried to impeach Perkins, accusing her of failing to enforce deportation laws.

7/ While the State Department erected “paper walls” to block Jewish refugees, Perkins used her authority to issue Rule 25(A) permits which helped thousands of German Jews escape Nazi Germany.

6/ Crucially, she didn’t act in a vacuum. Perkins was empowered by a surging labor movement. That labor power gave her the political capital to humanize the immigration process.

A good example of a truism I tell my students: Heroes don’t create movements. Movements create heroes.

5/ She refused to treat immigrants as economic scapegoats. She rejected the idea that deportation was a valid tool for unemployment relief, insisting on due process over police terror.

4/ She then merged immigration bureaus into the INS, an agency focused on processing adjudication, not raids. Her goal, she said, was to proceed “with scrupulous fairness.” Warrantless arrests ended and for a time immigration was treated as a social/administrative issue rather than law enforcement.

3/ Perkins couldn’t simply fire the Section 24 officers due to civil service protections. So she found a bureaucratic loophole: She let their funding appropriation lapse. Once the money was gone, she terminated the squad due to insufficient funds.

2/ In 1933, Perkins found a rogue unit in her Dept known as the “Section 24” squad. The squad was known for aggressive, extra-legal tactics, including illegal detainment and intimidation. Perkins was horrified, calling the squad “disorderly; uncontrollable; unlawful.”