The "U.S. v. Thind" Supreme Court case stripped every Indian Americans of their citizenship. Here's how the mass denaturalization happened.

This weekend was the 100 year anniversary of United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court case that stripped every Indian in the United States of their citizenship.

But how did the mass denaturalization actually happen? Professor found the receipts and shared them in this important new article: https://www.saada.org/tides/article/united-states-of-america-vs-vaishno-das-bagai

Here's the TLDR:

In her article, Lee describes finding a reference to the legal documents for "United States of America vs. Vaishno Das Bagai," stored in the National Archives in San Francisco. She went to California, entered the archives, and found the case again early San Francisco immigrant Vaishno Das Bagai.

In the documents she found, the US government argued that Bagai had “illegally obtained and procured naturalization” as a “white person, whereas in fact and in truth he was a Hindu and not a white person,” and he was knowingly obtaining illegal citizenship.

But of course Vaishno Das Bagai had carefully complied with racist US government policies, operating within an incredibly narrow set of choices, providing evidence that he was a “high caste Hindoo…[of] Aryan origin.” That was sufficient at the time of his naturalization. He never lied.

Looking back, we see how terrible those race/caste arguments were, and how they would play out decades later, e.g. see Equality Labs' 2018 caste history report. In 1923, Thind and other early immigrants used every legal argument they could muster to argue for belonging, and caste briefly worked—until it didn't.

Lee writes:

After discovering these documents, I had a Zoom call with Bagai’s granddaughter Rani…We went through each page and tried to decipher the government’s legal case, but we kept returning to the sheer cruelty of the government’s action. We concluded that…the Thind decision was neither a narrowly-conceived decision nor was it an abstract proclamation. The U.S. government used it as a weapon to go after the rights of groups believed to be a threat to white supremacy by claiming that those rights had been 'illegally' obtained…This denaturalization campaign, likely the U.S. government’s first large-scale…effort, must be viewed alongside the alien land laws…and Jim Crow legislation

In her article, Lee includes a photo of the September 1924 subpoena issued to force Bagai into court.

In May 1925, Bagai was stripped of his citizenship. He would go on to take his own life, heartbroken by being turned into a stateless person, by the racism he experienced in his new home.

Erika Lee's article is an important read, for the history it tells, the way it connects past and present, and how it brings in the voice of Vaishno Das Bagai's granddaughter and her family.

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P.S. Curious? Read this:

(And I'm always happy to try to answer questions about ABCDesi / South Asian American history.)