For George II, the problem was those damned Acadians. They had outright defied him. They refused to pick up arms against France or Indigenous allies like the Mi’kmaq. Their colony, now in British-controlled Canada, had a policy of neutrality, referring him to the Treaty of Utrecht, but bands of Acadians and their allies were killing his soldiers.
The Crown was not amused. Soldiers surrounded Acadian churches during Mass, imprisoning men and herding families with bayonets. The Acadians had been ingenious farmers on coastal plains with the same climate as Reykjavik or Bergen, building dikes to elevate farms above snowmelt and breeding fruit to mature in their moderately warm maritime summers. Now their homes and crops were leveled, their dams destroyed, their fertile farmlands flooded. The King callously burned century-old towns. Children were taken away from their parents and distributed to various families throughout Massachusetts. Adults were loaded onto overcrowded and undersupplied ships. Forcibly removed were approximately 10,000–11,500 Acadians, dispersed to France, Spanish Louisiana, and across the Colonial Caribbean. It became known as Le Grand Dérangement (The Great Upheaval), beginning in 1755 under the old King George II, and continuing through George III in 1764.
An estimated 5,000 died from disease, starvation, and shipwrecks like the Violet (280 aboard) and Duke William (360 aboard). When I was in grade school in New England in the 1950s, we were assigned Longfellow’s lament, Evangeline:
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it
Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman
Where is the thatch-roofed village, the home of Acadian farmers,
Men whose lives glided on like rivers that water the woodlands,
Darkened by shadows of earth, but reflecting an image of heaven?
Waste are those pleasant farms, and the farmers forever departed!
Scattered like dust and leaves, when the mighty blasts of October
Seize them, and whirl them aloft, and sprinkle them far o'er the ocean
The Dérangement was not an outlier. While differing in execution, the Scottish Highland Clearances (1760s–1880s), and the Irish Famine (1845–1852) were parts of a patented pattern of imperial policy that prioritized British economic and strategic interests over the lives of defenseless populations. Sheep replaced some 70,000 Highlanders. More than one million Irish starved and 2 million emigrated when the few potatoes unharmed by blight were seized for export.
Many crossed the ocean only to die as cannon fodder in the American Civil War. Soup kitchens, tenements, and workhouses epigenetically instilled ethnic humiliation. That did not end with the deaths of Victoria, Edward VII, in Flanders fields, or with the partition of India. For the Acadians, it left a legacy of collective trauma that persists today in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Maine, South Carolina, the Louisiana Bayous, and parts of the Caribbean.
The United States’ ethnic cleansing of its indigenous population was cited in parliamentary debates as merely following the English example. Even while my classmates and I were reading Evangeline, the U.S. relocated over 1,600 Bikini and Enewetak Atoll residents to conduct 67 nuclear tests, including the 1,000x Hiroshima-scale 1954 Castle Bravo thermonuclear catastrophe. In 1965, the UK expelled some 1,500 Chagossians so they could lease Diego Garcia to the U.S. Navy as a base for monitoring Soviet and Chinese ships. British officials privately called Chagossians “Tarzans or Men Fridays,” but those deportees got off easy compared to the Marshallese.
Displaced Marshallese, whose ancestors had lived on these same Pacific atolls for 3600 years, experienced high rates of cancers, birth defects (jellyfish babies, like were later seen in Fallujah), and other lingering and transgenerational health effects from fallout. Some atolls, such as Enewetak, were officially returned to the Marshall Islands in 1986 after a fake radiological cleanup. As revealed in the personal papers of AEC physicians Joseph Hamilton and Stafford Warren, now housed at Bancroft Library in U.C. Berkeley, Enewetak was a Cold War human medical experiment with the Islanders as unknowing guinea pigs. Many were simply dumped on uninhabitable spits of sand with no means to escape, where they starved to death in the 50’s and 60’s.
For transporting us beyond the Seas to be tried for pretended Offenses
There was a countercurrent to the atrocities of the King—witness the Boston Tea Party—but Parliament passed the Administration of Justice Act in 1774 in response to such protests. The Act's provisions allowed for the transportation of prisoners to England or distant colonies for trial. Colonists charged with crimes against the King's property, including damage to His Majesty's ships or other military equipment, faced potential dérangement to face judgment by strangers in foreign courts.
Crown justice systems operated under different rules and procedures than the civilian courts and jury trials of New England. The AJA combined the denial of trial by peers with the additional hardship of geographic and financial displacement and the inaccessibility of witnesses and lawyers. There was no “due process” or assumption of innocence.
Perhaps most troubling to colonial sensibilities was the broad discretionary power these policies granted to prosecutors. The decision to remove someone from their home could be made not only by hostile government officials but also by accusers seeking strategic advantages in prosecution.
On October 21, 1774, the First Continental Congress adopted a resolution declaring "That the seizing, or attempting to seize, any person in America, in order to transport such person beyond the sea, for trial of offenses, committed within the body of a county in America, being against law, will justify, and ought to meet with resistance and reprisal.” To King George, thems were fighting words, and the colonists knew it. The First Continental Congress had just legalized civil resistance, moving beyond petitions and protests to explicit endorsement of overt defiance.
By the rude bridge that arched the flood
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Concord Hymn (1836)
The Township of Concord, Massachusetts—soon to become a crucible of history with Paul Revere’s midnight ride and the Minutemen’s midday stand on the North Bridge—in November 1772 passed a resolution at town meeting, calling upon their town judge to defy the Transportation Act and "the Rage of some Malicous Persons who out of Complasance to Some Court Sycophant may accuse any Person, and thereby Cause him to be hurried out of the Countrey and Carried to some Distant Place… Deprived of the advantage of his Common Charicter, to be judged by Strangers & Perhaps by Foraners" and "Ruined in Person & Estate.”
Concord was America's first Sanctuary City.
JUSTICE KAGAN: . . . [W]hen you have the order of removal but the proceedings have not yet been concluded, what does the government feel itself free to do with the alien?
ASSISTANT TO THE SOLICITOR GENERAL: We do think we have the legal authority to, with the following caveat. We would have to give the person notice of the third country and give them the opportunity to raise a reasonable fear of torture or persecution in that third country.
—Transcript of Oral Argument at 20–21, Johnson v.Guzman Chavez, 594 U.S. 523 (2021)
JUSTICE KAGAN: So that’s what it would depend on, right? That -- that you would have to provide notice and if he had a fear of persecution or torture in that country, he would be given an opportunity to contest his removal to that country. Isn’t that right?
ASSISTANT TO THE SOLICITOR GENERAL: Yes, that’s right.
—Transcript of Oral Argument at 32–33, Bondi v. Riley, No. 23-1270 (S. Ct. Mar. 24, 2025)
The White House has called the men “monsters” and Judge Murphy [in Boston], who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr. last year, a “far-left activist judge.”
On Wednesday afternoon, after a chaotic remote hearing and after a daylong proceeding in court, Judge Murphy ordered the government to make arrangements for the men to be able to contact their lawyers by phone.
As of midday Saturday, that had not happened, according to Ms. Realmuto, one of the lawyers who brought the suit. The government did file a new declaration late Friday, from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, acknowledging that the flight carrying the eight men had used facilities at “the only U.S. base on the African continent.”
— Mattathias Schwartz, Judge Finds U.S. Violated Court Order With Sudden Deportation Flight to Africa, The New York Times, May 21, 2025
A gay Guatemalan man deported by the Trump administration despite legal protections is begging a federal court to intervene, describing in a sworn declaration on Thursday how he now lives in hiding, terrified he’ll be killed for his identity.
“My mother and cousins and other relatives have been helping me out so that I don’t have to go outside very much,” the man, identified as O.C.G., wrote. “I live in fear because of the past hateful incidents I experienced.”
The declaration, part of the class-action lawsuit D.V.D. v. DHS in the District of Massachusetts, comes days after the administration admitted it has no record that O.C.G. was ever asked if he feared deportation to Mexico—a country where he was previously raped and held captive. The government had claimed he said he wasn’t afraid. However, in a May 19 filing, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials acknowledged: “Defendants cannot identify any officer who asked O.C.G. whether he had a fear of return to Mexico.”
— Christopher Wiggins, Gay Guatemalan asylum-seeker deported by Trump by mistake pleads for lifeline in federal court, The Advocate, May 23 2025
Our Constitution embodies these truths, in a limited government of enumerated powers, in its system of checks and balances separating the executive, legislative, and judicial branches, and in its guarantee that neither citizen nor alien be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Yet, in March 2025, more than 200 aliens were removed from this country to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (“CECOT”), with faint hope of process or return. The sweep for removal is ongoing, extending to the litigants in this case and others, thwarted only by order of this and other federal courts. The destination, El Salvador, a country paid to take our aliens, is neither the country from which the aliens came, nor to which they wish to be removed. But they are taken there, and there to remain, indefinitely, in a notoriously evil jail, unable to communicate with counsel, family or friends.
— Alvin K. Hellerstein, District Judge (SDNY), Opinion and Order Granting Preliminary Injunction in GF.F. vs Trump
The Colonial response to Crown deportation policies reveals sophisticated thinking that went beyond mere opposition to inconvenient regulations. Colonists understood deportation without fair process as a fundamental violation of English legal traditions and natural rights principles. Their Town Meetings and leaflets appealed to the Magna Carta, emphasizing jury trials by peers and insisting on local judicial autonomy. There was a coherent political philosophy in the New England and Virginia colonies that would later inform Congress’s constitutional development.
In Congress, July 4, 1776
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed….
But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security…. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States:
***
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither….
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation;
***
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world;
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent;
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For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences;
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A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Due Process of Law
The Declaration of Independence's complaint about "transporting us beyond Seas, to be tried for pretended Offenses" brought together multiple streams of colonial grievances and laid the groundwork for the Bill of Rights.
"Transporting us beyond Seas" was a microcosm of the larger imperial crisis—colonial expectations of legal autonomy and protection from arbitrary governance. The Continental Congress resolution of 1774 and the Declaration's formal complaint in 1776 were successive stages in colonial rejection of imperial rule, but they were cornerstones of something much larger—the establishment of independent American judicial systems based on local control and constitutional limitation of government power.
The deportation of the Acadians began a process where the imperial claim of cultural erasure met an indomitable human spirit. As descendants in Canada’s Maritimes and the Louisiana bayous continue to celebrate their heritage, Le Grand Dérangement should be a cautionary tale to a government bent on exiling citizens and protected migrants to foreign prisons. It should goad more lawyers, judges, cities and states to stand up and reject imperial rule.
Meanwhile, let’s end these wars. We support peace in the West Bank and Gaza and the efforts to cease the war in Ukraine immediately. Global Village Institute’s Peace Thru Permaculture initiative has sponsored the Green Kibbutz network in Israel and the Marda Permaculture Farm in the West Bank for over 30 years. It will continue to do so with your assistance. We aid Ukrainian families seeking refuge in ecovillages and permaculture farms along the Green Road and work to heal collective trauma everywhere through the Pocket Project. You can read about it on the Global Village Institute website (GVIx.org). Thank you for your support.
And speaking of resettling refugees, did you know? A study by Poland’s National Development Bank found that the influx of Ukrainians added between 0.5% and 2.5% to GDP growth and paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
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#RestorationGeneration.
When humans are locked in a cage, the Earth continues to be beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.
We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize, not destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.
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