It was also used to seize their passports—including US citizens like Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who fought it for years. I read her pamphlet on the McCarran Act in her archives at Wayne State, here’s a digitized version:
digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/ob...Fun fact: The "obscure legal statute" cited by the "New York Times" here is a clause in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act, which was originally written to allow the US government to deport Eastern European Jews suspected of Communist sympathies.
