Who were the first musicians deported from the US?
Deportation is in the news fairly regularly at the moment, as the iron fist of Donald Trump and ICE continues to detain and deport swathes of people from the United States, whether they entered illegally or not. Indeed, many of these cases haven’t been deportations at all, seeing rightful US citizens black-bagged and sent to another country for a variety of shambolic and politically-motivated reasons. In recent months, this restrictive border policy has led to numerous musical artists and bands being sent packing, too.
Most notably, the legendary punk rock outfit UK Subs were denied entry into the United States last month. The group were scheduled to perform at a handful of events in Los Angeles, but multiple members of the band were knocked back at the border in LAX Airport. In an op-ed written by the band’s Alvin Gibbs and published in the Dorset Eye, the punk shared, “There were two reasons given: first, they claimed I did not have the correct visa for entry; second, there was another unspecified issue that they refused to disclose.’”
Inevitably, though, the political undercurrent of punk, and the music of UK Subs in particular, became an unavoidable piece of evidence as to the true reason for their deportation back to the UK. “I can’t help but wonder whether my frequent, and less than flattering, public comments regarding their president and his administration played a role—or perhaps I’m simply succumbing to paranoia,” Gibbs theorised.
This incident kicked off a run of other artists, such as Neil Young, fearing the same fate. Only this month, the Mexican corrido band had their visas revoked by the US Department of State, after the band used imagery of drug cartel leader ‘El Mencho’ during a show in Guadalajara. The Jalisco New Generation Cartel group, led by ‘El Mencho’, was designated by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation earlier this year.
Even during Trump’s first term in office, artists were still treated with suspicion at the US border. Italian post-punk outfit Soviet Soviet, for instance, were detained and deported over apparent visa issues when they attempted to enter the country in 2017 for a scheduled appearance at SXSW in Austin, Texas.
Despite the current prevalence of these worrying stories about deportation, leading to widespread uncertainty about the prospect of artists touring the United States, musicians being deported from the country is certainly not a modern phenomenon. Back in 2003, Yusuf Islam – also known as Cat Stevens – was forcibly ejected from a plane in Bangor, Maine, over apparent concern that he had connections with Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group designated as a terrorist organisation by the US.
So, who was the first musical artist to be deported from the United States?
To find the very first musical artist to face the wrath of the US state, we have to go all the way back to 1917. With the US embroiled in the First World War over in Europe, many German people and businesses were the subject of suspicion. One such person was Johanna Gadski, the German dramatic soprano whose powerful voice earned a successful career singing opera in New York City.
Gadski married Hans Tauscher in Berlin in the 1890s and remained married throughout the singer’s stint in the United States. During the First World War, however, Tauscher—a representative of the German weapons manufacturing company Krupp and an officer of the Imperial German Army—was accused of attempting to sabotage the Welland ship canal in Canada, thereby disrupting the Allied supply chain.
Although Tauscher was later acquitted of this crime and allowed to remain in the United States until his death in 1941, both he and Johanna Gadski were reportedly deported back to Germany in 1918 after attracting the criticism of Woodrow Wilson’s administration.
