The Great Upheaval Revisited: What the Acadian Expulsion Teaches Us About U.S. Deportations Today
(I saw Beausoleil avec Michael Doucet last night in Beverly, MA. Doucet mentioned the expulsion (deportation) of the Acadians a few times, which inspired this post.)
In 1755, the British Crown issued an order that would ripple across centuries: the forced removal of the Acadian people from Nova Scotia. The decree arrived not as thunder but as administrative logic; quiet, clipped, deliberate. It was read aloud in churches where families had baptized children, married, buried their dead. The Acadians, who for nearly a century had coaxed fertile marshland out of Fundy tides, found themselves declared a threat to imperial security. Their refusal to sign an unconditional oath of allegiance to George II that would bind them to fight against the Mi’kmaq and the French, rendered them suspect. And suspicion, once sanctioned, becomes a weapon.
British troops gathered them into makeshift detention centers; storehouses, barns, churches retrofitted for confinement. Families were separated with unsettling ease. Crops ready for harvest were burned; homes were torched, livestock was seized or slaughtered. Between 1755 and 1763, more than 10,000 Acadians were deported to the Thirteen Colonies, to France, to the Caribbean, and eventually to the Louisiana bayous where their descendants, the Cajuns, would craft a culture from the debris of exile. Many perished from disease, shipwrecks, or starvation. The British called it “removal.” The Acadians called it the le Grand Dérangement: the Great Upheaval.[i]
Three centuries later, on the other side of the continent, a different empire rehearses a similar choreography under the neon lights of detention centers and airport hangars.
Today’s American deportation regime operates with the same sterile confidence that once uprooted the Acadians. Government spokespeople speak of “removals,” “processing,” and “deterrence,” as if human beings were cargo. ICE raids neighborhoods with the same clinical detachment that British officers once brought to Acadian villages. And like the Acadians, today’s migrants are cast as a demographic inconvenience: too numerous, too foreign, too unassimilable for the political imagination of a nation that insists on defining itself by exclusion.
In the United States, more than 12 million undocumented people live in the shadow of the state’s deportation machinery. Many have lived here for decades. Some were brought as children; some have U.S.-born children of their own. Yet they exist inside a legal purgatory where a traffic stop can become a deportation sentence, where paperwork errors become exile, where asylum seekers escaping violence are detained—not for what they have done, but for what they represent: the disorderly spillover of U.S. foreign policy, economic predation, and climate disruption.
The forced removal of the Acadians was justified as a matter of loyalty. The forced removal of immigrants today is justified as a matter of legality. But legality is not a moral category; it is a manufactured one. The Acadians were declared illegal the moment Britain decided that a people unwilling to take up arms against their Indigenous neighbors could not be trusted. Migrants today become “illegal” through labyrinthine policies crafted to fail them: quotas without logic, asylum standards impossible to meet, court backlogs that trap people in limbo long enough for political climates to turn against them.
In both cases, deportation becomes a way to redraw the demographic map in favor of those with power.
The parallels deepen in the methods. The British separated families not out of necessity but out of strategy: separation destabilizes communities and accelerates surrender. The U.S. government performed the same ritual along the southern border; tearing children from their parents as a deterrent. Thousands still remain separated. The British burned Acadian villages to ensure they would not return. Today, economic deportation burns invisible holes in American towns: empty seats at dinner tables, vanished co-workers, classrooms with children who no longer raise their hands.
And just as the Acadians found themselves dispersed across continents, today’s deportees arrive in nations destabilized by decades of U.S. intervention, coups supported by Washington, and economic policies designed in distant boardrooms.
Yet, across centuries, there is a stubborn truth: people forced into exile continue to root themselves in new soil. The Acadians survived by carrying their stories into every bayou and inlet where they rebuilt their lives. Today’s migrants do the same; through mutual aid networks, sanctuary movements, community defense, and the small daily acts of survival that confound the state’s desire to make them disappear.
The story of deportation is not just about those expelled; it is also about those who remain behind, compelled to confront the moral wreckage.
Britain eventually apologized for the Acadian expulsion: two and a half centuries too late, long after the empire that ordered it had dissolved. The United States, still in the middle of its own expulsion project, has not yet imagined such an apology. But history, like a tide, is patient. It keeps returning to shore the things nations try hardest to cast away.