# @downinnadesert on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DdKipnFD9rK
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/70299975-downinnadesert-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/6ee613c277.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-09-11T23:00:18.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Down In The Desert🌵 (@downinnadesert) — https://gondola.cc/downinnadesert

## Caption

On October 1, 1904, a train pulled into Clifton, Arizona carrying forty Irish Catholic orphans between the ages of one and six.

The New York Foundling Hospital had sent them west with nuns and nurses. The local priest, Constant Mandin, had lined up placements with Catholic families in Clifton and Morenci, the twin copper towns on the Arizona side of the border.

Almost every Catholic family in those towns was Mexican.

The nuns did not understand what that meant here. In New York the children were Irish and poor. In Arizona they were white, and the families receiving them were not counted as white, and that was the only thing anybody in town could see.

The children were washed and dressed and handed over to their new parents. Anglo women in town watched it happen and organized that night.

Over the next three days, armed men went house to house and took every child back. They brought them to the hotel and redistributed them among Anglo families. The crowd came close to lynching the nuns and the priest.

The Foundling Hospital sued to get its wards back. The Arizona territorial court ruled for the men who took the children. The language is still in the record. One filing describes a white, Caucasian child handed to a guardian it calls unfit by reason of his race, his habits, and his mode of living.

The case went to the US Supreme Court. New York Foundling Hospital v. Gatti, decided December 3, 1906.

The Court dismissed it. It held that a custody fight over a small child is not a question of personal freedom, so it had no jurisdiction to review Arizona’s judgment. It never reached the facts.

The territorial ruling stood. The children stayed.

The men who did it said they were rescuing kids from poverty. That was their framing then and it is in the court file. The historian Linda Gordon spent a book on what was actually being defended, and it was not the children.

Clifton and Morenci are still there. So is the mine.

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#Clifton #Morenci #ArizonaHistory #ArizonaNews #DownInnaDesert

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## Tags

clifton, morenci, downinnadesert, arizonahistory, arizonanews

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