The crisis began with a strike. Over 3,000 miners, roughly 85 percent of Bisbee's mine workers, had walked off the job demanding better wages and safer conditions. Many were affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical labor union known as the Wobblies. Phelps Dodge, the dominant mining company, had no intention of negotiating. Cochise County Sheriff Harry C. Wheeler organized a posse of 2,200 men, each issued a white armband for identification and a list of names. At 4:00 a.m. on July 12, the deputies took up positions throughout the town. By 6:30 a.m. they were moving door to door, arresting every man on their lists along with anyone who refused to work or had voiced support for the strike. Grocery store owners were seized. Cash was taken from registers. The arrests appeared random to many residents, though the lists had been prepared by the company. Two men died in the operation: Deputy Sheriff Orson McRae, shot by a miner resisting arrest, and the miner himself, killed moments later by three other deputies.

The arrested men were marched to a local baseball park and held in the desert heat without water. Then they were loaded onto boxcars and cattle cars belonging to the El Paso and Southwestern Railroad, a Phelps Dodge subsidiary. The train carried approximately 1,300 men two hundred miles southeast through the Chihuahuan Desert to Hermanas, New Mexico, a remote rail siding near the Mexican border. The journey lasted sixteen hours. No food was provided. Water was scarce. The men were dumped at Hermanas and told not to return. An IWW attorney who met the train at its destination issued a press release, which became the first outside account of what had happened. Only then did the nation learn that an American mining company had effectively expelled more than a thousand people from a town on a single morning.

The national reaction was strangely muted. Many newspapers editorialized that the workers must have been violent and therefore deserved what they got, criminalizing the victims without evidence. Former President Theodore Roosevelt declared that no reasonable person could doubt the deported men were bent on destruction and murder. Some papers conceded that Sheriff Wheeler had gone too far, but suggested imprisonment rather than deportation. The Federal Mediation Commission ultimately condemned the action, stating in its November 1917 report that the deportation was wholly illegal and without authority under state or federal law. But condemnation and prosecution proved to be entirely different things. Phelps Dodge had controlled the information channels, shaped the initial narrative, and benefited from a political climate in which labor organizing was conflated with anarchism and disloyalty during wartime.

On May 15, 1918, the U.S. Department of Justice ordered the arrest of 21 Phelps Dodge executives, including Walter S. Douglas, along with several elected leaders and law enforcement officers from Bisbee and Cochise County. Sheriff Wheeler avoided arrest because he was serving in France with the American Expeditionary Force during World War I. A federal district court released all 21 men on a pre-trial motion, ruling that no federal laws had been violated. Arizona officials never initiated state criminal proceedings. In 1920, some 210 defendants were brought before Cochise County courts, but after the first trial resulted in a 16-minute jury deliberation and acquittal for defendant Henry E. Wootten, the remaining cases collapsed. The Supreme Court later ruled in United States v. Wheeler (1920) that the Constitution did not give the federal government power to prosecute the kidnapping, even one involving transport across state lines on federally regulated railroads. Some workers filed civil suits, but in the first case, the jury declared the deportations represented good public policy. A few workers eventually received payments of $500 to $1,250. Most suits were quietly dropped.

The Bisbee Deportation was not the last mass removal of people from American soil, but it marked a turning point. Later actions, including the Red Scare deportations of 1919-20, the mass deportation of up to two million Mexicans and Mexican Americans during the Great Depression, the internment of 120,000 Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans during World War II, and Operation Wetback in 1954, were authorized by law and executed by government agents rather than private posses. The Bisbee and Jerome deportations came to be classified as vigilante actions. From the air today, Bisbee sits in a narrow canyon in the Mule Mountains of southeastern Arizona, its pastel-painted houses stepping up steep hillsides much as they did in 1917. The baseball park where the men were held before their deportation is gone. The mines that drove the entire episode closed decades ago. What remains is the architecture, the landscape, and the uncomfortable fact that a copper company once emptied a town of its workers and nobody went to prison.