From the start of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s first campaign in 2015 (when he descended the escalators of Trump Tower and called Mexican immigrants criminals and “rapists”) to the present day, over and over and over again Trump has pointed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 mass deportation program as a model for his mass purging agenda, which seeks to carry out mass family separation on a national scale.
The program then was called “Operation Wetback,” and as the son of Mexican immigrants, I know how ugly and hurtful the language used by President Eisenhower is. It’s a racist epithet. But that’s literally what it was called, and I don’t want to erase or sugarcoat a vicious history that Trump is now praising.
“Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him,” Trump claimed at one of the 2016 GOP primary debates. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he continued last year.
Trump has, of course, never publicly referred to Eisenhower’s program by its offensive name. That would open a glimpse into the program’s blatant racism. Nor has Trump told the public how it was carried out and what its consequences were, instead falsely calling it effective and humane. But the details behind the brutal and deadly “Operation Wetback” are critical as Trump pledges to mimic the policy should he return to the White House in January.
Operation Wetback was a “racial terror” campaign that swept up and deported hundreds of thousands of Latinos – including U.S. citizens. An unknown number of U.S. citizens were among the hundreds of thousands of individuals who were rounded up and deported by U.S. officials, who raided communities and workplaces in the American southwest and Illinois. In a quote chillingly similar to the present-day rhetoric of Trump, the then-head of the Border Patrol promised to carry out “the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history,” The Washington Post reported. “Hundreds of agents were deployed to locate and deport anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally — sometimes mistakenly targeting American citizens, according to historians.” It was a “racial terror campaign” against communities, historian Kelly Lytle Hernández said. Current history tells us Trump’s plan will replicate this on a national scale. In 2021, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office released a shocking report detailing how federal immigration officials had deported as many as 70 U.S. citizens during the preceding five years and detained nearly 700 others. In 2018, ICE attempted to deport a Philadelphia-born Black man to Jamaica. Peter Sean Brown “knew almost nothing about Jamaica, having only visited the country once on a cruise,” the American Civil Liberties Union said.
Deported individuals were abandoned “like cows” in the desert. Some died agonizing deaths from exposure. Operation Wetback was a cruel policy. In one incident, nearly 90 individuals died from heat stroke after they were rounded up like cattle and deported in 112-degree heat, according to historian Mae Ngai. “At the other end of the border, in Nuevo Laredo, a Mexican labor leader reported that ‘wetbacks’ were ‘brought [into Mexico] like cows’ on trucks and unloaded fifteen miles down the highway from the border, in the desert,” she wrote in her book Impossible Subjects. “In another incident, a riot broke out on an overpacked ship in the Gulf of Mexico, prompting 37 people to jump into the water,” The Washington Post reported in 2015. Five of them drowned, Ngai wrote.” Officials intentionally deported individuals to remote locations, far from safety and loved ones. It’s a fact that Trump, notoriously averse to policy details, is frighteningly aware of. “Moved them way south. They never came back,” he said during the 2016 GOP debates. Chicago-based attorney Joaquín “Jack” Sanchez described to The Washington Post how agents rounded up his grandmother, a mom of five U.S. citizen children, and deported her and one of her American children far from any relatives in Mexico. “Two years passed before Aurora and Noelia were able to reunite with the rest of their family in Chicago, where they still live.”
Modern-day observers have likened Operation Wetback’s deportation boats to 18th century slave ships. “Among the over 25 percent who were transported by boat from Port Isabel, Texas, to the Mexican Gulf Coast, many shared cramped quarters in vessels resembling an ‘eighteenth century slave ship’ and ‘penal hell ship,’” The Washington Post further noted. Mirroring the previous point, U.S. officials preferred deporting individuals on ships “because they carried the Mexican workers farther away from the border than did buses, trucks, or trains,” the Texas State Historical Association said. These deportation methods “were not anomalies,” said The Washington Post. Like in the case of present-day immigration policies, such as the Trump administration’s inhumane and traumatic family separation policy, cruelty has always been the point. In 2017, one Trump administration deportation flight drew national attention following disturbing allegations that nearly 100 detainees who were being deported back to Somalia were kept shackled, hungry, and deprived of restroom access for nearly two days aboard an ICE flight. Miguel Perez, Jr., a U.S. military veteran deported in 2018, said immigration officials took selfies “like fishermen with a prize fish” during the flight.
Trump’s endorsement of Operation Wetback has also been praised by white supremacist groups and leaders, who applauded its mention during the 2016 GOP presidential debates. “After Trump mentioned the policy, called ‘Operation Wetback,’ at Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, tweeted, ‘Operation Wetback, fuck yeah,’” Buzzfeed News reported.
As the “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” placards and party platform at the recent GOP convention made abundantly clear for any remaining doubters, mass deportation is the GOP’s signature issue in 2024. Despite being their main plank, they’ve similarly been less than forthcoming about what this massive and cruel undertaking would entail and its impacts on every aspect of our nation. But just as with Operation Wetback, the details behind mass deportation are critical. Read more here.
