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He promises the “largest deportation operation in American history.”
But Donald Trump's plans are triggering criticism and horror among experts.
Washington DC - It happened in the hot summer of 1954. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants were packed onto buses, planes and boats and sent across the US border to often unknown parts of Mexico.
The head of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service then declared the border “secure”.
"The so-called 'wetback' problem no longer exists," Joseph Swing wrote in the agency's annual report published in 1955, using a derogatory term for Mexican migrants.
But the military campaign that had the same term in its name - "Operation Wetback" - tore families apart and violently uprooted people in the name of border security, experts say.
And sometimes these efforts ended in death.
Donald Trump uses the Eisenhower plan as a blueprint
Now former President Donald Trump is using the Eisenhower-era operation as a blueprint for his vision.
He promises it will be “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” to remove the estimated 10.5 million undocumented people in the United States.
Two thirds of them have lived in the country for more than a decade.
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“Americans can expect President Trump to resume all of his previous policies as soon as he returns to the Oval Office.
“He will take brand-new measures that will devastate all criminal smugglers in the world and use all federal and state power necessary for the deportation operation,” Trump campaign spokeswoman for the 2024 US election, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement to The
Washington Post
.
She added that undocumented immigrants “should not feel comfortable because they will be going home very soon.”
Donald Trump's planned deportation criticized as "inhumane".
But when it comes to describing the operation on which Donald Trump's plan is based, experts usually end up with the same word: "inhumane."
The Eisenhower-era operation is cited as such by think tanks, academics and historians, who also say the policy was not as successful as Swing and others claimed.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Greenville, S.C., on Tuesday.
© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández told the
Washington Post
that the operation, which emerged in 1954, was a "racist terror campaign" that relied on scaremongering to encourage people to self-deport.
“If [Trump] resorts to this, we need to be clear about what kind of law enforcement campaign he threatens to unleash,” said Lytle Hernández, who holds the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair in History at UCLA.
“It's not just a mass deportation, it's a mass racial expulsion.” Even if the program doesn't come to fruition, promoting such a plan will only deepen the marginalization of Latino and immigrant communities in the United States, Lytle Hernández continued .
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Immigration has been a controversial issue in the USA long before Donald Trump
This was also an issue in the 1950s, when newspapers were flooded with headlines about the “rise in border crossings.”
In 1954, The
New York Times
described that immigrants continued to "invade the United States in an endless—and uncontrolled—stream."
“Two come across the border every minute,” was the headline.
That same year, Sen. Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.) sent a letter to President Dwight D. Eisenhower blaming American unemployment on the "influx of wetbacks from Mexico and aliens from other countries who are here illegally." , pushed.
Immigration from Mexico increased in the 1940s with the introduction of the “Bracero Program.”
This was an agreement between the United States and Mexico that recruited millions of Mexican men into legal short-term labor contracts - an agreement intended to address the national agricultural labor shortage during World War II.
However, the program excluded women and children, Lytle Hernández said, prompting some families to enter the country illegally to stay together.
And farmers in border states often preferred to employ undocumented migrants to whom they paid lower wages, she added.
Donald Trump's great role model: Dwight D. Eisenhower
Concerned about losing too many of its workers, the Mexican embassy warned the U.S. State Department that the Bracero agreements would be revised if controls were not put in place, Lytle Hernández wrote in a 2006 article about the Eisenhower-era deportation operation .
As a result, the article says, the United States began to increase deportations - setting in motion a decades-long campaign that culminated in the summer of 1954.
In June 1954, the head of the U.S. Border Patrol vowed to launch “the largest operation against illegal immigrants in history,” the Los Angeles Times reported at the time.
Under Swing, then commissioner of the INS, the campaign began in California and quickly expanded to Arizona, Texas and Illinois.
Hundreds of agents were deployed to locate and deport anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally - sometimes mistakenly targeting American citizens, historians say.
The people were “transported like cows to Mexico in trucks or on boats,” which a congressional investigation compared to an eighteenth-century slave ship.
This is what historian Mae Ngai from Columbia University described in Impossible Subjects.
Trump wants to deport again - despite tragic events
Ngai said 88 people in Mexicali died of heat stroke after being herded together in sweltering 112-degree heat.
In another incident, a riot broke out on an overcrowded ship in the Gulf of Mexico, prompting 37 people to jump into the water.
Five of them drowned, Ngai wrote.
Chicago-based attorney Joaquín “Jack” Sanchez, 40, said the operation had a lasting impact on his family.
In 1954, agents arrived at his grandmother's home in La Feria, Texas, where she lived with her husband and six children, all of whom were American citizens.
Aurora, Sanchez's grandmother, was excluded from immigrant employment programs because of her gender.
Her husband worked in agriculture and Aurora sold food to workers and looked after the children, Sanchez said.
But that summer she had just minutes to pack up her life before agents took her to a detention center, he said.
Aurora, with a "stern face and piercing green eyes," Sanchez said, remembers explaining that she had six U.S.-born children, including an infant.
The officers asked them to take the child - Sanchez's mother, Noelia - with them.
Noelia and her mother were taken across the border and left in Reynosa, about 130 miles northwest of Monterrey, where Aurora's family lived.
“She was lucky enough to have one of her brothers or an uncle pick her up,” Sanchez said.
It took two years before Aurora and Noelia could be reunited with the rest of their family in Chicago, where they still live.
The traumatic deportation has shaped the family for generations, Sanchez said, and left them with ambivalent feelings toward the U.S. government.
“We are constantly in a situation of being locked up, controlled or monitored,” he said.
Donald Trump calls Eisenhower campaign a 'very effective chapter'
The point of the military “publicity campaign” in the 1950s was to carry out mass deportations quickly and on an impressive scale, Lytle Hernández said.
Authorities wanted to address Americans' growing concerns about a border crisis and stoke enough fear of deportations to encourage returning or deported migrants to participate in the Bracero program.
These goals could only be achieved if the media reported on them, she added.
So officials invited reporters to observe the operation and sent press releases to cities before the raids.
Decades later, the deportation campaign is described as a “shameful time in American history,” as 21 members of Congress noted in a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland.
In 2020, the Los Angeles Times apologized for its "uncritical Washington mouthpiece" reporting on the Eisenhower administration's operation.
And although Donald Trump has praised the operation since 2015 as a "very effective chapter" in American history - and one in which brutal tactics resulted in the migrants "never coming back" - its success has been greatly exaggerated, historians say .
Donald Trump wants to repeat a dark chapter in US history
Although authorities claimed the operation resulted in 1.3 million arrests over the summer, scholars like Lytle Hernández have questioned that number - they say those statistics include arrests from previous years.
According to Lytle Hernández, the number of arrests in fiscal year 1955 was approximately 250,000.
In 1955, the Congressional Appropriations Committee also questioned the INS' claims that the operation had resulted in 540,000 deportations in California - primarily because records indicated about 84,000 arrests during that period.
But the operation produced another unexpected result, Lytle Hernández said: It helped increase the number of braceros by encouraging immigrants who had been working in the United States illegally to become legal.
But ultimately it stoked fear, Lytle Hernández said, adding that Trump's proposal would repeat a dark chapter of history.
“If he makes these threats, the campaign has already begun,” she said.
“The dimension of racial terror is already in full swing.”
(
Maria Luisa Paul)
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English on February 27, 2024 at the “Washingtonpost.com” - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.