Donald Trump has praised the Eisenhower-era raids without using their name since he first ran for president and is now promising voters he would begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, exceeding the 1950s. He has escalated his verbal attacks on immigrants as he seeks a second term, telling supporters twice in recent weeks that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
People affected by “Operation Wetback” and historians on immigration argue Trump is using fragments of history and rhetoric for political reasons while discounting his own administration’s failures to carry out mass deportations, even as it separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border and enacted sweeping restrictions on asylum.
“Families were divided by misapplied immigration policies and discriminatory immigration policies specifically geared toward Indigenous people, Mexican Americans, Latinos,” said Joaquin Sanchez, Noelia’s son, who is now an immigration attorney in Chicago. “These are the types of policies that my family has witnessed for generations.”
“Operation Wetback” coincided with a guest worker program that provided legal status to hundreds of thousands of largely Mexican farm workers. Noelia Sanchez, who was born in Missouri, and her mother were able to get their papers in about a year and return to settle in Chicago.
The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a military-style campaign in the summer of 1954 seeking to remove Mexican immigrants who were in the country illegally. The operation followed several other deportation efforts of the 1940s and 1950s.
Scholars have challenged the 1 million arrests reported under that summer operation, saying that they had included figures from previous years and that the number for that entire year was actually much smaller at about 250,000.
The government relied on scare tactics to prompt people to self-deport so that they could have another chance to return to the U.S.
Experts have highlighted it was no coincidence the deportation drive happened as farmers were looking for guest workers under the Bracero program that began in the 1940s, aimed at allowing Mexican farmworkers to enter the country and work in the U.S. legally. The program excluded women and children, driving some families to enter the country illegally to remain together.
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