Friday, November 13, 2015
Donald Trump Calls for the Revival of Operation Wetback
In discussing immigration during the debate of the field of Republican presidential candidates earlier this week, Donald Trump again made immigration waves. Click here, here, here, and here for discussion of Trump's latest immigration enforcement proposal. Some white supremacists have registered support for the new deportation campaign advocated by Trump.
Trump specifically endorsed a new mass deportation campaign targeting persons of Mexican ancestry like that championed by President Dwight Eisenhower, who oversaw a mass removal campaign popularly known at the time as "Operation Wetback." Although he clearly referenced the operation, he did not refer to it by its racist moniker. Now viewed as a stark civil rights blemish on U.S. history, Operation Wetback resulted in mass arrests and deportations, allegations of physical abuse and civil rights violations, and the deportation of thousands of U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry. Juan Garcia's book Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (1980) is the classic historical treatment of this regrettable chapter in U.S. history. Operation Wetback was the 1950s version of what was known as the "repatriation" of persons of Mexican ancestry during the Great Depression, with hundreds of thousands of persons of Mexican ancestry, including some U.S. citizens, forced by state and local governments, with federal support, forced to "return" to Mexico.
Kate Linthicum of the Los Angeles Times offers analysis of how Donald Trump in the debate hailed the Eisenhower administration's Operation Wetback as a model for the "deportation force" he would deploy to swiftly remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. "They moved 1.5 million out," Trump said, responding to rivals who said his plan would not work. "Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him," achieved it, he said.
History portrays a darker and more complicated picture, than the idyllic vision painted by Trump. The Eisenhower-era operation deported hundreds of thousands of people and was accompanied by scores of deaths and shattered families. In some cases, U.S. citizens, as well as undocumented immigrants, were arrested and deported. Raids were concentrated in border communities but stretched as far north as St. Louis. In the pre-civil rights era, few spoke up on behalf of the immigrants.
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/2015/11/donald-trump-calls-for-revival-of-operation-wetback.html
