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Editor’s note: This story includes the name of a 1950s federal program and quotes from a former federal official that refer to Mexican immigrants with a racist slur.
In the summer of 1955, Joseph M. Swing, the commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, wrote in his 138-page annual report that the “wetback problem no longer exists.”
“The border has been secured,” he declared.
His comments came a year after a monthslong U.S. Border Patrol mission across the country — including California, South Texas, Chicago and the Mississippi Delta — that the government dubbed “Operation Wetback,” using a racist term for Mexican immigrants. The operation was hatched after California officials claimed that Mexican immigrants — many of whom entered the U.S. legally via the “bracero” program — were committing crimes and using public resources meant for U.S. citizens.
Some farmers supported the bracero program because it allowed them to legally hire immigrants willing to work for 30 cents an hour — 45 cents cheaper than the federal minimum wage. But the program, launched during World War II to address farm labor shortages, didn’t stop illegal immigration. Some farmers preferred hiring undocumented immigrants, so they didn’t have to abide by the program’s rules: paying a minimum wage and providing sanitary working conditions and housing.
When the country’s economy cooled and unemployment rates rose, labor union leaders and other Americans complained that immigrants were depressing wages and taking jobs. In March 1954, U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell met with national labor organizations to reassure them that his office, which oversaw immigration enforcement, would clamp down on illegal immigration.
At the time, there were just over 1,000 Border Patrol agents, and many of them relocated from the Canadian border to the U.S.-Mexico border to participate in the mission. The roughly 750 officers assigned to the mission were ordered to arrest undocumented Mexican immigrants in farms, parks, neighborhoods and ranches.
When it ended, the Border Patrol claimed it deported nearly 1.2 million Mexicans — a number historians now say was substantially lower — at a cost of $99,000, which would be $1.1 million in today’s dollars.
It was the last time the federal government attempted mass deportations in the country’s interior. Seventy years later, another president has promised to repeat what President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration did during the summer of 1954.
President Donald Trump cited Eisenhower’s operation during his presidential campaign and promised to oversee the mass deportations as soon as he took office. On his first day in office, Trump signed 10 executive orders related to immigration, all meant to reduce immigrants entering the country — legally or illegally.
Since then, the Trump administration has repeatedly touted arrests of undocumented immigrants on social media and daily deportation numbers — which echoes what the Eisenhower administration did to assure the public that it was clamping down on illegal immigration. Since inauguration day, the Trump administration has said it has arrested between 8,000 to 11,000 undocumented immigrants.
Alexander Aviña, an associate professor of history at Arizona State University, said that, like the Eisenhower administration, the Trump administration has embraced the theatrics of an immigration crackdown.
The administration has shared photos of men arrested by immigration officials on social media. Celebrity talk show host Dr. Phil McCraw embedded with ICE officers during a raid in Chicago in late January, while U.S. Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem posted a video of herself wearing tactical gear and participating in an ICE raid in New York.
”There is this element of spectacle that both administrations use,” Aviña said. “They try to induce fear and terror in immigrant populations to get them to self-deport, and that’s something they tried to do with Operation Wetback, and it’s something that is continuing with the Trump administration.”
UCLA history professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, who researched the operation for her 2010 book “Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol,” said the 1950s operation was “more propaganda than it was a change in immigration law enforcement tactics or intensity.”
In her book, she wrote that Border Patrol agents didn’t do anything they didn’t normally do as part of their jobs during the operation, but the rhetoric around the effort “was meant to scare Mexican immigrants to leave on their own.
“The propaganda campaign is real, and it’s something that needs to be taken seriously,” Hernández said, referring to both the 1950s operation and today’s efforts by the Trump administration. “That does not take away from the terror campaign.”
Bracero program invited millions of immigrants to U.S.
Before the Eisenhower administration cracked down on immigrants, the Roosevelt administration invited them into the country by the millions as the nation mobilized during World War II. Four other presidents continued the effort for more than 20 years — including Eisenhower.
The Bracero Program attracted 5 million Mexican men to work on farms and railroads between 1942 and 1964, giving them temporary work permits good for six months. The program was designed to fill jobs vacated by American servicemen fighting overseas. At that time, some migrants crossed the border illegally when the available permits were taken or when they found work on farms that didn’t participate in the program.
In Imperial Valley, California, residents complained about the newly-arrived Mexican immigrants, claiming they drained public resources and caused crime. The state governor wrote to Brownell, asking the federal government to intervene.
That led to a meeting on July 15, 1953, between Border Patrol Chief Harlon B. Carter and Swing, then a U.S. Army general. Carter presented Swing with the idea of what he dubbed Operation Cloud Burst: a mission to place 2,180 military troops along the U.S.-Mexico border; erect 8-foot fences with concertina wire in high-traffic areas; have Border Patrol officers in jeeps patrolling the area and checkpoints on major interstates near the border to inspect private and commercial vehicles for undocumented immigrants.
But when the idea reached the president’s desk, Eisenhower scrapped it because of an 1878 law prohibiting the Army from being used for local law enforcement unless Congress approved it. Others in his administration worried about using the military against immigrants because it could harm the country’s relationship with Mexico.
According to Juan Ramon Garcia’s book, “Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954,” Brownell had brought up the idea of shooting and beating immigrants as a way to deter illegal immigration. But the idea went nowhere.
Eisenhower later appointed Swing to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service after he retired from the Army. Born in New Jersey, Swing had been part of the U.S. Army forces that hunted Pancho Villa in 1916 when the Mexican revolutionary leader had raided Columbus, N.M., because the U.S. government had supported the anti-Revolutionary Mexican president.
His colleagues described Swing as a “professional, long-time Mexican hater,” according to Garcia’s book.
After assuming his new role, Swing joined Carter, the Texas-born Border Patrol chief, to plan the operation with Labor Department and State Department officials. The Eisenhower administration received cooperation from the Mexican government, which, in some cases, jailed immigrants to try to prevent them from crossing the border illegally again.
To prepare for the mass deportations, Swing moved hundreds of Border Patrol officers from Canada and the Florida coasts to create 12-man units. Some of the units descended into neighborhoods, farms, parks and any other public place, asking Mexicans and Mexican-Americans for their papers. The units would use jeeps, planes and trucks to transport immigrants to temporary detention camps in public spaces.
The operation started in California and Arizona, then it came to South Texas.
Texas support and resistance
To garner support, Swing met with Texas farmers but failed to convince many of them that they were better off hiring Mexican immigrants through the federal government’s Bracero Program. Many Texas farmers preferred hiring undocumented immigrants rather than braceros because they didn’t have to abide by the program’s labor rules.
Swing hoped to get support from Texas leaders like he did in California, but Gov. Allan Shivers simply thanked Swing for informing him about the Border Patrol’s operation without offering any help from Texas law enforcement or officials, according to Garcia’s book.
Lacking public support from officials in Texas, the Border Patrol asked for the support of two Latino rights organizations: the American GI Forum, a Hispanic veterans and civil rights group, and the League of United Latin American Citizens — or LULAC — a Latino civil rights organization.
The groups agreed and asked its members to publicly support the Border Patrol’s operation, believing that deporting undocumented immigrants would eliminate competition for jobs, Hernández, the UCLA history professor, wrote in her book.
“The immigration Service is to be highly commended for their careful planning for this drive, not only in South Texas but in California as well,” Frank Piñedo, LULAC’s president, wrote in a newsletter to members. “It is important that all members of LULAC should represent to the people of Texas that the League whole-heartedly supports this drive, and incidents if any occur, should be carefully analyzed before hasty judgment is passed and harmful criticism is made.”
The Border Patrol began its raids in Texas on July 15, 1954, sweeping through farms in the RIo Grande Valley. The makeshift detention camps filled fast and local jails rented beds for $1.50 a day to the Border Patrol to hold immigrants as they awaited deportation. Some immigrants were driven or flown to ports of entry where they would return to Mexico.
Carter announced the Texas operation by telling journalists that they would witness “the arrival of one of the most powerful immigration forces ever assembled for the purpose of rounding up illegals,” according to García’s book. He didn’t say how many Border Patrol officers would be involved in the mission.
On the first day, the operation resulted in the arrest of 4,800 men in Texas. By the end of July, officers claimed to have deported nearly 42,000 people and said another 46,000 had fled back to Mexico to avoid being arrested.
The mission began to receive criticism from Rio Grande Valley residents and the press after it became public that Border Patrol agents would take $10 from each immigrant they arrested to pay for their transportation out of the country.
Carter told journalists that immigration officers had the “statutory authority” to charge Mexicans for their deportation since they were not being criminally prosecuted, according to Garcia’s book.
The operation officially ended in mid-September after funding ran out.
In total, the Border Patrol claimed its officers had arrested 80,000 immigrants in Texas and more than 84,000 in California and Arizona. In all, the agency claimed that 1.2 million Mexicans were either arrested or self-deported.
According to its estimates, 700,000 Mexicans voluntarily left the country out of fear that they would get arrested and deported. However, neither Border Patrol nor Mexican officials could point to evidence backing up that claim.
“This is a highly inflated number,” said Hernandez, the UCLA professor, whose research found the official number to be between 300,000 and 400,000 people deported by U.S. Border Patrol.
After the operation, Swing told a congressional committee that if they wanted to continue securing the border, it was important to hire more agents. Congress agreed and increased the Border Patrol’s budget by $3 million and approved hiring another 400 agents in 1955.
Garcia wrote in his book that the operation and the “accompanying propaganda” shifted the public’s perception of some immigrants.
“The image of the mysterious, sneaky, faceless ‘illegal’ was once again stamped into the minds of many,” Garcia wrote. “Once this was accomplished, ‘illegals’ became something less than human, with their arbitrary removal being that much easier to justify and accomplish.”
Trump’s deportation plans
Trump has promised millions of deportations in his second term. An estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. today, and a report from the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights advocacy nonprofit organization, estimated that it could cost more than $88 billion to deport 1 million immigrants.
The Trump administration gave federal officers a national quota to arrest at least 1,200 undocumented immigrants every day — more than double the highest daily average of 500 arrests in 2014 and four times more than the 300-per-day average over the past 10 years.
As of Feb. 6, the Trump administration says it has arrested 11,000 undocumented immigrants — or about 600 daily arrests, according to Tom Homan, an immigration adviser to Trump.
It’s still too early to determine if the Trump administration is on pace to deport a record number of immigrants.
In its network of private detention centers, ICE can detain almost 40,000 immigrants at a cost of about $165 a day per immigrant. In a recent memo, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, warned Congress that it would cost nearly $27 billion to add 110,000 detention beds, according to the National Public Radio.
In Texas, some Republican leaders are eager to help the Trump administration with its promised mass deportations.
Shortly after Trump won the election, Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham offered the federal government use of a 1,400-acre ranch in Starr County as a detention center site. Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott met with Trump and offered 4,000 state jail cells to hold undocumented immigrants. The state has also built a military base in Eagle Pass to house 1,800 National Guard soldiers deployed to the border.
“All of that is available for the United States of America,” Abbott told reporters after his meeting with Trump in the White House.
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