BRACING FOR THE MASS DEPORTATION

DÉJÀ VU ALL OVER AGAIN!

Operation Wetback, 1954 (National Archives)

President-elect Trump boasts that his long-promised mass deportation of illegal immigrants will be the “largest deportation” in US history.[1] While “largest” is typical Trumpian bluster, he did at least acknowledge that there’s a history in this country to casting out immigrants and even referenced Operation Wetback, whose purported record number of deportees he proposes to smash.

What he failed to mention is that this Eisenhower-era program was and remains notorious. First, because “wetback” was then a common racist epithet for Mexican immigrants—derived from many having swum across the Rio Grande—but which also applied, as I well remember, to Mexican Americans. And worse, because among Operation Wetback’s circa 1.3 million deportees were many who’d been admitted legally, as well as American citizens. The operation also employed the military, as Trump threatens to imitate, and has been called—hyperbolically, as we’ll see—”the largest deportation in American history.”[2]

Trump even plagiarized the fear-mongering notion of an “illegal invasion” from Operation Wetback, which coined the phrase after fissures emerged in the more respectfully labeled Bracero Program (1942-1964)—bracero, in Spanish, meaning “manual laborer.” Initiated by the government during World War II, the Bracero Program, contrary to Operation Wetback, was a guest worker program that actively promoted and organized legal Mexican immigration (and later repatriation, in a revolving-door process) to supply much-needed labor for industry and agriculture during wartime and subsequently during the postwar economic boom.[3]

Rio Vista Processing Center during the Bracero Program (National Archives)

Ultimately, the divergent purposes of the two programs and the continuing benefit of cheap immigrant labor—American farmers actually recruited illegal immigrants—led to the end of Operation Wetback after a mere three months.[4] A crucial legacy of the failed program, however, was “a more permanent, strategic border control along the Mexico-United States border,” which has since, as we know, become overburdened by the influx of asylum seekers fleeing the perilous conditions in Mexico, much of Central America and the Caribbean, and more recently, Venezuela.[5]

The Bracero Program was eventually terminated over concerns (unfounded, it turns out) that the undocumented workers were dampening the wages of American farmworkers.[6] In any event, despite the end of the program and increased border controls, the US has remained reliant on, if not become addicted to, the cheap, often undocumented labor from south of the border and elsewhere—to the point that today nearly half of all US farmworkers are undocumented![7]

An additional hurdle for Trump’s plan is the proliferation of sanctuary cities and counties—not only in deep blue states but also in Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Nebraska, North Dakota, North and South Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Utah, Virginia, and Wyoming![7] Altogether, it seems likely that Trump’s neo-Operation Wetback, if it gets off the ground at all, will wreak far greater havoc, socially and economically, than its predecessor.[8]

And there were others.

Relatives and friends wave goodbye to a train carrying 1,500 people, including women and children, being repatriated from Los Angeles to Mexico in 1931 (New York Daily News Archive / Getty Images)

Euphemistically termed “repatriation drives,” a series of raids of Mexicans from 1929-1936 (the vast majority during the Hoover administration from 1930-1933) were carried out by state and local governments mainly in the border states.[9] Up to 1.8 million people (a third more than Operation Wetback) were rounded up and deported, an estimated 60% of whom were American citizens! A large number of the overall total were also women and children, despite the fact that the repatriations’ impetus, unlike with Operation Wetback, wasn’t the immigrants’ undocumented status or criminality but competition for scarce jobs and resources during the Great Depression.[10]

The humanitarian crisis caused by the repatriations is graphically portrayed in Gregory Nava’s 1995 saga Mi Familia, set in Los Angeles, the epicenter of the operation, where trainloads of deportees were transported deep into the heart of Mexico in order to make their return to the US as difficult as possible.[11] Mi Familia focuses on one of these arduous journeys by the young mother of the film’s narrator, an American citizen who was pregnant when she was deported (unbeknown to her husband) and almost loses her newborn son and barely survives herself on the return trek to LA (which of course had once been Mexican territory). What the film omits, understandably, are the even more gruesome hardships some of the deportees endured.

According to a long-overdue investigation into the repatriations by California State Senator Joseph Dunn in 2004, one of the deportees “was a woman with leprosy who was driven just over the border and left in Mexicali, Mexico. Others had tuberculosis, paralysis, mental illness or problems related to old age. Orderlies carried them out of medical institutions and sent them out of the country.” Overall, the raids “tore apart families and communities, leaving lasting trauma for Mexican Americans who remained in the United States,” many rightfully fearing they themselves might be the next targets. Besides the repatriations’ sheer inhumanity, they were also unconstitutional, as they proceeded without legal protections or due process. President Hoover hadn’t issued an executive order, though he implicitly supported the raids and repatriations by touting the nativist slogan, “American jobs for Americans!”[12]

And clearly that sentiment hasn’t gone out of style.

Trump has been playing the nativist card ever since he first ran for office, asserting, or at least implying, that most Mexican immigrants are drug-dealing criminals and rapists.[13] He’ll occasionally leave the ultra-nationalism to his lackeys, such as when once and future adviser Stephen Miller, at Trump’s pre-election, Nazi-like Madison Square Garden rally, blurted, “America is for Americans and Americans only!”[14]

Trump himself has become more broad-minded in his racism, now including all brown- and black-skinned immigrants and doubling down on their criminality. In a December 8th Meet the Press interview, he justified the urgency of his deportation scheme by claiming that 13,099—yes, he was that precise—undocumented “murderers” had been “released into our country over the last three years,” which just happened to be “during the Biden period of time.” And they’re not even in prison, he elaborated, “They’re walking down the streets. They’re walking next to you and your family. And they’re very dangerous people.”[15]

Fact Check: According to the Dept. of Homeland Security, “more than 13,000 noncitizens had been convicted of homicide in the US over the last four decades, including during Trump’s first term. And most of them are in prisons or jails, not walking the streets.”[16]

As for Trump’s lie that immigrants are “costing us a fortune,” LA Times columnist Robin Arcadian reminds us, “Time and again experts have concluded that immigrants do not cost U.S. taxpayers ‘a fortune,’ depress wages, increase government deficits and debt, or commit a disproportionate share of crime.”[17] As for the crime calumny, specifically, a 2024 National Institute of Justice study based on the immigrant-heavy, law-and-order state of Texas, “found that undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes and a quarter the rate of native-born citizens for property crimes.”[18]

Most criminal and fortune-squandering of all, of course, will be Trump’s mass deportation, for which he’ll likely paper over the illegality with an executive order and, to justify bringing in the military, declare a national emergency.[19]

About the only sordid questions that remain are: how many lives will be lost or incapacitated in this reckless operation; how many American citizens, as with Operation Wetback and the repatriations of the 1930s, will be caught in its web; and how much long-lasting damage will be dealt to the country’s economy and social fabric?

But before Trump’s disastrous plan can go down in history with other scandalous debacles such as Operation Wetback, Watergate, and Iran-Contra, it requires a name.

I for one suggest Operation Madagascar, recalling the Madagascar Plan first proposed by France and Poland in 1937 and revived by the Nazis in 1940, shortly before France’s surrender. This plan called for forcibly relocating one million Jews a year for four years to the island nation of Madagascar just off the southeastern coast of Africa, then a French colony, which Germany hoped to gain control of in the peace agreement. Once in Nazi hands, the country would be turned into a police state run by the SS.[20]

(Map by Shosholoza)

Then again, the Caribbean Community nations of the Bahamas, TCI (the Turks and Caicos Islands), and Grenada have already rejected Trump’s request to take in thousands of his prize deportees. And if his bad luck continues, the only “islands” for the deportees might end up smack dab in the United States, in the “drastically expanding detention centers” Trump is planning to have built by private prison companies—a travesty that can’t help but bring to mind the infamous Japanese American internment camps of World War II![21]

(nl.pinterest.com)

Or if by some miracle Trump comes to his senses, he could take his cue from the George and Ira Gershwin ditty in the 1937 MGM musical Shall We Dance—“Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”—and punctuate it with his signature Fred Astaire soft shoe.

(amazon.com)

It would make a good Saturday Night Live skit, at least. But the reality ain’t no joke.

* * * * * * * * * *

NOTES

[1] Stephen Inskeep and Christopher Thomas, “Trump promised the ‘largest deportation’ in U.S. history. Here’s how he might start,” https://www.nprillinois.org/2024-11-12/trump-promised-the-largest-deportation-in-u-s-history-heres-how-he-might-start.

[2] Erin Blakemore, “The Largest Mass Deportation in American History,” March 23, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/operation-wetback-eisenhower-1954-deportation.

[3] Ronald L. Mize and Alicia C. S. Swords, Consuming Labor: From the Bracero Program to NAFTA (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).

[4] Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (New Jersey: Princeton UP, 2004).

[5] Ibid.

[6] Michael A. Clemens, Ethan G. Lewis and Hannah M. Postel, “Immigration Restrictions as Active Labor Market Policy: Evidence from the Bracero Program Exclusion,” American Economic Review, 108 (6).

[7] Meghan Roos and Alex J. Rouhandeh, “With Nearly Half of U.S. Farmworkers Undocumented, Ending Illegal Immigration Could Devastate Economy,” April 21, 2021, https://www.newsweek.com/nearly-half-us-farmworkers-undocumented-ending-illegal-immigration-could-devastate-economy.

[8] Jessica M. Vaughan and Bryan Griffith, “Map: Sanctuary Cities, Counties, and States,” November 1, 2024, https://cis.org/Map-Sanctuary-Cities-Counties-and-States.

[9] Brian Gratton and Emily Merchant, “Immigration, Repatriation, and Deportation: The Mexican-Origin Population in the United States, 1920-1950,” International Migration Review, vol. 47, no. 4; Becky Little, “The Deportation Campaigns of the Great Depression,” July 12, 2019, https://www.history.com/news/great-depression-repatriation-drives-mexico-deportation.

[10] Little, “The Deportation Campaigns.”

[11] Los Angeles Mayor’s Office Civic Memory Working Group, “Mexican Repatriation,” 2021, Huntington Library/USC Institute on California and the West, 2021, https://civicmemory.la/report/mexican-repatriation.

[12] Little, “Deportation Campaigns.”

[13] Katie Reilly, “Here Are All the Times Trump Insulted Mexico,” August 31, 2016, https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult.

[14] Anita Chabria, “Trump’s big rally doubles down on hatred,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2024, A1.

[15] Robin Abcarian, “Why Trump just doubled down on his mass deportation threat,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 2024, A10.

[16] Ibid.

17] Ibid.

[18] National Institute of Justice, “Undocumented Immigrant Offending Rate Lower Than U.S.-Born Citizen Rate,” September 12, 2024, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate.

[19] Alexandra Huxler, “Trump confirms plan to declare national emergency, use military for deportations,” November 18, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-confirms-plan-declare-national-emergency-military-mass/story.

[20] Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[21] Julia Ainsley, Laura Strickler and Didi Martinez, “Incoming Trump admin considering new immigrant detention centers near major U.S. cities,” November 12, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/incoming-trump-admin-eyeing-new-immigrant-detention-centers-major-us.