“We are going to carry out the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States.”
The above phrase was uttered by Donald Trump during a rally in Iowa in September 2023.
But it is a promise that he has also repeated in other places and that he included in his presidential campaign for the 2016 elections.
The now virtual Republican presidential candidate has made it clear that When he talks about mass deportation, he plans to follow a specific model: Operation Wetbackexecuted by Dwight Eisenhower’s government in the summer of 1954, exactly 70 years ago.
“We are going to close the border because right now we have an invasion. We have an invasion of millions and millions of people coming into our country (…) And we are going to have to deport. In fact, we are going to have to have a level of deportation that we have not seen in this country for a long time, since Dwight Eisenhower.”
That operation officially culminated in the expulsion of nearly 1,300,000 undocumented migrants, mostly Mexicans, and has since been considered a the “largest deportation in US history”.
Additionally, it has also been denounced by its critics as a campaign of “terror” that not only affected undocumented immigrants, but also U.S. citizens of Mexican origin, which separated families and marked the beginning of the use of military tactics to control migration.
As historian Delia Fernandez commented in an article published by Ohio State University: “This new policy marked the beginning of modern deportation raids and the militarization of the border that we know today.”.
But what exactly did “Operation Wetback” consist of?
Military tactics and mass deportations
In May 1954, then-U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, along with Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner General Joseph Swing and Border Patrol Chief Harlon B. Carter, issued a press statement announcing “Operation Wetback,” a plan to sweep the southwestern United States to find, detain, and deport undocumented Mexican migrants.
The term “Wetbacks” was a racist slur referring to migrants crossing from Mexico across the Rio Grande and which, naturally, arrived wet on the shores of the United States.
In statements to the press, Carter promised that “an army of Border Patrol agents, with jeeps, trucks and seven planes,” would carry out an “all-out war” to return these people to Mexico.
On June 9, the start of the operation in California and Arizona was confirmed. At dawn the next day, some 800 border agents from different parts of the United States established massive checkpoints on the roads to catch undocumented immigrants.
During the first week, agents detained more than 12,300 Mexicans and sent about 7,000 by bus to Nogales to be deported.. And by the end of the month, another 22,000 had already been detained.
Border Patrol agents were organized in groups of 12 and had patrol cars, rustic vehicles, vans, and many times even surveillance planes that provided them with support and guidance from the air.
They raided farms and industrial plants, but also restaurants, homes and other public places in communities with a large Mexican presence. In Los Angeles, the INS turned a public park into a makeshift camp where they housed people they were going to deport in the open air.
Within three months, they carried out numerous raids, arresting thousands of people in California, Arizona, Texas, Illinois and the Mississippi Delta.
The detainees were put on buses, boats or planes and sent to the border where they were handed over to the Mexican authorities who in turn sent them to areas of the interior of Mexico where, frequently, they had no family or friends.
By October 1954, Joseph Swing stated that the operation had succeeded in stopping and sending back to Mexico more than one million immigrants.
“The so-called “wetback” problem no longer exists. The decline in the number of “wetbacks” found in the United States (…) shows that this is no longer, as it was in the past, a border control problem. The border has been secured,” Swing noted in the INS annual report for 1954.
Self-deported
But a significant portion of the migrants who returned to Mexico were, in fact, self-deported.
According to Adam Goodman in the book “Deportation Machine”, during the fiscal year 1954 there were more than a million people who voluntarily left the United States.
He highlights that, according to an INS press release released in July of that year, the self-deportations “were a planned part of the general purpose of the operation.” [Espalda Mojada]”.
Historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, a professor at the University of California Los Angeles, agrees. “This was a campaign of terror designed to scare people away from the country,” she told the AP. “In reality, it was a campaign designed to terrorize communities into self-deportation.”.
And indeed, US authorities were celebrating the migrants leaving on their own.
“This is saving the government money because it means we don’t have to bear the costs of rounding them up and transporting them to the border,” noted an article in the INS bulletin published in late June 1954 and cited by Goodman in his book.
A month later, General Frank H. Partridge, who was serving as Swing’s special assistant, noted in a letter that “the most recent reports indicate that those who leave of their own free will as a result of news of the operation are almost three times as many as those arrested by the agents.”
A key element for this to happen was the management of the media and the collaboration they provided, consciously or not.
News crews were constantly on the move to where Border Patrol was raiding, detaining and deporting migrants. Experts say this extensive news coverage often gave the impression that the operation was larger than it actually was.
Encouraging migrants to leave without being deported had, as we will see below, an additional undeclared objective.
Discontent in South Texas
The official justification for Operation Wetback focused on the supposed threat that undocumented workers posed to the United States.
According to Attorney General Brownell, the problem of these migrants was becoming “increasingly serious” because they were “displacing local workers, affecting working conditions, spreading disease, and contributing to the crime rate.”
Although this statement It coincided with an anti-immigrant sentiment that was in voguesome experts point out that this was not the underlying issue.
U.S. authorities found themselves caught between two opposing forces: those who rejected undocumented migrants from Mexico and those who wanted to hire them.
In this regard, various experts agree in linking Operation Wetback with the Bracero Program established by the United States during World War II, to cover the country’s labor needs with Mexican workers.
Established in 1942, it is estimated that this program allowed the legal entry into the United States of some 4.6 million Mexicans in its 22 years of validity. This initiative contemplated a series of demands for the employer related to working conditions, including salary.
To prevent these workers from staying to live in the United States, entry was granted only to men. (since it was thought that with their families remaining in Mexico they would have more incentives to return) and the length of their stays was limited.
Be that as it may, experts point out that there were states, such as California, that became dependent on the Bracero program.
At the same time, there were other places – like South Texas – where Many farmers wanted to rely on Mexican labor, but they did not want to assume the costs. which involved the hiring of these workers, which is why they chose to employ undocumented workers.
This spelled trouble for the federal government. Not only because these landowners refused to resort to the Bracero Program, but because they even went so far as to hire armed guards to prevent the Border Patrol from detaining undocumented immigrants.
“Operation Wetback of 1954 was a campaign to crush the South Texas uprising and force them to comply with the Bracero Program. However, it was Mexican workers who paid the highest price,” wrote Kelly Lytle Hernández in an article for The Conversation.
The expert also points out that, at the same time that Operation Wetback was being carried out, General Swing sent Border Patrol teams to meet with employers in the southwestern United States – especially those in south Texas – to who were offered two less expensive versions of the Bracero Program known as the I-100 and the special programs.
These alternatives contained fewer demands on employers in terms of working conditions and also gave them more control over the hiring and firing processes.
Finally, if the farmers still resisted, they were threatened with establishing a permanent Border Patrol checkpoint next to their farm until they agreed to commit to not hiring undocumented immigrants.
According to Lytle-Hernandez, this effort worked and the number of Mexican workers hired in Texas through I-100 and special programs increased from 168 in July 1953 to 41,766 in July 1954.
“Operation Wetback did not solve the problem of unauthorized migration. In fact, he never had that intention.”wrote Eladio Bobadilla, a historian at the University of Pittsburgh, in an article published by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.
“Operation Wetback, above all, was a political sleight of hand intended to appease the nativists while still ensuring that farmers, growers, and other employers of cheap Mexican labor remained giving access to workers.
“Many of the ‘deported’ were simply granted parole to work as farmers. Others were sent across the border and became braceros,” he added.
That, in part, also helps explain why Border Patrol agents encouraged self-deportations, since undocumented immigrants who left on their own could return to the country as laborers more easily since they did not have an immigration record due to having been expelled.
Historians have not only questioned the actual goals of “Operation Wetback,” but have also revealed that deportation figures are misleading.
“The more than one million deportations recorded in 1954 cannot be attributed to that summer program because fiscal year 1954 ended on June 30, 1954, just two weeks after the start of the summer operation,” Lytle wrote. -Hernández in an article published by the Western Historical Quarterly magazine.
In that short period, the Border Patrol apprehended some 33,000 people and another 254,096 between July 1, 1954, and June 30, 1955, so The number of people arrested during the summer campaign is expected to be less than 300,000.
And, according to the expert, the number of arrests of undocumented Mexicans had been growing since 1950, the date on which the beginning of the adoption of military-style tactics by the Border Patrol that characterized Operation Wetback.
Between 1950 and 1953, the number of detained undocumented immigrants almost doubled, going from 459,289 to 827,440. These figures, according to the expert, are not a good indicator of the increase in unauthorized workers since in many cases undocumented people returned to the United States again and again after having been deported.
In any case, in the years that followed Operation Wetback – and the negotiations undertaken in parallel by the Border Patrol – more and more employers were able to resort to hiring braceros and in the following years the number of deportations fell.
But this decline, in the words of Lytle-Hernández, “had more to do with the Bracero Program, which—until its end in 1964—provided a form of legalization for many Mexican men working in the southwestern United States.”
Despite everything, for the Border Patrol it was a great publicity coup that 70 years later keeps alive the legend of the “largest deportation in the history of the United States.”
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