Just like Trump, politicians and the media in the 1950s spoke of migrants as a faceless, dangerous mass with no humanity. Few records were left of their experiences. But some people have been able to tell their stories. The late former congressman Esteban Torres, a child of Mexican immigrants, recalled that when he was only three years old, his father did not return home one day because he had been deported. “My brother and I were left without a father,” he recounted. “We never saw him again.” Deportation tears families and communities apart; it is traumatic both for those who experience it and for those around them.
Deportation campaigns also infringe on the rights of citizens. During the 1954 operation, the Border Patrol increased surveillance and racial profiling of those who “looked Mexican.” Claiming that many migrants tried to avoid deportation by posing as U.S. citizens, officials insisted that immigration officers had to question anyone who appeared to be from south of the border.
While Operation Wetback did reduce unauthorized border crossings, it did not do so strictly through deportations—as Trump seems to assume. Alongside mass deportations, the government expanded the Bracero Program, a set of agreements between the United States and Mexico that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States legally as contract laborers. As a result, men who had crossed the border before 1954 without papers because they had been denied a slot in the Bracero Program began to come as legal guest workers, thus reducing unauthorized migration.
Other massive deportation campaigns in American history have had similarly pernicious effects. Between 1919 and 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer set out to purge the country of political radicals, often immigrants from Southern or Eastern Europe. During the Palmer Raids, federal, state, and local agents arrested thousands of people whom they believed to harbor revolutionary intentions (First Amendment be damned), detained them at Ellis Island, and eventually deported over 500 of them. Among them was well-known anarchist Emma Goldman, who described the awful conditions during her detention: the “quarters were congested, the food was abominable, and [we] were treated like felons.” These detentions and deportations also ripped families apart: those classified as radicals were sent away, while their parents, spouses, and children remained behind.
