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TopicTrump plans to use the military to deport making round through the news
WingsOfGood
11/19/24 8:43:43 AM
#29:


https://www.cbsnews.com/news/blueprint-of-trump-deportation-plan-a-questionable-approach-by-eisenhower-60-minutes/

What the U.S. government did under Dwight D. Eisenhower was a massive military-style sweep. U.S. Border Patrol agents conducted raids to round up Mexican laborers from farms and ranches, then transported them deported deep into Mexico. Historians say the program tore families apart, violated civil rights and at times, even turned deadly.
Moreover, those who have studied the Eisenhower administration's approach say this short-term show-of-force did not stop the problem.
"I would describe [it] as a very cruel operation of deportation," said immigration historian Mae Ngai, whose book "Impossible Subjects" examines how illegal migration became a central issue of U.S. immigration policy. "But also, it was a kind of political theater. It did not solve the issue of undocumented migration."

The blueprint for Trump's idea: "Operation Wet REDACTED SLUR
Following World War II, immigration into the United States was fairly low. The U.S. government imposed strict immigration quotas that limited the number of people allowed to enter the country. The controversy over immigration arose in the early 1950s, around the Bracero program, a guest worker program for agricultural laborers from Mexico.
According to Ngai, the American growers who were hiring these Mexican laborers preferred undocumented workers because they had fewer regulations governing their treatment. This embarrassed the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Ngai said, because they wanted the farmers to only take the legally contracted Braceros.
Although the terms have since become ethnic slurs, in the 1950s, most everyone involved in immigration policy on both sides of the border referred to people who crossed the river illegally from Mexico as "wetbacks" or "mojados." In 1953, CBS's Edward R. Murrow reported on the situation at the border using that term.
Trump vows to deport millions. Would it mean family separations?
"Every 30 seconds, a Mexican wetback enters this country illegally," Murrow detailed. "The number is increasing. Some days as many as 5,000 are caught and sent back in a single day."
To deal with the issue of illegal entries from Mexico, Eisenhower assigned his Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization, Lieutenant General Joseph Swing, Eisenhower's friend and former West Point classmate. Swing concocted a military-style plan to round up and mass deport those laborers who crossed the border outside of the Bracero program. The plan became known as "Operation Wetback."
Although the U.S. had steadily increased deportations of Mexican laborers, the largest effort commenced in June 1954, when U.S. Border Patrol head Harlon Carter promised "the biggest drive against illegal aliens in history," according to a contemporaneous report by the Los Angeles Times.
Over the next year, hundreds of Border Patrol agents apprehended and deported anyone suspected of being in the United States illegally. They flew airplanes over the Rio Grande Valley to see where people were working and would check to see if there was a farm that was illegally contracting workers. While the operation included some raids in cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, Ngai said, the primary focus was laborers near the Mexican border.
"These people were just rounded up, put on trucks and buses, driven over the border, dumped on the other side, sometimes in the desert," Ngai said.
Ngai said about a quarter of the people deported through "Operation Wetback" were put on ships and taken across the Gulf of Mexico to Veracruz in the Yucatan Peninsula.
"There was a big expos that these ships were barely converted freighters that were very old and dirty," Ngai said. "One person in Congress called them 'hell ships.'"
Mass deportation would come with hefty bill, require more manpower, immigration experts say
According to Ngai, migrants were sometimes left in the scorching Mexican desert, with temperatures soaring over 100 degrees. "In one case, 88 people died from sun stroke, and more would have died had the Mexican Red Cross not come to their rescue," Ngai said.
"Operation Wetback," Ngai said, was largely intended to show force to two audiences: Americans living near the border who had complained about the migration problem, and the growers, in an effort to make them obey the federal hiring program. It was not intended to score political points nationally.
"It was not a campaign issue," Ngai said. "Most Americans didn't think about farm workers at the border, legal or not."
The mass deportation operation lasted about a year. The program had become expensive to maintain, and American agriculture growers had begun to comply with the Bracero program to hire Mexican workers legally, leading them to use fewer undocumented laborers.
At the time, the Eisenhower administration said it carried out more than one million "returns," but historians believe many people were deported more than once and that the actual number of people is significantly less. Two historians told 60 Minutes that some American citizens were mistakenly deported in the roundups.

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