E.J. Montini:

Trump’s policy is “Operation Wetback 2.0 — The Children.”

President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance policy that is cruelly impacting migrant families at the border is what history buffs might call “Operation Wetback 2.0 — The Children.”

And the inspiration for this policy, the recent real-world proof that let the president know he could get away with it comes from — you guessed it — Arizona.

Back in 2006, then-state Senate President Russell Pearce told me that the U.S. needed to revisit a 1950s mass-deportation program called “Operation Wetback.”

Pearce said, “My critics don’t like history. They want to rewrite history. I didn’t use the term (wetback). I quoted a successful program. The far left always tells you, ‘Russell, you can’t deport 12 million people.’ I say, ‘Yes, you can, if you have the will.’”

Pearce referred to his critics as “sissies,” among other things. Sound like anyone you know? Pearce was the legislator behind Arizona’s infamous, anti-immigrant, unconstitutional SB 1070.

Signing that atrocity got Jan Brewer elected governor. She became a big Trump supporter.

Enforcing SB 1070 (which has cost us millions) kept Sheriff Joe Arpaio in office. He became a big Trump supporter.

Some version of that same hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric has gotten Arizona Republicans elected to state, county and local offices for years. In other words, it works.

In July 2015, when the national media was treating Trump’s presidential campaign as a joke, I wrote a column that began:

“People who don’t know any better are saying Donald Trump can’t win the presidential election. In Arizona, we

know that he can get elected, because Arizonans already have elected Donald Trump — many times.”

Trump isn’t original. He’s a political incarnation of Arizona elected officials stretching from Arpaio to Evan Mecham.

Perhaps that’s why Trump, too, praised the 1950s deportation program dubbed “Operation Wetback,” though without using the name.

Trump said, “Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. I like Ike, right? The expression. I like Ike. Moved a million (and a) half illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again, beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back. Dwight Eisenhower. You don’t get nicer, you don’t get friendlier. They moved a million (and a) half people out. We have no choice.”

It isn’t new for Trump to play the racist card. In the late 1980s, he pur-

chased newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the “Central Park Five” (four black men and a Latino) who were accused of a brutal rape but later exonerated by DNA. During the presidential campaign, he continued to say they were guilty.

Trump was a notorious birther, questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship.

He went soft on the white nationalists at Charlottesville.

He said a federal judge in a class-action suit was biased against him because the judge is Latino.

He called for a ban on Muslims entering the country.

He denigrated immigrants from places like Haiti, El Salvador and Africa by asking why we allow people in from “sh-thole countries.”

He backed Roy Moore in Alabama and hired Steve Bannon at the White House.

It hasn’t stopped.

Neither has the parade of Arizona politicians mimicking his hateful rhetoric. The latest being Rep. David Stringer with his comment about there not being enough white children.

Now the president has initiated a the zero-tolerance policy that is tearing apart families.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit over the policy.

According to the Los Angeles Times, a worker at a shelter in Tucson said that inadequate staffing and poor conditions have caused detained children to run away and even attempt suicide.

While the horror continues, the president apparently has hinted that he’d alter the zero tolerance policy if Democrats give in to his demands on immigration laws and the border wall.

In other words, he’s using 2,000 children as bargaining chips.

Is there anything worse than that? In the meantime, owing to the large number of children now in custody, separated from their families, the administration is planning to house hundreds of juveniles in a temporary tent shelter near El Paso.

Warehousing prisoners in a tent city.

Gee, I wonder where the feds got that idea?