Trump’s vows to deport millions are undercut by his White House record
Noelia Sanchez was born in the rolling farmlands of southwest Missouri, where her Mexican parents worked as seasonal farmworkers in the 1950s.
When she was 1, Noelia and her mother, Aurora, who had no work documents, were rounded up with dozens of other immigrants in a Texas town near the border. The U.S.-born child and her mother were forced to go to Mexico along with hundreds of thousands of other people.
Their deportations were part of a U.S. government effort that was known in official papers and the media as “Operation Wetback.” The term “wetback,” which was used to describe Mexicans who swam or waded across the Rio Grande, is considered a racial slur.
Donald Trump has lauded the Eisenhower-era raids without using their name since he first ran for president and is now promising voters he would begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, exceeding the 1950s. He has escalated his verbal attacks on immigrants as he seeks a second term, telling supporters twice in recent weeks that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”
People affected by “Operation Wetback” and historians on immigration argue Trump is using fragments of history and rhetoric for political reasons while discounting his own administration’s failures to carry out mass deportations, even as it separated families at the U.S.-Mexico border and enacted sweeping restrictions on asylum.
“Families were divided by misapplied immigration policies and discriminatory immigration policies specifically geared toward Indigenous people, Mexican Americans, Latinos,” said Joaquin Sanchez, Noelia’s son, who is now an immigration attorney in Chicago. “These are the types of policies that my family has witnessed for generations.”
“Operation Wetback” coincided with a guest worker program that provided legal status to hundreds of thousands of largely Mexican farm workers. Noelia Sanchez, who was born in Missouri, and her mother were able to get their papers in about a year and return to settle in Chicago.
The administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched a military-style campaign in the summer of 1954 seeking to remove Mexican immigrants who were in the country illegally. The operation followed several other deportation efforts of the 1940s and 1950s.