The deportation program also had something Donald Trump might have loved — extensive publicity, as immigration officers were followed and photographed by journalists courted by government officials.
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O’REILLY: Now, he deported, as you rightly pointed out, about a million, maybe a little bit more illegal aliens back in the early 1950s. “Moved them way south. They never came back”.
He did so again in this week’s Republican debate, saying “you don’t get nicer, you don’t get friendlier” than President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Though Trump extolled the program’s praises on the GOP debate, he didn’t call “Operation Wetback” by name. The racial epithet was widely used at the time.
On NPR Wednesday morning, conservative Republican Alfonso Aguilar slammed Trump’s comments. It was bad. Immigrants were humiliated. “To say it’s a success story, it’s ridiculous”. “It shows that Mr. Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about”. “Do you know Putin personally?”
Our friend Adrian Florido of the Code Switch blog wrote about the mass deportations of the 1930s and 1940s.
“Operation Wetback” is estimated to have moved more than one million immigrants from the United States, though scholars doubt that number. Many of them had been lured by the booming economy during much of the ’20s.
As Adrian reported, California formally apologized in 2012 for its role in illegally deporting hundreds of thousands of USA citizens.
As the USA entered World War II, it found itself in need of agricultural labor.
Donald Trump’s immigration plan is a lot funnier than his appearance on “Saturday Night Live”, at least according to President Barack Obama.
One memorable line from the report stated: “The magnitude… has reached entirely new levels in the past seven years….” And then what happened was that a lot of people poured across the border and the Eisenhower administration said look, you are corrupting the Bracero agreement we have so we’re going to haul you back.
In his book Walls and Mirrors, David Gutierrez dedicates a chapter to the complex relationship Mexican-Americans had with Mexican immigrants. Under the Eisenhower program, immigrants inside the USA were rounded up and deported to remote places, resulting in deaths.
Trump has yet to yet to lay out precisely how he would track down those living in the country illegally, or how he would determine who are “the good ones” that he would allow to return.
BuzzFeed News reports Spencer also tweeted that “mass deportation would be easy and could easily be done humanely”.
But he nonetheless defended what host Bill O’Reilly described as brutal treatment against those who were deported.
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As historian Mae Ngai related, while a few immigrants were transported by plane or train to Mexico, a quarter of those deported were transported on cargo boats from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, in an operation that a congressional investigation — convened in 1956 — compared to an “18th century slave ship” and a “penal hell ship”.
