During the Great Depression, increased economic pressure and strained resources stoked xenophobia and accusations that immigrants, particularly Mexicans, were taking jobs needed by U.S. citizens. President Herbert Hoover touted plans guaranteeing “American jobs for real Americans.” The message: Non-white people weren’t Americans — even if they were born in the U.S. Local agencies started excluding immigrants from getting aid, and officials floated the idea of deporting immigrants who had become a “public charge.” Informal raids and sweeps were conducted in major cities in border states like California but also in Michigan and Illinois. It’s estimated that by the mid-1930s, over a million Mexicans were returned to Mexico.
However, this era of “Mexican repatriation” wasn’t a full-scale deportation campaign. Ultimately, only about 80,000 Mexicans were formally deported, according to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Instead, U.S. immigration officers stoked fear through raids in major cities to pressure Mexicans to “repatriate.”
One of the most famous raids was at La Placita Park in Los Angeles, where immigration officers shoved Mexican immigrants — and Mexican Americans — into vans and deported 400 people, regardless of their immigration status. Local governments helped coordinate these raids and even offered free train tickets into Mexico. Newspapers ran inaccurate and inflated numbers of deportations in the program.
The result: large-scale self-deportation. Many Mexicans, including U.S.-born people of Mexican descent, elected to leave the country. In Los Angeles, by 1935, one-third of its Chicano population had disappeared. Nationwide, it’s estimated that up to 60 percent of those who left were actually American citizens.
“Operation Wetback”
It’s known as the largest mass deportation in American history, and many view it as a model for Trump’s impending immigration plans.
To understand why this operation was such a big deal, look no further than a guest worker program the U.S. government enacted with Mexico in the early 1940’s, known as the Bracero program, named after the Spanish word for manual laborer. It allowed temporary farm workers from Mexico to fill labor shortages during World War II, bringing around 300,000 immigrants each year. But some employers, particularly in Texas, didn’t want to play by the rules of the program (or pay Bracero workers a fair wage). Instead, they hired scores of undocumented workers who’d crossed the border illegally.
In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower mounted a massive political campaign and deportation operation to combat Mexican immigration, named after a derogatory slur for immigrants who crossed rivers to reach the U.S. It wasn’t a long operation, but it was widespread. The INS planned sweeps of factories and farms as if they were “war strikes,” all to round up undocumented workers and return them to Mexico. Some of them were U.S.-born citizens of Mexican descent.
And undocumented people weren’t just deported across the border, they were deported deep inside Mexico. This was a tactic to avoid reentry, Lytle-Hernández says. Often these undocumented immigrants were boarded on buses, planes and even some boats that resembled slave ships, according to historian Mae Ngai’s book Impossible Subjects.
The INS declared the operation a success, claiming to have deported more than a million people. But those deportation numbers were greatly exaggerated, according to Lytle-Hernández. The majority of the deportations were actually voluntary departures, where many Mexicans left the country on their own after being apprehended by the INS.
Similar to the Mexican repatriation of the 30’s, the biggest impact of “Operation Wetback” was the fear it created. “It was largely a publicity stunt, and they used terror to try to scare people out of the country through roadblocks and raids that were covered by the press,” Lytle-Hernández says.
It was a deeply-racially targeted campaign grounded in racial profiling of people perceived to be of Mexican descent, according to Lytle-Hernández, adding, “To me, it’s all racism.”
