The 1950’s “Operation Wetback” was the largest mass deportation of undocumented migrants in U. S. history. As many as 1.5 million people were swept up and deported in the Eisenhower Administration campaign. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) repatriated primarily Mexican immigrants (some of them American citizens) from the U.S. Ironically, millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country after World War II in the joint U.S.-Mexico Bracero Program. In 1954, the disparagingly-named and heavily publicized Operation Wetback reversed that immigration program and attempted to send them all back to Mexico.
Hundreds of immigration and border agents swept through the southwestern United States. They rounded up hundreds of thousands of immigrants they claimed were in the U.S. illegally. Scant attention was given as to whether they were a legal Bracero Program migrants or not. INS and border agents then herded them into trucks, trains, and ships and sent them back into Mexico. How did such a massive operation come about?
Deportations of Mexican immigrants from the U.S. date back to the Great Depression. In the 1930’s, with millions of Americans unemployed, the U.S. deported over 1 million Mexicans, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens! Nevertheless, American farmers still needed those migrant workers.
After World War II, before Operation Wetback, were years of effective border enforcement.
Believe it or not, Mexico and the U.S. have been partners in controlling border migration more often than they’ve been adversaries. The U.S. collaborated with Mexico to encourage the legal hiring of immigrant workers, and as a way to crackdown on illegal hiring by farmers and factories. Many American employers exploited the migrant workers who crossed the border illegally. Mexico and the U.S. negotiated an accord to protect the rights of Mexican agricultural workers in the U.S.
In 1942, the U.S. Mexican Farm Labor Program, Operation Bracero, began – named after the Spanish term for “manual laborer.” The program funneled Mexicans into the U.S on a legal, temporary basis in exchange for guaranteed wages and fair working conditions. Mexico kept some of its workers home to help on Mexican farm land. So INS designed the Bracero Program to help control the number of Mexican workers leaving Mexico for the U.S.
However, Texas employers did not want to pay for the guaranteed fair wages and housing requirements. So Mexico excluded that state from the program for violating the agreement. That’s where illegal “wetbacks” came in. These were Mexicans who illegally entered Texas by swimming across the Rio Grande River. The federal government initially turned a blind eye to Texans’ employment of undocumented immigrants.
In the 1940’s, the Bracero Program was viewed as a success in both countries.
An estimated 4.6 million Mexicans entered the U.S. legally through the program between 1942 and 1964. States’ growers soon became dependent on Bracero workers, especially during planting and harvest. At the same time however, thousands of Mexicans still crossed the border illegally and were also given jobs by farms and factories, though at far cheaper wages.
In the 1950s, Mexican immigrants were seasonal workers, not permanent residents like today. Back then, it was easy for workers to cross back and forth between their families in Mexico and jobs in the U.S. This reciprocal migration allowed farmworkers to come to the U.S. for the growing season, then return to Mexico after it was over. Plus, the Bracero Program provided jobs for migrants at a higher pay scale. So Bracero actually encouraged workers to enter legally.
During the Bracero Program, the INS tried to do their job while also being sensitive to farm owners. The procedure for years was that they’d not do sweeps and raids during harvest time. For the Bracero Program, an alternate target of INS was the farmers and factories who refused to use legal migrants, and instead chose the cheaper, illegal ones.
The situation in early 1950’s increased the Mexican exodus to the U.S.
The demand for cheap agricultural laborers kept increasing during the post-war American boom. Ever more employers hired and exploited illegal immigrants at far cheaper wages. Corruption on both sides of the border enriched many officials’ wallets, as well as unethical “coyote” freelancers. Cheap, illegal labor increased the violation of labor laws and caused rampant racial discrimination.
This prompted the Mexican government to rescind the Bracero Program in 1953 and cease exporting its workers. The U.S. Immigration Service, under pressure from large agricultural groups, retaliated against Mexico. They allowing thousands of immigrant workers to cross the border illegally, arrested them, then delivered them to work for various large-scale growers in Texas and California. By the 1950’s, the number of undocumented Mexican immigrants increased 6,000 percent over the prior decade.
By now, the American public began noticing the swelling numbers of Mexican immigrants in the U.S. They started getting alarmed about the “invasion” of illegals into the U.S. “stealing” their jobs. Various politicians opposed the Bracero Program, stating that the Eisenhower open-border policy posed a threat to security. In 1953, a Texas newspaper claimed increasing crimes by Mexican wetbacks. Harsh portrayals of immigrants as dirty, dangerous criminals became the new stereotype. Beginning to sound familiar?
In 1953, the federal government decided it had enough.
Border Patrol head Harlon Carter was frustrated by the sheer numbers of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., both legal and undocumented. He convinced Republican President Dwight Eisenhower to severely ramp up immigration enforcement efforts. Carter tried to get the National Guard involved. However, the U.S. military is not to be used to enforce domestic laws.
Instead, in the spring of 1954, the government introduced Operation Wetback in a nationwide publicity campaign. It would use Border Patrol resources in mass deportations of migrants back to Mexico. Operation Wetback couldn’t have happened without the cooperation of Mexico. The Mexican government wanted the return of Mexican nationals to alleviate its own a labor shortage.
Harlan Carter promised that agents would sweep American factories and farms. INS would detain undocumented workers in holding facilities before deporting them to Mexico. It would be, “The biggest drive against illegal aliens in history,” Carter told the press. News of the impending raids frightened U.S. Latinos, many of whom remembered the forced deportations of even citizens during the Great Depression.
Operation Wetback was headed by the INS commissioner, General Joseph Swing, an old Army buddy of President Eisenhower. Swing’s mandate was to ‘militarize’ U.S. immigration enforcement. Along with the U.S. Border Patrol, INS agents were aided by municipal, county, and state authorities. Operation Wetback may not have had the National Guard, but it used military-style enforcement tactics, as well as shrewd marketing to achieve its goal.
In April 1954, Attorney General Herbert Brownell announced the start of Operation Wetback.
A task force of 800 INS and border agents started sweeping through Texas and California for immigrants working illegally. On July 15th, the first day of the operation, approximately 4,800 immigrants were round up. Thereafter, the daily totals averaged about 1,100 a day. Agents conducted factory and farm raids and set up roadblocks to apprehend undocumented migrants. Throughout the next twelve months, they swept through the entire southwest, then into major cities.
The U.S. border agents stopped deporting people just into the desert over the border (where they could easily return), and instead started sending them deeper into Mexico. The trains and trucks that carried immigrants into Mexico’s interior were handed off, at the border, to Mexican officials. They were then in charge of taking their own people deep enough into the country so it would be harder for them to return. Hence, thousands of migrants were forced to unfamiliar parts of Mexico, rather their actual homes.
In the coming months, INS deported them en masse: by train, truck, bus, and cargo ship. The federal government was more concerned with showing that it was rounding up illegal migrants than with the logistics of how it all happened. The point of Operation Wetback was to conduct mass deportations quickly and on an impressive scale. There wasn’t room to care about human beings in the process. INS crowded massive numbers of migrants into train boxcars and cargo ship holds. Parents were often torn apart from children in the confusion.
The INS used widespread racial discrimination against Mexicans to justify their sometimes heartless treatment of captured ‘criminal’ migrants. Some died of dehydration, sunstroke, disease, and lack of medical attention while in custody. In many cases, condition under which migrants were deported were indeed horrifying.
A congressional investigation described conditions on one cargo ship as a “penal hell ship,” saying it was no better than an African slave ship. Immigrants who were sent over the border didn’t fare any better. They were shoved into hot boxcars “like livestock,” sent 100 miles into Mexico, and dumped into the desert – in punishing heat, without water. So not everyone was in favor or Operation Wetback.
Critics considered it obsessively cruel and xenophobic.
Some newspapers editorials attacked the Border Patrol as an invading army seeking to deprive farmers and factories of their labor force. Some Texas employers even hired armed guards to fend off Border Patrol officers during their farm and factory raids.
The operation trailed off in the fall of 1954 as INS funding began to run out. The INS claimed 1.5 million people were deported under Operation Wetback. Though hundreds of thousands of people were ensnared, the number of deportees was actually lower than claimed—likely closer to 800,000. It’s not clear how many legal American citizens were swept up in Operation Wetback. It’s also impossible to say how many of the “deportees” were actually legal Bracero migrants.
The INS claimed that many illegal migrants, fearing apprehension, had voluntarily self-deported. INS officials even claimed that 500,000 had fled to Mexico BEFORE the campaign even began. Most historians consider that figure highly inflated by an agency struggling to meet its promised goal. The discrepancy shows just how hard it is to accurately count human numbers during rapid, mass deportations.
So how does all of this compare to the similar-sounding present day? Remember in the 1950s, Mexican immigrants were seasonal workers, not permanent U.S. residents. It was easy for workers to cross back and forth between their families in Mexico and jobs in the U.S. Plus, the Bracero Program, made the whole process legal and at a higher pay scale. So it actually encouraged Mexican workers to enter legally.
Six decades later, most of the undocumented migrants deported today are full-time residents of the United States. Their lives, careers, and often entire families are in America, some for generations. Starting in the 1980’s, many Latin American countries fell into dangerous dictatorships, increasing refugee immigration into the U.S. In the 1990’’s, under President Clinton, the U.S. began securing the border with Mexico. It was now harder for Mexicans, Central Americans, Venezuelans, etc. to cross back and forth, and remain legally to work.
So migrants stayed and many remained undocumented for fear of deportation. This is but one reason the two periods are different. The Bracero Program and Operation Wetback were designed to replace illegal migrant workers with legal migrant ones, during a time when it was much easier to cross back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico. The same cannot be said today.
Nevertheless, present day mass deportations may look similar to Operation Wetback: hundreds of ICE and border agents making raids on farms and factories; detaining thousands in detention camps; then deportation into Latin America via trains, trucks, ships and even planes. But this time, the process would be all stick and no carrot. There is no joint Bracero Program today, promoting simple, temporary, legal immigration for better wages and a better life in America.