The new administration has begun what officials have said will be the largest mass deportation in U.S. history.
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, news reports have described Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in California, New Jersey, Minnesota and Texas, while rumors of other ICE operations have sent a chill through immigrant communities.
Federal authorities have used military planes to expedite the deportations to Latin American countries, although Mexico and Colombia initially refused to accept military planes with deportees.
While recent administrations have targeted immigrants for deportations, they have not engaged in mass deportations on the scale that Trump has proposed. That said, mass deportations are not new.
Large-scale deportations occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s and during Operation Wetback — the racist title of a government operation — in 1954. These campaigns were preceded by a rise in xenophobia, specifically a surge in anti-Mexican sentiments.
During the 1920s, the nativist surge was partially in response to the large-scale immigration of Mexicans resulting from the political turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. Politicians of that time, such as U.S. Rep. John Box of East Texas, argued that the nation had a “Mexican problem,” accusing immigrants of carrying diseases, engaging in crime, displacing U.S. citizen workers and being “un-American.”
Although the Box Bill, HR 6465, failed, he promoted it with racist propaganda to try to impose quotas on immigration from Mexico and Canada.
In the 1950s, a surge of undocumented workers from Mexico was the result of the guest worker Bracero Program, which began in 1942 during World War II and ended in 1964. The program was meant to curb undocumented immigration, but instead, it fueled it. Mexico had excluded Texas, Arkansas and Missouri from the Bracero Program due to those states’ official segregation policies that excluded Mexicans.
So growers in these states resorted to hiring undocumented Mexican workers. Undocumented immigration also grew because more Mexican nationals wanted to become guest workers than the Bracero program could accommodate. Those not selected to become braceros made the journey to the U.S. as undocumented workers. Nativists in the 1950s again accused undocumented workers of harboring diseases and committing crimes.
In addition to the surge in xenophobia prior to these mass deportations, both campaigns led to the forced expulsion of U.S. citizens. Children of undocumented immigrants born in this country were U.S. citizens because of the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
The mass expulsions of the 1930s did not solely target undocumented workers but also their families, including their U.S.-born children. The repatriation efforts were also meant to scare immigrants into self-deporting, which is also a current tactic.
By the 1950s, many of those deported were part of mixed-status families, in which some family members are undocumented and some might be permanent residents, while others are U.S. citizens. Operation Wetback, therefore, led to family separations as some of the children or spouses of the deported undocumented workers remained in the United States.
It also led to the deportation of U.S. citizens who could not prove their citizenship while immigration officials made little effort to distinguish between undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens.
The current administration claims it will target undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes and that 1 million immigrants will be deported every year. The last four administrations — of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Trump and Joe Biden — claimed they would target criminals for deportations.
Nevertheless, deportees have included noncriminals as well as undocumented immigrants who committed nonviolent crimes, such as traffic violations. During Trump’s final year in office in 2019, only 11% of deportees had criminal convictions. Fewer than half of immigrants arrested by ICE during the Biden administration had criminal convictions.
Given this history, it is unlikely ICE will be careful to distinguish undocumented immigrants with and without criminal convictions.
As in the past, mass arrests will likely ensnare U.S. citizens. In New Jersey last week, several Latinos who were citizens, including a military veteran, were arrested and forced to demonstrate their U.S. citizenship.
Current polling shows the U.S. public supports mass deportations, but it’s fair to expect public support will decrease if indiscriminate expulsions are carried out. Other polls show that support for mass deportations decreases when details emerge about how the expulsions will be done.
History also tells us that unintended and unforeseen consequences are likely to increase opposition to mass deportations. Prior to Operation Wetback, several Mexican American civil rights groups supported deportations of undocumented workers. These groups quickly became vocal opponents, however, when the expulsions led to widespread family separations, disrupted ethnic Mexican communities and fanned anti-Mexican sentiments.
Opposition to mass expulsions is likely to increase as U.S. citizens, Latinos and non-Latinos alike, begin to see the devastating effects on families, communities and the economy.
Other citizens will begin to voice their opposition as their neighbors, co-workers, fellow parishioners and family members are subject to deportations.
Mass expulsions will also fuel existing anti-Latino sentiments because immigrants from Latin America seem to be the likely targets of the raids.
Mass deportations will not solve the nation’s economic problems. Instead, they will probably worsen the economy, and increase ethnic and racial tensions.
Immigrants strengthen the nation’s economy and its vibrant culture. To address the nation’s immigration problem, sensible reform is needed. Such reform should include a pathway to citizenship and policies that address the root causes of migration rather than simply focusing on deterrence at the border or deportations.
Immigration reform requires hard work and compromise, not xenophobic fearmongering.
Omar Valerio-Jiménez is a history professor at The University of Texas at San Antonio and author of “Remembering Conquest: Mexican Americans, Memory, and Citizenship.”
A version of this op-ed appeared in the San Antonio Express-News.
