Trump’s deportation model – Dissent magazine

Trump’s deportation model

Trump has cited the mass deportation campaign of the 1950s as a blueprint for his nativist agenda. His story shows that abuse and dehumanization are inherent features of immigration detention.

In 2016, Donald Trump’s campaign promise was to build a wall between the United States and Mexico. During the current election cycle, Trump has stepped up his xenophobic rhetoric and vowed to deport tens of millions of migrants already in the United States if elected to a second term. At a 2023 event in Iowa, he set a historical precedent for his plan: “Following the Eisenhower model, we will conduct the largest internal deportation operation in American history.”

The story of the “Eisenhower model” should give pause to anyone who values ​​the rule of law or human rights. In the early 1950s, US officials were concerned about the sharp increase in unauthorized border crossings from Mexico. They accused migrants of committing crimes, taking jobs away from citizens, drug trafficking and spreading diseases. The Border Patrol argued that the problem could be solved if the government allowed the military and the National Guard to help the agency close the southern border. However, this is a suggested fix overlooked an 1878 law known as the Posse Comitatus that prohibits the government from using the military to enforce domestic policy unless such use is approved by Congress. A former classmate of President Dwight D. Eisenhower at West Point, Lt. Gen. Joseph M. Swing insisted that the administration ignore the law, but Eisenhower refused.

Trump showed no such reluctance. In an interview with time earlier this year, he said he would implement his plan with the help of the National Guard, along with other branches of the military, if “things got out of control.”

Although Eisenhower rejected the use of the military on US soil, he appointed Swing commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service in 1954. Almost immediately, Swing launched Operation Wetback, a brutal paramilitary campaign to expel Mexicans whose name evoked a pejorative insult to migrants crossing the Rio Grande. The Immigration Service has recruited approximately 750 immigration officers; seven airplanes; and 300 jeeps, cars and buses to capture migrants. Over the course of three months, historian May Ngai notes, the service detained approximately 170,000 people. Given the sheer number of people captured, the government did not have the resources to deport everyone immediately. Instead, he set up temporary detention centers to hold them while they await deportation.

During his presidential administration, Trump took a similar action by building branched camps to detain detainees before deportation, a measure he plans to expand if re-elected. One such facility, which opened in Tornillo, Texas, in 2018 housed thousands of minors in tents. While many have noted the inhumane conditions in these facilities, as well as the brutality of the family separation policy, abuse in detention facilities has not been unique to the Trump administration. As I show in my new book, In the shadow of freedomabuse and dehumanization occurred regardless of when, how, and why immigration detention was implemented—they are intrinsic to the system. In fact, immigration detention centers were originally intended as places where the Constitution did not apply.

Just like Trump, politicians and the media in the 1950s spoke of migrants as a faceless, dangerous mass without humanity. Few records remain of their experiences. But some people were able to tell their stories. The late former congressman Esteban Torresthe child of Mexican immigrants, recalled that when he was only three years old, his father did not come home one day because he was being deported. “My brother and I were left without a father,” he said. “We never saw him again.” Deportation tears apart families and communities; it is traumatic both for those who experience it and for those around them.

Deportation campaigns also violate citizens’ rights. During the 1954 operation, the Border Patrol increased surveillance and racial profiling of those who “looked Mexican.” Claiming that many migrants tried to avoid deportation by posing as US citizens, officials insisted that immigration officers should have questioned anyone who appeared to be from south of the border.

Although Operation Wetback has reduced unauthorized border crossings, it has not done so solely through deportations, as Trump seems to suggest. Along with mass deportations, the government expanded the Bracero program, a set of agreements between the United States and Mexico that allowed Mexican men to work legally in the United States as contract workers. As a result, men who had crossed the border before 1954 without documents because they were denied the Bracero program began arriving as legal guest workers, thus reducing unauthorized migration.

Other mass deportation campaigns in American history have had similarly disastrous consequences. Between 1919 and 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer set out to purge the country of political radicals, often immigrants from Southern or Eastern Europe. During Palmer’s raids, federal, state, and local agents arrested thousands of people they believed had revolutionary intentions (First Amendment be damned), detained them at Ellis Island, and eventually deported more than 500 of them. Among them was the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, who described the terrible conditions of her imprisonment: “the quarters were overcrowded, the food was disgusting, and (we were) treated like criminals.” These detentions and deportations also families were torn apart: the radicals were expelled, while their parents, wives and children remained.

In the 1930s, the government launched an even more massive deportation campaign. Amidst the hardships of the Great Depression, Mexican migrants and Mexican Americans were accused, paradoxically, of both taking jobs away from US citizens and counting on the help of the population. In response, immigration authorities sought to deport ethnic Mexicans, not only targeting unauthorized migrants, but also pressuring legal residents and even US citizens to leave the country under the guise of “voluntary” departure. Estimates of the number of Mexicans repatriated during this period range from 350,000 to 2 million, with approximately 60 percent believed to be US citizens—most of them children.

Although Mexicans and Mexican-Americans were blamed for the nation’s problems, their expulsion did little to improve the economy. Ironically, just a few years later, during World War II, the US government decided it needed more Mexican workers in the country to fill the jobs left by American men serving in the military.

Our history speaks loudly of the legal and human toll of anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy. Migrant victims—much less their deportation—do not solve our social or economic crises. Indeed, deportation time and time again harms not only the migrants themselves, but also their families and communities who remain. Anti-immigrant policies have weakened the rights granted by the Constitution and as such have threatened all American citizens. We must reject the Eisenhower model or any other draconian approach to immigration.

Ana Raquel Minyan is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and an author In the Shadow of Freedom: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States.