Historian: Trump deportation plan ‘absolutely not possible’
Ordered by President Dwight Eisenhower, its controversial tactics prompted a congressional investigation and was eventually stopped because of the expense.
Trump, a real estate billionaire who has been leading in opinion polls among candidates for the Republican nomination in the 2016 election, calls for deporting all illegal immigrants and has said he would get the Mexican government to pay for building a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border.
Asked how he would enforce the deportation of millions of people from the U.S. Trump said: “You’re going to have a deportation force, and you’re going to do it humanely”.
After Trump mentioned the policy, called “Operation Wetback”, at Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, tweeted, “Operation Wetback, f*** yeah!” “We would do it in a very humane way”, he said. “They swept through Texas and California and also northern states and cities”.
Others were sent deep into the interior of Mexico to prevent re-entry by train or cargo ship, where conditions drew the attention of federal regulators. But did he really move that many in one operation?
There were lots of lies, distortions, and borderline insane moments at the GOP debate Tuesday night, but none were as offensive as Trump’s defense of Eisenhower’s 1950’s plan to expel Mexican immigrants from the United States. According to Mother Jones, the program used cramped buses, trucks, and boats to “round up undocumented immigrants and drop them off in Mexico by the busload”, leaving immigrants in rural areas without resources to survive.
“They [the United States] had a duel policy”. He said he will do it by hiring a huge force of “Deportation Officers” who would round them up and ship them out. It targeted agricultural workers in the Southwest, and Trump’s claim that Eisenhower deported 1.5 million is probably a wild exaggeration, though no reliable numbers exist. They apprehended 3,000 people a day and 170,000 during its first three months.In an interview Wednesday morning on MSNBCs Morning Joe, Trump indicated he would take a similar approach.
“People are going to come in and they are come in legally”. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south; they never came back. Dwight Eisenhower. You don’t get nicer, you don’t get friendlier. Don’t forget you have millions of people that are waiting on a line to come into this country and come in legally. But we have no choice.
“It was like a military operation and inhumane”.
Eisenhower did oversee a deportation program in 1954, but it involved nowhere near the 11 million people now estimated to be in the USA illegally and it was criticized for violating the civil rights of deportees. Even Bill O’Reilly of Fox News confronted the Republican candidate by saying, “That was brutal what they did to those people”.
“The ships weren’t refurbished or fitted for this”, Ngai explained.
“Some 88 braceros died of sun stroke as a result of a round-up that had taken place in 112-degree heat, and [and American labor official] argued that more would have died had Red Cross not intervened”.