1953 SPECIAL REPORT: "MEXICAN WETBACKS"

I would like to put a disclaimer on this post. Good or bad it is history ! One must be armed with knowledge.

July is scorching in Mexicali. The Mexican city just across the border from Calexico, California, averages 108 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer, but temperatures often swell into the 120s.

In 1955, thousands of disoriented people roamed the city’s streets as the sun bore down on them. They had just been dumped there by American immigration officials—snatched from their lives and jobs in the United States and thrown into a city where they didn’t know anyone.

These Mexican immigrants had been caught in the snare of Operation Wetback, the biggest mass deportation of undocumented workers in United States history. As many as 1.3 million people may have been swept up in the Eisenhower-era campaign with a racist name, which was designed to root out undocumented Mexicans from American society.

The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants—some of them American citizens—from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico.

With the help of the Mexican government, which sought the return of Mexican nationals to alleviate a labor shortage, Border Patrol agents and local officials used military techniques and engaged in a coordinated, tactical operation to remove the immigrants. Along the way, they used widespread racial stereotypes to justify their sometimes brutal treatment of immigrants. Inside the United States, anti-Mexican sentiment was pervasive, and harsh portrayals of Mexican immigrants as dirty, disease-bearing and irresponsible were the norm.

During Operation Wetback, tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives. In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.

It’s not clear how many American citizens were swept up in Operation Wetback, but the United States later claimed that 1.3 million people total were deported. However, some historians dispute that claim. Though hundreds of thousands of people were ensnared, says historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez, the number of deportees was drastically lower than the United States reported—likely closer to 300,000. Due to immigrants who were caught, deported, and captured again after re-emigrating, it’s impossible to estimate the total number of people deported under the program.

Mass deportations of Mexican immigrants from the U.S. date to the Great Depression, when the federal government began a wave of deportations rather than include Mexican-born workers in New Deal welfare programs. According to historian Francisco Balderrama, the U.S. deported over 1 million Mexican nationals, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, during the 1930s. Balderrama toldFresh Air’s Terry Gross that the program was referred to as “repatriation” to give it the sense of being voluntary. In reality, though, it was anything but.

https://www.history.com/news/operation-wetback-eisenhower-1954-deportation

Here are other post and websites in reference to Operation wetback.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Wetback

https://timeline.com/mass-deportation-operation-wetback-mexico-eb79174f720b

https://1950immigration.wordpress.com/operation-wetback/

Additional videos of operation wetback :

https://youtu.be/zJ3u2Cc6kyE

https://youtu.be/Wzh02F9jDbE

https://youtu.be/OC5Mt1MQ_0k

There is quite a bit of information on this topic .. Too many to list. These are just some.