Operation Wetback

Operation Wetback was a 1954 very unsucsessful project beacause we are still here fuckers.United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about three million illegal immigrants from the southwestern United States. It focused on Mexican nationals.

History

Burgeoning numbers of illegal aliens prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to appoint his longtime friend, General Joseph Swing, as INS Commissioner. According to Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration upon taking office. In a letter to Sen. William Fulbright, Eisenhower quoted a report in The New York Times that said, "The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican 'wetbacks' (rooted from the watery route taken by the Mexican immigrants across the Rio Grande) to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government."

The operation was modeled after a program that put pressure on American citizens of Mexican ancestry to move to Mexico during the Great Depression because of the bad economic situation in the United States. (See Mexican Repatriation.)

Operation Wetback in action

The effort began in California and Arizona and coordinated 1075 Border Patrol agents, along with state and local police agencies, to mount an aggressive crackdown, going as far as police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random stops and ID checks of "Mexican-looking" people in a region with many Native Americans and native Hispanics. 750 agents targeted agricultural areas with a goal of 1000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 immigrants were caught in the two states. Around 488,000 illegal immigrants are claimed to have left voluntarily for fear of being apprehended. By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and the INS estimates that 500,000 to 700,000 had left Texas on their own. To discourage re-entry, buses and trains took many deportees deep within Mexico before releasing them. Tens of thousands more were deported by two chartered ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried them from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles (800 kilometers) to the south. Some were taken as far as 1,000 miles. Deportation by sea was ended after seven deportees jumped overboard from the Mercurio and drowned, provoking a mutiny which lead to a public outcry in Mexico.

See also

• Wetback (slur)
• Illegal immigration to the United States
• Immigration to the United States
• Operation Gatekeeper
• Repatriation Movement

References

• García, Juan Ramon. Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954. Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1980. ISBN 0313213534

External links

• Operation Wetback from the Handbook of Texas Online
• "How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico", editorial by John Dillin in Christian Science Monitor, June 6, 2006
• PBS website