Today, Explained - Deportation nation

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

President-elect Donald Trump has promised mass deportations. "Operation Wetback" from the Eisenhower days is serving as inspiration. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast Support Today, Explained by becoming a Vox Member today: http://www.vox.com/members Trump supporters hold signs reading "Mass Deportation Now!" at the Republican National Convention in July. Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The first time Donald Trump was president, he really wanted to deport a lot of people. We have some bad hombres here and we're going to get them out. But he wasn't all that successful. I mean, don't tell him because it would probably drive him nuts, but his predecessor, Barack Obama, actually deported way more people than he did. Thank you for reminding me. Thanks, Obama. But now Donald Trump is getting a second shot at the title,

and people say this time he means business. Immigrant advocacy groups are bracing for a presumed second Trump administration that promises those mass deportations he talked about and a harsher immigration regulations. Immediately upon taking the oath of office, I will launch the largest deportation program in American history. Seal the border, deport all the illegals. Now. On Today Explained, we're going to figure out what he wants to do, who he wants to do it for him, and how likely it is he'll get it done.

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This is Today Explained. Nick Miroff covers the Department of Homeland Security for the Washington Post, so he's bracing himself for a busy few years. I mean, me personally, I'm getting ready for like a shock and awe campaign of deportations, arrests, border announcements, court rulings, a lot of the same kind of chaos that we saw during the first Trump administration. We asked him what he's expecting from the first few weeks. Yeah, I mean, I think we'll see a series of, you know, immediate rollbacks of Biden era policies, some of these policies that allowed migrants to apply to come to the United States to live and work legally, namely like the parole programs that Biden used, the CBP One app that let asylum seekers try to get appointments along the southern border, you know, trying to bring some kind of order to that process. And then I think we'll see, you know, the return of some of Trump's signature policies from the first term,

like remain in Mexico. He's talked about bringing that back. But, you know, the big one is going to be, you know, this shift to the interior. Right now, you know, legal border crossings, which have been at record levels for the first three years of Biden's term, are now at their lowest levels in more than four years, even from, you know, lower than before Trump left office. And so I think that will allow him to pivot almost immediately to the interior of the United States and this mass deportation campaign that was, you know, a core campaign promise of his. And we're speaking Monday morning, and it looks like the president just reposted some random dude

on Truth Social saying that he was indeed committed to this plan of mass deportation. What did he say? What did he confirm? saying that they were going to bring back the National Emergency Declaration and that military assets would be involved in the mass deportation campaign. And that's not anything different than what he said on the campaign trail. And I'll make clear that we must use any and all resources needed to stop the invasion, including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas. I think we can count on them using military, you know, assets such as bases, aircraft, you know, transportation networks, and all of those things will allow them to significantly increase their, you know, throughput, so to speak,

in terms of people they can take into custody and try to quickly deport. This is going to be a Homeland Security situation. So though inspired by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem is going to be in charge of this. Yeah, Kristi Noem is Trump's nominee to be the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is considered a hardliner on immigration. And if confirmed as DHS secretary, she would be at the forefront of the plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Make no mistake, an invasion of our country is happening and our border is a war zone. But I think that this effort is really going to be led out of the White House by Stephen Miller, his speechwriter and main immigration ideologue.

President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name longtime aide and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Who's going to stand up and say the cartels are gone, the criminal migrants are gone, the gangs are gone, America is for Americans and Americans only? And Tom Homan, who will be in the kind of operational role. Former ICE director Tom Homan will be the president-elect's border czar. I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden's released in our country in violation of federal law. You better start packing now. And there are a few people who know the system, you know, the deportation system better than Homan,

who spent his career in immigration enforcement in various roles, including Trump's acting director of ICE during the first 18 months of Trump's first term. What is standing in their way, if anything? Immigration activists and attorneys are saying that they are going to ramp up the resistance once again and will try to use similar strategies to those that they deployed during Trump's first term to try to slow down the pace of deportations and to try to draw attention to, I think, some of the, you know, crueler and harsher aspects of immigration enforcement. So I think we'll see a lot of legal challenges. But, you know, it feels like this time will be different.

The Republican Party obviously will be in control of both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court is stacked in the president-elect's favor. And the terrain has just changed significantly. I think we've seen this big shift in public opinion in favor of a more aggressive deportation campaign, including in some of the so-called sanctuary cities like New York, where tens of thousands of migrants are living in hotels and have arrived

over the past few years. And that has produced a lot of tension. This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City. But even if the American public is on board with a mass deportation, it's going to take a lot of resources. Do we have those resources in place? No. And this was, you know, one of the reasons that Trump never was able to carry out the, you know, two, three million deportations that he promised during his first term. The highest levels they ever reached were

around 300,000 or so. So I think we can expect that the current levels are certainly going to go up, but they will face both logistical and financial challenges to getting to the kind of, you know, millions that Trump has promised. That's one reason they're going to try to leverage the military assets. And, you know, I do think that there will be more funding available for, you know,

for this kind of thing through Congress. They could ramp up the number of detention beds that they have available. They can get more aircraft. They can get more personnel to try to assist in this effort. But does that mean they can deport all 11 or 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States? No.

Do we think the American people will still have the stomach for this once it starts happening? Yeah, you know, Sean, that's something that I've seen over the past, you know, eight years of covering immigration enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security is that the public really can't stand to come face to now. And once you start to see images of children crying and suffering and being torn out of their homes and screaming for their parents as their parents are being hauled off by uniformed government agents, that kind of thing has a serious cost. And while the incoming administration, you know, thinks that it has a mandate for that type of thing, I think that, you know, folks like Homan know that once the public starts to see that over and over again, that it's going to erode the support for Trump doing something of this kind. Outraged by the Trump administration's policy of taking migrant children away from their parents, protesters rallied in Los Angeles. No borders, no nations, stop deportations!

I mean, look at, you know, the zero-tolerance family separation episode of Trump's first term. The Trump administration says it is seizing children and separating families as a deterrent, scaring other would-be migrant parents away. The backlash that that produced was so enormous that it even reached Trump's family. And Melania and Ivanka were among those telling him that he had to stop it because it just became unsustainable politically to do something like that. Another thing, Sean, I think to look for is that there's going to be a fundamental tension going forward between the expectation that Trump has created for lowering inflation and for carrying out this mass deportation effort. Because if you remove hundreds of thousands of workers from the labor force, you can't deliver cheaper food, cheaper child care, and lower cost housing. Those two things just don't go together. Do they have the political skills to manage the backlash to that?

That remains to be seen. I think they may have a relatively narrow window in which to try to carry out some of the inspo. We're going back to the 1950s on Today Explained. Today, Explain is back and we're joined by Kelly Lytle Hernandez. I am the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History at UCLA. Go Bruins. Go Bruins. We asked Kelly to tell us about Donald Trump's mass deportation inspiration. It's a government program that just went ahead and included the racism right in the name. So pardon the racial slurs in this half of the show. President-elect Trump has referenced that he has taken his inspiration from Operation Wetback of 1954, which to date is the largest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history.

The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country. Even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is a manifest right of our government to limit the number of immigrants our nation can absorb. That was a campaign that targeted Mexican immigrants, undocumented immigrants in particular. It was defined by racial profiling. It was defined by roadblocks and sweeps across the Southwest United States. And so, yeah, we have seen this before, and it is quite concerning that that might be the blueprint for what's to come. I know it's not as acceptable to say that term anymore, but it sounds like it was a lot more acceptable in the 1950s. Can you remind us the origin of the term wetback?

It's a racial slur. It was a racial slur then, it's a racial slur now. But it was more commonly used in the popular discourse back in the 1950s. The origins of that term are disputed, but most people think that it's about during the 1920s, during Prohibition, when immigrants would come across the border with alcohol, right? Could be wetbacks, or that you have Mexican immigrantsstrels crossing the Rio Grande and are going into the water and coming out with wet shirts, right? So, our wetbacks. So, we can't quite figure out the origins of it. It's one of those two. What's going on in the 1950s when someone comes up with Operation Wetback? What's the backdrop? The backdrop to Operation Wetback of 1954 is actually a legal

immigration program called the Bracero Program. Yes, with the domestic supply of farm labor being inadequate, Braceros are a must. So back in 1942, during World War II, the United States was experiencing a labor shortage as all the young men are going off to war and are working in urban industries. Farmers in particular are saying we don't have enough laborers. The term most commonly used is braceros. In Spanish, this means a man who works with his arms and hands. So the United States government goes and develops contracts with the Mexican government and other governments in the Caribbean to bring in short-term laborers, largely to work in agriculture but also on railroads. That Bracero program brings in millions of Mexican workers between 1942 and 1965.

The fact is that farm wages have gone up steadily for many years, but we still don't have enough seasonal domestic labor willing to do this kind of work. But it has limitations. Women are not eligible to become Bracero workers. People coming from urban areas in Mexico are not eligible to become Bracero workers. Industrial workers are not eligible to become Bracero workers. So you have a large segment of the Mexican population who needs work,

but doesn't have access to the Bracero program. So what you get is at the same time, you have millions of Mexican workers coming to the United States legally through the Bracero program. You also have large numbers of undocumented workers who are coming to the United States. So that is the backdrop. You have a surge of legal immigration from Mexico.. You have a surge of legal immigration from Mexico.

You also have a surge of undocumented immigration from Mexico. And so the campaign of 1954 grows alongside the Bracero program. Statistics have indicated that when the traffic in WETS is high, the supply of dope in our big cities increases proportionately. It actually began during the 1940s and just gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it hits its climax in 1954. The job has been compared to trying to scoop the tide off the beach and pour it back into the ocean.

How do they target the right people or, you know, people who are undocumented? Well, they don't. They target, and I quote, anyone of Mexican appearance. Oh, wow. And so they're sweeping across the Southwestern United States, entangling U.S. citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants in the search for people of, quote, Mexican appearance. So it's a racial profiling campaign that impacts citizens and non-citizens alike, lawful migrants and people who have crossed without documentation as well. This is the morning prison train out of Southern California into Mexico.

It makes this run every day about dawn. It's cargo, Mexican wetbacks, who have sneaked across the border and are being deported. On June 10th of 1954, the U.S. Border Patrol, several, about a thousand officers spread out across California and Arizona near the border, and they set up roadblocks to stop anyone of Mexican appearance moving north on the roads into the United States. They sweep up about 10,000, 11,000 people in those roadblocks, again, conducting racial profile operations, targeting anyone who looks Mexican heading north into the United States.

About two weeks later, they unleash these task forces that sweep from north to south, pushing people out of the country, arresting people wherever they can. And it's not just farms. They are raiding restaurants. They are raiding racetracks. They are raiding communities. These are really big media spectacles. Once they get people arrested in towns, Sacramento, Chicago, Los Angeles, wherever it is in the country. They take people down to the border where they hold them in mass detention camps. And they hold them until they have a train, a plane, or a boat that is ready to mass deport people into Mexico. So they would cram people onto these trains, planes, and boats.

The boats, for example, would bring bananas up to the United States and then be packed with deportees who would be taken down to Veracruz, Mexico. A congressional investigation into these boat lifts, these ships, two years after Operation Wetback 1954 1954 called these boats penal hellships. The conditions were outrageous. There were several protests on the ships. And so one of the tactics of Operation Wetback in 1954 was to dislocate people who were being deported into the center of Mexico. So they're far from homes in the United States and far from homes in Mexico. And this is a punishment tactic to make sure that people feel that they are abandoned and that it's extremely difficult for them to get home wherever that home may be. Hmm. How many people were caught up in Operation Wetback?

Now, that is an excellent question, right? So Donald Trump and others will tell you often that the United States Border Patrol rounded up and deported a million people. Did you like Dwight Eisenhower as a president at all? Well, I wasn't around during President Eisenhower's... But he was a fair man. He did this. He was a great American. Yeah, he did this with over a million people.

That is a total fabrication. It was a fabrication back in 1954. It's a fabrication now. The Border Patrol likely apprehended maybe 300,000 people during the summer of 1954, which is really when the campaign happened. But, yeah, the commissioner of the INS inflated those numbers. And this is really important. I'm really glad that you asked this question.

Because what the INS, the Immigration Naturalization Service, and the Border Patrol are doing is they're showing that there's an ever-increasing number of deportations during the 1950s. They tell the world that that's about a million apprehensions in the summer of 1954. And then after 1954, the number of apprehensions drop off dramatically, well into the 1960s. You only have maybe 20,000, 30,000 people being apprehended. And the story that they're telling us is that aggressive immigration law enforcement with all of these punitive tactics is what, quote, solved the crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border or the immigration crisis. That is absolutely not what happened. The Border Patrol, one, did not apprehend as many people as we're being told. Those numbers are simply inflated. You can go into the Border Patrol's archive and it's clear, plain as day, that those are

inflated numbers. But two, they changed the rules of the Bracero program so that more people could become eligible to be legal workers in the United States. And then three, after the campaign of 1954, they demobilized all their special task forces and they put border patrol officers on two-man and one-man patrols who couldn't round up as many people. The lesson here, right, is that the way that we, quote, solved the immigration crisis in 1954 is not through mass deportation, but in fact through legalization, and we stopped deporting people. Why is it that Trump wants to point to Operation Wetback as some sort of model for what he wants

to do once he reenters office. It's inflammatory, the title of the operation alone, but also the way in which it was conducted. I think that one of the things also to recognize about the campaign of 1954 is that although a million people were not apprehended, this does not mean it wasn't hugely impactful in the lives of people and it wasn't terrifying. Everywhere the Border Patrol went in the summer of 1954, they invited journalists to come with them. And the journalists snapped photos of entire families being rounded up. They snapped photos of workers running through kitchens trying to escape the border patrol. They chronicled the stories of community centers being turned into detention centers. And that constant press was absolutely terrifying to people on the ground.

And it's trying to instigate people to engage in what some people call self-deportation, right? And that is a big part of the campaign of 1954 that people don't talk about. So when you have a president who is about media and spectacle, of course he's going to gravitate to a campaign that was about media and spectacle. And that actually, in fact, is one of its primary tactics. I'll see you on the boat, Kelly. Send me the pamphlet. Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez,

History, UCLA. Our program today was produced by Halima Shah and Miles Bryan. We were edited by Jolie Myers and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir mixed this episode of Today Explained. you