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While campaigning in Iowa last September, former President Donald Trump made apromise to votersif he were elected again: Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history, he said. Trump, who made asimilar pledgeduring his first presidential campaign, has recently repeated this promiseat rallies across the country.

Trump was referring toOperation Wetback, a military-style campaign launched by the Eisenhower administration in the summer of 1954 to end undocumented immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. Wetback was a widely used ethnic slur for Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river dividing Mexico and the U.S.

Trump says that he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, includingNational Guard troops, to remove the estimated11 million undocumented immigrantsnow living in the U.S.

As amigration scholar, I find Trumps proposal to be both disturbing and misleading. Besides playing to unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhowers policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.

Operation Wetback

In May 1954, U.S. Attorney General Harold Brownell appointed Joseph Swing, a retired general, to lead the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, in a special program to apprehend and deport aliens illegally in this country fromareas along the southern border. Until 2003, the INS was responsible for immigration and border control, now handled by multiple federal agencies, including Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Swing ramped up adecade-long practiceof using special task forces composed of INS agents who could be rapidly deployed where needed in order to locate and deport undocumented workers. The operation began in California and then spread to Arizona and Texas. INS agents set up roadblocks and raided fields, factories, neighborhoods and saloons where immigrants were working or socializing. The INS also built a vastwire-fenced security camp, according to the Los Angeles Times, in order to detain apprehended immigrants in Los Angeles before sending them to the border.

Captured immigrants were put on hot, overcrowded buses or rickety boats and sent to designated border crossings in Arizona and Texas, where they were forced to cross back into Mexico. Some found themselves stranded in the Mexican desert just over the border. In one incident,88 migrantsdied of sunstroke before the Red Cross arrived with water and medical attention. Others were delivered to Mexican authorities, who loaded them onto trains headed deeper into Mexico.

By mid-August, INS agents had deportedmore than 100,000 immigrantsacross the U.S. Southwest. Fearing apprehension, thousands morereportedly fled back to Mexicoon their own. Most of these immigrants were young Mexican men, but the INS also targeted families, removingnearly 9,000 family members, including children, from the Rio Grande Valley in August. There is alsoevidence of U.S. citizensgetting caught up in the INS sweeps.

Operation Wetback wound down its operations a few months later, and Swing declared in January 1955 that the day of the wetback is over. The INSdisbanded its special mobile task forces, and the deportation of undocumented immigrantsplummetedover the next decade.

Not just about deportation

Operation Wetback made the headlines and disrupted countless lives, but it was more show than substance when it came to deportation.

Thegovernments claimto have deported more than 1 million Mexicans during the summer of 1954 does not stand up to scrutiny. The1.1 million figurewas for the entire fiscal year, which ended in June 1954, and a sizable share of these apprehensions wererepeat arrests, sometimes in a single day. Moreover, over 97% of these deportations occurredwithout a formal order of removal. Instead, migrants agreed, or were coerced, to leave the country after being apprehended.

Despite Trump-like rhetoric decrying a wetback invasion across the U.S.-Mexico border, Operation Wetbacks main objective was not to remove Mexican immigrants but ratherto frighten U.S. farmers, especially in Texas, into hiring them legally.

This tactic largely worked. A crucial but often overlooked detail about Operation Wetback is that it happened at the same time as theBracero Program, a massive guest-worker program between the U.S. and Mexico. Between 1942 and 1964, U.S. employers issued over4.6 million short-term contractsto more than 400,000 Mexican farm workers.Nearly three-quarters of these contractswere issued between 1955 and 1964 after the INS carried out Operation Wetback.

Operation Wetback is unlikely to have led to a dramatic decline in undocumented immigration had Mexican workers not had a legal option for entering the United States. As one immigrant caught up inOperation Wetback commented, I will come back legally, if possible. If not, Ill just walk across again.

The INS explicitly recognized the connection between the Bracero Program and the decline in undocumented immigrationin a 1958 report, stating that should a restriction be placed on the number of braceros allowed to enter the United States, we can look forward to a large increase in the number of illegal alien entrants into the United States.

It is no coincidence that the lull in migrants illegally crossing the U.S-Mexico border after Operation Wetback did not last once the Bracero Program ended in 1964. Mexicans still had strong incentives to migrate, but now they had to do so without visas or work contracts, contributing to a steady increase inborder arrestsafter 1965 that surpassed 1 million in 1976 and reached nearly 2 million in 2000.

Real lessons

If he were to win the presidency again, Trump would have the legal authority to deport undocumented immigrants, but the logistical, political and legal obstacles to doing so quickly and massively are even greater today than they were in the 1950s.

First, most undocumented immigrants now live in cities, where immigrant sweeps are more difficult to carry out. The INS learned this lesson when Operation Wetback shifted from the largely rural Southwest to urban areas in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest in September 1954. Despite transferring hundreds of agents to these locations and using similar tactics, INS agents producedfar fewer apprehensionsas they struggled to find and detain immigrants.

Second, the U.S. undocumented population is much more dispersed and diverse than in the 1950s.Today, Mexicans are no longer in the majority, and nearly half of undocumented immigrants live outside the six major hubs for immigrants California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.

Third, most undocumented immigrants in the U.S. did not sneak across the border. Anestimated 42%entered the country legally but overstayed a visa illegally. Another 17% requested and received ashort-term legal statusthat protects them from immediate deportation.

Finally, mass deportations are likely to spark a more broad-based resistance today than happened in the 1950s. Once staunchly opposed to undocumented immigration, most labor unions andMexican-American organizationsare now in the pro-immigrant camp. Likewise, the Mexican government, which helped with Operation Wetback, isunlikely to allowmassive numbers of non-Mexicans to be deported to its territory without the proper documentation.

Trump has not supported a way to provide undocumented immigrants with a legal alternative, which means that migrants will keep finding ways to cross illegally.

Katrina Burgess does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

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Trump promises to deport all undocumented immigrants, resurrecting a 1950s strategy but it didn't work then and is ... - Insight News