"Operation Wetback' Summer of '55 -Thousands Dumped in 125° temp - 1 Bus=88 people died from heat

[kpete]

Donald Trump’s ‘humane’ 1950s model for deportation, ‘Operation Wetback’, was anything but



By Yanan Wang November 11 at 2:02 AM

Updated: This story, originally published Sept. 30, has been updated and republished in light of Donald Trump’s comments Tuesday night on immigration during the Milwaukee debate.

In Mexicali, Mexico, temperatures can reach 125 degrees as heat envelops an arid desert. Without a body of water nearby to moderate the climate, the heavy sun is relentless — and deadly.

During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were “dumped” after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home.

This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they would have to return to America. But the tactic also proved to be dangerous, as the migrants were left without resources to survive.

After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.

At another drop-off point in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants were “brought like cows” into the desert.

Among the over 25 percent who were transported by boat from Port Isabel, Texas, to the Mexican Gulf Coast, many shared cramped quarters in vessels resembling an “eighteenth century slave ship” and “penal hell ship.”

These deportation procedures, detailed by historian Mae M. Ngai, were not anomalies. They were the essential framework of Operation Wetback — a concerted immigration law enforcement effort implemented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 — and the deportation model that Donald Trump says he intends to follow.

....................

much more (can we say inhumane?):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/09/30/donald-trumps-humane-1950s-model-for-deportation-operation-wetback-was-anything-but/

One thing that neither Operation Wetback nor all the other U.S. immigration
strategies could achieve was a final answer to the problem of illegal immigration.
Mexican nationals continued to flow illegally into the United States as they always had,
albeit in fewer numbers after 1954. The real losers in the game of legalization and
deportation were these people, and it is a sad commentary on U.S. perceptions of illegal
immigration that the workers themselves hardly appeared in the debate. In their concern
over the impact of illegal immigration on their lives, Americans easily overlooked the
extreme hardships that drove a Mexican national to cross the border illegally, and the
difficulties he or she encountered trying to earn a living while remaining isolated from
the surrounding community and outside of the law. When illegal immigrants did appear
in the discussion, “they were described in terms that were stereotypic and negative,” as
Operation Wetback historian Juan Ramon García eloquently argues. “Rather than
acknowledge them as human beings with dreams, hopes, aspirations, and needs, most
people in this country chose to malign them and to shroud them with names and labels
that reeked of derision, racism, and denigration.”44 One of the few groups that did see
the humanity of the immigrants was the American G.I. Forum. To give credit where
credit is due, with all their concern about the negative impact of illegal immigration on
American citizens in What Price Wetbacks?, they also displayed great sympathy for the
immigrants, describing them throughout the pamphlet as hard-working, self-motivated,
and independent individuals. Ironically, these are the same characteristics that most
Americans admired and considered the core of America’s exceptional national identity
(and still do today).45 Why Americans were unable to see these virtues in the illegal
workers during the bracero era remains a paradox.

http://scholar.dominican.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1066&context=masters-theses

[olddots]

1. Trump the ultiimate W.A.S.P.