“After hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants were put on buses, planes and boats during the scorching summer of 1954 and sent across the U.S. border into often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service declared the border ‘secured,’” the Washington Post reports.
“But the military-style campaign, which used the same slur in its name — ‘Operation Wetback’ — tore families apart and forcibly uprooted people in the name of securing the border. And sometimes, those efforts turned deadly.”
“Now, former president Donald Trump is using the Eisenhower-era operation as a blueprint for his vision, which he pledges will be ‘the largest domestic deportation operation in American history’ to remove the estimated 10.5 million undocumented people in the United States — of which, two-thirds have lived in the country for more than a decade.”
