The first time Donald Trump was president, he really wanted to deport a lot of people. But he wasn't all that successful. I mean, don't tell him because he would probably drive 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 to port all the illegals.
On today's explain, we're going to figure out what he wants to do, who he wants to do it for, and how likely it is he'll get it done. Hey everybody, I'm Ashley C. Ford and I'm the host of Into the Mix, a Ben & Jerry's podcast about joy and justice produced with Vox Creative. And in our new mini series, we're talking about voter fraud.
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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 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-1 app that let asylum seekers try to get appointments along this other 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 We he's talked about bringing that back, but you know the big one is gonna be
You know, this shift to the interior right now, you know, legal border crossings, which have been at where 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? Well, he essentially endorsed a post on Truth Social by, you know, another user
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 assets such as bases, aircraft, transportation networks, and all of those things will allow them to significantly increase their throughput, so to speak, in terms of people they can take into custody and try to quickly deport.
This is gonna be a Homeland Security situation, so though inspired by Steven Miller, Kristi Noam's gonna 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 gonna be led out of the White House by Stephen Miller, his speechwriter, and main immigration ideologue. President-elect Donald Trump is expected to name long-time aide and immigration hardliner Stephen Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy. Who's gonna 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 Holman, who will be in the kind of operational role. Former ICE director Tom Holman 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 Holman, 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 we'll 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.
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 one of the reasons that Trump never was able to carry out that two, three million deportations that he promised during his first term, the highest levels they ever reached were around 300,000 or so. I think we can expect that the current levels are certainly going to go up.
they will face both logistical and financial challenges to getting to the millions that Trump has promised. That's one reason they're going to try to leverage the military assets. I do think that there will be more funding available 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, Sean, that's something that I've seen over the past eight years of covering immigration enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security is that the public really can't stand to come face to face with the reality of immigration enforcement. It looks really bad, and everybody has a cell phone camera.
right 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 thinks that it has a mandate for that type of thing,
I think that folks like home and 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 rally in Los Angeles.
I mean, look at 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 childcare, 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 harsher elements of what Trump is proposing, particularly with the military involved.
Nick Miraf, WashingtonPost.com. I'm Sean Ramos for him. When we're back, we're going to look at Trump's mass deportation inspo. We're going back to the 1950s on Today Explained.
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Today explain is back and we're joined by Kelly Lydell 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 part of 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 past deportation campaign in US 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 America's right of our government to limit the number of immigrants our nation can absorb. That was a campaign that targeted Mexican immigrants and document 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 a border with alcohol, right, could be wetbacks, or that you have Mexicans who are 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.
The United States government 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 bacero workers. People coming from urban areas in Mexico are not eligible to become bacero workers. Industrial workers are not eligible to become bacero workers. So you have a large segment of the Mexican population who needs work but doesn't have access to the bacero program.
So what you get is at the same time you have millions of Mexican workers coming to the United States legally through the Bocero 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 also have a surge of undocumented immigration from Mexico. And so the campaign of 1954 grows alongside the Bocero program.
statistics have indicated that when the traffic in Watts is high, the supply of dope in our big cities increases proportionately. It actually began during the 1940s and just goes 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 beak 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 there's sweeping across the Southwest United States, entangling US 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 wetback who have sneaked across the border and are being deported. On June 10, 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 any one of Mexican appearance moving north on the roads into 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 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 race tracks, they are raiding communities. These are really big media spectacles. Once they get people arrested in town, 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 Web Act 1954.
called these boats penal hell ships. The conditions were outrageous. There were several protests on the ships. And so one of the tactics of Operation Web back 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. How many people were caught up in operation went back? 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. He was in Great America. 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. Huh. 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 US-Mexico border or the immigration crisis. That is absolutely not what happened.
The Border Patrol 1 did not apprehend as many people as were 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 2, they changed the rules of the Bocero program so that more people can 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 is that the way that we, quote, solve the immigration crisis in 1954 is not through mass deportation, but in fact through legalization, and we stop 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 during 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 gonna 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, Lydal Hernandez, History, UCLA. Our program today was produced by Halima Shaw and Miles Bryan. We were edited by Jolie Myers, in fact, checked by Laura Bullard. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Kristin's daughter mixed this episode of Today Explained.
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