It was Operation Wetback, the mass deportation of migrants to the United States.

During Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, the candidate repeatedly said that on immigration issues, wants to repeat Operation Wetback. It’s the biggest deportation massif of migrants of American history. » which was carried out 70 years ago, according to an article published in BBC World .

“We are going to close the border because we are currently facing an invasion. We have an invasion of millions and millions of people coming into our country (…) We’re going to have to have a level of deportation that we haven’t seen in this country in a long time. since Dwight Eisenhower,” Trump said in 2023.

1,300,000 undocumented immigrants were expelled on this occasion. The majority were Mexican.

However, some analysts remember the deportation as a campaign of terror that separated families even of American citizens of Mexican descent. This is also what gave rise to the use of military tactics to control migration in the United States.

This is what Operation Wetback looked like.

According to a report by BBC WorldIt all began in May 1954, when a U.S. attorney issued a press release announcing the start of the war. Operation Wetback: They were going to search, arrest and deport all undocumented Mexican migrants in the southwest zone.

He had been baptized ‘wet backs’ because at that time, It was a racist insult aimed at Mexicans entering the United States via the Rio Grande and arriving soaked at the border.

And the warning was clear: the prosecutor assured that “An army of Border Patrol agents, with jeeps, trucks and seven planes,” would be searching for all undocumented immigrants.

The operation began and in the first week alone, more than 12,300 Mexicans were arrested. By the end of the month, another 22,000 migrants. Authorities set up checkpoints on highways, raided farms, industrial plants, restaurants, homes and public places where communities of Mexicans lived.

After arresting them, They took them by bus, boat or plane to the border with Mexico. There, they were handed over to Mexican authorities, who eventually sent the deportees to the interior of the country. from their home countries. In most cases, they had no family or friends in the places where they found themselves isolated.

“The “wet back” problem no longer exists. The decrease in the number of wetbacks discovered in the United States indicates that this is no longer a border control problem. the same prosecutor later said, after deporting more than a million migrants.

And although the man pointed out that they were all undocumented, in reality, many of them decided to leave voluntarily, according to Adam Goodman, researcher in Latin American studies at the University of Illinois .

“It was actually a campaign to terrorize communities into self-expulsion, a campaign of terror to scare people into fleeing the country.” argued the historian Kelly Lytle Hernández, academic at the University of California .

The media would have played an important role in instilling fear in Mexicans: they would go with cameras to places where raids were carried out and transmit an image which, very often, had a larger dimension than it was. really.

Although the rationale for Operation Wetback was that undocumented immigrants were supposed to take Americans’ jobs, “spread disease” and affect working conditions, experts believe there was something else behind it: the Bracero program.

This is due to the fact that, during the Second World War, 4.6 million Mexicans were allowed to legally enter the United States to meet labor needs, but on the condition that only men were allowed entry. (so that they have more incentive to return to their families) and that he has a limited length of stay.

However, States like California and Texas have become dependent on Mexican labor So they started employing undocumented immigrants and didn’t follow the guidelines of the Bracero program, which ended up being a problem for the U.S. government.

“Operation Wetback of 1954 was a campaign to crush the South Texas uprising and force them to comply with the Bracero Program. However, “It was the Mexican workers who paid the highest price.” wrote Kelly Lytle Hernández in The conversation .

According to a writing by Eladio Bobadilla, historian at the University of Pittsburgh This operation was “above all a political sleight of hand aimed at appeasing the nativists and, at the same time, continue to ensure that farmers, growers and other employers of cheap Mexican labor continue to have access to workers.

Experts even wonder if the number given by the prosecutor is real. And the Bracero program and other phenomena would explain why so many Mexicans have decided to voluntarily leave the country. Not only because of Operation Wetback.