“Operation Wetback” uprooted a million lives and tore families apart. Sound familiar?
The 1950s scheme to deport Mexicans was as racist as its name.
Beginning in the late spring of 1954, hundreds of U.S. Border Patrol agents descended on borderland towns as far-flung as San Ysidro, California, and Laredo Texas, even making their way into the country’s interior, to cities like San Francisco and Chicago. They showed up unannounced at cotton and citrus farms, surveyed cattle ranches and factories, and fanned out through train and bus stations, parks, hotels, and restaurants. While agents infiltrated Mexican or Mexican American communities, pilots in low-flying planes scoured the arid landscape, radioing to patrolmen in jeeps below. Their goal was simple: to deport as many Mexicans as possible, as quickly as possible, due process be damned. And if their tactics didn’t make their intentions clear, the name of the campaign left little to the imagination. It was called Operation Wetback.
It was a year when public parks became detention centers and restaurant kitchens were turned upside down as dishwashers and busboys tried to flee on foot. Border Patrol boasted of nabbing 2,000 undocumented immigrants a day — more than a million people total, as promised — although the high figure is called into question by historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez in her book Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol. Though the exact numbers proved slippery, there was no denying that Operation Wetback was a massive undertaking, one of the most aggressive such campaigns in Border Patrol history, intensifying the political climate on an already contentious U.S.–Mexico border.
Operation Wetback was the brainchild of two immigration hard-liners with personal histories that matched the immigration system’s escalating violence. Harlon Carter, then the head of Border Patrol, was raised amid a backdrop of violent racism brewing on the Texas–Mexico border, and known for his brutal tactics and a willingness to escalate conflict. To settle an argument in his youth, he had killed a Hispanic teenager. A proponent of vigilante justice, Carter aligned with a radical group within the National Rifle Association that was hell-bent on reinterpreting the Second Amendment. After staging a coup and overthrowing the NRA old guard, Carter took the helm of the organization; he is widely credited with turning it into the political lobbying behemoth it is today.
The other man behind the roundup was General Joseph May Swing, a career military man and West Point classmate of President Dwight Eisenhower’s. Swing had fought alongside General Pershing against the Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa. As Lytle Hernandez explains, Border Patrol agents hoped Swing would bring this military might to their ranks.
Anti-Mexican sentiment had been brewing on this side of the border for years. Since 1944, increasing numbers of Mexicans had been crossing over in search of work. In the early 1950s, amid stagnant wages, President Truman sought a scapegoat and landed on illegal immigration. As a report issued by his administration read, “It is virtually an invasion.”
In the early summer of 1953, Harlon Carter called for a meeting with Swing and another general to plot the military’s involvement in ridding the U.S. of Mexican nationals. There were discussions of running barbed-wire fences all along the border and checkpoints all over the borderlands. Swing was eager to get American troops involved; he considered “the purge” to be excellent training for action in Korea, where the U.S. was currently wrapping up a war. Noting that immigration was a domestic policy issue, not grounds for military action, President Eisenhower refused to issue a decree that would advance Swing’s agenda. He did, however, appoint his old classmate as the head of the INS. Immediately upon his arrival, Swing boasted of massive paramilitary-style campaigns that would solve the problem of illegal immigration once and for all. “If the Border Patrol could not use troops,” writes Lytle Hernandez, “at least they could have the leadership and guidance of a seasoned officer in the borderland battles to come.”
For Operation Wetback, Swing and Carter had a new idea. Rather than dump deportees on the other side of the border, where many would simply cross back over, the U.S. government negotiated with the Mexican government to transport them by train, truck, or plane to southern Mexico, hundreds of miles away. Since many of the deportees were from other places, this stranded them, without connections or access to money or food. For the sake of speed, civil rights went out the window. As during the massive deportation push of the 1930s, when more than half a million U.S. citizens were deported, hundreds of Americans who could not quickly produce proof of citizenship were swept up in Operation Wetback’s dragnet and hauled off to Mexico.
The term “wetback,” a slur alluding to Mexican migrants wading across the Rio Grande to enter the United States, was used widely in newspapers at the time. The choice of the word in the operation’s name underscored the creators’ belief that these were not humans with rights but an invasive species that needed to be rooted out.
But Carter and Swing were subject to some scrutiny in the media mayhem that ensued after Operation Wetback’s rollout. While testifying before a Senate subcommittee, Swing made troubling statements that spoke volumes about his views on the value of Mexican life, and the double standard so common among anti-immigration zealots who’ll bend the rules or make exceptions if it suits their needs.
Senator Lyndon B. Johnson: General, do you have a Mexican maid?
General Swing: I certainly do.
Senator Johnson: Was she recruited through the Immigration Service?
General Swing: I just do not quite understand the question. This is a Mexican maid who was serving in a restaurant in Juarez, and while I was on one of my inspection trips down in El Paso, I said to the district director, “It is hard to get a maid in Washington! Wondering if there is any little Mexican girl over in Juarez who would like to immigrate and come over and go to work for me.”
It turned out that the general’s maid, who, by Swing’s account, had been effortlessly spirited from Juarez to Washington on a whim, had cost the INS many man-hours and created numerous bureaucratic hurdles. But more than labor costs, the “little Mexican girl” comment revealed Swing’s dismissiveness toward Mexicans. The girl, of course, wasn’t a child but a woman, and the term recalled the pejorative “boy” used by white people to belittle African American men.
Operation Wetback had powerful opponents. Farmers, for example, were outraged, though their concerns weren’t about the human rights of their desperately poor neighbors; the roundup threatened to dismantle the borderlands’ delicate economic ecosystem by depriving them of cheap, regulation-free labor. “We’re being driven to the poor house,” one Texas farmer said. “The cotton crop means life or death to the valley at this time,” said another.
While these farmers weren’t on board, the Mexican government was. Though from the outside, Border Patrol and the INS puffed their chests and made sweeping claims in the media touting their deportation numbers and blunt-force tactics, on the inside, the U.S. was playing a much more delicate game, so as to avoid losing the support of the Mexican officials. The two groups were in constant negotiations, walking on tiptoes, coordinating which areas could handle what amount of deportees at what times.
Though the United States has since abandoned the racial epithets in operation names, Operation Wetback’s legacy lingers in the American immigration system. The tactic of punting unwanted people as far as possible from the border, regardless of the impact on their lives, has been used in more recent times. Operation Intercept, a massive border shutdown in the late 1960s, resulted in lasting economic and diplomatic tensions, and thousands of Mexican workers losing their jobs. In Southern California in the 1990s, the benignly named “Youth Border Project” sent homeless immigrant children to languish in Tijuana jails, while other massive raids during that era targeted agricultural and meat industry workers and sent immigrant communities into the shadows for years. And in 2015, during the Republican debates, Donald Trump praised Operation Wetback, saying that if you want to enforce immigration policy, “You don’t get nicer. You don’t get friendlier.”
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