Deportation raids terrorized my family for decades — and we had papers

Los Angeles Times

18-03-2025

I grew up believing I was the grandson of an undocumented immigrant. My mother, raised in an adobe home in New Mexico behind the county sewer system, would tell me and my siblings about the backbreaking work her father did daily at the railroad tie plant, breathing in a toxic mix of copper and arsenic. And she told us about all the times he hurried home, not stopping to chat with any friends or neighbors, in order to pace the short length of the house and mutter a common refrain: 'Ahí viene la migra.' Here comes immigration.
Many living in the U.S. today know that feeling all too well, as the Trump administration has talked loudly and often about deporting millions of people.
My mom describes her childhood as clouded over with fear every time the community buzzed with rumors that 'raiders' were coming to the plant or the neighborhood to round up Mexicans. Whenever the air thickened with gossip and paranoia, my grandfather would keep it low, pacing the house. Everyone tried to make themselves small — invisible even — a tricky task in a family of 11 kids. My grandparents would dispatch their fair-skinned oldest daughter to go to the store and purchase household necessities in perfect English.
Stories like these are why, for decades, I thought my grandfather was undocumented. The family maintained that my grandfather had spent years in the U.S. before he regularized his status during one of the many immigrant amnesty programs of the 1940s and '50s.
We were wrong. Sorting through family heirlooms, we recently found my grandfather's resident alien card: He'd had legal status as early as 1920, long before the first iterations of 'green cards' were introduced 20 years later.
If my grandfather was living in the U.S. legally, why was he hiding?
In 1954, the U.S. government launched Operation Wetback, a campaign that took its name from an ethnic slur, with dramatic raids targeting Latino laborers. The U.S. government claimed that the program deported 1.3 million people, but historians estimate the actual number was closer to 300,000. Officials inflated the numbers by counting voluntary repatriations and individuals deported multiple times, creating the illusion of an overwhelmingly successful operation. To further this pageant play, the government tipped off news crews in advance, ensuring photographers and journalists were on scene to document the roundups and reinforce the narrative of a robust crackdown.
Bob Salinger, the Border Patrol inspector in charge of Texas at the time, ordered immigration officers to carry a pair of clippers to shave the heads of those they detained. Some officers reportedly marked detainees with ink or scars to humiliate and track them. Other officers took it further; Chief Patrol Inspector Fletcher Rawls ultimately ordered his agents to stop 'peeling Mexican heads.'
The campaign didn't just target undocumented immigrants. It also swept up thousands of U.S. citizens and legal residents who were deported by mistake. Law enforcement made little effort to verify legal status, instead rounding up anyone who 'looked' Mexican. Many had no way to prove their citizenship before they were forcibly removed from their homes, workplaces and families.
And these efforts of the 1950s were not the first wave of cruel policy aimed at forcing Mexican Americans out of the country.
This is why my grandfather hid: In a system designed to criminalize brown skin, having the right papers wasn't always enough to protect you.
Despite their brutality and high-profile raids, the expulsions of the 1950s failed to change the economic realities that drove migration, failed to bring order to the U.S.-Mexico border and failed to reduce the size of the undocumented population in the United States. After all the barbarities and abuses, the U.S. economy continued to rely on undocumented labor. The agriculture and construction industries needed workers then as much as they do today.
And now, history repeats itself. President Trump, promising to carry out the 'largest domestic deportation operation in American history,' has openly cited Operation Wetback as the blueprint for his own mass family separation plan. We are already seeing U.S. citizens wrongly detained, people of color under pressure to prove they are not deportable and people with legal status swept up in arrests.
Should Congress approve the additional billions in funding needed to ramp up detention and deportation, then in swaths of the United States, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents bursting into homes, businesses, schools and churches could become the most visible symbol of the federal government.
Less than half of those swept up in arrests so far have criminal convictions. These extreme and indiscriminate crackdowns do nothing to fix the backlogged courts and outdated laws that are at the heart of our broken immigration system. We need to protect families from deportation and keep them together. As my family experienced, under a mass deportation regime, the fear and chaos is the point, and those living here with all the right papers are not immune.
While my grandfather was never swept up in the raids, living under the threat of deportation left an indelible mark on my family. My mother grew up paranoid, eager to cloak her children in whatever privilege she thought would protect us. My parents ended up taking 27 mortgages on their home to send all their kids to Harvard. My parents worked hard, and my siblings and I worked hard, but our success in this country was possible only because our ancestors were lucky during the raids of generations past — lucky to not be dragged out of their homes and left across the border in the desert to die.
I'm not an anomaly, and those fears aren't left to history. There's a kid staying home from school right now out of fear that ICE could raid her classroom. If she could only feel safe attending school, who knows what she could accomplish as an American? Just as my grandfather did 75 years ago, people are hiding out of fear of losing everything. Chaotic roundups will bring us no closer to fixing the very real problems in our immigration system. They lead only to more dysfunction and horror.
Tom Chavez is chief executive of the venture fund Superset in San Francisco and founder of the Ethical Tech Project.