The U.S. Has Ordered Mass Deportations Before. Now History Is Repeating Itself.
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The following article is adapted from PBS NewsHour. It is published here with permission as part of a collaboration between PBS' Student Reporting Labs and Teen Vogue.
The Trump administration's immigration policies have created fear and uncertainty for many communities, including people who lived through an earlier crackdown. Santiago Campos of our journalism training program, PBS News Student Reporting Labs, talked to his family members about how they view this moment.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
Geoff Bennett:
Now a more personal take on how the Trump administration's immigration policies have created fear and uncertainty for many communities.
Amna Nawaz:
Santiago Campos of the "News Hour's" journalism training program, the Student Reporting Labs, spoke with his family members who lived through an earlier government crackdown.
Santiago Campos:
In the 1950s, the Eisenhower administration deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants, both documented and undocumented, as well as American citizens of Mexican descent. This included my grandfather, Daniel Campos.
He and his family were among those deported to Mexico. His mother was undocumented, but he was a U.S.-born citizen.
Daniel Campos, Grandfather of Santiago Campos: Why they were deported, I don't know, but I know they were deported. And we shouldn't have been. We were U.S. citizens. The powers to be were white, so they could basically do just whatever they wanted with us.
Santiago Campos:
At one point, a confrontation with a Border Patrol agent would lead Daniel's mother, my great-grandmother, to agree to a deal.
Daniel Campos:
The entire time that they had been deported, my mother was to try and get her to be an informant for the Border Patrol.
Santiago Campos:
My great-grandmother did succumb to this pressure, agreeing to inform Border Patrol of the whereabouts of other undocumented migrants.
In exchange, she wouldn't be deported any further and would eventually get naturalized. These sorts of encounters with Border Patrol instilled fear that persisted to the next generation. My father, who was born in the U.S., showed me around the colonias where he grew up. These were unincorporated communities near the border, primarily inhabited by undocumented migrants and their families, with very few resources and in poor living conditions.
Marco Campos, Father of Santiago Campos: This was originally a one-bedroom shack built out of discarded political campaign billboards, but we lived in a community of poor undocumented immigrants. We didn't experience the wrongful deportations. We still grew up in a community where that was still a very real threat for us.
At least we felt that it was still a real threat because we knew what our family had gone through.
Santiago Campos:
When my father was young, in the 1980s and '90s, the process to cross-Border Patrol checkpoints often didn't involve showing papers. They would simply ask you whether or not you were a citizen.
Marco Campos:
What if one day I say yes and they don't believe me? Because it was purely based on what you looked like. We were poor. We were brown. We didn't have any kind of identity documents that said that we were from here. Mentally, it was a constant threat that we had to encounter any time we traveled out of this area.
You didn't grow up in this kind of a community. You didn't grow up with a similar close experience of the family deportations. And so I think it's easier for your generation, when you hear something like mass deportation, to think, well, that couldn't happen to me because I'm an American citizen.
Daniel Campos:
But for someone who has experienced it and for someone who lived it, it's not far-fetched today we could wind up like that again.
Santiago Campos:
Despite these struggles, my family has successfully escaped poverty and built better lives for themselves.
As anti-immigrant policies surge again, I and many others may need to reconsider how they could affect us.
For PBS News Student Reporting Labs, I'm Santiago Campos in Elsa, Texas.
Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue
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