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Yahoo
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Contributor: Deportation raids terrorized my family for decades — and we had papers
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. If it's in the news right now, the L.A. Times' Opinion section covers it. Sign up for our weekly opinion newsletter. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
18-03-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Deportation raids terrorized my family for decades — and we had papers
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.
Yahoo
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Shaky History of Mass Deportations
When Trump supporters envision an America made great again, they are likely picturing the 1950s: a decade in which the U.S. military was preeminent in the world, its economy enjoyed a trade surplus, and its population was homogenous. Yet this mythical vision of the past obscures as much as it reveals. For it was during this decade that the U.S. government made commitments that would lead to futile military interventions, sapping the nation's martial confidence and economic strength. And it was during these years that a postwar civil rights movement took shape that would desegregate the South and decouple the reflexive equation of American whiteness with American citizenship. It was squarely within the mythical 1950s that the U.S. government launched the most public effort to deport large numbers of undocumented Mexican migrants: Operation Wetback. And it's this example that many on the Trump team are citing as they seek to implement a mass deportation program. But why this campaign from 1954, when there are more recent attempts to draw experience from? The reasons all fit into a mythical reading of the 1950s. Operation Wetback was big, bold, and public. It was effective. And it was quick. Yet, leavening myth with reality, we can now conclude its approach was short-sighted, its conduct was brutish, and its long term results were fleeting. Operation Wetback was futile. It is a cautionary tale in trusting the political platitudes and simplistic prescriptions that promise a rapid solution to the immigration crisis. The number of undocumented border crossings, as indicated by the U.S. Border Patrol's (BP) apprehension of Mexican migrants, was rising in the years before Operation Wetback: 458,215 in 1950, 500,628 in 1951, 534,538 in 1952, and 875, 318 in 1953. BP agents had been using various methods to stem the tide, notably fences and cross-border raids. So when President Dwight Eisenhower appointed an old classmate from West Point, Gen. Joseph Swing, as the new commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in May 1954, many hoped border enforcement would be instilled with a degree of military efficiency. Swing was soon promising a swift conclusion to the 'wetback problem.' An economic recession, which nearly doubled the U.S. unemployment rate between 1953 and 1954, put the issue of undocumented Mexican labor migration into sharp focus for Americans. A stage was being set. The INS worked hard during the first months of 1954 to ensure American agricultural growers had a plentiful supply of documented Mexican workers. Advance public announcements of Border Patrol roundups convinced many undocumented migrants and their families to voluntarily leave the United States. The U.S. Department of State informed Mexico's government to prepare for a sudden and large influx of its nationals. Then in mid-June 1954, 'Operation Wetback' began. Border Patrol agents built roadblocks along routes that led to and from the border, including around Nogales, Arizona and El Paso, Texas; teams of 12 BP agents roved in jeeps, planes, and trucks throughout California, Arizona, Texas, and other parts of the country, searching for Mexicans. Public spaces such as parks, fields, and country roads were converted into temporary detention facilities as apprehended Mexican nationals, mostly men, were processed for deportation (the deportation of women and children was kept minimal because it was considered a bad look for the Border Patrol). Migrant camps, ranches, farms, restaurants, and hotels were raided for migrant workers. Journalists followed BP agents everywhere they went, photographing and documenting the apprehensions. The INS claimed that well over 1 million immigrants exited the United States during the latter half of 1954. Nearly 27,000 were formally deported, yet the great majority of departures were voluntary. There were accounts of harsh and abusive treatment of Mexican immigrants by BP agents. Some Mexican migrants were reportedly 'dumped' just across the border—sometimes in the middle of the desert—with no plans for their provision. Migrants were often packed into cargo vessels and shipped from Texas to Mexico ports. In one case, migrants on a ship sailing from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico, were subjected to conditions that resembled an 'eighteenth century slave ship.' But the goal of Operation Wetback had been met: a militarily precise removal of foreign laborers who were stealing work from American citizens and undermining the stability of the United States. By March 1955, Swing crowed that the undocumented Mexican migration problem was resolved. Of course, there is a precedent for everything in history. The precedent for Operation Wetback was the Repatriation crisis of the early 1930s, when an estimated 300,000 Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans went back to Mexico. A sudden lack of work precipitated by the Great Depression, along with public prejudice, combined to drive them out of the country. Even though most repatriados left the United States voluntarily, their departure was coerced. News of harassment, rumors of local authorities visiting Mexicans' homes to request immigration documentation, and the general mood of persecution convinced many Mexicans to return south. Voluntary departure did not classify undocumented migrants as deportees, allowing them to apply for legal readmission to the United States once they were on the other side of the border. Local governments and railroad companies facilitated Mexicans' return southward by discounting transportation costs. Even local charities played a part in pressuring Mexicans to leave the United States by withholding services. Cities throughout the United States organized campaigns to drive out Mexican workers from their communities, but Los Angeles County was considered the 'hotbed' of repatriation—over 12,000 Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans would depart that county alone by the mid-1930s. Immigration agents and local police carried out a string of well-publicized raids, detaining and questioning thousands of persons suspected of being in the country illegally. Count officials opined that the departure of immigrants would fix rising unemployment and crime problems. The local police chief, Roy Steckel, developed a novel, 20th-century type of public inquisition called 'scareheading,' which involved having several federal officials preside over a few arrests, ensuring that those arrests received ample publicity. Such practices created a social environment so hostile to immigrants that many left the United States willingly; indeed, historians Francisco Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez argue that Mexicans 'elected to face deprivation in their homeland rather than endure the disparagement heaped upon them in El Norte. … In Mexico they might suffer hunger pains, but at least they would be treated like human beings.' Voluntary departures suited U.S. immigration authorities just fine. Deportation proceedings—which required court hearing and background checks—were cumbersome and time-consuming processes that federal and state governments preferred not to undertake. Due process gummed up the works of mass deportation. Instead, social coercion was the ticket. By making living conditions for immigrants in the United States so intolerable, and dialing up a climate of fear to such a fever pitch, the undocumented would have no choice but to leave. Problem solved. Both the Repatriation crisis and Operation Wetback were spurred by economic recessions, but they were underpinned by a palpable American prejudice toward immigrants. The language of exclusion was more blatant in the early 1930s. Anti-immigrant congressmen like Rep. John Box said Mexicans did 'not make good citizens' and that they were 'dirty and diseased.' Twenty years later, the language was nearly as direct, such as when Commissioner Swing stated that undocumented Mexican migrants constituted 'an actual invasion of the United States,' and that the deportation program's objective was a 'direct attack… upon the hordes of aliens facing us across the border.' The name itself, Operation 'Wetback,' indicates the public nature of prejudice in mid-20th century America. Another chief characteristic shared between government deportation projects of the early 1930s and mid-1950s was the coordination of federal, state, and local authorities. It is hard to imagine such robust cooperation these days, but ironically, the channels for cooperation between local, state, and federal governments to deport immigrants have only increased in recent decades. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) made it harder for undocumented immigrants to adjust their status to that of a legal immigrant while simultaneously making it much easier for these undocumented immigrants—including minors and children—to be apprehended and deported. Under section 287(g) of the new law, local and state police could be trained to enforce federal immigration law, more offenses were deemed deportable, it was easier to deport criminals ('expedited removal'), and deportation decisions were made by immigration courts with stricter judicial review procedures. The IIRIRA stipulated that 28 distinct offenses including 'crimes of violence' that carried a prison sentence of a year or more could result in deportation. Perhaps most dramatically, the law also instituted retroactive punishment, in which pre-1996 crimes that were formerly not defined as aggravated felonies—such as traffic violations—were now classified as such, providing the government grounds for deportation. Convicted residents could be deported even if they had completed their prison sentences. Not coincidentally, deportations of undocumented immigrants shot up. For most of the twentieth century up to 1990, deportations averaged about 20,000 per year. Between 1990 and 1995 they increased to 40,000 per year. During the late 1990s, after passage of the IIRIRA, deportations rose to nearly 200,000 per year. Additionally, new regulations from 2002 to 2006 allowed immigration officials to expeditiously return undocumented migrants found within 100 miles of the border up to 14 days after their actual crossing. These new measures included authorization to build a border barrier and to create the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), which is spearheading the current deportation campaign. The federal government's ability to deport immigrants has grown in Operation Wetback's long wake, even if public toleration for anything resembling what happened in the summer of 1954 is ambivalent. Some Americans undoubtedly want to support Trump's desire to deport millions of immigrants. Private security firms and even private citizens may soon directly participate in such efforts. And the state of Texas has offered the Trump administration the use of 1,400 acres to host deportation facilities and to build a border wall. Other Americans decry such policies, protesting what they see as an unethical and unconstitutional approach to immigration control and a federal government's blatant attempt at legal overreach. Many Democratic-leaning city and state governments offer themselves as sanctuaries to immigrants and spurn federal officials' demands that local authorities cooperate in mass deportation. Such responses to U.S. immigration policy taps into the historical example of the Sanctuary movement, which began in the early 1980s to safeguard Central American refugees who were denied asylum by the U.S. government. Americans' disagreements over immigration cut along political, legal, economic, and even philosophical lines. A fundamental question raised by the immigration debate is who belongs in a nation-state. What makes an individual a legally-protected entity, their personhood (regardless of the nation-state) or their citizenship (because of the nation-state)? Another relevant legal question to immigration is this: are 'illegal' aliens accorded due process because of their personhood or are they denied it because they are not citizens of the United States? The 14th Amendment—the same Constitutional statute of 1868 that created the notion of birthright citizenship (and that has been targeted recently by the Trump administration for cancellation)—also granted due process protections to all 'persons' regardless of their citizenship status. Seen in this light, are operations like mass deportation a violation of undocumented immigrants' civil protections? The American public, its leaders and courts have debated the topic for well over a century. The historical legacy of Operation Wetback is a flash in the pan: a momentary, shocking flame burst that quickly dissipates. It got attention and immediate results. Yet it failed to provide a lasting solution to the immigration issue. American policymakers did not consider what would happen to all the migrants deported. It was assumed that once migrants had been expelled, they would cease being a headache for U.S. leaders. That assumption was wrong. A new border crisis was proclaimed by the mid-1960s as rates of undocumented migration grew. By the early 1970s, American media broadcast panic at rising migration. One Arizona newspaper headline from March 1973 read, 'Illegal Aliens Flooding Yuma, California Area.' Undocumented migration would continue to rise through the last years of the twentieth century, especially after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect in 1994. For critics of immigration, free trade had an unfortunate tendency of creating the conditions for the free movement of people. Ultimately, Operation Wetback failed because it treated immigrants as numbers instead of people. The Trump administration is taking a similarly mistaken and ahistorical approach to the immigration problem. Present-day advocates of mass deportation would do well to consider the various factors in migrant-sending countries that lead people to the United States: crime, drug wars, weak government institutions, depressed economies. Of course, the United States is not isolated from these international factors. Indeed, in many ways the United States contributes to the problem with its proliferation of guns and consumption of illicit substances. Immigration, then, is a transnational concern that cannot be solved through domestic mass deportation programs. Instead, to find a lasting solution to the problem, policymakers must analyze and empathize with the reasons individuals make the fateful decision to leave their home country for a distant destination. And then they must legislate and negotiate accordingly.
Axios
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Axios
Trump asks for funding for mass deportations and repeats debunked claims
President Trump renewed his ask for more funding to carry out his immigration agenda, including border security and "the largest deportation operation in American history" during his address to Congress Tuesday night. Why it matters: Trump's mass deportation plans are near-impossible to achieve without more money, which Democrats are likely to oppose. Trump Cabinet members, particularly border czar Tom Homan, have made a similar ask for weeks. Zoom out: During the speech, Trump said he hoped to surpass the deportation record of"current record holder Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders" — a reference to Operation Wetback. That mass deportation, in the 1950s, used military-style tactics to round up 1.3 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans across the country for the-then largest deportation operation in U.S. history. "Wetback" is a racial slur for Mexicans. The president also celebrated new data on border crossings in February that showed they'd declined to their lowest level in decades. Zoom in: Trump made his case for more funding by repeating messages from the campaign trail, including falsehoods about migrants and immigration policy. Trump repeated debunked claims about the immigrant population numbers in Springfield, Ohio and gang members occupying Aurora, Colo. He repeated that his predecessor, President Biden, had open borders into the country, which he did not. Trump also said that people who illegally crossed the border were "murderers, drug dealers, gang members and people from mental institutions and insane asylums" and invited several guests to underscore his anti-immigration message. Reality check: There's no evidence that immigrants trying to come into the country were from prisons and mental institutions. Immigrants commit fewer crimes than their American-born counterparts, studies have shown. But Trump and others have elevated individual cases that support their claims, like the death of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. The 22,797 immigrants out of 43,759 — or 52.1% — currently held in ICE detention at the various locations across the country have no criminal record, data shows. Many more have only minor offenses, including traffic violations. Less than 0.5% of the 1.8 million cases in immigration courts during the past fiscal year — involving about 8,400 people — included deportation orders for alleged crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally, an Axios review of government data found. Between the lines: Trump entered office at a time when U.S. immigration courts already are on pace to decide record numbers of deportation cases — and order the most removals in five years — under Biden's push to fast-track asylum decisions. A backlog of 3.7 million cases in immigration courts, where immigrants are entitled to make their case to stay in the U.S., means detained immigrants can wait months, even years, for a hearing. Immigration courts are predicted to rule on 852,000 deportation cases from Oct. 1, 2024, to Sept. 30, 2025, according to an analysis of data by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC). If that pace continues, immigration judges will decide more deportation cases in 2025 than in any previous year on record. The other side: Immigrant rights groups quickly denounced Trump's rhetoric around "invasion" or immigrants coming from mental institutions. "It is vital that we remain vigilant against any hateful language that undermines the rich diversity and strength of democracy," Hector Sanchez Barba, President and CEO of the left-leaning Mi Familia Vota said. In the Spanish language response, U.S. Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) said Trump's immigration policies are not designed to deport criminals who should be deported, "but to create a reign of terror that negatively impacts local economies." The chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus said the president was acting "more like a king than like a president." Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional comment from Rep. Adriano Espaillat.
Politico
05-03-2025
- Politics
- Politico
Tariffs fact check
President Donald Trump made a plea tonight for more funding for his mass deportations agenda, a message he delivered as the family members of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray, who were killed by undocumented immigrants, sat in the audience. Trump also shouted out Border Patrol agent Roberto Ortiz, who received a standing ovation. The president has been struggling to ramp up the removals of undocumented immigrants during his first weeks in office — falling short of the immediate increase in deportations he promised on the campaign trail. Top administration officials have been working to increase arrests and deportation stats as they face a number of resource challenges, including a need for detention capacity and additional personnel. The president's border czar, Tom Homan, has been stressing for weeks that ICE can only carry out as many deportations as resources allow. Roberto Ortiz applauds Allyson Phillips and Lauren Phillips, the mother and sister of Laken Riley. | Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP Trump said he sent a detailed funding request to Congress, and made a reference to 'Operation Wetback,' the largest mass deportation campaign of undocumented immigrants in U.S. history. As many as 1.3 million Mexican immigrants were swept up in the Eisenhower campaign — named after a derogatory slur for immigrants who crossed rivers to reach the U.S. and what has long been viewed as the model for Trump's plans. 'I have sent Congress a detailed funding request laying out exactly how we will eliminate these threats, protect our Homeland, and complete the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than current record holder President Dwight D. Eisenhower — a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders,' Trump said.
