'Communities were destroyed': Mass deportations of 1930s and 1950s show harm of Trump plan

Donald Trump has made the mass deportation of immigrants a centerpiece of his plans for a second term, vowing to forcibly remove as many as 20 million people from the country. Historian Ana Raquel Minian, who studies the history of immigration, says earlier mass deportation programs in the 1930s and '50s led to widespread abuse, tearing many families apart through violent means that also resulted in the expulsion of many U.S. citizens. “These deportations that Trump is claiming that he will do will have mass implications to our civil rights, to our communities and to our economy, and of course to the people who are being deported themselves,” says Minian. She also says that while Trump's extremist rhetoric encourages hate and violence against vulnerable communities, in terms of policy there is great continuity with the Biden administration, which kept many of the same policies in place.

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: We end today’s show looking at Donald Trump’s threat to deport as many as 20 million immigrants living in the United States. It’s a threat he repeated on an almost daily basis on the campaign trail, including at the Republican National Convention.

DONALD TRUMP: That’s why, to keep our families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country, even larger than that of President Dwight D. Eisenhower from many years ago. You know, he was a moderate, but he believed very strongly in borders. He had the largest deportation operation we’ve ever had.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined right now by a historian who’s closely studied past mass deportation programs in the United States. Ana Raquel Minian is an associate professor of history at Stanford University and the author of In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States Their recent piece for Dissent magazine is titled “Trump’s Deportation Model.”

So, Professor Minian, if you can start off by talking about Trump’s victory, what that model is, and, you know, his famous motto, “Make America great again”? Go back in history and talk about the mass deportations of people in the United States.

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: Thank you.

In many ways, we think that Trump is a new model, a person who completely goes against the grain of American history in terms of deportations, in terms of his treatment of immigrants. But as he noted himself, that is absolutely not true.

What he was referring to when he spoke about Eisenhower was an operation that occurred in 1954 titled Operation Wetback. And this was a massive deportation campaign. The tactics were military tactics. They brought tanks. They brought Border Patrol people all throughout the border, airplanes. People were grabbed from their houses and taken to the border, stopped outside of their jobs and taken to the border. Their families didn’t know where they had been. It was a very cruel operation. In the year 1954, the year of Operation Wetback, over 1 million people were deported. And this is the model that Trump says that he is going to expand.

And it comes at huge costs to America, to its communities and to the people themselves. In the United States, when Operation Wetback happened, communities were destroyed. People were left without central members, without churchgoers, without breadwinners. Families came to [inaudible]. Families who relied on some of the folks who were deported had to either rely on welfare or find jobs immediately. Children were left without parents. Many jobs, many employers needed workers who were deported. It was bad for the U.S. economy. It was also bad for American civil rights. Many Mexican Americans, people who were born in the United States, could be walking through the streets and considered to be Mexican just because they, quote-unquote, “looked Mexican,” and their civil rights were not protected. Their constitutional rights were not protected.

The deportation of American citizens is something that we have seen over and over again. For example, in the 1930s, there was also a massive deportation campaign against Mexicans. It occurred, of course, during the Great Depression. We estimate that from 350,000 to a million people were deported and that over 60% of those were American citizens. These deportations that Trump is claiming that he will do will have mass implications to our civil rights, to our communities and to our economy, and of course to the people who are being deported themselves.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could explain? If you could put that in the context of more recent history? In other words, how does Trump’s proposal — or, in fact, what is actual policies that he implemented in the four years he was in power, from 2016 — on immigration, how do they compare with what the Biden administration did and what Kamala Harris said herself, since it was also central to her, immigration border security was also central to her campaign?

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: Absolutely. In many ways, the Biden administration also led an extremely anti-immigrant movement. His administration first continued the “return to Mexico” policy, continued Title 42. What did these policies do? These policies meant that either asylum seekers could not even apply for asylum in the United States, even though asylum is something that we abide to because of our own national law and because of international agreements, and it said that — and the “Remain in Mexico” policy said that if we were to accept asylum seekers to apply for asylum, they had to wait while their cases were adjudicated in northern Mexico. While people waited in northern Mexico for either Title 42 to go away or for the “Remain in Mexico” policy to be allowed in, people lived in terrible encampments where they were regularly raped, tortured, mugged. It was absolutely brutal, the conditions there. In fact, I once interviewed a woman who had fostered a child during Trump’s zero-tolerance policy, the policy that Trump implemented that separated children from their parents while in detention. And this woman, who had fostered one of these little kids who was separated from his father while crossing the border because of the Trump administration, said, “Right now the Biden administration’s 'Remain in Mexico' policy is basically a zero-tolerance policy in reverse.” Why? The conditions in northern Mexico were so brutal that some parents made the heart-wrenching decision of sending their children across the border, because unaccompanied minors were the only ones who could get into the United States while their parents had to wait in northern Mexico. Even recently, the Biden campaign has dramatically reduced the number of asylum seekers who can come into the country. These policies have been devastating to asylum seekers and migrants.

But there is, I believe, a big difference between what Trump did and what Biden did, even if not so much numerically. The rhetoric that Trump implemented, the anti-immigrant discourse, calling Mexicans “animals,” all Central Americans as belonging to MS-13, calling people rapists, that is not something that we heard so much from the Biden administration or from Kamala Harris’s campaign. And that rhetoric matters. That rhetoric leads to violence in Latino communities, and eventually it also pushes people, administrations, to move further and further toward anti-immigrant policies. Additionally, Trump’s family separation policy was explicitly created for purposes of deterrence. What does this mean? Trump implemented the zero-tolerance policy to cause harm to asylum seekers in order to warn other asylum seekers not to try to come into the United States. The very purpose of this policy was to cause harm. This is different from the policies that Biden has implemented and that Kamala Harris promised to implement, as well, even though they, too, would have created massive harm.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: And if you could say, given all of that, especially what you said the distinctions are between Kamala and Biden and Trump — you know, so many exit polls have found, across the board, there was an increase in the number of votes for Trump, and obviously Latinx community is a massive and highly diverse community, but among this community, however defined, there was also an increase in the number of people who voted for Trump. How do you understand that?

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: I do want to emphasize your first point, which is: Why are we even thinking of a Latinx community when we think of votes? We know, for example, that Cubans have regularly voted Republican, that Mexicans have switched back and forth. So, I have been a little disturbed by this concept of a Latinx community and the blame that has been put on this community for the election of Trump nowadays.

But there is a history that we must understand. For example, if we look at the Mexican American community, right now the biggest Latinx community is of Mexicans. And Mexicans have changed — Mexican Americans have changed their views around migration many times. Up until the 1970s, most Mexican Americans viewed immigrants as a huge problem. Why? When immigrants arrived in the United States, they were cast as bringing disease, bringing crime — just like nowadays. And so, Mexican Americans had an option. One of these options was to say, “Look, we are not them. We don’t want them here. If they don’t come, we won’t be stereotyped as criminals. We won’t be stereotyped as bringing in disease. Stop them from coming.” So this was a very common speech and rhetoric of the Mexican American community up until the 1970s. This type of rhetoric began to change —

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

ANA RAQUEL MINIAN: — because of the civil rights movement — because of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when Mexican Americans said, “Actually, these people are our brethren. We are still being discriminated. Instead of stopping their discrimination — instead of fighting for them not to come, let us say they should not be discriminated, either.”

AMY GOODMAN: Ana Raquel Minian, we have to leave it there, and we thank you so much for being with us, associate professor of history at Stanford University, author of In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.