Operation Wetback: America's Previous Mass Deportation

How close are we to doing it again?

The agents ascended the narrow staircase of the Garcia home, rapping sharply on the door. Rosa’s heart rate accelerated. Sweat crept across her palms. She opened the door just enough to seem polite.

“Times are tough here,” the agents said. “You’ll be better off with your own kind of people in Mexico. People that speak your language.” At first, the agents –employees of a relief organization– made it sound like refusal was an option.

“It’s really for the best. You can bring your things with you, and we’ve got the train tickets all arranged. Will two weeks be enough time to get your affairs in order?”

It was the 1930s, and the Garcias were not really being given a choice. They were being forced to “repatriate.”

Imagine, for a moment, the sum total of every homeless person currently in the United States. How many people, would you estimate, are currently unhoused, in a population of 330 million? The answer is about 650,000.

And now imagine the United States in 1930. The population of the country was about 120 million. The number of people who became homeless as a result of the Great Depression was north of 2,000,000. Most of the social safety net programs hadn’t been developed yet, and devastation was rampant.

President Hoover was loath to do much about the people who couldn’t keep a roof over their heads, and most of the work fell to relief societies, various charities who collected funds from the better off and distributed them to those in need.

In part because of this significant economic unrest, Americans began to view Mexican immigrants like the Garcias, mostly seasonal workers, as a burden. They were taking the jobs. They were taking the charity. There just wasn’t enough pie to go around, people thought, and the simplest answer was to tell Mexicans they needed to go home. Governments persuaded major employers to their way of thinking, and soon businesses like Ford Motors and US Steel were saying to Mexican laborers, “You’d be better off elsewhere.”

During the Great Depression, the federal government never declared a formal deportation program, so state and local governments, who lack the authority to deport, began to stoke the fires of “repatriation,” creating the conditions under which Mexican immigrants would just “voluntarily” return home. Sometimes this included local governments raiding businesses that employed Mexican immigrants, and soon word –and fear– began to spread.

Historians estimate that around 400,000 people of Mexican heritage were “repatriated” during the 1930s, and around 60% of them were US citizens. In 2012, California formally apologized for its role in the illegal raids on businesses and homes.

When the US entered WWII, large numbers of American men were drafted into the military, and others left their jobs on farms for better-paying defense jobs. Agricultural workers were sorely needed, so Americans once again looked south. Together, the Mexican and American governments created the Bracero Program, which allowed Mexican workers to come to the US on short term employment contracts.

The US government promised the braceros that they would not be discriminated against, that they would make the same as a US citizen worker, and that they would receive healthcare and housing while in the US.

The Mexican government went for it, despite the fact that they would be exporting thousands of their male workers, because they knew that the braceros would send money back to their loved ones in Mexico, which would, in turn, be better for their economy.

The Bracero Program did not result in fair and equal treatment of Mexican workers. Many employers simply ignored the promises of equal pay, didn’t provide housing, or hired undocumented workers outside of the official channels. A Jim Crow-like system of segregation emerged, restricting where Mexicans could live, where they could travel, and which businesses would work with them.

More than 200,000 contract laborers were hired every year by businesses in the US, but the fact that some employers preferred to hire undocumented “wetbacks” instead of participating in the more highly regulated Bracero Program embarrassed INS. (Wetback is a derogatory term that referred to people who crossed the Rio Grande to come to the United States.)

The Bracero Program continued for more than 20 years. So, the US has a long history of not just actively recruiting immigrant workers, but building an economy that depended on them. All while actively discriminating against them in a form of imported colonialism.

After the war ended and GIs returned home to find many of their jobs occupied by Mexican immigrants and American women who no longer wished to stay at home, pressure increased on the Truman and Eisenhower administrations to do something about wetbacks.

How could they increase participation in the Bracero Program and decrease the hiring of undocumented migrants? If employers were deprived of access to undocumented immigrants, they would, by necessity, need to participate in the Bracero Program, immigration officials reasoned.

It wasn’t difficult to convince some Americans that immigrant labor was detrimental to the country, despite actually needing it to function. A pamphlet called “What Price Wetbacks?” distributed in Texas by the Texas Federation of Labor and the American GI Forum of Texas, shows exactly how many Americans viewed Mexican laborers.

If this was the news that the hard working men and former GIs in your community were passing out, it’s not difficult to imagine why public resentment increased.

Tuberculosis? Crime? Wetbacks, Americans were told, were mere peasants. They readily accepted exploitation, the pamphlets said. They are fine with the starvation wages, the diarrhea and the unsanitary conditions. They are more than willing to suffer.

And so, many Americans believed, wetbacks might as well go ahead and “suffer” back in Mexico.

By the summer of 1954, action on “native labor displacement” came in the form of Operation Wetback. The head of Border Patrol, Harlon Carter, said that Wetback would be the “biggest driver against illegal aliens in US history.”

Shock and awe became the name of the game as 750 immigration officials faced off against the “hordes of aliens facing us across the border.” Immigration officials stopped trains and set up roadblocks, using a strategy they called “blocking it off and mopping it up.” They relied on massive publicity to convey a show of force far beyond their actual capabilities, holding up traffic and then putting people into the backs of trucks. “Mop ups” later extended to northern cities like Chicago.

Border agents invaded private homes in the middle of the night, demanded identification from people who looked like they might be Mexican, showed up at restaurants and Mexican businesses, and detained anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally. They did this without due process, any kind of hearing, and without regard for their actual immigration status.

Sometimes people who were seized during Operation Wetback were not permitted to even let their family know where they were going or what had happened to them – they simply disappeared. Throughout the operation, border agents sought to amp up the number of deportations they were carrying out, in an effort to scare people into leaving voluntarily.

People were herded onto planes, trucks, and preferably, boats, and then carried as deep into Mexico as possible, without regard for anyone’s community of origin. Deportees, nearly ¼ of them, were sent via ship across the Gulf of Mexico and to the Yucatan Peninsula. One prominent historian who studies this time period, Mae Ngai, said that conditions on these ships were akin to ships carrying enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. One member of Congress referred to them as “hell ships.”

People were unceremoniously dumped off in remote areas of Mexico, into the scorching desert where temperatures reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit. They were given no food, water, or means to communicate. In one single incident, at least 88 people died from sun stroke. One Mexican labor leader said that deportees were “brought into Mexico like cows” on trucks.

The US government estimates around 1.3 million people were deported in just a handful of months, but historians say this is overstated. For starters, some of these people were likely deported more than once, so the number does not represent unique individuals. It also includes US citizens and legal residents who should not have been subject to deportation. Historians put the actual number of deportees somewhere in the ranges of 300,000-800,000.

Regardless of the precise number, two important points emerge. The first is that undocumented immigration from Mexico during the Bracero Program was largely transitory in nature. Meaning, people came to the US to seek seasonal work, and then a few months later, they returned home. The following year, they often did it again. Undocumented immigrants often remained in the country for short periods of time.

Today, many undocumented immigrants have been living and working in the United States for years – some for decades. They have moved here permanently, given birth to citizen children, and in the case of approximately 800,000 Dreamers, were brought here by their parents as children and have little memory of any other home.

And secondly, Operation Wetback did not solve illegal immigration. It killed people, it deprived them of their human and civil rights, but it did not fix the underlying motivators that speak to why people didn’t want to participate in the Bracero Program or other legal means of entry.

And those underlying structural issues – the imported colonialism, the pull of the US economy that depended on cheap labor, the push of civil unrest, wars, natural disasters, and lack of opportunity in their home country? History shows us that mass deportations did little to address these issues.

What does this mean for today?

Echoes of the past ring especially loudly in this political moment. People no longer pass out pamphlets about “wetbacks,” but they post about the same groups of people on Twitter/X. Videos of people nearly drowning in the Rio Grande or children getting trapped in razor wire now draw laughing emojis and reposts in the tens of thousands. Hashtags like #DEPORTATIONNOW trend, and candidates attach their political success to a nativist mindset that is stoked by social media and viral moments.

What these tragic viral moments fail to account for are not just the human costs, but the financial ones. Not just the cost to taxpayers in the form of the multi-billion dollar price tag needed to carry out mass deportations, but the cost in the form of higher prices in nearly every sector of the economy.

Operation Wetback ended nearly abruptly as it started. Having declared it a “success,” border agents quietly repurposed the trucks and planes, and for the past 70 years, have not undertaken a similar effort. But in 2025, that is set to change.