Operation Wetback
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Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Operation Wetback in action
3 See also
4 Notes
5 References
6 External links
Operation Wetback was a 1954 operation by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about one million illegal immigrants from the southwestern United States, focusing on Mexican nationals[1].
[edit] History
Burgeoning numbers of illegal Mexican immigrants prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to appoint his longtime friends, John Cox and General Joseph Swing, as INS Commissioner. According to Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower had a sense of urgency about illegal immigration upon taking office. In a letter to Sen. William Fulbright, Eisenhower quoted a report in The New York Times that said, "The rise in illegal border-crossing by Mexican 'wetbacks' (rooted from the watery route taken by the Mexican immigrants across the Rio Grande) to a current rate of more than 1,000,000 cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the Federal Government."[2]
The operation was modeled after a program that put pressure on citizens of Mexico to move back to Mexico during the Great Depression because of the bad economic situation in the United States. (See Mexican Repatriation.)
[edit] Operation Wetback in action
The effort began in California and Arizona and coordinated 1075 Border Patrol agents, along with state and local police agencies, to mount an aggressive crackdown, going as far as police sweeps of Mexican-American neighborhoods and random stops and ID checks of "Mexican-looking" people in a region with many Native Americans and native Hispanics.In some cases, illegal immigrants were deported along with their American-born children, who were by law U.S. citizens. [3] 750 agents targeted agricultural areas with a goal of 1000 apprehensions a day. By the end of July, over 50,000 immigrants were caught in the two states. Around 488,000 illegal immigrants are claimed to have left voluntarily for fear of being apprehended. By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and the INS estimates that 500,000 to 700,000 had left Texas on their own. To discourage re-entry, buses and trains took many deportees deep within Mexico before releasing them. Tens of thousands more were deported by two chartered ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried them from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles (800 kilometers) to the south. Some were taken as far as 1,000 miles. Deportation by sea was ended after seven deportees jumped overboard from the Mercurio and drowned, provoking a mutiny which led to a public outcry in Mexico.[4]
