{"id":6431,"date":"2015-11-12T09:00:18","date_gmt":"2015-11-12T17:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spijue.wpengine.com\/news\/trump-touts-program-with-dark-history\/"},"modified":"2015-11-12T09:00:18","modified_gmt":"2015-11-12T17:00:18","slug":"trump-touts-program-with-dark-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/news\/trump-touts-program-with-dark-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump touts program with dark history"},"content":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014<\/strong> As proof that he can successfully and humanely deport the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump often touts the efforts of the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s.<\/p>\n

He did so again in this week\u2019s Republican debate, saying \u201cyou don\u2019t get nicer, you don\u2019t get friendlier\u201d than President Dwight D. Eisenhower. \u201cThey moved 1.5 million out,\u201d the billionaire real estate mogul said. \u201cWe have no choice. We have no choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

But the program to which Trump refers, known as \u201cOperation Wetback,\u201d was a complicated undertaking largely viewed by historians as a dark moment in America\u2019s past. Also lost in Trump\u2019s telling is that it coincided with a guest worker program that provided legal status to hundreds of thousands of largely Mexican farm workers.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s only got part of the story,\u201d said Mae Ngai, a professor of history at Columbia University.<\/p>\n

The operation was named after a term for Mexicans who crossed the Rio Grande that is now viewed a racial slur. The 1954 initiative was aimed at apprehending and deporting agricultural workers who had crossed the border illegally looking for work.<\/p>\n

According to a summary of the project from the Texas State Historical Association, the United States Border Patrol \u201caided by municipal, county, state, and federal authorities, as well as the military, began a quasi-military operation of search and seizure of all unauthorized immigrants.\u201d<\/p>\n

The project, Ngai said, began with 750 immigration officers and border control agents, who used jeeps, trucks, buses and airplanes to apprehend migrants nationwide, including in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago. They apprehended 3,000 people a day and 170,000 during its first three months.<\/p>\n

In an interview Wednesday morning, Trump indicated he would take a similar approach. \u201cYou\u2019re going to have a deportation force, and you\u2019re going to do it humanely,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Critics of the program say the conditions for those the agents apprehended were anything but humane. Many of the migrants were transported in crowded buses and dumped on the other side of the border in a manner some at the time equated with the treatment of livestock.<\/p>\n

In one incident, Ngai said, 88 Mexicans died of sunstroke after being subjected to 112-degree heat. The number would have been higher had the Red Cross not intervened.<\/p>\n

Some of those apprehended were sent deep into the interior of Mexico to prevent re-entry by train or cargo ship, where conditions drew the attention of federal regulators.<\/p>\n

One congressional investigation likened a transport ship that was the site of a riot to an \u201ceighteenth century slave ship\u201d and a \u201cpenal hell ship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump touted the approach as a virtue of Eisenhower-era program in Tuesday night\u2019s debate.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn\u2019t like it,\u201d Trump said. \u201cMoved them way south. They never came back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump also leaves out of his advocacy for the Eisenhower-era approach the fact the program was developed to complement a guest worker program that began in the 1940s and was aimed at allowing Mexican farmworkers to enter the country and work in the U.S. legally.<\/p>\n

Hundreds of thousands of farm workers did so, and the deportation effort was conceived as a way to pressure employers into using the guest worker program.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was like a carrot and a stick,\u201d Ngai said.<\/p>\n

While Trump has put the number of deportations at 1.5 million, most accounts suggest the numbers are far fewer, because they included those who chose to leave the country voluntarily as well as people who returned after being deported and were deported again.<\/p>\n

Trump has yet to yet to lay out precisely how he would track down those living in the country illegally, or how he would determine who are \u201cthe good ones\u201d that he would allow to return. Both John Kasich, Ohio\u2019s governor, and Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, rejected Trump\u2019s plan on Tuesday night as unrealistic and cruel.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo send them back, 500,000 a month, is just not, not possible,\u201d Bush said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s not embracing American values. And it would tear communities apart. And it would send a signal that we\u2019re not the kind of country that I know America is.\u201d<\/p>\n

___<\/p>\n

Follow Jill Colvin on Twitter at: http:\/\/twitter.com\/colvinj<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

WASHINGTON \u2014 As proof that he can successfully and humanely deport the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally, Republican presidential contender Donald Trump often touts the efforts of the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. He did so again in this week\u2019s Republican debate, saying \u201cyou don\u2019t get nicer, you don\u2019t get friendlier\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":107,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":4,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[65],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-6431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-nation-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/107"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6431\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6431"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=6431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}