In that initiative, federal agents and law enforcement officers used military techniques such as sweeps, raids and surveillance checkpoints — as well as a blunt form of racial profiling — to round up undocumented workers and load them onto buses and boats.
As many as 1.3 million people were expelled, mostly Mexican and Mexican American workers, some of whom were U.S. citizens.
Critical to the initiative — named Operation Wetback, for the racial slur — was intense anti-immigrant sentiment.
Officials at the time used that sentiment to justify family separations and overcrowded and unsanitary detention conditions — practices that the Trump administration would deploy decades later in its own immigration enforcement.
But recent polling shows that Mr. Trump’s position on immigration appears to be resonating.
Persons:
Donald J, Trump, Dwight D, Eisenhower, —, Biden
Organizations:
CNN, Authorities