"Trump promises to deport all undocumented immigrants, resurrecting a 1950s strategy − but it didn’t work then and is less likely to do so now"

Katrina Burgess for The Conversation questions President Trump’s promise of a new mass removal campaign. “Following the Eisenhower model, we will carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” he has said. “Trump was referring to Operation Wetback, a military-style campaign launched by the Eisenhower administration in the summer of 1954 to end undocumented immigration by deporting hundreds of thousands of Mexicans. “Wetback” was a widely used ethnic slur for Mexicans who illegally crossed the Rio Grande, the river dividing Mexico and the U.S.

Trump says that he can replicate Operation Wetback on a much grander scale by setting up temporary immigration detention centers and relying on local, state and federal authorities, including National Guard troops, to remove the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the U.S.”

Professor Burgess “find[s] Trump’s proposal to be both disturbing and misleading. Besides playing to unfounded and dehumanizing fears of an immigrant invasion, it misrepresents the context and impact of Eisenhower’s policy while ignoring the vastly changed landscape of U.S. immigration today.”