This is an adapted excerpt from the Aug. 9 episode of “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”
In 2026, under Donald Trump’s second administration, the president’s anti-immigration crusade has proven to be a supersized version of what we saw unfold during his first term.
During Trump’s first stint in the White House, government records show his administration deliberately separated 5,500 children from their parents in what a Republican-appointed judge called “one of the most shameful chapters in the history of our country.” This time around, according to Brookings, that number is more than 100,000 children.
The cruelty might seem unprecedented, but what we are seeing with Trump and Stephen Miller’s mass deportation campaign is not new. In fact, it’s history repeating itself: They are pulling directly from the pages of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s playbook.
During a campaign rally shortly before Election Day in 2024, Trump vowed to launch what he called the “largest deportation program of criminals in American history” and compared his mission to that of his predecessor. “We’re going to get them out. We have to. Dwight Eisenhower has the record. … But we’re going to, unfortunately, beat the record,” he said.
Eisenhower’s deportation campaign was aggressive and violent. And the cruelty of it all started with its name.
The Eisenhower model that Trump has touted as a massive success and that he’s trying to imitate had a name so racist, so deeply offensive, that I hesitate to even share it. But you should know this history, and you should know its name. Eisenhower’s 1954 massive deportation campaign, Operation Wetback, used military-style tactics to round up Mexican immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. It was aggressive and violent. The cruelty of it all started with its name: “Wetback,” a racist term that first originated as a derogatory way to describe people who swam across the Rio Grande River into Texas.
It was vile when the U.S. government used the term as official policy decades ago, and it is vile today as the administration uses that policy as a model.
While the Trump administration seeks to emulate the Eisenhower days, it seems some of our nation’s immigration and border patrol agents are inspired by it, too. The ACLU recently released body camera footage from deportation operations in Los Angeles last year in which officers are heard using the term “wet” to describe immigrants during street stops and raids. Those three letters, used in a situation like that, have hate and trauma ingrained in them.
The Eisenhower administration said the operation led to the deportation of more than a million Mexicans in just one year. Some historians say the number may be lower. But what is not disputed is that many of the people deported were American citizens or immigrants in the country legally.
The operation prioritized volume, speed and public perception over precise, accurate enforcement. Sound familiar?
Harlon B. Carter, who was the head of U.S. Border Patrol at the time, told The Los Angeles Times what was coming. “An army of Border Patrol officers complete with jeeps, trucks, and seven aircrafts” would soon unleash an “all-out war to hurl … Mexican wetbacks back into Mexico.”
When you keep reading that article from 1954, the similarities and parallels to today are hard to ignore. The Times reported a “flying squad” of immigration officers would “sweep through factories, into Skid Row saloons and hotels and ferret out illegal Aliens,” adding that “arrests will average from 1,000 to 2,000 Mexican aliens a day.”
Days later, the Times reported on a massive raid that rocked Los Angeles, complete with a photo of a mother clutching her 10-month-old baby as she was preparing to be sent to a detention center.
During the Eisenhower era, the U.S. government eventually started to invite journalists and photographers to come and document these enforcement operations. The goal was to spread fear across the front pages and flash it on the 6 o’clock news in the hopes that immigrants would be so scared that they would self-deport.
The cruelty was the point, as Adam Serwer famously wrote of Trump’s family separation policy during his first term.
Here’s another crazy thing about Eisenhower’s immigration operation: Many of the immigrants who were in the U.S. at that time were here legally through joint immigration programs. Many were actually recruited by the American government and brought to the U.S. from Mexico as part of something called the Bracero Program.
It started back in 1942, in the thick of World War II, as an agreement between the two countries to address wartime labor shortages and to bring people into the U.S. for paid, legal work in the agriculture and railroad industry.
It was meant as a temporary solution, but once the war ended, demand did not. Industries relied heavily on Mexican labor, whether it was legal or not. Suddenly, a narrative began to play out, one that we are all too familiar with today. There were concerns over certain people coming in and taking American jobs, potential criminal activity and health risks.
So “Operation Wetback” was designed to send back all the people America had brought here in the first place.
It led to isolation and fear. People were too scared to leave their homes without documentation. Immigrants were shoved into crammed trucks and dumped into unfamiliar towns across the border. In a rare home movie, available to us thanks to the Texas Archive of the Moving Image, you can see Border Patrol officials load apprehended undocumented immigrants onto a ship. The ship’s name? Emancipación.
That video looks eerily similar to the videos of deportation flights in this second Trump administration. You don’t have to imagine what it was like back then because you’re seeing it play out again right now.
The stories being told today are almost indistinguishable from the stories of the Eisenhower days.
This time last year, I, along with my colleague Kay Guerrero, covered the story of a 17-year-old honor student and star athlete named Nory Sontay Ramos. She lived with her mother in their home in Los Angeles. But they were deported to Guatemala, a place Nory had left as a small child and barely recognized. They arrived without money or phones, wearing the same clothes they had on when their nightmare started.
“I’m going to be lost here because I don’t know anybody,” Ramos told me.
Shortly after they arrived, Ramos’ mother died due to medical complications. She told me her mother was “overwhelmed” with stress since their deportation, and she was terrified to be back in Guatemala. It wasn’t going back home for her mom; it was going back to hell. Her mother had fled Guatemala in 2015 after she said she received threats from members of the 18th Street Gang.
The stories being told today are almost indistinguishable from the stories of the Eisenhower days — like the story of Noelia Sanchez, a newborn in the U.S. when she and her mom were deported to Mexico as a part of Eisenhower’s operation. In 2023, she described the situation to The Associated Press, saying, “I was maybe too little to really understand what was going on. I just knew that I was taken away with my mom. And I had no reason, I had no knowledge why that, you know, we were separated.”
If it sounds familiar, it’s because it is.
Eisenhower’s offensively named operation ended in the fall of 1954, after the government ran out of funding and declared the southern border successfully secured.
But it appears this administration is just getting started.
Allison Detzel contributed.
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