Donald Trump, born in 1946, was a budding 8-year-old racist in 1954. And by the time he reached 69 years old 61 years later, he was a full-fledged racist Republican presidential candidate who, in 2015, said Mexican immigrants are “bringing in crime. They’re rapists.” In 2014, he described Mexicans as “our enemies.”
As president, he declared that during his first 100 days in office, he would deport up to three million undocumented immigrants, meaning the Brown and Black ones. Not the white ones. As he stated earlier this year, “Why do we want all these people from Africa here? They’re s***hole countries. …. We should have more [white] people from Norway.”
Also as president, he initiated and implemented in 2018 a policy that has never — I repeat, never — before been initiated and implemented to separate thousands of immigrant, especially Mexican, infants and other children from parents fleeing imminent violence and/or dire poverty in their native land.
Let’s get back to 1954’s “Operation Wetback,” which is a perfect example of what Trump means by his “Make America Great Again” nonsense. By the way, when he and his 63 million racist supporters tell Mexicans to go back to their own country, those so-called immigrants should just plop down in Texas and explain that they and their ancestors are natives of that land — at least until America in 1845 stole the northeastern province of Mexico and declared it the 28th state and then began the Mexican-American War a year later and claimed victory in 1848.
And while our Mexican comrades are at it, they should mention that the American states of Arizona, California, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah are also part of their ancestral homeland. As a result, maybe Trump should go back to Germany and his stooges back to their various European countries.
As indicated by Erin Blakemore of The History Channel, “[This] short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants — some of them American citizens — from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico. … During [this operation] …, tens of thousands of immigrants were shoved into buses, boats and planes and sent to often-unfamiliar parts of Mexico, where they struggled to rebuild their lives. In Chicago, three planes a week were filled with immigrants and flown to Mexico. In Texas, 25 percent of all of the immigrants deported were crammed onto boats later compared to slave ships, while others died of sunstroke, disease and other causes while in custody.”
Columbia University professor Dr. Mae Ngai similarly referred to the type of boats used as like “eighteenth century slave ships.”
UCLA professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez pointed out that the operation was “lawless …, arbitrary … [and] based on a lot of xenophobia … and … resulted in sizable large-scale violations of people’s rights, including the forced deportation of U.S. citizens.”
There were so many immigrant kidnappings, as I describe them, that The Conversation (which is a global network of newsrooms founded by British-Australian journalist Andrew Jaspan) reported that the Border Patrol was “converting public parks into concentration camps to detain at least 1,000 people at a time.”
These types of mass deportations actually began much earlier. During the 1930s, as uncovered by historian Francisco Balderrama, “The United States deported over one million Mexicans …, 60 percent of whom were U.S. citizens of Mexican descent.”
Yesterday’s 1954 immigration policy oozed from the same sewer that today’s 2018 immigration policy oozes: the racism sewer. It was a political response to white brainless KKK-type voters who illogically claimed that the backbreaking and labor-intensive farming jobs they didn’t want were being taken by Brown people. Wait … What?!
I should note that in 2015, then-candidate Trump endorsed Operation Wetback in a campaign speech wherein he proclaimed, “I like Ike … [who] moved a million-and-a-half illegal immigrants out of this country. … Moved them way south. They never came back.”
I should also note that the Trump-like cretin who served as Southwest Border Patrol Chief during that operation was Harlon Carter. He’s the guy who had been convicted at age 17 of hunting down and murdering Mexican-American Ramon Casiano in Laredo, Texas in 1931 and later, years after his conviction was overturned on a (racist) technicality, became chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association. Anyone surprised? Nope.
You’ve just read about the old problem and the new problem. But what about the solution? It’s very simple: Abolish not only I.C.E. (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) but also any federal policy that does not allow people fleeing violence, persecution, or deadly poverty the right to due process proceedings which include court-appointed lawyers and a “preponderance of the evidence” burden placed on the government to disprove such claim of violence, persecution, or deadly poverty.
Oh, and by the way, when is any member of Congress gonna ask the indigenous Red people here what they think about the so-called (and misnamed) New World’s immigration policy since 1492 and America’s immigration policy since 1776? Red land reparations anyone?
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