President Trumps speech yesterday mentioned that he was going to follow President Eisenhowers deportation program .

Operation Wetback, U.S. immigration law enforcement campaign during the summer of 1954 that resulted in the mass deportation of Mexican nationals—1,100,000 persons according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), though most estimates put the figure closer to 300,000. Drafted by U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell, Jr., and vetted by Pres. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Operation Wetback arose at least partly in response to a portion of the American public that had become angry at the widespread corruption among employers of sharecroppers and growers along the Mexican border and at the Border Patrol’s inability to stem the influx of illegal workers.

The role of the Bracero Program

In 1942 the U.S. government, with the cooperation of the Mexican government, enacted the Bracero Program, which allowed short-term contract labourers from Mexico, known as braceros, to work legally in the United States. The program was originally conceived in the early 1940s, during World War II, to combat a wartime dearth of agricultural labourers due to military service and a shift by agricultural workers to better-paying manufacturing jobs. Financed through taxpayer labour subsidies, the plan lasted until 1964.

Bracero Program

Bracero Program

Even though most contract employers did not pay enough for many of the documented Mexican workers to make a decent living, other undocumented Mexican labourers were still drawn by the promise of employment. As a result of the ease with which illegal immigrants could be hired without the burden of the immigration bureaucracy, only a small portion were issued valid worker certificates from 1947 to 1960. The problems with the administration of the Bracero Program almost immediately led to a growing influx of undocumented workers in the United States and to a widespread public outcry over the depressive effect on wages for U.S. workers, supposedly created by the proliferation of illegal immigrants.

The emergence and implementation of Operation Wetback

In 1954 Attorney General Brownell forwarded the initiative that would eventually become known as Operation Wetback. Its name was derived from wetback, the offensive term for the multitude of Mexican immigrants who traversed the Rio Grande to illegally cross the border between Mexico and the United States. (In 1953 alone, some 886,000 persons were seized by the U.S. federal government for illegally entering the United States from Mexico.) The initiative focused on two primary objectives: (1) stemming the flow of illegal and undocumented Mexican workers into the United States and (2) discouraging the employers who harboured such workers. The plan met with resistance from some legislators as well as from agricultural and farming groups that lobbied Congress. Many legislators objected to one of the initiative’s central tenets—that employers of illegal workers should be punished—because proving the employers’ awareness of the workers’ illegal status would be difficult. Moreover, some lawmakers were hesitant about Brownell’s militaristic approach, which involved carrying out the plan like an invasion. Ultimately, Congress failed to pass legislation authorizing punishment for those who hired illegal workers, but it did allocate increased funding for the Border Patrol.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Operation-Wetback