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'Operation Wetback': What happened last time the US did mass deportations

Politics

From the Center

President-elect Donald Trump has promised to carry out the largest deportation project in American history, using the military and local law enforcement to do it, in a move that could echo the last major effort to remove migrants en masse in the 1950s. Dubbed "Operation Wetback", hundreds of thousands of mostly Mexican undocumented immigrants were forcibly removed or self-deported during President Dwight D. Eisenhower's term. The program's name was derogatory even at the time, referring to migrants who crossed illegally into the United States by crossing rivers along the southwest...

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