The Challenges of ‘Mass Deportation’

For much of America’s history, the idea of deporting people, never mind mass deportations, was unheard of. Prior to the end of the 19th century or so, America barely had any immigration laws at all; people just sort of showed up to help fill a young, hungry, and scrappy nation in desperate need of workers and farmers. Prohibitive immigration laws did not appear until around the time of the First World War, when a growing population coupled with growing elements of racism combined to shut the door a bit.

The arrival of the Great Depression in 1929 led to the first “mass deportations.” The 1931 La Placita sweep in Los Angeles was the first major public immigration raid, and one of the largest in a wave of “repatriation drives” that rolled across the country during the Great Depression. La Placita Square was a prominent public space which had become a hub for the Mexican community, where many migrants gathered.

Some 400 Mexican farm workers found there one day, legal or not, were deemed “illegal aliens,” and became scapegoats for job shortages and shrinking public benefits. President Herbert Hoover’s slogan, “American Jobs for Real Americans,” kicked off local legislation banning employment of anyone of Mexican descent. Police descended on workplaces, parks, and social clubs, dumping people willy-nilly across the border via trains and buses. Some two million “Mexicans,” including an estimated half of whom were actually U.S. citizens, were deported without due process.

Under President Dwight Eisenhower, mass immigration deportations were carried out through a campaign known formally as Operation Wetback, which aimed to address illegal immigration, particularly from Mexico. This initiative took place between 1954 and 1955, followed by the end of the Bracero Program ten years later, and was one of the most significant efforts to date in U.S. history to deport undocumented immigrants, with a focus on those who had entered the country without permission or overstayed their visas.

As in the country's earliest days, it was labor shortages that drove immigration, in this case the absence of so many young American men from the economy as they went off to fight the Second World War. As the war gave way to post-war prosperity and the baby boom, the continued influx of Mexicans seeking better economic opportunities in the U.S. shifted from a welcome thing to unfair competition with returning soldiers for jobs.

The demand for cheap labor remained high, but by the early 1950s there were increasing concerns about the number of undocumented workers in the U.S. The Eisenhower administration, in the context of the broader Cold War climate, saw the issue as both an economic and national security concern, i.e., control of the border. A secondary issue was the Bracero Program (1942–1964), which allowed temporary guest workers from Mexico to work legally in the U.S.. While the program, too, was meant to fill labor gaps during wartime, it became a point of contention as many workers, once they had completed their contract, stayed in the U.S. illegally.

Operation Wetback launched in June 1954 and was a collaborative effort between the Immigration and Naturalization Service (today, ICE), the U.S. Border Patrol, and local law enforcement. The goal was to round up and deport undocumented Mexican immigrants. The operation was initially focused on regions like Texas and California, which had high concentrations of undocumented workers. However, it quickly expanded to other parts of the U.S. with significant Mexican populations. Approximately one million people were deported or voluntarily returned to Mexico during the operation. Many of those deported had been in the U.S. for years. Civil rights organizations protested the operation for its heavy-handed approach, its racial profiling, and its violation of due process for those detained and deported.

For Trump’s plans to deport some subset of the estimated 13 million illegals in the U.S. to have any success at all, his program will need to pick out the elements of the earlier efforts which worked, and stay away from their missteps—that “learn from history” stuff.

On the plus side, the use of local law enforcement, or at least their passive cooperation, is essential. As in the past, the proposed scale of deportations and complexity of the process (the term “mass deportations” is a misnomer, as each deportee in 2025 is entitled to a judicial process before removal) very quickly outruns the resources of ICE.

Instead, ICE will need to work with local law enforcement to ID potential deportees, house them until their court dates, and then transfer them to ICE custody as applicable. Some 65 percent of current deportations take place through this sort of cooperation, moving out of the country persons already in local custody for some crime. It'll work well in states like Oklahoma and Texas who have already promised robust joint efforts, and work poorly in New York and California where efforts will be somewhere between a complete lack of cooperation to outright hostility to the idea. Mass raids or sweeps as in the past are a non-starter in 2025, both for public relations purposes and because it is wholly inefficient (though don’t discount a few “show” raids, especially at first—political theater is not dead).

The other key take-aways from earlier large-scale deportations are to avoid detaining American Citizens, and in the same vein, what to do with the American citizen children of illegals.

A quick test on the former point—using only what is in your wallet or purse, prove you are an American citizen. For the average American, a driver’s license is not proof of American citizenship. A driver’s license is primarily issued as a state-level identification to allow individuals to operate a motor vehicle legally and buy alcohol and tobacco. It is not a document that directly verifies a person’s citizenship status.

To prove U.S. citizenship, you typically need to present one of the following documents rarely carried: a U.S. passport (or a passport card), a state-issued U.S. birth certificate, a certificate of naturalization (for naturalized citizens), or a certificate of citizenship (rare.) While a driver’s license may indicate an individual is legally residing in the U.S., it does not provide definitive proof of citizenship. Also some states, like California, issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. Absent the rare individual who carries one of the aforementioned documents around casually, most detainees will need to be run through various ICE and State Department databases to prove or disprove citizenship. That alone argues against the value/efficiency of raids and sweeps and in favor of focusing deportation efforts on already-arrested individuals whose incarceration has provided time to run the necessary checks. Trump’s deportation process must be meticulous in avoiding American citizen adults.

Lastly there is the problem of those American citizen children, kids almost always being citizens simply by virtue of their birth in America (“birthright citizenship”). Tom Homan, Trump's incoming border czar, plans on offering only two options to illegal parents with American citizen kids: take the kids with you back to the parents’ home country, or leave them with someone in the U.S. to grow up here as is their legal right. The former demands Trump's deportation work be carried out quickly, to avoid another rough round of “Kids in Cages” and all the negative publicity. Trump has suggested some sort of carve-out from deportation for DACA kids.

There’s little evidence to suggest the mass deportation efforts of the 1930s and 1950s were successful at curbing illegal immigration. The number of undocumented immigrants has in fact tripled just since the 1990s. But like claiming the death penalty has no value because murders continue to occur, overlooking the value of large-scale deportations is foolish. In the aftermath of the Biden administration's open border policy, something must be done to restore balance in the immigration system. And getting rid of illegal immigrant criminals is a good thing. Trump’s broader plan, even if it never reaches anywhere near 13 million deported (J.D. Vance suggests one million a year is a more realistic number), is the needed beginning of a more comprehensive solution.