First Mass Deportations of Mexican-Americans in Los Angeles
Partly in response to the Depression, but also because of anti-immigrant sentiment and specific bias against Mexican-Americans, U.S. authorities on this day began rounding up and deporting Mexican-Americans to Mexico. Some of these were U. S. citizens who were deported illegally.
In the 1950s, the U.S. began another deportation action against Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. Called “Operation Wetback,” it began on June 17, 1954.
The most outrageous actions by the U.S. government in recent decades involved the detention of children occurred on the southern border of the U.S. under the administration of President Donald Trump (2017-2021), where thousands of children were separated from their families who were attempting to migrate to the U.S. The problem continued and even escalated in the first months of President Joe Biden’s administration in 2021.
Read: Juan Ramon Garcia, Operation Wetback: The Mass Deportation of Mexican Undocumented Workers in 1954 (1980)
Hear Arlo Guthrie sing Woody Guthrie’s song, Deportee: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2eO65BqxBE
Learn more: Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2014)
Learn more about “Operation Wetback:” http://1950immigration.wordpress.com/operation-wetback/
Learn more: Margaret Sands Orchowski, Immigration and the American Dream: Battling the Political Hype and Hysteria (2008)
See a timeline on U.S. immigration history here