My youthfulness did not allow me at the time to understand the significance of an incident. This became the basic framework of my empathy toward people who are inexcusably mistreated.
It was during the Eisenhower program called “Operation Bracero.” I was seventeen years old in 1954, hoeing in a peanut field along with about a dozen Mexican workers. Several were my friends. A vehicle drove up. Two officers got out but paid no attention to me.
They walked to where those with brown skin were working. I did not know what was happening, but they took some workers away with them. The others were so terrified they dropped their weeding hoes and left.
Later I learned what had happened in that peanut field. When my father needed extra help on the farm, he would drive his truck into town in early morning, go into the area where Mexican folks lived, and honk the horn.
I still smile when I remember guys running to jump onto the truck, hopping on one leg while trying to put a shoe on, or buttoning clothes while reaching back to grasp a lunch sack.
Back then, we never thought about checking for undocumented immigrants.
The workers picked up by those Border Patrol agents did not have proper identification. Few had drivers’ licenses because they could not afford cars. Others had been born at home in Texas, but their undocumented parents were either afraid, or did not know how, to get birth certificates.
These details contributed to their problems. But there were other difficulties caused by the haste to get them into custody and back to “where they came from.”
This program, frequently nicknamed with the demeaning slur “Operation Wetback,” referred to the way workers often entered Texas, by swimming across the Rio Grande.
It began in response to political concerns about the effects of Mexican immigrants living in the United States without legal permission, which gave rise to arrests and deportations by the U.S. Border Patrol (Don Mitchell, “They Saved the Crops: Labor, Landscape, and the Struggle over Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California,” Geographies of Justice and Social Transformation Series, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2012).
Three hundred Jeeps, cars, trucks, and buses, along with ships and seven airplanes, were allocated to the program, with the emphasis on quick removal. A total of 25% of these Mexicans were crammed onto boats that have been compared to slave ships (Erin Blakemore, ”The Largest Mass Deportation in American History,” March 23, 2018, www.history.com/news/operationwetback- eisenhower-1954-deportation”).
Nearly 1,500,000 people were deported during “Operation Wetback.” They were handed off to Mexican officials far south of the Texas border with hopes they would not return. Most had to leave possessions behind.
In the haste to deport illegal immigrants, some workers who were citizens but had no opportunity to prove their citizenship were included. At least 88 men died from dehydration and exposure in the 112-degree heat (Mae M. Ngai, “Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America,” Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 143160).
Sixty-four years later, on May 7, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new immigration policy. Addressing potential immigrants (with English-to-Spanish speakers), he said, “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law.”
I was horrified to learn that children as young as six months, still nursing at their mothers’ breasts, were forcefully taken away. Mothers were deported with no way to learn the fate or location of their children. Six years later, some 1,400 children remain separated from their families, and may never be reunited with them (www.washingtonpost. com/politics/2024/05/07/immigration- family-separation).
This policy triggered the same profound feelings of sorrow and disillusionment I felt long ago. Oh, the poor little kids and those field workers! Was there also no justice for these helpless mothers?
President-elect Trump has now named Tom Homan to be the Border Czar. Stephen Miller will be Deputy Chief of Staff and Policy Advisor to Homan. Both are hard-liners on immigrants. Miller was a primary architect of the strategy for separating families in 2018. I have every reason to fear their actions will be like Operation Bracero of long ago.
Can we agree that laws devoid of empathy and compassion are an insult to humanity? Will you join me in the struggle to make this a kinder, gentler nation, as President George H. W. Bush desired of us?
The rewards, I believe, will be worth the effort.