Professor: Implementation of Leaked Immigration Proposal Would be ‘Cataclysmic’

Although the White House has distanced itself from a leaked memo that included plans to use the National Guard to round up unauthorized immigrants, some scholars say the memo harks back to — and portends — one of the darkest chapters in American history.

“If that’s what they’re planning on doing, that’s going to be cataclysmic,” Dr. Arturo Aldama, associate chair and an associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, said regarding an Associated Press report that the administration of President Donald. J. Trump considered mobilizing up to 100,000 National Guard troops in 11 states to round up undocumented immigrants.

“It’s going to be ‘Operation Wetback’ all over again,” Aldama said.

Aldama was referring to the 1954 mass deportation of Mexican undocumented workers that took place under the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Through the program — which has been described as “one of the most shameful episodes in American history” — Immigration and Naturalization Service, or INS, apprehended nearly 1.1 million individuals.

“More than a quarter of the migrants were taken in cargo ships from Port Isabel, Texas, to Veracruz, Mexico — a form of transportation that a congressional investigation would later compare to an ‘eighteenth-century slave ship’ and a ‘penal hell ship,’” according to 2016 New Republic article titled

“Operation Wetback Revisited.”

“Most of the people they removed, by the way, were braceros, people who had a legal contract to work in the crops and in different industries because there was a labor shortage,” Aldama said.