Hours after he was inaugurated for a second term on Monday, President Donald Trump signed executive orders declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and reshaped policy to target anyone in the country illegally — “millions and millions” of people, according to him — for deportation.
Donald Trump’s mass deportation pledge could test Chicago’s immigrant protections
Fear has risen in Chicago, which has long garnered criticism from the president for its sanctuary status, after Trump threw out policies that limited immigration arrests at sensitive locations, such as churches, schools and hospitals — places of protection where the migrant community once felt safe.
There is precedent here. Chicago’s community of immigrants lacking permanent legal status was targeted more than 70 years ago for deportation. But a little history first.
Millions of Mexican farmworkers, known as braceros, began arriving legally in America during World War II to temporarily help harvest crops. The Bracero Program, an agreement between the U.S. government and the Mexican applicants, was supposed to provide a low wage, room and board, which was paid for by taxpayer subsidies. But many laborers were mistreated. In August 1945, the Tribune reported a group of about 20 braceros were “stranded without funds” despite signing a six-month contract. The Mexican Civic Center, 868 Blue Island Ave., provided food and lodging and found work for the men in South Bend, Indiana.
Business owners discovered they could pay hired hands even less than what was contracted by skirting the Bracero Program altogether. Driven by the opportunity for work, many Mexican laborers traveled to the U.S. without proper documentation. With this undocumented workforce estimated to number in the hundreds of thousands or even millions in the early 1950s, concerns arose.
“Future efforts should be directed toward supplying agricultural labor needs with our own workers and eliminating dependence on foreign labor,” was the recommendation of the Commission on Migratory Labor, established by President Harry Truman, in a 1951 report. “Legislation is needed to make it unlawful to employ aliens who have entered the United States illegally. Legalization and contracting of aliens illegally in the United States should be discontinued and forbidden.”
During summer 1954, Chicago became the focal point for President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s derogatorily named “Operation Wetback” (which referred to a person of Mexican origin who crossed the border into the U.S. illegally by navigating the Rio Grande). With military-style preciseness, Mexicans were rounded up, housed in holding facilities then flown back to the U.S.-Mexico border. Nationwide, estimates range from 300,000 to more than 1 million people were deported as a result.
Here’s how the operation played out in the pages of the Tribune:
July 30, 1954
Chicago became a focal point in a federal drive to return immigrants lacking permanent legal status to Mexico.
Walter A. Sahli, newly installed director of the Immigration and Naturalization Bureau’s Chicago district, which included Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, estimated there were between 25,000 to 40,000 people from Mexico living without legal documentation in the Chicago area at the time, yet his agents were returning just 2,500 to Mexico per year.
Sahli, who sent one-fifth of his investigators and half of his Border Patrol officers to assist at the U.S.-Mexico border the previous month, said about a planeload of “wetbacks” had been sent to Laredo, Texas, each week for several years. A Tribune story from September 1953 estimated 300-500 immigrants lacking permanent legal status were deported from Chicago to Mexico each month.
When asked by a Scripps-Howard reporter why he believed so many Mexicans were coming to America to find work, Sahli told him high wages and plentiful jobs.
“One American dollar is worth 12 Mexican pesos,” Sahli said in July 1954. “These men and women who cross the (Rio Grande River in Texas) will risk anything in their gamble to make some money to buy that small plot of land back home.”
Aug. 2, 1954
Sahli offered immigrants the opportunity to avoid prosecution by giving notice of their presence and leaving the U.S. voluntarily.
He explained that those who visited his office to declare their illegal entry and who would leave of their own accord would have a good opportunity to legally enter the U.S. in the future under regular immigration quotas.
Sept. 17, 1954
Immigration inspectors began a raid targeting Mexican immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally along Lake Michigan from Milwaukee into Michigan.
Sahli told reporters that people who were apprehended and had sufficient funds to leave on their own would be given a reasonable amount of time to leave the country. Others would be detained in Cook County Jail until they could be flown in planes provided by the U.S. Air Force to McAllen, Texas. From there, they would be taken by truck to Port Isabel, Texas, and put onboard a ship bound for Veracruz, Mexico.
The first plane left on Sept. 18, 1954.
Sept. 21, 1954
A second plane departed three days later from Chicago’s Midway International Airport for Mexico, Sahli said.
December 1954
With three planes carrying workers who had entered the U.S. illegally to Mexico from Chicago each week, Sahli was later reassigned to the San Antonio district. He joined another former Chicago district head in Texas — Marcus T. Neelly.
Joseph M. Swing, a recently retired lieutenant colonel who was named the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Bureau by his fellow West Point grad President Dwight D. Eisenhower, announced that more than 266,000 immigrants from Mexico who had been living in the U.S. illegally had been deported by the U.S. in 1954 — including more than 1,500 “undesirable aliens.”
July 22, 1955
Immigration officials discontinued their efforts to deport Mexicans after just 600 immigrants who had entered the country illegally were estimated to remain in the Chicago area.
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