A Boy Uprooted Recalls Deportation --- Eisenhower deported hundreds of thousands; Trump promises millions

"SAN DIEGO -- Victor Ochoa was 7 years old when a stranger in a wide-brimmed hat came to his house and told his parents they had three days to leave the U.S.

The man, brandishing a pistol beneath his trench coat, warned that federal immigration authorities would be back to make sure the family was gone. That night, Ochoa said, his mother's wails echoed through the house while his parents made plans to leave East Los Angeles and return to Mexico.

Nearly 70 years later, Ochoa, who was born in the U.S., vividly recalled the details of that day in 1955 and the tough times that followed. His parents had arrived illegally in the U.S. a decade earlier and worked in factories, drove trucks and cleaned houses. They raised Ochoa and his sister to speak only English.

Days after the stranger's visit, the family fled to the border city of Tijuana, Mexico. Over the next seven years, Ochoa struggled with a new country and new language. He was bullied and called "gringo," he said. At 14, he returned to live in the U.S., later settling in San Diego.

In the months before Ochoa's family was deported, hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, as well as U.S. citizens of Mexican descent, many of them children like Ochoa, were swept up in Operation Wetback, one of the largest mass deportations in American history. It was named after an ethnic slur common at the time and was overseen by then-President Dwight Eisenhower.

Former President Donald Trump has cited the monthslong operation as a model for a more sweeping deportation campaign that he said he would conduct if he wins in November.

Trump defended his plan in the debate Tuesday with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying an alleged influx of criminals from abroad has "destroyed the fabric of our country."

During the Eisenhower operation, federal immigration authorities coordinated raids in cities and borderlands. Many migrants didn't get time to pack their belongings before being loaded into buses, airplanes, trains and ships.

The Eisenhower administration claimed that authorities uprooted more than a million people, though later estimates put the figure closer to half that.

The legal and logistical hurdles of deporting the estimated 11 million people now believed to be living illegally in the U.S. would make the task far more difficult.

Particularly in the past few years, immigrants entering the U.S. illegally have come from nations around the globe, including countries that won't take them back. Most are clustered in blue-leaning cities and states that have laws blocking cooperation with U.S. immigration authorities. And, unlike in the Eisenhower era, they can't be deported without a hearing in immigration court.

Yet the social and political parallels between then and now are striking.

In the early 1940s, millions of Mexicans came to the U.S. to work on farms and railroads in a government program to fill jobs during World War II. Many of the workers stayed after the war. When American troops returned home, public sentiment turned against the migrants.

In 1951, before the launch of Eisenhower's deportation operation, the U.S. government issued a report blaming immigrants in the country illegally for many of the nation's economic woes.

It described illegal immigration as "an invasion," a description used in recent years by conservative media outlets and right-leaning politicians.

Today, most Americans view illegal immigration as one of the nation's biggest problems, polls show.

At the core of Eisenhower's effort was a public campaign to widely trumpet the government's plan. The goal, according to historians, was a public-relations blitz to pressure immigrants in the country illegally to flee rather than risk their families being captured in surprise raids.

Trump and his allies, many of whom served in top immigration-policy roles while he was president, have discussed replicating Eisenhower's tactics, according to people familiar with the matter.

A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign didn't respond to requests for comment.

Like Trump, President Biden has taken numerous executive actions to discourage new migrants from crossing the southern border.

But the two parties disagree more sharply over how to treat immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally and put down roots over the years. Biden has taken steps to give these people work permits and, in narrow cases, a path to citizenship. Trump wants to deport them.

The former president has said he would deputize local police and the National Guard to carry out mass arrests and hold migrants at converted military bases while they await deportation.

Former Trump advisers are drawing plans to hasten court decisions in the yearslong backlog of immigration cases and reverse Biden administration initiatives granting migrants a reprieve from deportation. Such changes would make it easier to remove millions of people.

Trump made similar promises for mass deportation in his 2016 campaign. Yet during his administration, the U.S. deported about 1.2 million people, not an unusually high number over four years. Fewer than 300,000 of them lived in the U.S. The rest were caught crossing the border.

Around 4.7 million American children have at least one parent living in the U.S. illegally, according to a 2019 estimate by the Migration Policy Institute, the most recent figure available.

If those parents are deported, they would have to decide whether to take their U.S.-born children or to leave them behind to be raised by relatives or friends.

Immigrant spouses of U.S. citizens also risk deportation, another echo of the Eisenhower operation.

In the spring of 1954, Aurora Sandoval was home with her six children in southern Texas when authorities knocked on her door. They asked for proof that she had permission to live in the U.S., she recalled. She was married to an American but hadn't filed the paperwork she needed to gain permanent residency.

The officers took her into custody and allowed her to bring her youngest child, who was still breast-feeding. Her oldest, an 8-year-old daughter, was left to watch the rest of the children until their father returned home from work.

Sandoval's husband was a farmhand who worked alongside Mexican migrants. "To people at the time, my grandfather was a Mexican -- who happened to have U.S. citizenship," said Jack Sanchez, the couple's grandchild and an immigration attorney in Albuquerque, N.M.

In those days, U.S. citizens of Mexican descent and Mexicans without legal status lived and worked side-by-side in segregated rural communities of Texas and Arizona. Mexican Americans who didn't have paperwork on hand showing their U.S. citizenship were often deported without a chance to hire a lawyer or obtain proof of citizenship.

Sandoval and her infant daughter were loaded on a bus that night and driven to Matamoros, Mexico, across the border from Brownsville, Texas. She contacted family members in Monterrey, Mexico, who took them in. Sandoval's husband and her other children followed. After six months, Sandoval obtained a visa and returned to the U.S. as a permanent resident.

In East Los Angeles, where Ochoa grew up, migrant communities were on edge during Eisenhower's deportation campaign. Ochoa recalled federal authorities driving through his neighborhood in unmarked cars. They visited his school several times and questioned teachers and students, he said.

Ochoa's mother, terrified the family might be targeted, instructed her children to hide their Mexican identity, Ochoa said. She told white neighbors that her family was from Russia, hoping their relatively light skin color would back up the lie, he said.

"My mom was worried all the time, and I think it made her sick," Ochoa said. "I made a pact to myself that I wasn't going to be a worry wart and I wasn't going to be stressed out all the time."

Ochoa said the years he spent living in Tijuana helped connect him with his Mexican identity. But he worried about his education -- he attended a rundown school in a former casino -- and eventually persuaded his mother to let him live in the U.S. with a family friend so he could study at an American high school.

He sometimes went more than a year without seeing his parents, who couldn't afford to pay for him to visit. In Tijuana, he said, they earned little compared with U.S. wages. During visits to Mexico, Ochoa said he carried his birth certificate and took care to enunciate his words when speaking with U.S. border guards.

Ochoa, 76, is now a prominent San Diego muralist and activist. His artwork, depicting the plight of Mexican migrants, is sprawled across freeway underpasses at Chicano Park, a National Historic Landmark in the city.

Ochoa lives less than a 20-minute drive from Tijuana, where he maintains his late parent's house. Some members of his family still in Mexico aspire to live in the U.S. A few have discussed crossing the border illegally.

As a boy, Ochoa decided he wouldn't let worry and fear take over his life. These days, with the threat of another mass deportation looming, he worries more than ever -- about his family and many others who might be jeopardized. "I'm kind of becoming like my mom," he said.

Last year, at a family reunion, Ochoa learned firsthand about the divide between his relatives in Mexico and younger family members who were born in the U.S. When he showed his family a binder of his art advocating for migrants, some of them scoffed and said they were Trump supporters.

Trump, they told him, would do more to lower their taxes.

"I can't believe that these are second-generation Mexicans siding with Trump," said Ochoa, a self-described progressive. "If it's happening with my family, I'm sure it's happening all over."" [1]

1.  A Boy Uprooted Recalls Deportation --- Eisenhower deported hundreds of thousands; Trump promises millions. Restuccia, Andrew; Hackman, Michelle.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 14 Sep 2024: A.1.