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July's heat in Mexicali pushes past 110 degrees most days, but in 1955, thousands of disoriented people wandered the Mexican border city under an even more brutal sun. They’d been deposited there by American immigration officials after being picked up in the United States where they had homes, jobs and often families.
Hundreds of miles north, cotton farmers in the Rio Grande Valley watched crops wither in the fields, unable to find workers to bring in a harvest that represented their family's entire year of income.
These were the victims of “Operation Wetback,” the largest mass deportation in American history until today.
Most Americans have never heard of this offensively named operation, but how it came to be, and what happened when it was over, should serve as an important warning.
WWII saw the launch of the Bracero Program, which brought laborers from Mexico to fill vacant farm jobs. It stabilized prices and helped growers meet demand, but the fees to employers were costly. Skirting the system and hiring undocumented workers to protect margins became commonplace.
Meanwhile, the American public was already wary of communism and other foreign influences, and the tension between economic need and cultural fear set the stage for President Eisenhower to launch his massive deportation program in 1954.
The program’s goals sound familiar: prioritize criminals, restore order, protect American jobs. The operation promised economic opportunity for American workers and won broad public support from those demanding enforcement.
Eisenhower deployed military-style command teams of Border Patrol agents, buses, planes and temporary processing stations to remove hundreds of thousands of immigrants within a few months. Officials called it a "quasi-military operation of search and seizure."
The campaign was initially deemed a success. Headlines celebrated the swift enforcement and politicians and the public both praised the decisive action. But within months, the consequences came into focus.
Agricultural labor shortages forced farmers across the U.S. to leave crops unharvested in the fields. Cotton rotted in Texas. Fruit groves went unpicked in California. Farmers — even those who had initially supported the crackdown — were screaming for help.
By fall 1954, Eisenhower faced an impossible situation. In the haste to fill quotas and deadlines, American citizens were wrongly deported. Children were left stranded when parents were arrested without warning, and schools reported attendance drops as families decided that leaving the house was not worth the risk of never seeing each other again.
The public demanded a fix, and Eisenhower had few other options but to reverse course: he dramatically expanded the Bracero program and allowed more Mexican immigrants into the country than ever before.
The expansion stabilized harvests through the mid-1950s, but at enormous cost to farmers. Within a few years, many once again returned to hiring undocumented workers, avoiding federal fees and bureaucracy.
In 1964, the Bracero Program ended and the government launched the A-TEAM program in 1965. This heavily-marketed campaign recruited American high school athletes to replace Mexican farm workers. Patriotic ads promising good summer jobs inspired 18,000 students to enroll, but only 3,300 actually showed up to work, and most quit when they discovered the brutal reality of farm labor in extreme heat. The program was abandoned after one summer, and illegal immigration continued to surge.
The underlying economic forces had not changed, and this series of failed programs proved that mass deportation and child labor was never a proper stand-in for effective immigration or economic policy.
This same pattern is repeating today. Cherry growers in Wenatchee are facing down losing a third of their crop due to labor shortages, and around the state, immigrant employees are staying home out of fear. Reports from farms nationwide describe up to 70% of workers failing to show up in some areas following ICE actions.
The H-2A guest worker program now costs $3,000-5,000 per worker beyond wages, with 60-75 day processing times and 2-3 week arrival delays, providing labor too late for time-sensitive harvests. Most small farms (which make up 95% of farms in Lewis County) can’t afford this system, just as most farmers couldn't afford the bureaucratic Bracero Program in the 50s.
Many Americans are frustrated by our reliance on undocumented labor, but the uncomfortable truth of then and now is that immigrant workers are foundational to entire industries, whether anyone thinks they should be or not. Mass deportations only shrink the workforce, they don't create new American workers willing to do backbreaking farm labor for low pay and no healthcare.
Trump’s immigration policies, just like Eisenhower’s, were sold to the American public as rooting out criminals and protecting prosperity. Both men made the same mistake of prioritizing flashy shows of force over careful, effective execution.
Eisenhower learned from his policy failures and changed course. He was a pragmatist who understood the effects of his policies and admitted when they weren't working. Today, pragmatism and humility are seen as signs of weakness in Trump’s Republican Party, leading to policies borne of extremes, hubris, and petty revenge.
Instead of repeating these costly mistakes, we should be championing immigration policies that acknowledge economic reality and respect human rights. Effective reform would support non-criminal, undocumented workers with practical pathways to citizenship or temporary work permits that don't bankrupt employers.
The lesson from 1954 isn't that immigration enforcement is wrong. The lesson is that focusing enforcement on quotas rather than public safety creates economic disruption, family separation, and community fear.
The truth is, it’s entirely possible — and reasonable — to believe in strong immigration enforcement while also questioning whether it protects or harms community interests. Dishonest politicians try to convince us that we must choose between no-exceptions enforcement and completely open borders, but that’s a false choice that only serves to pit us against each other.
The real choice is between policies that make America better or policies that break families and burden American businesses.
Those disoriented people wandering the streets of Mexicali in 1955, and the American farmers who lost everything afterward, were the human face of a program that promised order and opportunity but delivered chaos and economic hardship.
We’re making the same mistakes we made 70 years ago, and the families and farmers forced into impossible choices will bear the greatest cost.
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Zac Eckstein is chair of the Lewis County Democratic Party. Learn more about the party at https://lewiscountydemocrats.org.
