Kelly Lytle Hernández

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Kelly Lytle Hernández | The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943 to 1954 | The Western Historical Quarterly, 37.4 | The History Cooperative

The Crimes and Consequences of Illegal Immigration: A Cross-Border Examination of Operation Wetback, 1943 to 1954

Operation Wetback of 1954 is typically understood as a U.S. immigration law enforcement campaign that resulted in the deportation of over one million persons, mostly Mexican nationals. This article, however, uses research conducted in the United States and Mexico to trace the decade-long buildup and binational history of Operation Wetback.

IN MAY OF 1954, U. S. ATTORNEY GENERAL Herbert Brownell issued an announcement. In the coming months, the U. S. Border Patrol would implement what he called Operation Wetback. As he explained it, Operation Wetback would be an intensive and innovative law enforcement campaign designed to confront the rapidly increasing number of illegal border crossings by Mexican nationals. As promised, during the summer of 1954, eight hundred Border Patrol officers swept through the southwestern United States performing a series of raids, road blocks, and mass deportations. By the end of the year, Brownell was able to announce that the summer campaign had been a success by contributing to the apprehension and deportation of over one million persons, mostly Mexican nationals, during 1954.

Five decades later, Brownell's public chronicling of Operation Wetback 1954 continues to draw the basic framework for understanding the campaign as an intensive U. S. law enforcement campaign targeting undocumented Mexican nationals during the summer of 1954.¹ Yet, Brownell's account of Operation Wetback was a decade late and a nation short. It was ten years earlier when the U. S. Border Patrol had begun its aggressive campaign against undocumented Mexican immigration. Raids, mass deportations, and an uncompromising focus on undocumented Mexican immigration had increasingly characterized U. S. Border Patrol work since the early 1940s. Year after year, the Border Patrol's campaign to detect and deport undocumented Mexican nationals developed slowly and unevenly until its well-publicized announcement in the summer of 1954. Further, Border Patrol efforts and innovations to prevent undocumented Mexican immigration into the United States developed in close collaboration with Mexican officials and law enforcement officers seeking to limit and control unsanctioned migration out of Mexico. Together, U. S. and Mexican immigration officers devised new collaborative strategies for preventing and punishing the crime of undocumented migration. Therefore, when it is defined as an innovative, aggressive, and targeted campaign against undocumented Mexican immigration, Operation Wetback is only partially understood if framed as occurring just during the summer of 1954 and only north of the U. S.-Mexico border.

Rooted in archival research conducted in the United States and Mexico, this article digs deep into the history of Operation Wetback to tell a binational story of migration control that began long before 1954 and extended far beyond the U. S.-Mexico border. This binational history of Operation Wetback challenges the generally accepted view of Operation Wetback as a national initiative of U. S. immigration law enforcement. While it is certainly true that the U. S. Border Patrol was the primary police force involved in migration control along the U. S.-Mexico border, the cross-border history of Operation Wetback reveals how Mexican officials actively participated in the imagination and implementation of policing unsanctioned migration along the U. S.-Mexico border. Without denying the dominance of U. S. interests in U. S.-Mexican relations, Mexican officials participated in migration control along its northern border according to Mexico's domestic interests in regulating the international mobility of Mexican laborers.² This article, therefore, focuses upon Mexican collaboration with the United States Border Patrol to establish a set of law enforcement priorities and practices designed to police the crimes of Mexican laborers who exited Mexico without authorization and entered the United States without sanction. This set of police practices developed slowly over a decade and across the U. S.-Mexico border, but has been narrowly understood since it was announced to the public as Operation Wetback during the summer of 1954.

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