Deportation nation

Summary

Today, Explained: Deportation Nation
Hosted by Sean Rameswaram and Noel King | Released on November 19, 2024

---

Overview

In this episode of Today, Explained, Vox delves into the imminent policy shift under the anticipated second Trump administration, focusing on a large-scale deportation campaign. Hosts Sean Rameswaram and Noel King, alongside guest Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez from UCLA, examine the objectives, key players, historical precedents, and potential ramifications of this aggressive immigration strategy.

---

Trump’s Second Deportation Campaign

Timestamp: 00:01 – 02:08

The episode opens with a discussion on Donald Trump's renewed commitment to deporting undocumented immigrants. Unlike his first term, where President Obama actually deported more people, Trump is now positioned to intensify his efforts significantly.

• Nick Miroff notes, “[Trump] is getting a second shot at the title, and people say this time he means business” (00:23).
• Sean Rameswaram states, “I will launch the largest deportation program in American history” (00:34).

Key Figures in the Deportation Strategy

Timestamp: 02:08 – 05:00

Nick Miroff, covering the Department of Homeland Security for the Washington Post, anticipates a tumultuous period ahead under Trump's administration.

• Sean Rameswaram anticipates, “a shock and awe campaign of deportations, arrests, border announcements, court rulings” (02:15).

The administration plans to reverse Biden-era policies and reinstate measures like the "Remain in Mexico" policy. The strategy also involves leveraging military assets to enhance deportation capabilities.

Roles of Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan

Timestamp: 05:00 – 07:32

• Kristi Noem, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security, is highlighted as a hardliner poised to spearhead the deportation efforts.
• Stephen Miller, a longtime aide and immigration strategist, is expected to serve as Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, driving the ideological framework of the campaign.
• Tom Homan, former ICE Director, will take on the role of Border Czar, overseeing operational aspects of the deportation process.

Challenges and Opposition

Timestamp: 07:32 – 11:24

Despite the administration's intentions, significant obstacles loom:

• Logistical and Financial Hurdles: Previous attempts saw inflated targets that were unattainable. Funding and resources remain substantial challenges.

  • Sean Rameswaram mentions, “they will face both logistical and financial challenges to getting to the kind of millions that Trump has promised” (07:50).

• Public Perception: While there is some support for aggressive deportation, public discomfort arises when deportations become visible and emotionally distressing.

  • Sean Rameswaram expresses concern over public backlash: “images of children crying and suffering... have a serious cost” (08:50).

• Political Tensions: Balancing deportation efforts with economic promises, such as lowering inflation, may create policy conflicts.

Historical Context: Operation Wetback

Timestamp: 15:35 – 28:03

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez provides an in-depth analysis of Operation Wetback, the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history, conducted in 1954 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

• Operation Wetback targeted Mexican immigrants through racial profiling and mass deportations, paralleling Trump’s current strategy.

  • Kelly Lytle Hernandez explains, “They target, and I quote, anyone of Mexican appearance” (20:02).

• The operation was marked by inflammatory tactics and media spectacles, intending to instigate fear and encourage self-deportation among undocumented immigrants.

  • Hernandez notes, “they invited journalists to come with them... stories of community centers being turned into detention centers” (25:15).

• Contrary to claims of deporting a million people, historical records indicate the actual numbers were significantly lower, around 300,000.

  • Hernandez states, “Donald Trump and others will tell you often that the United States Border Patrol... a million people. That is a total fabrication” (23:01).

• Post-campaign impacts included legislative changes that legalized many immigrants and reduced future deportations, highlighting that mass deportation alone does not resolve immigration challenges.

Insights and Implications

Timestamp: 25:15 – 28:03

Professor Hernandez draws parallels between past and present, emphasizing the cyclical nature of immigration enforcement strategies and their profound effects on communities.

• The spectacle-driven approach of both Operation Wetback and Trump’s proposed campaign underscores the use of media to shape public perception and policy acceptance.

  • Hernandez observes, “when you have a president who is about media and spectacle... it is concerning” (25:24).

• There is a critical need to understand historical outcomes to avoid repeating past mistakes and to foster more humane and effective immigration policies.

---

Conclusion

The episode concludes by highlighting the complexities and potential repercussions of reinstating aggressive deportation policies. By examining historical precedents and current political dynamics, Today, Explained offers listeners a comprehensive understanding of what a second Trump administration could mean for U.S. immigration enforcement.

---

Notable Quotes

• Sean Rameswaram: “I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.” (00:34)
• Kelly Lytle Hernandez: “They are sweeping across the southwest United States, entangling U.S. citizens, legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants...” (20:02)
• Sean Rameswaram: “images of children crying and suffering... have a serious cost.” (08:50)
• Kelly Lytle Hernandez: “That is a total fabrication.” (23:11)

---

About the Guest

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez is the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History at UCLA. She is an expert on immigration history and has extensively researched deportation campaigns and their social impacts.

---

For more episodes and detailed analyses, subscribe to Vox's Today, Explained on your preferred podcast platform.

Transcript

[Nick Miroff]

The first time Donald Trump was president, he really wanted to deport a lot of people.

[Sean Romisver]

We have some bad hombres here and.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

We'Re gonna get him out.

[Nick Miroff]

But he wasn't all that successful. I mean, don't tell him because it would probably drive him nuts. But his predecessor, Barack Obama, actually deported way more people than he did.

[Sean Romisver]

Thank you for reminding me.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Thanks, Obama.

[Nick Miroff]

But now Donald Trump is getting a second shot at the title, and people say this time he means business.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Immigrant advocacy groups are bracing for a.

[Sean Romisver]

Presumed second Trump administration that promises those.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Mass deportations he talked about and a harsher immigration regulations. Immediately upon taking the oath of office.

[Sean Romisver]

I will launch the largest deportation program in American history.

[Nick Miroff]

Seal the border, deport all the illegals. Now on Today Explained. We're going to figure out what he wants to do, who he wants to do it for him, and how likely it is he'll get it done.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Amgen, a leading biotechnology company, needed a global financial company to facilitate funding and.

[Sean Romisver]

Acquisition to broaden Amgen's therapeutic reach, expand.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Its pipeline and accelerate bringing new and.

[Sean Romisver]

Innovative medicines to patients in need globally.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

They found that partner in Citi, whose seamlessly connected banking markets and services businesses can advise, finance and close deals around the world. Learn [e-mail] clientstories support for this show comes from Polestar. Polestar is an electric performance car brand that is focused on innovation for both cutting edge technology and design. And their all electric SUV. Polestar 3 is for those unwilling to compromise, for those who believe they shouldn't have to choose between the spacious comfort of an SUV and the agile handling of a sports car. For those who need an intuitive infotainment system and a dashboard designed with minimalism in mind. Polestar 3 is for drivers who won't settle for anything less. Book a Test drive for Polestar [e-mail] this is today explained.

[Nick Miroff]

Nick Miroff covers the Department of Homeland Security for the Washington Post. So he's bracing himself for a busy few years.

[Sean Romisver]

I mean, me personally, I'm getting ready for like a shock and awe campaign of deportations, arrests, border announcements, court rulings, a lot of the same kind of chaos that we saw during the first Trump administration.

[Nick Miroff]

We asked him what he's expecting from the first few weeks.

[Sean Romisver]

Yeah, I mean, I think we'll see a series of, you know, immediate rollbacks of Biden era policies. Some of these policies that allowed migrants to apply to come to the United States to live and work legally, namely like the parole programs that Biden used, the CBP1 app that let asylum seekers try to get appointments along the southern border, trying to bring some kind of order to that process. And then I think we'll see the return of some of Trump's signature policies from the first term, like Remain in Mexico. He's talked about bringing that back. But the big one is gonna be this shift to the interior. Right now, illegal border crossings, which have been at record levels for the first three years of Biden's term, are now at their lowest levels in more than four years, even from lower than before Trump left office. And so I think that will allow him to pivot almost immediately to the interior of the United States and this mass deportation campaign. That was a core campaign promise of his.

[Nick Miroff]

And we're speaking Monday morning, and it looks like the president just reposted some random dude on Truth Social saying that he was indeed committed to this plan of mass deportation. What did he say? What did he confirm?

[Sean Romisver]

Well, he essentially endorsed a post on Truth Social by, you know, another user saying that they were going to bring back the national emergency declaration and that military assets would be involved in the mass deportation campaign. And that's not anything different than what he said on the campaign trail. And I'll make clear that we must use any and all resources needed to stop the invasion, including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas. I think we can count on them. Using military assets such as bases, aircraft, transportation networks, and all of those things will allow them to significantly increase their throughput, so to speak, in terms of people they can take into custody and try to quickly deport.

[Nick Miroff]

This is going to be a Homeland Security situation. So, though inspired by Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem is going to be in charge of this.

[Sean Romisver]

Yeah. Kristi Noem is Trump's nominee to be the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is considered a hardliner on immigration, and if confirmed as DHS secretary, she would be at the forefront of the plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Make no mistake, an invasion of our country is happening, and our border is a war zone.

[Sean Romisver]

But I think that this effort is really going to be led out of the White House by Stephen Miller, his speechwriter and main immigration ideologue.

[Nick Miroff]

President elect Donald Trump is expected to name longtime aide and immigration hardliner Stephen.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Miller as his deputy chief of staff for policy.

[Nick Miroff]

Who's going to stand up and say, the cartels are gone, the criminal migrants.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Are gone, the gangs are gone, America.

[Nick Miroff]

Is for Americans and Americans only.

[Sean Romisver]

And Tom Homan, who will be in the kind of operational role, Former ICE Director Tom Homan will be the President Elect's border czar.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

I got a message to the millions of illegal aliens that Joe Biden's released.

[Sean Romisver]

In our country in violation of federal law. You better start packing now. And there are a few people who know the system, you know, the deportation system better than Homan, who spent his career in immigration enforcement in various roles, including Trump's acting director of ICE during the first 18 months of Trump's first term.

[Nick Miroff]

What is standing in their way, if anything?

[Sean Romisver]

Immigration activists and attorneys are saying that they are going to ramp up the resistance once again and will try to use similar strategies to those that they deployed during Trump's first term to try to slow down the pace of deportations and to try to draw attention to, I think, some of the, you know, crueler and harsher aspects of immigration enforcement. So I think we'll see a lot of legal challenges. But, you know, it feels like this time will be different. The Republican Party obviously will, can be in control of both houses of Congress. The Supreme Court is stacked in the President Elect's favor, and the terrain has just, you know, changed significantly. I think, you know, we've seen this big shift in public opinion in favor of a more aggressive deportation campaign, including in some of the so called sanctuary cities like New York, where, you know, tens of thousands of migrants are living in hotels and, you know, have, have arrived over the past few years. And that has produced a lot of tension.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

This issue will destroy New York City. Destroy New York City.

[Nick Miroff]

But even if the American public is on board with a mass deportation, it's going to take a lot of resources. Do we have those resources in place? No.

[Sean Romisver]

And this was one of the reasons that Trump never was able to carry out the 2,3 million deportations that he promised during his first term. The highest levels they ever reached were around 300,000 or so. So I think we can expect that the current levels are certainly going to go up, but they will face both logistical and financial challenges to getting to the kind of millions that Trump has promised. That's one reason they're going to try to leverage the military assets. And I do think that there will be more funding available for this kind of thing through Congress. They could ramp up the number of detention beds that they have available. They can get more aircraft, they can get more personnel to try to assist in this effort. But does that mean they can deport all 11 or 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States? No.

[Nick Miroff]

Do we think the American people will still have the stomach for this once it starts happening.

[Sean Romisver]

Yeah. You know, Sean, that's something that I have seen over the past, you know, eight years of covering immigration enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security is that the public really can't stand to come face to face with what, you know, the reality of immigration enforcement. It's just, it looks really bad. And everybody has a cell phone camera right now. And once you start to see images of children crying and suffering and being torn out of their homes and screaming for their parents as their parents are being hauled off by uniformed government agents, that kind of thing has a serious cost. And while the incoming administration thinks that it has a mandate for that type of thing, I think that folks like Homan know that once the public starts to see that over and over again, that it's going to erode the support for Trump doing something of this kind.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Outraged by the Trump administration's policy of taking migrant children away from their parents.

[Sean Romisver]

Protesters rallied in Los Angeles. No borders, no nations. Stop deportations. I mean, look at, you know, the zero tolerance family separation episode of Trump's first term.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

The Trump administration says it is seizing children and separating families as a deterrent, scaring other would be migrant parents away.

[Sean Romisver]

The backlash that that produced was so enormous that it even, you know, reached Trump's family. And Melania and Ivanka were among those telling him that he had to stop it because, you know, it just became unsustainable politically to do something like that. Another thing, Sean, I think to look for is that there's going to be a fundamental tension going forward between the expectation that Trump has created for lowering inflation and for carrying out this mass deportation effort. Because if you remove hundreds of thousands of workers from the labor force, you can't deliver cheaper food, cheaper childcare, and lower cost housing. Those two things just don't go together. Do they have the political skills to manage the, you know, the backlash to that? That remains to be seen. I think, you know, they may have a relatively narrow window in which to try to carry out some of the harsher elements of what Trump is proposing, particularly with the military involved.

[Nick Miroff]

Nick Meeroff, washingtonpost.com I'm Sean Romisver and when we're back, we're going to look at Trump's mass deportation inspo. We're going back to the 1950s on today explained. Support for today Explain comes from the Liberty's Journal Foundation. Are you familiar? Election season is a good time to reflect on and manage your media consumption. So if you want to take a break from the noise on social media and instead sit down with a good piece of writing. After listening to your latest episode of Today Explained, then you might want to check out Liberties, a publication from the Liberties Journal Foundation. They say their goal is to inform today's cultural and political leaders hello. And inspire participation in the democratic process. Wow. Is that like our goal too? Anyway, you can engage with some of today's brightest minds with Liberties. You can subscribe [e-mail] explained or find liberties at your favorite bookseller. That's libertiesjournal.com explained. You might run into Mario Vargas Llosa or Ralph Fiennes. Check them out. Liberties journal.com support for today explained comes from Noom. Noom wants to remind you that the end of the year is on the horizon and so if you made a New Year's resolution back in, you know Jan, like it's crunch time they say. And yes, maybe you cheated, maybe you lost track. We're all human. But Noom wants you to know that, you know, if you started rebounding with junk food on that diet you resolved to commit to, it may have less to do with discipline and more to do with psychology. Ask Phoebe Rios, one of our colleagues here at Vox who tried Noom herself.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

I feel like the plan Noom created was catered to my individual needs. It was very thorough. I felt like the questions they asked I hadn't even asked myself, like what time I get out of bed in the morning and if I eat with my phone in my hand. It was very helpful and very, very educating of how I spend my day.

[Nick Miroff]

Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology based approach. Sign up for your trial [e-mail].

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Support.

[Nick Miroff]

For today explained comes from Green Light. There comes a time when every parent has to talk to children about money. And before you get to options trading, derivatives and credit default swaps, dad, you can start with the simple stuff like saving their allowance. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest and spend wisely and parents can keep an eye on kids money habits. And now there's Greenlight's Infinity plan which they say includes the same access to financial literary education but also includes new built in safety features to give you peace of mind. Our colleague here at Vox, Oda Sham, has tried Greenlight. Here's what she thinks.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

My kids have learned lessons using Greenlight because like during the holidays, during birthdays.

[Sean Romisver]

When they get money, usually what they'll.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Do is they give me the money And I will ask them, how much do you want to put in spending versus savings?

[Sean Romisver]

So that they're very conscious of, okay.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

If I want to buy something expensive.

[Sean Romisver]

I'm going to put into my savings to make sure I don't spend it at the gas station.

[Nick Miroff]

You can sign up for Green light [e-mail] explain. That's Greenlight.com explain. To try green light today. I'll stop doing that. Greenlight.com explained today. Explain is back. And we're joined by Kelly Lytle Hernandez.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

I am the Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History at UC ucla.

[Nick Miroff]

Go Bruins.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Go Bruins.

[Nick Miroff]

We asked Kelly to tell us about Donald Trump's mass deportation inspiration. It's a government program that just went ahead and included the racism right in the name. So pardon the racial slurs. In this half of the show, President.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Elect Trump has referenced that he has taken his inspiration from operation wetback of 1954, which to date is the largest bass deportation campaign in U.S. history.

[Sean Romisver]

The Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country, even larger than that of.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is a manifest right of our government to limit the number of immigrants.

[Sean Romisver]

Our nation can absorb.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

That was a campaign that targeted Mexican immigrants, undocumented immigrants in particular. It was defined by racial profiling. It was defined by roadblocks and sweeps across the southwest United States. And so, yeah, we have seen this before, and it is quite concerning that that might be the blueprint for what's to come.

[Nick Miroff]

I know it's not as acceptable to say that term anymore, but it sounds like it was a lot more acceptable in the 1950s. Can you remind us the origin of the term wetback?

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

It's a racial slur. It was a racial slur then, it's a racial slur now, but it was more commonly used in the popular discourse back in the 1950s. The origins of that term are disputed, but most people think that it's about during the 1920s, during Prohibition, when immigrants would come across the border with alcohol. Right. Could be wet backs. Or that you have Mexican immigrants who are crossing the Rio Grande and are going into the water and coming out with wet shirts. Right. So our wet backs. So the. We can't quite figure out the origins of it. One of those two.

[Sean Romisver]

Hmm.

[Nick Miroff]

What's going on in the 1950s when someone comes up with Operation Wetback? What's the backdrop?

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

The backdrop to operation wetback of 1954 is actually a legal immigration program called the Bracero Program.

[Sean Romisver]

Yes.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

With the domestic supply of farm labor.

[Sean Romisver]

Being inadequate, braceros are a must.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

So back in 1942, during World War II, the United States was experiencing a labor shortage. As all of the young men are going, going off to war and are working in urban industries, Farmers in particular are saying, we don't have enough laborers.

[Sean Romisver]

The term most commonly used is braceros. In Spanish, this means a man who.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Works with his arms and hands. So the United States government goes and develops contracts with the Mexican government and other governments in the Caribbean to bring in short term laborers, largely to work in agriculture, but also on railroads. That bracero program brings in millions of Mexican workers between 1942 and 1965. The fact is that farm wages have gone up steadily for many years, but we still don't have enough seasonal domestic labor willing to do this kind of work. But it has limitations. Women are not eligible to become bracero workers. People coming from urban areas in Mexico are not eligible to become bracero workers. Industrial workers are not eligible to become bracero workers. So you have a large segment of the Mexican population who needs work but doesn't have access to the bracero program. So what you get is at the same time you have millions of Mexican workers coming to the United States legally through the bracero program, you also have large numbers of undocumented workers who are coming to the United States. So that is the backdrop. You have a surge of legal immigration from Mexico. You also have a surge of undocumented immigration from Mexico. And so the campaign of 1954 grows alongside the bracero program. Statistics have indicated that when the traffic in wets is high, the supply of dope in our big cities increases proportionately. It actually began during the 1940s and just gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it hits its climax in 1954. The job has been compared to trying to scoop the tide off the beach and pour it back into the ocean.

[Nick Miroff]

How do they target the right people or, you know, people who are undocumented?

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Well, they don't. They target, and I quote, anyone of Mexican appearance.

[Nick Miroff]

Oh, wow.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

And so they're sweeping across the southwest United States, entangling U.S. citizens, legal immigrants and undocumented immigrants in the search for people of, quote, Mexican appearance. So it's a racial profiling campaign that impacts citizens and non citizens alike, lawful migrants and people who have crossed without documentation as well. This is the morning prison train out of Southern California into Mexico. It makes this run every day about dawn. Its cargo, Mexican wetbacks who have sneaked across the border and are being deported on June 10th, 1954, the US Border Patrol, several about a thousand officers spread out across California and Arizona near the border. And they set up roadblocks to stop anyone of Mexican appearance moving north on the roads into the United States. They sweep up about 10,000, 11,000 people in those roadblocks, again conducting racial profile operations targeting anyone who looks Mexican heading north into the United States. About two weeks later, they unleash these task forces that sweep from north to south, pushing people out of the country, arresting people wherever they can. And it's not just farms. They are raiding restaurants, they are raiding racetracks, they are raiding communities. These are really big media spectacles. Once they get people arrested in towns, Sacramento, Chicago, Los Angeles, wherever it is in the country, they take people down to the border where they hold them in mass detention camps. And they hold them until they have a train, a plane, or a boat that is ready to mass deport people into Mexico. So they would cram people onto these trains, planes and boats. The boats, for example, would bring bananas up to the United States and then be packed with deportees who would be taken down to Veracruz, Mexico. A congressional investigation into these boat lifts these ships. Two years after operation WEP Act 1954 called these boats penal hell ships. The conditions were outrageous. There were several protests on the ships. And so one of the tactics of Operation WEP back in 1954 was to dislocate people who were being deported into the center of Mexico. So they were far from homes in the United States and far from homes in Mexico. And this is a punishment tactic to make sure that people feel that they are abandoned and that it's extremely difficult for them to get home, wherever that home may be.

[Sean Romisver]

Hmm.

[Nick Miroff]

How many people were caught up in Operation Wetback?

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Now, that is an excellent question. Right? So Donald Trump and others will tell you often that the United States Border Patrol rounded up and deported a million people.

[Sean Romisver]

Did you like Dwight Eisenhower as a president at all? Well, I wasn't around during President Eisenhower's, but he was a fair man.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

He did. He was a great American.

[Sean Romisver]

Yeah, he did this with over a million people.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

That is a total fabrication. It was a fabrication back in 1954. It's a fabrication. Now, the Border Patrol likely apprehended maybe 300,000 people during the summer of 1954, which is really when the campaign happened. But, yeah, the commissioner of the INS inflated those numbers. And this is really important. I'm really glad that you asked this question, because what the ins, the Immigration Naturalization Service, and the Border Patrol are doing is they're showing that there's an ever increasing number of deportations during the 1950s. They tell the world that that's about a million apprehensions in the summer of 1954. And then after 1954, the number of apprehensions drop off dramatically well into the 1960s. You only have maybe 20,000, 30,000 people being apprehended. The story they're telling us is that aggressive immigration law enforcement, with all of these punitive tactics is what, quote, solved the crisis at the US Mexico border or the immigration crisis. That is absolutely not what happened. The Border Patrol, one, did not apprehend as many people as we're being told. Those numbers are simply inflated. And you can go into the Border Patrol's archive, and it's clear plain as day that those are inflated numbers. But two, they changed the rules of the Bracero program so that more people could become eligible to be legal workers in the United states. And then three, after the campaign of 1954, they demobilized all their special task forces, and they put Border Patrol officers on two man and one man patrols who couldn't round up as many people. The lesson here is that the way that we, quote, solve the immigration crisis in 1954 is not through mass deportation, but, in fact, through legalization, and we stop deporting people.

[Nick Miroff]

Why is it that Trump wants to point to Operation Wetback as some sort of model for what he wants to do once he reenters office?

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

It's inflammatory, the title of the operation alone, but also the way in which it was conducted. I think that one of the things also to recognize about the campaign of 1954 is that although a million people were not apprehended, this does not mean it wasn't hugely impactful in the lives of people, and it wasn't terrifying. Everywhere the Border Patrol went during the summer of 1954, they invited journalists to come with them. And the journalists snapped photos of entire families being rounded up. They snapped photos of workers running through kitchens trying to escape the Border Patrol. They chronicled the stories of community centers being turned into detention centers. And that constant press was absolutely terrifying to people on the ground. And it's trying to instigate people to engage in what some people call self deportation. Right? And that is a big part of the campaign of 1954 that people don't talk about. So when you have a president who is about media and spectacle, of course he's going to gravitate to a campaign that was about media and spectacle, and that that actually, in fact, is one of its primary tactics.

[Nick Miroff]

Well, I'll see you on the boat, Kelly.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Send me the pamphlet.

[Nick Miroff]

Professor Kelly Lytle Hernandez History UCLA Our program today was produced by Halima Shah and Miles Bryan. We were edited by Jolie Myers and fact checked by Laura Bullard. Patrick Boyd and Andrea Christensdottir mixed this episode of Today. Expl Support for this podcast comes from Stripe. Stripe is a payments and billing platform.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Supporting millions of businesses around the world.

[Nick Miroff]

Including companies like uber, BMW and DoorDash. Stripe has helped countless startups and established companies alike reach their growth targets, make.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Progress on their missions and reach more customers globally. The platform offers a suite of specialized.

[Nick Miroff]

Features and tools to fast track growth like Stripe Billing, which makes it easy to handle subscription based charges, invoicing and.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

All recurring revenue management needs.

[Nick Miroff]

You can learn how Stripe helps companies.

[Kelly Lytle Hernandez]

Of all sizes make [e-mail] that's stripe.com to learn more. Stripe Make Progress.