The big picture: From the Palmer Raids of Jewish and Italian immigrants of 1919 to the mass deportation of Mexican immigrants in the 1950s, previous deportation operations ignored civil liberties, heightened racial tensions and disrupted families of American citizens for generations.
Catch up quick: In campaign speeches, Trump has said he would launch “the largest deportation operation in American history” and end birthright citizenship as outlined in the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Reality check: To end birthright citizenship, the U.S. Constitution would have to be amended by three-fourths of the state legislatures or three-fourths of conventions called in each state for ratification — an unlikely event.
The Palmer Raids
A surge of Italian and Russian Jewish immigrants into many industrial cities at the turn of the century sparked a wave of anti-immigrant bigotry and fueled the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
- A bomb outside Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s home in Washington, D.C. — along with pandemic flu, Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution and the over-hyped “Red Scare” — gave the ambitious lawyer cover to go after those immigrants.
- Palmer dispatched young Justice Department lawyer J. Edgar Hoover to monitor immigrants suspected of holding radical political views, leading to the arrests of immigrants during simultaneous raids in major cities.
The “Repatriations” of the 1930s
The Great Depression saw pressure from state and local governments on Mexicans and Mexican Americans to “return” to Mexico amid high unemployment in the U.S. and violent anti-Mexican sentiment.
Between the lines: U.S. officials, who skirted birthright citizenship by saying they did not want to break up families, sent Mexican American children to Mexico, according to “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s.”
Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback”
President Eisenhower’s operation used military-style tactics to round up 1.3 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans across the country in the 1950s for what was then the largest deportation operation in U.S. history. “Wetback” is a racial slur for Mexicans.
The present mood
The intrigue: Despite cheers at Trump rallies of “send them back,” any modern-day mass deportation effort would likely be met with resistance from Latino civil rights groups and elected officials, David J. Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, tells Axios.ARTICLE HERE