Jeffrey Lord writes: The issue? Illegal immigration.
The answer? The Republican candidate had an answer. If he were elected president, the illegals swarming into the United States from Mexico would have to go.
No, the Republican candidate was not Donald Trump. The candidate in question was Dwight D. Eisenhower. And on Election Day of 1952, Ike was elected the nation’s 34th president in a landslide.
On June 17, 1954, using what today would be considered a deeply politically incorrect term, “Operation Wetback” began. Eisenhower had appointed a West Point classmate and veteran of the 10st Airborn, General Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Swing to head the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Eisenhower directive to Swing was Trumpian: they have to go, round them up and move them out. And in the kind of military style that Eisenhower himself had employed in organizing the massive logistics of the D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, General Swing went to work.
The General used buses. He used trains. He used ships. Most importantly he used the agents of the U.S. Border patrol. According to the Christian Science Monitor some 750 Border Patrol agents began sweeping north from Texas, eventually moving through Arizona, California, Utah, Idaho, and as far north as Chicago.
Within a month, reports the Christian Science Monitor, in California and Arizona alone, “over 50,000 aliens were caught. Another 488,000, fearing arrest, had fled the country.”
Swing kept going. Again the CSM:
By September, 80,000 had been taken into custody in Texas, and an estimated 500,000 to 700,000 illegals had left the Lone Star State voluntarily.
Unlike today, Mexicans caught in the roundup were not simply released at the border, where they could easily reenter the US. To discourage their return, Swing arranged for buses and trains to take many aliens deep within Mexico before being set free.
Tens of thousands more were put aboard two hired ships, the Emancipation and the Mercurio. The ships ferried the aliens from Port Isabel, Texas, to Vera Cruz, Mexico, more than 500 miles south.
The sea voyage was "a rough trip, and they did not like it," says Don Coppock, who worked his way up from Border Patrolman in 1941 to eventually head the Border Patrol from 1960 to 1973.
