>The Administration’s inflated assertions are hardly without precedent. One of the few times the federal government claimed to have deported a million people in a year, as members of Trump’s inner circle have [vowed](https://web.archive.org/web/20250411133918/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/16/us/politics/trump-policy-list-2025.html) to do, was in the nineteen-fifties. *ICE*’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or I.N.S., mounted a mass roundup called Operation Wetback. As the historian Adam Goodman writes in his book “The Deportation Machine,” “Operation Wetback also amounted to a yearlong INS self-promotion campaign that served as a way for the agency to boost its reputation, build morale among its officers, and solidify its place within the federal bureaucracy.” The commissioner at the time, **who publicly exaggerated the number of deportations by a factor of five**, said that “the so-called ‘wetback’ problem no longer exists,” adding, “the border has been secured.” Two decades later, Goodman notes, an agency statistician admitted, “We are told periodically that ‘the heat’s on,’and we know that we had better get to work and make it look like we’re after the ‘devils’ who are taking away the jobs.”
The sad part is that this would be the most reassuring scenario; that they’re just making shit up. Otherwise there’s a whole lot of people disappearing without any due process at all or anyone knowing what’s going on.
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>The Administration’s inflated assertions are hardly without precedent. One of the few times the federal government claimed to have deported a million people in a year, as members of Trump’s inner circle have [vowed](https://web.archive.org/web/20250411133918/https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/16/us/politics/trump-policy-list-2025.html) to do, was in the nineteen-fifties. *ICE*’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or I.N.S., mounted a mass roundup called Operation Wetback. As the historian Adam Goodman writes in his book “The Deportation Machine,” “Operation Wetback also amounted to a yearlong INS self-promotion campaign that served as a way for the agency to boost its reputation, build morale among its officers, and solidify its place within the federal bureaucracy.” The commissioner at the time, **who publicly exaggerated the number of deportations by a factor of five**, said that “the so-called ‘wetback’ problem no longer exists,” adding, “the border has been secured.” Two decades later, Goodman notes, an agency statistician admitted, “We are told periodically that ‘the heat’s on,’and we know that we had better get to work and make it look like we’re after the ‘devils’ who are taking away the jobs.”
The sad part is that this would be the most reassuring scenario; that they’re just making shit up. Otherwise there’s a whole lot of people disappearing without any due process at all or anyone knowing what’s going on.