Immigration will certainly be a central line of attack for Republicans against Vice President Kamala Harris this election year. And, now, their own plan to address the issue is also getting some attention.
Just this week, former President Donald Trump highlighted it in his broadcast interview with Elon Musk on X — promising “the largest deportation in U.S. history.” It’s also in the official 2024 GOP platform.
But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen large scale deportations in America — or here in Arizona. And, they’re often met with wide reaching consequences, according to Lisa Magaña. Magaña is a political science professor at ASU’s School of Transborder Studies. She joined The Show to talk more about it — beginning with their long history in the U.S.
Full conversation
LISA MAGAÑA: During the Great Depression, you know, one out of three Americans were unemployed and at the time, Herbert Hoover attributed the unemployment rate to Mexican nationals. And so in the 1930s, we had what was called the Great repatriation where Mexican and Mexican Americans were stopped. And, and this was mostly in California, Los Angeles were stopped, didn't have their documentation, they were sent, put on a train and sent to the interior of Mexico. A lot of people don't know about this, but that's the first major deportation operation. And I want to say Mexican American. So you know, U.S. born Mexican Americans that didn't have their documentation with them.
We go another decade in the 1940s, during World War II, there's a major labor shortage and guess what we need labor. And so during the 1940s, we had a mass work recruitment for labor with Mexican laborers. And we had, maybe a lot of people don't know, the Bracero Program, which was a guest worker program to bring Mexican nationals in for labor needs. And so after World War II ended 1950s, we had — guess what — another large deportation. This one unfortunately has a name of Operation Wetback. It's not a very nice term, refers to Mexicans swimming across the Rio Grande Texas region.
And so in the 1950s, this was another mass deportation. This was over a couple of years, over a million folks were removed over several states. So Arizona was one of them, California, Texas.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So then there's a more recent history right here in Arizona as well. Tell us about the Chandler roundup.
MAGAÑA: So I believe that was 1997. This was, if I can go back a little bit. So as we know, Arizona became very popular for their tough stance on immigration. Particularly Maricopa County Sheriff's Office. And so there was a little provision in the 1996 act that said if officers were specially trained, it was called 287G. If they're specially trained, they could stop and question the status of really bad folks. So, you know, murderers, kidnappers, smugglers. Only then when they were arrested, could they ask what their status was if they were suspected to be in the country unlawfully?
And Maricopa County Sheriff's Office overstepped the boundaries of 287G and that was where we had officers that were stopping and detaining immigrants and picking them up. Right? Families separated, you know, mom and dad would go to work, wouldn't come home, you know, terrible. And this is all from the beginning of 287G.
And so that going back to the 1997 Chandler round ups was part of that. I think the city said that they thought they could do that as a result of 287G but basically stopped and detained anybody that looked Mexican, looked like me. And that was found to be woefully unconstitutional, violation of rights because you can't stop somebody just on the basis of how they appear. But there's been a real, there's a long history of these sort of operations, particularly Maricopa County, which we know is the most populated in the whole state of Arizona.
GILGER: Yeah. So a long history here and that right, what you're talking about there is kind of when we started to see what we might think of when we think about Arizona and immigration kind of emerged, right? Sheriff Joe Arpaio, you mentioned 287G local law enforcement getting involved in immigration in a way that was kind of unprecedented. SB 1070 comes not too long after that.
MAGAÑA: Yeah, actually it's a direct result that when 287G was stopped and found to be unconstitutional and was racially profiling and Joe Arpaio was found guilty and then it was the state Legislature that passed SB 1070, Senate bill 1070, which was essentially all police officers in the state of Arizona can stop and detain somebody and ask them when they stop them, what is their status. That hasn't played out as much just because of all the lawsuits that could ensue. But it definitely symbolically made Arizona look again like a state that's really super tough on immigration.
GILGER: Yeah. Yeah. So given all of that history of these kinds of large deportations, right, and what they led to recent and not so recent, I wonder what do you make of the conversation today around? I think the direct quote in the platform for the GOP right now is the largest deportation operation in American history.
MAGAÑA: So immigration politics has a lot of symbolic immigration laws. I like to say they're symbolic rather than substantive. And the reality is that it's disingenuous. It's not a reality to say that you can mass deport millions of unauthorized immigrants.
GILGER: You're saying it's not even logistically, it's not logistically possible.
MAGAÑA: There's not a list of where every unauthorized immigrant works and lives. There's not enough person power to facilitate a major deportation. I can't imagine an economy how it would affect, would be affected if there was a mass deportation. I mean, this is just, it's just silly, I mean, symbolic, you know, it's like build a wall, it's impossible. It's not a reality. But people like to believe that very complicated issues can be fixed. I mean, if we look at actual numbers, and I was just reading this recently with past pandemic and immigration policies, National Order 42 and other deportations, there were actually quite a few during the Biden Harris administrations in terms of actual numbers, some, some even exceeding during the Trump administration.
So to say that the numbers are low, it's just not accurate. But again, if we're going to say, how do we assess immigration? That's a whole other issue right there. Is it the apprehension numbers? Is it this idea that immigrants come right through the border? That's not true. We know that almost half if not more of the unauthorized population are made up of people that overstay their visas. What do we do to address that?
GILGER: And I want to point out because you've written about this extensively as well like the times that there have been, especially in recent history, large scale deportations or attempts at them in Arizona, there have been political repercussions for that that still carry out in Arizona today.
MAGAÑA: Oh, absolutely. So it's very short sighted, I would say to be, you know, tough on immigration. I'm going to be the toughest sheriff or I'm gonna make it so miserable to live here. But we know that it's very short sighted because the political implications are profound. And that means that generations of children whose parents may have been, you know, detained or treated unfairly or poorly merely because of their status or how they look or, you know, high school students or DACA students or unauthorized, these are all now at an age where they're voting. Those are those that are U.S. citizens, let me be clear.
And we are seeing that we know that there have been activists that have addressed immigration that are now we're just getting done with an election. We know some of the candidates started out as activists during these immigration debates. So it's definitely it galvanizes it's kind of counterintuitive like you talk about these immigrants and it actually serves to mobilize and galvanize them politically.
