"Very nice and very humane" mass deportation

"Very nice and very humane" mass deportation

by digby

I wrote this in October of 2015. Trump couldn't have been clearer about what he wants:

Last week he even explicitly went back to the 1950s and evoked the Eisenhower era program "Operation Wetback," which he characterized on "60 Minutes" as "very nice and very humane." (It wasn't.) He said “Did you like Eisenhower? Did you like Dwight Eisenhower as a president at all? He did this. He did this in the 1950s with over a million people, and a lot of people don’t know that…and it worked.”

He elaborated at his rallies later in the week:

"You know, Dwight Eisenhower was a wonderful general, and a respected President - and he moved a million people out of the country, nobody said anything about it. When Trump does it, it’s like ‘whoa.' When Eisenhower does it, 'well that was Eisenhower, he’s allowed to do it, we can’t do it.'

That was also in the '50s, remember that. Different time, remember that.

That’s when we had a country. That’s when we had borders; you know, without borders you don’t have a country, essentially. We don’t have a country. Without borders, you just don’t have it.

But Dwight Eisenhower, this big report, they used to take them out and put them on the other side of the border and say, 'you have to stay here.' And they’d come right back, and they’d do it again and again, so they said 'Wait a minute, this doesn’t work.' And they took them out and moved them all the way South; all the way. And they never came back again; it’s too far. Amazing.

And I’m not saying this in a joking way — I’m saying this happened. It wasn’t working, they were coming back, and then they literally - literally - moved them all the way. A lot of the politicians - they never came back, it was too far. They’d put them on boats and move them all the way down South, and that was it."

A month later he repeated this in a nationally televised GOP presidential debate:

Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. "I like Ike," right? The expression. "I like Ike." Moved a 1.5 million illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back.

Moved them again beyond the border, they came back. Didn't like it. Moved them way south. They never came back.

(LAUGHTER)

Dwight Eisenhower. You don't get nicer. You don't get friendlier. They moved a 1.5 million out. We have no choice. We have no choice.

At the time I noted:

The latest Economist/YouGov poll reveals that Donald Trump is viewed as the GOP candidate Republicans trust most to handle immigration. What's more, the margin by which they prefer him is extremely wide, and it's grown substantially since he entered the race in July:

This was Trump unfiltered and totally himself.

Everyone says he doesn't know what he wants in a deal.

Is that right?

Katy Tur on MSNBC wisely noted that Trump's fundamental instinct is to turn toward the loudest applause line. When he said that he wanted to round up immigrants and drop them off in the Sonoran desert hundreds of miles from the border, the crowd went wild.

We have scenes like this happening every single day:

After years living in the U.S. for 30 years, a 39-year-old immigrant in metro Detroit was deported this morning to Mexico. Escorted by ICE agents, he said bye to wife and 2 kids before boarding. He was brought to US from Mexico when he was 10-yrs-old, too old to qualify for DACA: pic.twitter.com/KFPeweaMbG
— Niraj Warikoo (@nwarikoo) January 15, 2018

They are planning mass sweeps in Northern California.

They are rounding up immigrant community leaders.

The Trump cult wants a white America. And they want to accomplish this by ending all immigration from non-white countries, mass deportation of brown people and Muslims and putting African Americans in jail.

All Republicans don't agree with that but they vote for people who do and they support a president who has taken this idea of ethnic cleansing into the mainstream. So they are on board too.

.