At dawn on June 20, 1954, Border Patrol agents erected roadblocks across the Southwest, and reporters rode alongside as officers looked for anyone of “Mexican appearance.” They descended on farms, ranches, warehouses, and neighborhoods, stopping people on highways and pulling workers out of fields. Trucks and buses carried Mexican migrants to detention centers. Trains and airplanes carried them farther away. Some were handed over to Mexican authorities and transported hundreds of miles into the interior, a deliberate attempt to make returning to the United States more difficult.
Others were put aboard commercial ships that normally carried bananas from Mexico to Texas. On their return voyages, the ships carried deportees south. The head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, a retired general named Joseph Swing, liked the arrangement because “I understand they get a little sea sick and they are a long way from home.” A congressional investigation eventually condemned the vessels as “penal hellships.”
The government called it “Operation Wetback.” Even the plainly racist name was deliberately publicized by President Dwight Eisenhower’s administration. Officials wanted Mexicans to believe agents could appear anywhere and that they had better leave the country before they were caught. The Eisenhower administration later claimed that more than a million people had been expelled, but the real number was probably far smaller.
Donald Trump has long understood the political power of Operation Wetback, and has repeatedly praised Eisenhower’s crackdown as proof that mass deportation could be done. “Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him,” Trump said in a 2015 Republican debate. Eisenhower had “moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country,” he claimed. “They never came back.”
The history was considerably messier than Trump suggested. The purpose of Operation Wetback was not solely to deport migrants. Its other aim was to encourage American employers to change the way they hired workers by forcing them to instead use the tightly controlled Bracero Program, which admitted Mexican men temporarily and tied their ability to return for work to the approval of employers. The government terrorized Mexicans into a coercive labor regime designed to make them cheaper and more controllable. Trump drew a simpler lesson: The government had once mobilized enormous power against immigrants, and he could do so again.
This June, federal agents arrested more than 43,000 people, the highest monthly total since Trump returned to office. By July, ICE was holding more than 65,000 people in detention, and the administration claimed it had deported more than 590,000 people since January 2025. Unlike the border surges of earlier years, much of this enforcement has been taking place inside the country, through arrests at workplaces, homes, traffic stops, court appearances, and required check-ins.
It is tempting to see this enormous crackdown as a distortion of immigration enforcement, a system bent to authoritarian purposes by a president unusually willing to test its limits. UCLA historian Kelly Lytle Hernández’s new book, Racist by Design: Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration Control, offers a more disturbing explanation: Trump did not have to build this apparatus. America built it for him. The reason a president can exercise powers over a group of people that would be constitutionally shocking in almost any other setting, Hernández argues, is that over the course of several decades, American immigration law was deliberately constructed as an exception to ordinary constitutional protections. Trump inherited a machine assembled over two centuries by slaveholders, eugenicists, and segregationists.
Hernández’s first book, Migra! (2010), told the history of the U.S. Border Patrol, and ever since she has been a major figure in a field that has refuted the sentimental story of the United States as a nation made by welcoming newcomers. Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects (2004) showed how federal law produced the modern category of the “illegal alien.” Erika Lee’s America for Americans (2019) traced xenophobia across American history. Jia Lynn Yang’s One Mighty and Irresistible Tide (2020) recovered the political struggle that led from the national-origins quotas of 1924 to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine (2020) showed that expulsion has been a central, durable practice of the American state. And Michael Luo’s Strangers in the Land (2025) returned readers to Chinese exclusion—the racial crucible in which modern federal immigration power was formed. Building on this scholarship, Hernández takes the history further back: Before Chinese exclusion, the Border Patrol, or national-origins quotas, she finds enslavers using migration control to protect slavery itself.
Beginning in 1791, enslaved people in Saint-Domingue rose against French colonial rule and created Haiti, terrifying American slaveholders with proof that Black liberation could succeed. Southern states tried to bar free Black people, and Congress reinforced their restrictions. The Immigration Act of 1803 prohibited free Black people arriving in the country from entering states that barred their presence. America’s first federal immigration ban, Hernández emphasizes, was not designed to police a modern national border. It was to ensure the enslavement of Black people.
The federal government acquired another extraordinary instrument in 1798, amid fears of war with France. The Alien Friends Act allowed the president to expel foreigners considered dangerous, but it soon expired after becoming notorious. The Alien Enemies Act survived, allowing the president to detain and remove nationals of a hostile foreign power. For most of American history it remained a wartime power.
The more consequential transformation came when Congress began restricting the entry of Chinese laborers in 1882 and continued tightening those restrictions for years. The Supreme Court then offered something even more powerful than exclusion: constitutional exceptionalism. In a series of decisions involving Chinese Americans, the court developed what became known as the “plenary power doctrine.” Immigration, it held, belonged to the federal government’s sovereign authority, and the political branches deserved exceptionally broad discretion over it. In Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889), the court upheld the exclusion of a longtime Chinese resident whose return certificate Congress invalidated while he traveled, and described the power to exclude foreigners as an inherent attribute of national sovereignty.
In Fong Yue Ting v. United States (1893), the court extended that logic, from keeping people out to expelling those already here. Deportation, the majority reasoned, was an administrative procedure rather than criminal punishment. In a dissent, Justice Stephen Field, who had helped establish broad federal authority in Chae Chan Ping, recoiled from where the Fong Yue Ting decision led: The majority had placed a “dangerous and despotic power” in the government, an apt epigraph for the present.
In Wong Wing v. United States (1896), the court granted jury trials to immigrants facing criminal punishment but called detention pending deportation “not imprisonment in a legal sense.” The state could apprehend rather than arrest, detain rather than imprison, and deport rather than punish. Such semantic engineering moved familiar acts into a civil category with fewer protections. Decided the same day the court sanctioned segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson, Wong Wing helped complete an immigration regime that was also organized along racial lines. While Plessy was later repudiated, the immigration precedents survived.
The exceptional power described by Justice Field soon merged with a new racial science. In the early twentieth century, eugenicists argued that nations could improve themselves by controlling reproduction and migration. Border restriction became a form of racial engineering. Harry Laughlin, one of the most influential American eugenicists and an adviser to Congress, described immigration control as a tool for preserving the nation’s racial composition. The Immigration Act of 1924 translated those ideas into national policy. Its national-origins quotas overwhelmingly favored Northern and Western Europeans, while Asians were largely barred. The same year, Congress created the Border Patrol, and soon granted its officers warrantless arrest and search authority. Agents focused that authority on Mexicans and frequently swept in Mexican American citizens, as well.
In 1929, Congress made unauthorized entry a federal crime. One of the leading forces behind the law was South Carolina Senator Coleman Livingston Blease, a white supremacist who said of Mexicans, “I want them kept out.” The descendants of that law survive as Sections 1325 and 1326 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, criminalizing improper entry and illegal reentry. Prosecutions became so common that the government had to expand prison capacity near the border. By 2011, illegal reentry had become the most frequently prosecuted federal crime.
Whites, on the other hand, encountered a different arm of the state. Hernández shows that the Border Patrol devoted far less time policing the Canadian border and tracking European migrants. The Registry Act of 1929 allowed immigrants who had entered before 1921 to pay a fee and become permanent residents, while a companion program let migrants cross into Canada and reenter legally, a route geographically closed to Mexicans. By 1940, Canadians and Europeans made up 80 percent of the immigrants who had legalized themselves under the law.
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished national-origins quotas, prohibited racial discrimination in visa allocation, and transformed the country by allowing millions from Asia, Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere to enter legally. But Congress removed explicit racial categories without dismantling much of the machine. Plenary power, deportation, criminal penalties for unlawful entry and reentry, the Border Patrol, and officers’ expansive authority all remained.
Later presidents and Congresses added powers. Bipartisan laws enacted in 1988, 1994, and especially 1996 expanded detention and the crimes triggering deportation, deputized local police, and enabled removal without ordinary hearings. George W. Bush put enforcement in the new Department of Homeland Security; Barack Obama oversaw enormous numbers of removals while protecting some undocumented immigrants. Hernández’s argument reaches beyond another indictment of Trump’s racism: His terror campaign depends on powers built and preserved by governments that would have rejected his rhetoric.
Trump has exploited those powers more eagerly than most predecessors. In March 2025, he revived the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to send Venezuelan men accused of belonging to Tren de Aragua to a notorious El Salvador prison. (No matter that many of those deported had been wrongly identified as gang members on the flimsiest suspicion.) The president called the gang’s presence an “invasion” and “predatory incursion,” converting a problem of crime and migration into an act of war. The wartime logic has a history: The Supreme Court used remarkably similar ideas during Chinese exclusion, treating the arrival of a racially alien population as a threat against which the nation could defend itself. Trump is speaking a language the U.S. immigration system already understands.
A government that can designate immigrants as enemies, arrest and deport them, and imprison them beyond the reach of courts could turn on people like me. I am an immigrant. I have lived in the United States for decades, built my life here, and remain a lawful permanent resident, a green card holder. For most of my adult life, that distinction from citizenship seemed important but settled. I was here legally; I belonged. The political division between “legal” and “illegal” appeared to put me safely on one side of a bright line. Recently, that line has become less reassuring.
In June, the Supreme Court decided Blanche v. Lau, involving a lawful permanent resident. The Court ruled 6–3 that border officers need not have clear and convincing evidence of a qualifying crime before treating a returning green card holder as seeking admission. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the decision gave the government a “massive blank check” and could leave permanent residents in years of uncertainty. Even the most secure noncitizen status remains governed by a regime with rules of its own.
I do not expect agents at my door tomorrow. My fear comes from discovering how much of Trump’s desired power already exists and has been normalized against people with fewer political rights. That fear is smaller than the danger facing undocumented migrants, asylum-seekers, and those already deported, some to countries where they may never be free again. But that is Hernández’s point: Immigration law trains Americans to imagine concentric circles of belonging, each with different constitutional claims. The person at the border has fewer rights than the person inside; the undocumented immigrant fewer than the green card holder; the green card holder fewer than the citizen. Each group is reassured that the machine is meant for someone further outside. Trump depends on that reassurance. We cannot simply move a fortunate few into a safer category while preserving arbitrary power over everyone below it.
A country can regulate its borders without preserving powers created for racial exclusion or treating immigration as a constitutional exception. It can distinguish citizens from noncitizens without exposing the latter to government powers that would horrify Americans if applied generally. Trump’s terror program demands a larger reckoning than whether this president has gone too far. We cannot merely wait for a different president to operate the same machine more humanely.
Congress should reconsider criminal provisions born in the Blease era. Chinese exclusion precedents should no longer provide a constitutional foundation for sweeping immigration power. The courts should reject the proposition that by calling migrants invaders, a president can seize powers created for war (an issue that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently sidestepped). Most importantly, the court should bring the immigration system back under ordinary constitutional discipline: with meaningful hearings, access to counsel, genuine judicial review, limits on detention and warrantless policing, and laws stripped not only of racist language but of racist design.
Trump’s responsibility for the cruelty of his immigration program is direct, but treating that cruelty as his invention lets his predecessors off too easily. Trump will eventually leave office, but simply defeating his abuse is no longer enough. America has to decide whether any president should possess these powers at all.
