Immigrant Rights in the Shadows of Citizenship

Primary Source: Shame of a Nation: A Documented Story of Police-State Terror against Mexican-Americans in the USA, 1954

226 Primary Source Shame of the Nation A Documented Story of Police-State Terror against Mexican-Americans in the USA, 1954 Patricia Morgan Published by the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, this 1954 pamphlet on Operation Wetback resounds in the current period. Like the raids conducted by the Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) branch of the Department of Homeland Security in the current period, Operation Wetback targeted undocumented migrants and political subversives. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican Americans were deported under this program. Note about the Author Patricia Morgan worked for the Los Angeles Committee for the Protection of Foreign Born during the 1950s. Shame of the Nation 227 We are all descendants of immigrants. —F.D.R. In April, 1954, President Eisenhower appointed a military man, a retired U.S. Army General like himself, as Commissioner of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service, a post traditionally held by a civilian. Late in May, Congress confirmed this appointment. The man is Lieutenant General Joseph M. Swing, known to reputable newsmen as “a professional, long-time Mexican hater.” Swing was with General John (“Blackjack”) Pershing on the United States’ punitive expedition into Mexico, an “expedition” which kept U.S. troops on Mexican soil from February 1916 until March 1917. He is a field artillery and airborne troops expert and prior to his recent appointment was Commanding General of the U.S. Sixth Army in Syngman Rhee’s South Korea. On June 14—American Flag Day—U.S. Attorney General Herbert J. Brownell, Jr., head of the U.S. Department of Justice of which the Immigration and Naturalization Service is the deportation arm, announced that a militarized campaign, “the Government’s biggest offensive against Mexican ‘illegals’ in history,” was about to begin. Legal weapon used by the attackers was the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Law (the Walter-McCarran Act of 1952). This law, purporting to codify all existing immigration and naturalization laws into one law, simple and easily understood, instead, in the words of U.S. Senator Herbert H. Lehman “pushes to extreme and inhuman length the doctrine that aliens have no guaranteed rights in this country.” Of this racist law, the Reverend Joseph J. Lamb, Director of the Diocesan Bureau of Social Service, Inc., in Providence, R. I., has also said: “I am quite shocked and surprised in seeing Hitler’s principles retained in our immigration legislation, particularly after we have fought a war to eradicate his ideas.” The Walter-McCarran Law was passed in the midst of the war in Korea and at the end of a five-year “anti-alien” drive in which the U.S. Justice Department had suffered numerous court setbacks in seeking to deprive noncitizens of their constitutional rights. It jumbles together all existing immigration laws and adds many shocking provisions, exposing its sponsors ’ bias and hatred of all foreign-born Americans. Indeed it is believed by many that the Justice Department itself helped 228 Patricia Morgan to draft many sections, if not the entire law. It, together with its predecessor the McCarran Law (the Internal Security Act of 1950), has already been used against thousands of noncitizens. Now Mexican-Americans, long the object of unconstitutional attacks by immigration authorities, were to be its mass victims. Reports told of “reinforced ranks” of border guards and patrols; of plans to “flush out” Mexican workers in the fields and industrial plants and to institute terror “raids” in Mexican-American communities. In Los Angeles, advance reports said, the Elysian Park Recreation Center, a city playground for children and adults, was being readied as a “security facility”—a concentration camp if you please—to hold the rounded up workers pending their transport “to stockades” in Nogales, Arizona, and final dumping over the border. A quota of 40,000 Mexican-Americans was set for the California district by Brownell and General Swing and accepted by local immigration authorities. I Under the Attorney General’s personal order and under General Swing’s personal command, again in the words of Brownell and immigration officials , “flying squadrons” of U.S. deputies “swept” through the fields, factories and communities “to ferret out . . . to capture . . . to herd over the border” defenseless Mexican laborers. Federal agents (the dreaded Los Federales, long-feared and despised by the Mexican people), invaded private homes in the dead of night, frightening and routing from their beds men, women and children. Business places were...