Operation Wetback 2.0
Trump's Politics Of Intimidation.
Sadly, I can’t seem to write about anything that isn’t directly or indirectly about Donald Trump. Oh I try. Mightily. But this guy is the undisputed champion of focus-pulling. He’ll stop at nothing to keep the spotlight on himself and his agenda. Which are really one and the same.
This past week has seen him go as far as federalizing the California National Guard, and when that didn’t ‘own’ enough libs, he even sent active military into the streets of Los Angeles. That did the trick.
Trump’s hijinks have succeeded, forcing Gavin Newsom into the overtly anti-MAGA stance that he’s been trying desperately to avoid - what with all of his podcast invites to Trump allies, and his new tougher stand on homeless encampments.
Newsom was looking to play the center until the midterms tell him where the country’s going. But now he’s hooked into representing ‘liberalism’ writ large. Republicans love it when California steps forward, this being the root-soil of everything they oppose. Fair or not, we are as much a caricature to them as Alabama is to Californian liberals.
In addition, Trump has forced Karen Bass to impose a curfew downtown, and further mobilized the left-most edges of progressivism, guaranteeing that further demonstrations will look more and more like the communist threat that Trump fans so love to imagine is looming.
Meanwhile he’s sent fear and anger echoing through the entire immigration-activist community, further stressing them and making it harder than ever to strategize effective opposition to his so-called ‘mass deportations’. Talk about getting the maximum bang for your buck out of a couple of ICE raids.
Illegal border crossings had already slowed to a trickle. Do you think people are forming caravans deep in Central America to take on the United States Marines?
Donald Trump might be the least informed president in US history. He might be the laziest intellectually … the shakiest morally. But this dude is a friggin’ GENIUS when it comes to manipulating the media - both traditional and social. Nobody provokes response like this guy.
While I was watching and waiting for the next crazy thing to happen, I dug in a little to the history of the last ‘mass deportation’ of Central American immigrants. The one that Trump was referring to back in 2015 when he and John Kasich got into it at the fourth GOP debate. I’ve cued the exchange up for you here: (starts at 26:43)
Kasich was talking about a Reaganesque approach, while Trump was promoting the method instituted by Ike’s Attorney General. He got the particulars wrong, as he always does, but it’s clear what he’s referring to.
Growing up in a SoCal town that was almost half Mexican American, I heard the term ‘wetback’ often. Sometimes by Mexican-Americans themselves. It was always derogatory. As a kid, I’d never heard of Operation Wetback, the campaign of deportation implemented 71 years ago this month.
When I did hear about it, as an adult, I assumed that it originally had a less derisive name, and was just called ‘Operation Wetback’ by the opposition to make its promoters seem racist. But I’m unable to find proof of that. Apparently Republican politicians in 1954 didn’t care much, what people thought about them. Kind of like now.
For those unfamiliar, the image is of a worker who’s just swum northward across the Rio Grande. So recently, that he still has a wet back. Subtle eh?
This operation of ‘mass deportations’ followed on the heels of - and overlapped with - the more humane Bracero Program, which was in effect from 1942 until 1964 . ‘Bracero’ is a Spanish word for a manual laborer. Braso being the Spanish word for arm. So a Bracero is a person who works with his or her arms.
The program granted contracts with Mexicans allowing them to toil mostly in the American agriculture industry, and guaranteed them housing, meals, a minimum wage and insured that part of their earnings went into Mexican banks.
All of this was implemented to address a shortage of Americans able to work these jobs, given that most able-bodied men were off fighting in WW2.
In fact, this agreement between the US and Mexican governments was largely a trade. Mexico would not join the allied effort against Germany and Japan, but would instead, aid the war effort by helping with food production at home.
The project included greatly strengthening the US-Mexico border. It’s not well known, but in those years, it was Mexico that wanted tighter borders, for fear that all of their best workers would go north for the better wages, leaving their own farming industry undermanned. Mexico’s leaders also hoped that - upon returning - the Braceros would bring back techniques being innovated in The States.
Of course American cities were also experiencing a tremendous industrial growth, particularly in Los Angeles. After the war, manufacturers too wanted labor at a bargain, so many Braceros simply walked out on their contracts and into the vast network of factories in the L.A. basin.
Mexico wanted them back, to power their own industrial growth, and most Americans wanted rid of them, to make wages more competitive. And so, in ‘54, the Eisenhower administration’s Border Patrol, and INS, rounded up many thousands of undocumented immigrants, mostly in Southern California and South Texas. They then handed them off to Mexican officials who intended to move them south to the Mexican states where jobs were plentiful.
There were incidents where the drivers didn’t take them all the way and instead left them in the desert, where some died. All of these workers were being forcibly moved by governments that were greatly influenced by big business. Pawns in a game of power and money.
When Donald Trump referred to this mass-deportation effort on the debate stage in 2016, he showed his usual cursory understanding of what went on back then. But his recent comments about relocating Palestinians, show that he thinks rich people ought to decide where poor people live.
Most of us accept that there are borders for a reason. For many reasons, including ideological ones. Our border with Mexico has been a political football for generations. In Los Angeles, as blue a city as you’ll find, the common theme is that we make immigrants from the south welcome. That we protect them, give them sanctuary.
But let’s be honest here. We have largely relegated Central American immigrants to doing the hardest jobs for the least amount of money.
I’ve written on this issue many times, and always made it clear that I respect anybody who works hard to support themselves and their families. I’m not convinced that ‘kindness’ drives the Limousine Liberals in all of our toney enclaves.
In my years as a house painter, I too was a ‘Bracero’. Working with my arms through 35 hot summers. Right through the winters as well. And with every passing year, incrementally more contractors were dropping off teams of recent immigrants to hang drywall, pour concrete, frame out remodels, trim trees, tear off and replace roofs. Every dirty job you can think of.
When I was working inside a wealthy family’s home, there were often two or three Spanish speaking immigrants laboring on the grounds or doing the laundry or walking the children to school. I worked pretty cheap. But I’m confident that I was always the highest paid ‘help’ on site, because I could speak nuanced English, and carry out the highly specific instructions handed down by expensive interior designers.
There was no political will to fix the immigration process, because conservatives and liberals alike have been enjoying cheap labor all along. Performed by humble people who will work tirelessly with few protections if any. And never make a fuss.
At the demonstrations, people were waving placards handed out by a group called ‘The Party For Socialism and Liberation’. I wonder if these revolutionaries understand they are defending the capitalist status quo in Southern California.
Do they think that the owners of the dress factories live among their underpaid undocumented employees?
How much of what I’m saying does Trump himself understand? Does he really intend to deflate the work-force all across our great and prosperous land?
If he’s as strategic as his fans think he is, then he must have a pretty good idea that ‘mass deportations’ will not go over well with his golfing buddies.
My guess is that there will be almost no raids in MAGA country. For example, on enormous meat packing concerns like Tyson Foods, who employ many thousands of Hispanic immigrants. I’m pretty certain that their workers are all covered by work visas and whatever asylum processes that will allow them to work the slaughterhouses.
My guess is that Trump’s ICE will mainly target the blue cities, and cause their governors to go ballistic like Gavin Newsom is now doing.
The immigration battle we’re now watching is largely theater.
Donald Trump is first-and-foremost a ‘content creator’ playing to the shattered attention spans of internet trolls. He pretends that illegal immigrants are largely criminal because that engages the downtrodden energies of the American Working Class, and funnels it toward people who are just different enough to trigger the xenophobia latent in all human populations.
’Look over here! See the foreigners who’ve taken all the jobs? Did you know that they are also criminals? Fentanyl smugglers? Human traffickers?!
’Just please don’t look behind the curtain, people, because we don’t want to muddy the waters with discussions about crony capitalism and that Big Beautiful Bill that will lower billionaire’s taxes while defunding Medicaid and adding two trillion to the national debt.
’It’s these damned wetbacks that are causing you grief!!’
In the mid fifties, when Operation Wetback was ‘rounding up’ illegal immigrants, where did they go to find these vulnerable humans? Into the fields and the factories. Where they were already being exploited and mistreated.
When Trump’s new take on ‘mass deportations’ met with furious opposition this past weekend, where was the flash-point? It was first in the garment district. Then at a Home Depot. Are Home Depot parking lots known as gathering places for criminals? As hang-outs for MS-13? Of course not. These are work drops for day-laborers. This is where men gather every morning in the hope of being trucked to a jobsite where they’ll do difficult and often dangerous work, for not much money.
During his campaign last year he repeatedly - and falsely - implied that undocumented immigrants were disproportionately criminal. So why is ICE going to churches and work drops? Is that where they think the bad guys hang out?
Or is it that they are desperately trying to keep up with the 3,000 a day quota asked of them by Trump’s Rasputin, Stephen Miller? ICE needs to make arrests. As many as they can. And if that means collateral damage in the form of family members and the occasional pastor, then so be it. Dragnets are not for the faint of heart.
Underlying this is what my Trumper friends don’t want to know … that there are simply not enough real criminals among undocumented immigrants to meet Trump’s and Miller’s grand and ghoulish goals.
It hasn’t always been that that Republicans trafficked in nativist fear, at the behest of crude ham-fisted leaders. It used to be that they preferred leaders of charm and decorum. Good natured people who grinned through disagreements, and had lunch with with friends in the loyal opposition.
In 1986, Ronald Reagan signed the bi-partisan Simpson/Mazzoli act.
Reagan was not exactly a ‘bleeding-heart conservative’ in the Jack Kemp mold, but his comments upon signing that bill, remind us that ‘normative’ Republicans are not necessarily paranoid about a Central American ‘invasion’.
"The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society. Very soon many of these men and women will be able to step into the sunlight and, ultimately, if they choose, they may become Americans." -Ronald Reagan, November 6, 1986
Imagine Donald Trump focused on ‘improving the lives of’ undocumented aliens. It boggles the mind.
Reagan’s ‘Western White House’ was a relatively humble horse ranch in the Santa Ynez Mountains near Santa Barbara. While spending time there, President Reagan famously enjoyed working up a sweat in jeans and a work-shirt. Mending fences, pruning trees, clearing brush, chopping firewood.
Often he was joined by local friends, Barney Barnett, and Dennis LeBlanc. LeBlanc once said that Reagan “just loved getting dirty and working with his hands”.
He was also a skilled horseman. One of his favorite steeds was an Anglo-Arab given to him by Mexican President José López Portillo. And everybody knows that the best horsemen in California are the dignified Charros from Jalisco. I have no doubt that Ronald Reagan felt an affinity for hard-working immigrants from our southern neighbor.
When I was a kid, Westerns were the action-movie choice of most men. This was before the age of the ‘anti-hero’. Back then, the hero rode in, risked his neck doing the right thing, and slipped out of town before too much fuss could be made.
His word was his bond, and his moral code absolute. He may have been dusty and trail-worn, but he was always a gentleman.
Reagan played some of these men on film, and - in the minds of his greatest supporters - embodied that John Wayne / Gary Cooper ethos. This was one of his favorite things to say:
How did we go from that to Donald J Trump? A man who takes credit at every opportunity, lies even when it does him no good, insults men and women alike if they fail to kowtow, and doesn’t have much use at all for moral codes.
I think I understood why the working men and women of this country originally held their collective nose and chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. But I cannot understand why they are still carrying his water today. He has virtually nothing in common with average Americans.
This is a guy who wasn’t familiar with the word ‘groceries’, until he read it on his teleprompter. He was so proud of mastering this new concept that he couldn’t stop talking about it. He thought that he was re-popularizing an arcane term. How could a person possibly be more out of touch?
And now rather than admit that their man’s gone rogue, Trump loyalists are actively shaking off their own life-long values in order to keep supporting him. It’s a goddamned tragedy.
I’m getting a fair bit of pushback for not having shit-canned my integrity in order to keep my YouTube following. Some of them followed me here and are still hoping to get me back in line. Here’s a comment from my last post.
”Appreciate you sharing your opinion, Mr. Morrison. You got broke by Jan 6. It has affected your entire perspective. Pushed you back into your comfortable leftist beliefs. Now you denigrate and generalize on those that voted for and support Trump.”
I assume that he means ‘broken’? I was not broken by Jan 6. But I was made aware of just how broken Donald Trump is. I have never held either leftist or rightist beliefs. I am, by temperament, cautious and conservative. But not because there is a club I need to belong to. I’ll team with either party, or oppose either party, depending on what either is up to at the time.
I’m not sure how I can avoid ‘generalizing’ about a group of people who follow Donald Trump in precise unison, no matter where he goes. No matter what he does. No matter how much he exaggerates or lies outright. However often he contradicts himself. However unrepublican and undemocratic he gets.
His adherents have generalized themselves haven’t they?
If me saying so is denigrating to them, I plead guilty. But to my way of thinking, it is they who have denigrated themselves.
Sunday is Father’s Day. Unusually early this year. My dad’s been on my mind a lot, as I’ve resurrected a song I wrote for him in 2008. As he was making his last lap around the sun. I look forward to singing it next weekend as I celebrate my own lap and kick off the summer.
I don’t need a political figure to give my life meaning. I had great parents. And my political views are really just my way of adapting their values to what’s currently on offer by one party or another. I miss my pop. But I’m glad that he finished up here on Earth before he had to watch the disintegration of the party for which he and my mother usually voted.
His was a solid life. Both kind and firm. It was never necessary for him to insult those - including myself - whose vote canceled out his own. He was everything that a man should be, and I suspect that if my detractors compared Donald Trump to their own fathers, they’d be a lot less confused about what they want in a leader.
Thanks for reading. Happy Father’s Day!
Here’s the e-flyer for our event next weekend. If you’d like to come out, let us know by Wednesday of next week so we can have enough food and drink on hand for everybody. RSVP here: alexia@alexiasalvatierra.com
The only conclusion I can draw when I compare this 2025 Dave Morrison to the Blue Collar Logic Dave Morrison I discovered on YouTube is that there must have been a lot of pretending going on with that earlier version. Maybe earlier Dave Morrison was pandering to the algorithm to draw off its monetary riches with the audience it brought? Because this Dave Morrison doesn't have the handle on things that the earlier one had. It may as well be a different person.
Sure, people change with circumstances, but brother, you aren't bringing change here, you're bringing a slant that makes no sense to a firm centrist like me. None whatsoever.
Let us think coolly and logically for a second. What exactly were the nationalized National Guard and Marines tasked to do? The Federal Bldg in Downtown LA was attacked by a violent mob and would have been looted and destroyed if it weren't for those Guardsmen behind their plexiglass riot shields. They were NOT sent into the streets to bust heads. 700 Marines... wow you would think it was the entire force that landed on D-Day on French beaches in June 1944... by all the hyperbolic media accounts. 700 Marines in LA County that has 10 million residents. And what are they tasked to do? Guard the Federal Bldg in Westwood near UCLA. That is all they are doing!