The Deep Roots of Deportation

Editor’s Note: This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative in partnership with palabra.

An unrelenting sun drenches its light on the huge tombstone’s image of a rust-robed San Isidro, the Catholic patron saint of farmworkers. 

Beneath the tombstone lies the remains that were found of 28 Mexican farmworkers who perished in a 1948 plane crash, one of the worst deportation catastrophes in U.S. history. Their nameless lives were immortalized in the Woody Guthrie poem “Plane Crash at Los Gatos,” more commonly known as “Deportee.” 

The poem became a protest song against the anonymity of the deaths sung by luminaries like Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, and Joan Baez. More recently, the deportees’ identities were fully revealed in two books by Tim Z. Hernandez, a native of California’s San Joaquin Valley where the crash occurred.

Donald Trump campaigned hard demonizing immigrants, a strategy that helped catapult him into the White House in a U.S. election unlike any other. Now, the nation’s history of deportation and its consequences merit the closest scrutiny.

Trump says he’ll unleash mass deportation of immigrants without documents and even some immigrants with lawful temporary documents. In racist rhetoric, Trump called immigrants “animals” and “not human” and said they’re “poisoning the blood of America.”

In a polarizing election, can the United States still be a place for immigrant reinvention or has the nation been reinvented with the coming Trump presidency?

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“I thought we had learned a lot from history and that we’ve grown a lot, and we haven’t,”  said Hernandez, the author of books that examined the fiery crash that took the deportees’ lives and a flight crew of four. 

His first book about the incident, All They Will Call You, inspired the placement in 2013 of the gray granite tombstone that finally named those who perished in the Fresno County crash. The book told many of the backstories of the workers and the flight crew. The original marker at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery had no names.

His second book on the topic is part memoir, called They Call You Back, which further chronicled the lives of farmworkers who died in the crash and their families and threaded that more broadly with other dehumanizing traumas such as police brutality.

Immigrants contribute to the United States, Hernandez said, as they did in the decades before and after the 1948 plane crash. Deportations split families, leaving what Hernandez calls “an inheritance of trauma” and invisibility that plays out in the next generations. 

Trump’s talk of deportation “extends the trauma” and pokes “into the wound,” Hernandez said after the election. But winning candidates are often elected on platforms that are difficult to carry out, and sometimes never carried out, said the University of Texas at El Paso professor and writer.

The stakes are now particularly high for asylum-seekers. “Their deportation could be a death sentence,” says Jenifer Williams, a licensed therapist and executive director of Humanitarian Outreach for Migrant Emotional Health in Dallas. “They live with a lot of anxiety, usually in the form of PTSD.”

Not far from the cemetery in downtown Fresno, near the remnants of an immigrant neighborhood known as Old Armenian Town, new immigrants gather at the entrance of the local office of ICE, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

Many expect tougher policies against immigrants but argue that carrying out mass deportations will be difficult. There aren’t enough immigration judges to handle even one million deportations, a number suggested by the Trump team for the first year, some say.

 The latest government figures show that more than 11 million immigrants are in the country without legal status. And, as of September, the nationwide immigration court backlog stood at 3.7 million for about 700 judges. 

Some immigrants don’t even get to see an immigration judge before they are removed when caught at the border under a process ramped up during the current tenure of President Joe Biden. 

There are also financial costs. The National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration group, said the labor loss from deportations would “kneecap” businesses and that it would cost more than $150 billion to remove 11 million immigrants. The American Immigration Council puts mass deportation costs at more than $315 billion.

For Mexicans, deportation history is particularly painful. Estimates vary on the hundreds of thousands swept up in the 1950s in deportations known by the racist name of “Operation Wetback.” In the 1930s, large-scale deportations hit with a jolt: 60 percent of “deportees” were actually U.S. citizens, according to historian Francisco Balderrama.

Today some 4.4 million U.S.-born children live with a parent who does not have legal immigration status, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. The same study finds over 4 million mixed-status families in the U.S.

Some immigrants without documents aren’t waiting for the aftermath of the election. Some are already slipping underground. 

In Dallas, community organizer Socorro Perales said some immigrants without documents are so deep in hiding that their families in Mexico haven’t heard from them in weeks. Some are buying cheap cell phones that are easily disposable and are more difficult to track, Perales said. “They are going to continue to stay in hiding and continue to suffer emotionally,” she said, after Trump was declared the winner.  Others are wondering what happens if they are picked up by immigration officials and their children come to an empty home, Perales added. 

Immigrant families have long faced prospects of division. Now there are more of them. And more deportations.

One of those now in hiding is a Mexican immigrant in the Dallas area who had a U.S. government-issued ankle monitor on her leg so tight her skin bled. An employer found someone to cut off the monitor after attempting to extract a promise that the underpaid immigrant wouldn’t leave her North Texas restaurant job, the Mexican immigrant said. When immigration officials showed up at the location where the GPS last pinged, the woman was across the street but spotted their arrival.

She ended up losing her immigration court case in Dallas. “The case is returned to DHS (Department of Homeland Security) for removal of the applicant,” reads a court decision. “This is a final order. There is no appeal from this decision.”

Immigration authorities told her she needed to prepare to be deported.

“Come tomorrow with your daughters and your belongings,” the immigrant mother said, recounting the conversation with the immigration officers shortly before the election.  

“Hasta mañana,” she replied.  Mañana never came.