C. Nothing In The Post-1952 History Purged The Racist Intent Of The 1929 Statute
No developments after 1952 served to purge the racist intent behind the 1929 statute. The inhumane treatment of Mexican immigrants at the border continued and intensified in the years after Congress passed the 1952 Act. In 1954, President Eisenhower appointed retired Army General Joseph Swing as the commissioner of INS to focus on the militarization of the INS. Crimes and Consequences 442. According to Swing, the “ ‘alarming, ever-increasing, flood tide’ of undocumented migrants from Mexico constituted ‘an actual invasion of the United States' ” that necessitated a reciprocal response. Ngai 155 (quoting typescript, Joseph Swing, Report to the American Section of *26 the Joint Commission on Mexican Migrant Labor, September 3,1954, 3, file CO629P, INS-CO).
The government's response came in the form of Operation Wetback, an intensive law enforcement campaign designed to be a “direct attack * * * upon the hordes of aliens facing [the United States] at the border.” Ngai 155. Under Operation Wetback, the INS redirected its resources from the northern and eastern districts to the southern border. The INS deployed 750 Border Patrol officers, 300 jeeps, cars, and buses, seven airplanes, and other equipment in an effort to sweep through the southwestern United States, performing raids and mass deportations. Ibid. The policy of discouraging illegal reentry by relocating apprehended migrants “far into” the Mexican interior also continued in full force. Id. at 156.
Prosecutions under the criminal entry and reentry provisions also surged during this period. Prosecuting Immigration 1352-1353. In what were referred to by the Attorney General as the “wet-back” cases, thousands of laborers were criminally charged by the federal government, served little if any jail time, and were sent back across the Southwest border. Id. at 1352. And in Arizona, the U.S. Attorney's Office instituted a zero-tolerance policy of prosecuting all unauthorized border crossers. Ibid.
Operation Wetback also resulted in mass deportations on an enormous scale. Between 1953 and 1955, the INS reported capturing 801,069 Mexican immigrants-twice the number of apprehensions from 1947 through 1949. Ngai 156 (quoting minutes, meeting of American section, Joint Migratory Labor Commission, September 10-11, 1954, file 56321/448G, box 3299, accession 58A734, INS). General Swing sought to capitalize on Operation Wetback's success and build a fence along sections of the border in California and Arizona to deter “the illegal migration of ‘disease-ridden’ women and children whom he said *27 comprised over 60 percent of those entering surreptitiously after Operation Wetback.” Ibid.
Decades later, during a 2015 debate for the Republican nomination for President, then-candidate Donald Trump praised the operation, saying:
Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. I like Ike, right? The expression. I like Ike. Moved a million and a half 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.
Dwight Eisenhower. You don't get nicer, you don't get friendlier. They moved a million and a half people out. We have no choice. Dara Lind, Operation Wetback, the 1950s Immigration Policy Donald Trump Loves, Explained, Vox (Nov. 11, 2015), https://www.vox.com/2015/11/11/9714842/operation-wetback).
Further, Operation Wetback's operational success coincided with a significant increase in prosecutions for unauthorized entry and reentry. Prosecuting Immigration 1352-1353. Unauthorized entry quickly became the most prosecuted crime on the entire federal docket, and in the decades since the total number of prosecutions has increased dramatically. Ibid.; see also The Movement 1984. And unauthorized reentry prosecutions, for their part, have risen steeply since the early 2000s. The Movement 1988 & tbl.1.
*28 Given this background, subsequent reenactments and reauthorizations of Sections 1325 and 1326 after 1952 $%^7 do not represent a break with the past. Congress has never taken any action to remove the taint of the racism inherent in their passage in 1929. Although some of the post-1952 enactments made changes to peripheral provisions of the statute, including by adding Section 1326(d), the subject of this case, none of them enacted material changes to the core criminal-liability provisions in Sections 1325 or 1326. Congress's repeated failure to grapple with the “sordid history” of those provisions makes clear that the intent underlying them remains. Ramos v. Louisiana, 140 S. Ct. 1390, 1410 (2020) (Sotomayor, J., concurring); see also Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, 140 S. Ct. 2246, 2273 (2020) (Alito, J., concurring) (recognizing that “it emphatically does not matter whether Montana readopted the no-aid provision for benign reasons. The provision's ‘uncomfortable past’ must still be ‘examined’ ”).
