‘Operation Wetback’: The Valley has been down this road before

How ironic that a term still deemed offensive today in the Rio Grande Valley — “Wetback” — was considered normal in the summer of 1954 when then-President Dwight Eisenhower launched “Operation Wetback,” which used military style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants from along the U.S./Mexico border, including the Rio Grande Valley.

Sound familiar?

The U.S. Border Patrol preyed upon decent, hard-working people whose only “crime” was being in this country without proper documentation, which resulted in mass deportation.

The federal program lasted from July 1, 1954, to June 30, 1955.

Local daily newspapers then were doing the same thing Fox News is doing today, stoking the flames of disinformation: “Wetbacks Seen Out of Control.” (Source: Valley Morning Star, June 25, 1954:”

In that story, the director of the Immigration and Naturalization Service was really upset: “The wetbacks are running over us in the Rio Grande Valley.”

No matter that they were working as motel maids, roofers, picking crops and citrus.

A guy by the name of John Holland, who was head of the San Antonio INS district at the time, described the McAllen sector as the “second worst wetback-infested area in the United States,” and “out of control,” second only to the LA area.

Today, hardly anyone knows about Operation Wetback from approximately 70 years ago, but once you start digging into it, the commonalities are remarkable.

The Backstory

At The Advance, we caught on to “Operation Wetback” after a longtime reader called over the weekend to say that he had read last week’s front-page Observations column titled, “Where has our yard guy gone?”

It was a story about a great guy we had who used to cut our grass for years. He never said he was in this country without proper documentation but insinuated as much because he was clearly worried about ICE activities up and down the RGV, taking hard-working people into custody so they could send them to a for-profit holding prison, and then from one week to another, poof, he was gone.

The caller said that he had read the column, and the same thing happened here in the 1950s. So much so, his mom was worried that Border Patrol was going to show up at their house one day and cart off their longtime housekeeper.

So, with a little digging, up popped “Operation Wetback.”

As disgusting then as it is now.

Instead of taking the violent criminals into custody, which is what the American electorate was promised by this current administration, we watch as Maria the Maid, Juan the plumber, and Jose the roofer being tagged by ICE and carted off to who knows where.

Land of the free, home of the screwed up.

Seventy years ago, the U.S. government found itself in a contradiction of its own making. On one hand, the Bracero Program — begun during the labor shortages of World War II — was legally bringing in thousands of Mexican agricultural guest workers. Everyone was happy.

Then, some American growers realized they could bypass the program’s paperwork and minimum wage requirements by simply hiring undocumented laborers who crossed the Rio Grande on their own.

As the number of undocumented workers grew, a political backlash took hold. Labor unions complained about suppressed wages, and a post-war wave of nativism put pressure on Washington to secure the border.

Hello, “Operation Wetback.”

In the end, it was discarded because, well, the people who needed manual labor realized that there was suddenly a labor shortage, so Eisenhower and company dismantled it.

Moral of the story? It appears we were smarter 70 years ago than we are today.

Today, businesses are suffering from labor shortages, especially in the construction industry, but our government does nothing but double down.

In 2026, stories are being told up and down the RGV about good people getting targeted by ICE, DHS, Border Patrol, whose only “crime” is being in this country without legal documentation.

Doesn’t matter if they came here as kids with their parents, graduated high school, worked jobs that few other people want to work because they require the hard manual labor that too few people with legal documentation want to do.

Instead, the feds take them into custody, and from one day to the next, they have simply disappeared from our sight.

Lost and forgotten.