In his 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump is promising to deport millions of migrants now living in the U.S. if he is elected. While his followers wave signs reading “Mass Deportation Now!” and polling shows that support for the policy has increased, what’s missing from the conversation is the often-brutal reality of what mass deportations have looked like in America’s past — and what they might look like in the near future.

Many historians of immigration see America’s previous experiments in mass deportation as failures, both because they did not accomplish their purported goals and had widespread negative social effects. Similarly, many policy analysts predict that any mass deportation plan attempted by a second Trump administration would be shambolic and likely stuck in a legal and logistical quagmire. Others, however, suggest we should not underestimate the willingness of Trump and his 2024 inner circle to violate legal and political norms and bulldoze the kinds of obstacles that might stop a more conventional administration.

There have been several attempts to deport large numbers of immigrants throughout American history, but the largest — and the one Trump has previously referenced — was literally called Operation Wetback, using a blatantly offensive term for immigrants from Mexico who had allegedly entered the U.S. by wading or swimming across the Rio Grande.

That operation, which began in June 1954 and was largely managed by retired U.S. Army Gen. Joseph Swing, then the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, saw the federal government deploy military-style tactics to round up migrants, mostly in the Southwest and major West Coast cities, and deport them.

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Exactly how many people were deported during the 1954 operations is unclear. The INS reported that apprehending about 1.1 million people, while other estimates suggest that as many as 1.5 million people were deported. While the goal was to focus on undocumented immigrants, there is clear evidence that some U.S. citizens and legal residents were also swept up in the operation and deported. Trump promises to go beyond these numbers.

“Impossible Subjects,” a 2014 book by Columbia University historian Mae Ngai, details the history of Operation Wetback from the circumstances that led to the Eisenhower administration to pursue the policy, through the operation to its ultimate conclusion.

During the early 1950s, backlash against migration across the southern border began to build, in terms that seem strikingly familiar today. In 1951, President Harry Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor described the influx of Mexican immigrants as “virtually an invasion.” Agricultural interests in California and the Southwest, however, largely depended on transient labor in order to pick and process vegetables.

Ngai notes that proponents of the INS operation often spoke of migrants in demeaning terms. Gen. Swing said that “hordes of aliens” were crossing the Mexican border, calling it an “alarming, ever-increasing, flood tide.” of migrants at the border. A Los Angeles Times story from 1955 quotes a U.S. government official calling Mexican immigration “history’s greatest peacetime invasion.”

In the early 1950s, backlash against migration across the southern border began to build, in terms that seem strikingly familiar today. Harry Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor described the influx of Mexican immigrants as “virtually an invasion.”

Perhaps surprisingly, there was also significant support for tightening immigration policies among some Latino and Hispanic groups in the U.S. including the League of United Latin American Citizens. That stemmed from the perception among Mexican Americans that “braceros,” a term used to describe temporary agricultural workers........

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