All Wet

Writing at Hullabaloo, Digby says—

"I must confess that I'm a little bit surprised that so few journalists seem to have been familiar with "Operation Wetback" or that Donald Trump had been extolling its virtues on the campaign trail for months. I guess they don't actually listen to what he's saying.

From Digby's piece in Salon—

In the debate on Tuesday, Trump reiterated the plan which half of Republicans in the U.S. support. He promised to build a wall along the nearly 2,000 mile border and to make Mexico pay for it. He also once more committed to rounding up and deporting all illegal immigrants. As he has in the past, he referenced President Eisenhower's program from the 1950s, fatuously insisting that it must be "nice" since everybody "liked Ike," even as he assiduously avoided calling the plan by its name: "Operation Wetback."

Here's Trump’s exact quote from the debate:

Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him. "I like Ike," right? The expression. "I like Ike." Moved a 1.5 million 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.

(LAUGHTER)

Dwight Eisenhower. You don't get nicer. You don't get friendlier. They moved a 1.5 million out. We have no choice. We have no choice.

Indeed, Trump has been saying this all along. Back in September, the Washington Post responded with the
history of how "repatriation" actually was conducted—

In Mexicali, Mexico, temperatures can reach 125 degrees as heat envelops an arid desert. Without a body of water nearby to moderate the climate, the heavy sun is relentless — and deadly.

During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were "dumped" after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home.

This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they would have to return to America. But the tactic also proved to be dangerous, as the migrants were left without resources to survive.

After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.

At another drop-off point in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants were "brought like cows" into the desert.

Among the over 25 percent who were transported by boat from Port Isabel, Texas, to the Mexican Gulf Coast, many shared cramped quarters in vessels resembling an "eighteenth century slave ship" and "penal hell ship."

These deportation procedures, detailed by historian Mae M. Ngai, were not anomalies. They were the essential framework of Operation Wetback — a concerted immigration law enforcement effort implemented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 — and the deportation model that Donald Trump says he intends to follow.

In the Hullabaloo post above, Digby adds this—

I noticed this morning that Luke Russert and Tamron Hall both refused to use the word "Wetback" when describing Eisenhower's program. This is a big mistake. People need to know exactly what they called Donald Trump's "nice, humane, 'I like Ike'" program. It brings the reality of what he's talking about right home. His voters won't care. They probably like it. But normal people will recognize it for what it is.

Certainly, our native Nazis recognize Trump's shout-out; via tengrain—

The New Confederacy isn't even trying to hide it anymore: White Supremacists Are Thrilled Donald Trump Mentioned "Operation Wetback"

White supremacists are praising Donald Trump for citing a 1950s U.S. government policy that deported hundreds of thousands of Mexican immigrants.

After Trump mentioned the policy, called "Operation Wetback," at Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Richard B. Spencer, the president of the white nationalist National Policy Institute, tweeted, "Operation Wetback, fuck yeah!"

... A post that ran on the white nationalist site Vdare.com and the white supremacist site the Daily Stormer called it a "milestone in the immigration debate."