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A harrowing new normal has emerged in U.S. immigration enforcement. The chase-down of immigrants, traditionally a tactic employed by the Border Patrol in remote borderlands areas, is now a blunt national strategy deployed by the federal government in America’s most populous cities. ICE agents conducting surprise raids and brutal arrests have rapidly become the symbol of an immigrant purge.
Critics have called for ICE agents and other federal officers to drop their masks so they might be known and accountable to the public. But Trump’s hot pursuit of immigrants in American cities requires an unmasking not only of ICE operatives, but of the flimsiness of his narrative. Contrary to Trump Administration messages, there is no “invasion” necessitating the widespread suspension of basic civil liberties.
During Trump’s clampdown, Mexican communities in Chicago and Los Angeles have emerged as notable targets. But Mexican migration, far from being an invasion, proceeds from an invitation eagerly extended by the United States to Mexican migrants to address its farm labor shortage during and after World War II.
The U.S. federal government insisted on access to Mexican migrants, even when Mexico began to seriously question whether the exodus was desirable and piloted measures to impede it. Long before ICE persecuted migrants on the streets of America’s most iconic cities, the United States openly pursued them as its laborers of choice.
For more than two decades after WWII, the United States beckoned Mexicans to move north to work in American agriculture. To facilitate this migration, the United States formally enlisted the cooperation of the Mexican government, which was to recruit Mexican men and transport them north, proceeding from the understanding that migrants were to be guaranteed certain baseline wages, housing, and food provisions. The treaties outlining this cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico came to be known as the Bracero Program. All told, it…
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