The Teamsters and “Operation Wetback”

Newly re-elected President Donald Trump pledged in a recent interview that, “On day one, I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” He wants to deport anywhere from fifteen to twenty million people, mostly from Latin American countries. “Criminals” for Trump is a broad slander against undocumented workers. He plans to use the U.S. military — along with state and local law enforcement agencies — and backed by the legal authority of a host of repressive federal laws, including the Enemies Aliens Act of 1798 to carry out what would be the largest attack on the U.S. working class in this century.

There would be few areas of the country, including workplaces, schools, and communities that would not be touched by such a sweeping, militaristic assault. With the prospect of mass deportations by the incoming Trump administration on the horizon, what will the Teamsters — the country’s most Trump — aligned union stand on the issue? The Teamsters like to boast that they represent every kind of worker, they are nearly union federation unto themselves. Will the Teamsters defend undocumented workers in their own ranks and the broader working class from the Trump administration?

Looking back on the union’s history, we should be greatly worried. The Teamsters have a terrible record defending undocumented workers, especially during the 1950’s “Operation Wetback,” which Donald Trump has enthused about publicly.

Anti-Mexican Racism

“Wetback” was and is the racist term used to describe Mexican workers who cross the Rio Grande in to U.S. territory. Beginning in February 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower implemented one of the largest scale deportations of workers in U.S. history, many of whom entered the United States legally decades beforehand. Dwight Eisenhower, the WWII hero, is lamented these days as the kind of moderate Republican and public servant that has disappeared from the Republican Party during the Trump era.

Yet his administration’s luridly racist named “Operation Wetback” revealed how deeply ingrained anti-Mexican racism was — and still is — in U.S. culture and politics. Mexican immigrants were portrayed as lazy, docile, criminal-minded, undermining “American wages,” and sinister communist agitators. These racist tropes persist to the day — in one form or another — though “communist” has been replaced with “terrorist.” Chicago Tribune columnist Ron Grossman writing earlier this year reported:

Prominent U.S. senators were troubled by a government program that allowed some Mexican workers to enter the country legally. Sens. Herbert Lehman, D-N.Y., and Hubert Humphrey, D-Minn., the Tribune reported, “charged that the recruitment program makes it easy for Communists and other subversives to enter the United States.” Lehman estimated the daily flow of troublemakers as “perhaps many hundreds.”

Operation Wetback wasn’t woven out of thin, it built upon the more neutral sounding, but equally racist and terrorizing Mexican “repatriation” program under President Herbert Hoover in the early years of the Great Depression. Eisenhower’s Attorney General Herbert Brownell and Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) — the predecessor to today’s Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) both made well publicized visits to California, and other border states to sound the alarm about the alleged, but unfounded threat of “subversion” posed by Mexican immigrants.

Historian Erin Blakemore summarized Operation Wetback this way:

As many as 1.3 million people may have been swept up in the Eisenhower-era campaign with a racist name, which was designed to root out undocumented Mexicans from American society. The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants — some of them American citizens — from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century, Operation Wetback was designed to send them back to Mexico.

Adam Goodman wrote in The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants:

The campaign depended not only on hundreds of Border Patrol agents organized in special mobile task forces, but also on local and state authorities and law enforcement officers, farmers and ranchers, and the media. It stoked and mobilized public fears that “wetbacks” propagated disease, committed crimes, drained the tax base, and degraded the labor standards and living conditions of domestic workers.

According to Goodman, the shape of the campaign was somewhat different when it shifted to the industrial Midwest, specifically, the Chicago area. He wrote:

Whereas the service [INS] relied on hundreds of Border Patrol officers and the use of light planes to locate large numbers of immigrants and jeeps and buses to apprehend them in the southwestern border region, in Midwestern metropolitan areas a relatively small number of agents conducted investigations and relied on tips from citizens and informants to carry out piecemeal deportation campaigns.

Dave Beck

How did the Teamsters respond to Operation Wetback? Not only did the Teamsters, led by Dave Beck, support Eisenhower’s anti-immigrant crackdown but promoted the worst racism and anti-Communism in the ranks of the union.

The Teamsters were at the time led by Dave Beck, who became General President of the Teamsters unions in 1952, after a vicious behind the scenes battle to replace Dan Tobin, longtime leader of the union. While Tobin was a militant anti-Communist, who expelled the Minneapolis Trotskyists from the union, he was also a New Dealer and a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt. In fact, Roosevelt spoke at the 1944 Teamster convention dinner in Washington, D.C. Beck later revealed that he voted for Republican Presidential candidate Thomas Dewey in 1948 and Eisenhower in 1952. The Teamsters were becoming known as the Republican unions during this era.

In what was probably the most notorious issue of the International Teamster magazine ever, the front cover declared “The Wetback Menace: Drastic Imperative to Halt Dangerous Threat to American Security and Labor at Mexican Border.” It repeated all of the Eisenhower administration’s racist tropes against Mexicans, while expressing some concern about the unsafe living conditions, and poverty wages paid to migrant workers, much of which could have been solved by amnesty from the president, not pushing them further into the shadows or out of the country.

The Teamsters escalated the anti-Communist part of Operation Wetback by claiming that “100 Communists A Day Invade U.S. By Wetback Route.” The Teamsters article took a swipe at the mildly reformist government of Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala. In display of Cold War paranoia, it claimed:

An increase in Communist activity in Central America, particularly in Guatemala, raises the problem of stricter security on the Mexican border for it is easy for the Guatemalan to enter the country disguised as a wetback. Once in the country, he can get on his way to carry out whatever mission the Communist party may have cut out for him.

Beck in his Letter from the General President column mused, I wonder if we could infiltrate behind the Iron Curtain as easily as Communists are getting into this country? He then went to argue:

News stories of recent weeks indicate the magnitude of the Communist threat in Central America. And we are getting, according to the testimony of our own government, hundreds of Communists coming via the wetback route. This poses a serious menace to our security which is two-fold; there is the immediate danger of Communists infiltrating our workforce and into our cities, and the economic situation created by American incompetence and bungling in handling the problem is serving the long-range aims of the Communist masters.

None of this was remotely true. After disastrous testimony before the Senate Rackets committee in 1957, he chose not to run for reelection and was replaced by Jimmy Hoffa. Within a few years​, Beck was charged with financial crimes related to his time as Teamster General President and went to prison for three years.

“The American Worker”

When Teamster General President Sean O’Brien spoke before the Republican National Convention (RNC) this past summer, he was enthusiastically embraced by Donald Trump, Senator (soon-to-be Vice President) J.D. Vance, and well-known fascist sympathizer Tucker Carlson. O’Brien was proud of the speech he gave. He attacked Tech monopolies and union busting but he was silent on the lurid racism and xenophobia of the RNC. Trump’s xenophobic acceptance speech drew a wild response from the delegates. The near hysterical delegates shouted approval and hundreds of delegates waved “Mass Deportation Now!” signs.

Trump’s racism and xenophobia is well-known, and though O’Brien spoke days before the former president, he made no effort to challenge Trump’s bigotry, despite the long history of racism and xenophobia being used to weaken and divide the U.S. working class. In fact, O’Brien appeared to enjoy going along with it all. From boilerplate declarations of “I love America. Teamsters love this country” to the more ominous sounding, “To ensure we make the greatest nation in the world, BIGGER, FASTER, and STRONGER!” O’Brien kept referencing the “American worker.” A traditional way of playing to native born workers against foreign born or undocumented workers.

Back in June when Trump visited Teamster headquarters in Washington, D.C, O’Brien said he disagreed with Trump on immigration, but he said little, if anything, publicly since then. Despite proclaiming that the Teamsters are “not beholden to any party,” O’Brien appears to be very beholden to Trump. O’Brien applauded the appointment of Lori Chavez-DeRemer as Trump’s Secretary of Labor despite her terrible labor record. He even posed for a photo with her and Trump publicly thanking Trump.

If the mass deportations begin — and they are very likely to begin soon after Trump is sworn-in, the Teamsters — from bus to truck to rail workers — are likely to be some of the workers tapped to transport the undocumented to concentration camps before they are expelled from the country. How will the union respond? The history of the Teamsters is not heartening and many of its officials will likely duck the issue, if the union is to overcome its past and not participate in this great crime, it will have to come from the membership.

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