Under the direction of Border Patrol chief Harlon Carter and INS Commissioner General Joseph Swing, the U.S. government launches Operation Wetback, a massive military-style deportation campaign targeting ethnic Mexican communities across the southwestern United States. The operation employs Border Patrol agents, local law enforcement, and military resources in coordinated sweeps of farms, ranches, factories, and neighborhoods. The INS claims to deport or "voluntarily repatriate" over 1.1 million people during the operation, though historians question the accuracy of these figures.
Operation Wetback is collective punishment operationalized as federal policy: entire Latino communities are subjected to dragnet enforcement regardless of citizenship or legal status. American citizens of Mexican descent are swept up alongside undocumented immigrants, with skin color and Spanish-language use serving as de facto probable cause. Families are separated, with deported individuals often dumped across the border without resources. Some deportees are transported by ship to Veracruz, Mexico, in conditions compared to slave ships; at least 88 people die from heat exposure during one mass transport.
The operation's name itself—using a racial slur as its official designation—reflects the dehumanization embedded in collective punishment ideology. Carter and Swing design the operation as a spectacle of force: visible military-style operations in ethnic neighborhoods intended to terrorize communities into "self-deportation," the same logic of collective intimidation practiced by Texas Rangers during La Matanza and by the Klan during Reconstruction. Operation Wetback becomes the explicit template invoked by the Trump administration in both 2017 and 2025 when designing mass deportation programs, with the historical operation's name cited approvingly. The direct line from Harlon Carter's teenage killing of Ramón Casiano through his rise in the Border Patrol to his command of Operation Wetback represents the most complete individual embodiment of the collective punishment tradition flowing from Reconstruction through modern immigration enforcement.