Eisenhower didn't deport... oh, wait, he did
Trump: “Dwight Eisenhower …moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country…Dwight Eisenhower—you don’t get nicer, you don’t get friendlier—they moved a million and a half people out.”
As strange as this sounds, he’s mostly right about that—though nobody really knows how many people were really shipped out.
The folks at
Factcheck.org dug into claims about the deportation policies of former Presidents Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower and came up with a few key figures after talking to archivists in their libraries.
The main point: under Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” (yes, that’s the actual name), “just over 2.1 million [Mexican immigrants] were recorded as having been deported or having departed under threat of deportation,” according to official statistics. The number actually deported is thought to be about 1.3 million people (not the 13 million figure occasionally thrown around), but “even that figure is criticized as inflated by guesswork.”
Hoover officially deported or “induced to leave” 121,000 people. During Truman’s eight years in office, about 3.4 million people were deported or left under the threat of deportation.
— Katy O'Donnell