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Every time I see one of these bits about how hard it is to deport people, I just find myself asking why we can't just repeat Operation Wetback.
Can't we just make them? I mean, if a US ship full of a bunch of immigrants to be repatriated, guarded by Marines and with a couple of Navy boats escorting, show up at one of the country's ports and start offloading people, what can the country in question really do about it?
I mean the answer is just announce everyone who gets deported goes to Haiti- lots of people will decide that Mexico is a better deal and go back on their lonesome- if it comes to that. But as the regional hegemon the US does have an interest in stability and that means not trampling on the sovereignty of lesser powers.
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Operation Wetback was able to deport as many people as they did because they had an unusually high level of Mexican co-operation, which was only available in the context of a bracero programme which let in roughly as many legal Mexicans as Operation Wetback deported illegal ones. There were tens of thousands of people who were deported under Operation Wetback, returned to the US as braceros, violated the rules of the bracero programme, and got deported again under Operation Wetback. All within less than a year.
Operation Wetback also operated at a time when America was sufficiently racist that nobody cared if a few Hispanic US citizens were deported accidentally (as far as I can see, nobody has investigated how many citizens were deported, but the Great Depression era "Mexican repatriation" programme had deported hundreds of thousands of them). The reason why deportation is administratively expensive is that America has no list of US citizens it can check people against, and the list of legal immigrants isn't accurate or complete enough (this is pure INS incompetence - in principle the US should have an up-to-date list of all non-citizens legally in the country) for deporting anyone not on it to be "safe".
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That actually seems like a pretty good example. I'm not sure from the descriptions I'm reading how much was random round-ups and how much was how the government already had paperwork on a lot of them. This might help with visa overstays, but I think most immigration at least through the southern border generally does not generate a government paper trail. There also was a level of buy-in from the police and actually employers too (!) which I don't think would be replicated today. Also, Britannica says the number was probably more like 300k rather than the claimed million or more, so if we extrapolate to today, that only would deport 600k rather than the millions Trump says. Plus, this was 1954. Recall that the US had just exited the Korean War and fought WW2 in the same decade -- the scale, capability, and organization of the military back then was at a high point and with a large amount of manpower that frankly the National Guard today I don't think could replicate.
There are limits, or more accurately consequences, to what the US can do abroad. Like let's take Mexico. Mexico generally lets us get away with a lot, but the threat of force might cause a lot of issues. We would actually stand to lose a lot if we forced it too much, like think how much access the DEA has in Mexico, that could change overnight. So yeah, very short term guns would work, but I don't think it would last long, and is that really what we want to return to? Would give echoes of the gun-enforced interventionism of the early 20th century in Latin America, which a lot of people frown on today.
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You don't even really need all that fanfare, you just throw them in ships with enough fuel for a one way trip. If Castro could empty his prisons to the US, why can't the US do it to others with vastly more ressources?
It requires only the will to do so, really.
Well the Cuban prisons angle was way overstated for one, for two they don't, uh, want to go to back, and three we don't actually own that many ships and who is going to be the captain anyways? Incoming boats are much more difficult to deal with than deliberately sending out boats, especially since we both legally and morally (and, frankly, politically as well) have to be at least a little humane about it.
No, you basically do need buses or planes for people going to Mexico and planes exclusively for people going elsewhere. Though there would be a certain irony if we ended up buying a ton of Chinese-built ships to use for deportations.
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