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Notes -
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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