Bill O'Reilly was very outspoken about his disdain for the outlandish plans many in the GOP have of deporting millions of undocumented workers because the courts would never allow it and he felt the FBN moderators should have shut down that discussion during the debate.
Donald Trump joined him wednesday night and Bill tried to explain to him that Ike's plan which was called "Operation Wetback," was very brutal to those they deported.
O'Reilly first asked Trump if he knew what Eisenhower named the deportation program.
"I do but I don’t like the term. I wouldn’t use the term," Trump responded, alluding to the program's title, "Operation Wetback." O'Reilly said he was referring to another name for the deportation effort, "bracero."
The Fox host then lectured Trump about Eisenhower's deportation process, through which the U.S. deported hundreds of thousand of immigrants, often under horrific conditions. American officials dropped many of the immigrants off in remote areas of Mexico without a way to get home, and some died in the sweltering heat.
"That was brutal what they did to those people to kick them back," O'Reilly told Trump on Wednesday night. "The stuff they did was really brutal, it could never happen today."
Trump refused to use the "wetback" slur because he does know it's offensive, but as usual he said he'd be a much more human being when he does round them up, imprison them and then ship them back across the border.
"I’ve heard it both ways. I’ve heard good reports. I’ve heard bad reports," Trump said in response. "We would do it in a very humane way."
BillO once again told him that the courts would never allow him to do that and then they debated about Trump's idea of deporting "anchor babies," which is an offensive slur, but they both had no problem using it repeatedly.
TRUMP: Do you remember when you said about the anchor babies that there's nothing you can do about it and I said yes there is and I was right about that?
O'REILLY: No you weren't.
TRUMP: And frankly all we need is a simple -- well yes I was. You don't need a new amendment. All we have to do is go back to Congress and have a rather -- it's been fully vetted now, Bill. I was right on the anchor babies.
O'REILLY: The courts have ruled twice against the anchor baby stuff. You'd have to get a constitutional amendment passed to overturn that. You might be able to do it. You might be able to do it, but you just couldn't --
TRUMP: Bill, you don't have to do. You don't have to do a constitutional amendment. You need an act of Congress.
Digby explains what happened during Ike's deportation plan:
In Mexicali, Mexico, temperatures can reach 125 degrees as heat envelops an arid desert. Without a body of water nearby to moderate the climate, the heavy sun is relentless — and deadly.
During the summer of 1955, this is where hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were “dumped” after being discovered as migrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border illegally. Unloaded from buses and trucks carrying several times their capacity, the deportees stumbled into the Mexicali streets with few possessions and no way of getting home.
This was strategic: the more obscure the destination within the Mexican interior, the less opportunities they would have to return to America. But the tactic also proved to be dangerous, as the migrants were left without resources to survive.
After one such round-up and transfer in July, 88 people died from heat stroke.
At another drop-off point in Nuevo Laredo, the migrants were “brought like cows” into the desert.
Among the over 25 percent who were transported by boat from Port Isabel, Texas, to the Mexican Gulf Coast, many shared cramped quarters in vessels resembling an “eighteenth century slave ship” and “penal hell ship.”
These deportation procedures, detailed by historian Mae M. Ngai, were not anomalies. They were the essential framework of Operation Wetback — a concerted immigration law enforcement effort implemented by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1954 — and the deportation model that Donald Trump says he intends to follow.
