In summary
America’s largest-ever deportation campaign unfolded 71 years ago, when agents evicted about 1 million people. A new California Museum exhibit draws comparisons to President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Editor’s note: This story contains a term for a 1950s federal immigration program that some might find offensive.
Pablo Espinoza and his older son were at the California Museum in downtown Sacramento checking out an exhibit on the World War II internment of Japanese Americans when he had an idea: He wanted to use the same space to tell a different story, one that would document America’s largest-ever deportation campaign.
By then he had dedicated his career as a journalist and then Capitol staffer to highlighting the experiences of Latinos in California. He believed he could have been a target during the 1954-55 mass deportation had he been in the state at the time.
“That could have happened to me. That could have happened to my son. We look the part,” he said.
But the timing for the exhibit he imagined wasn’t right — until now.
The California Museum in downtown Sacramento this week is unveiling “Help Wanted/Now Leave”, its special exhibit on the Eisenhower-era mass deportation campaign named after a racial slur for Latinos, Operation Wetback. It’s showing amid President Donald Trump’s crackdown on unauthorized immigrants, a campaign that he promised would exceed the 1950s campaign in scale.
The museum is embracing parallels between the past and present, featuring video testimonies from people who were deported 71 years ago alongside people who were detained and deported just last year.
“Maybe things happen for a reason. The message (the exhibit) has to share with the public is more timely than ever,” Espinoza said about the years it took him to persuade the museum to focus on the 1950s deportations.
About 1 million people were believed to have been deported during the Eisenhower-era campaign, which focused on Latino communities in the Southwest. The deportations followed by just a decade the severe labor shortages of World War II that led the government to expand its Bracero program, which brought laborers from Mexico to the U.S.
At the time, some political leaders viewed unauthorized immigrants as a threat to American workers, including California’s then Gov. Goodwin Knight. Trump made that argument in his 2024 campaign. “So when you see the border, it’s not just the crime. Your jobs are being taken away too,” Trump said before winning election that year.
The Eisenhower administration raced to deport people quickly, packing them in boats and trucks. Some died of sunstroke during the journey. Today, advocates for detainees say they’re being held in crowded conditions with insufficient access to medical care.
Then — as now — immigrants reported being rounded up indiscriminately based on their appearance and accent. The Eisenhower administration used a racial epithet — “wetback” — as its official name for its deporation push. Last month, text messages and audio recordings emerged showing present-day immigration agents using similar slurs as they conducted sweeps in Los Angeles.
Deported as a U.S. citizen
The exhibit features video storytelling by Victor Ochoa, a longtime San Diego artist and activist who was deported as a child in 1954.
His mother had been telling the family not to speak Spanish as the deportations picked up, fearing it would draw attention to them. One day federal agents in overcoats and wide-rimmed hats showed up at their East Los Angeles home with a jarring message: His family had three days to get out of the U.S. on their own or wait to be deported.
Ochoa was a citizen, a 7-year-old born in the United States, but his parents were from Mexico. They left rather than face a more forceful deportation.
“I remember them scaring the hell out of my mom, and she cried after they left,” Ochoa told CalMatters.
His deportation led to a lifetime of activism, including helping to create San Diego’s Chicano Park. He credits the schools he attended in Tijuana with leading him to think critically about the United States, a worldview that comes through in his work as a muralist.
He’s been helping groups that support unauthorized immigrants, and said he’s been troubled by reports of agents picking up parents near San Diego schools.
“It’s meaner now” than the 1950s campaign, he said.
Detained just before starting nursing job
In June 2025, immigration agents picked up Vilma Palacios, 23, about a week before she was expected to begin a new job as a nurse at a New Orleans hospital. She spent six months in a detention center fighting to stay in the country before giving up and agreeing to be deported to Honduras.
Palacios came to the U.S. at age 6 and spent much of her youth in Orange County. She finished high school in Louisiana and earned a degree from Louisiana State University.
Her case made headlines. She had no criminal record and what seemed like a bright future. She was aware of heightened immigration enforcement, but didn’t think she’d be a target.
“They were saying we’re coming for criminals and people with criminal backgrounds, not people who have dedicated their whole life to the U.S. and their career to serving the community. I never thought it would get to that point,” she said in an interview with CalMatters.
But her story didn’t end in Central America. Her nursing network led her to a job at a hospital in British Columbia, where she now lives.
She views today’s immigration crackdown as a loss for the United States. “These are good people that are being sent back. There are good people in the U.S. that just want to contribute and make it better, that are being deported.”
TV reporter’s journey
Espinoza from the California Museum board of trustees arrived in the United States from Ecuador with a student visa. It led to a career in TV news at stations in Texas, then in Fresno and then at Univision in Sacramento before he joined the Assembly Speaker’s Office.
As a young man, he believed that immigrants should “stay in line” for citizenship, but his perspective changed as he met people who crossed the border to support their families and had no realistic hope of gaining legal status.
In those cases, he believed, immigration “isn’t a choice at all, and it highlights the unfairness of an immigration system that doesn’t provide a path to citizenship for folks that are vulnerable economically yet are providing an important service to this country,” he said.
He’d like to think the new exhibit will inspire visitors, as he was when he attended the internment exhibit with his son, Adrian.
Espinoza is thinking of him as the show begins. Adrian died in 2024 at age 25. They used to talk about politics, which Adrian professed to hate, “although he was always involved.”
“In the end I’m hoping maybe people see this with their children and then think, ‘What else can I do?’”
