Presidential Rhetoric and Policy Direction: A Study of Current Executive Orders

The analyses of the contemporary challenges already facing by identified undocumented immigrants who infiltrated into the United States’ territorial spaces are presently facing serious challenges with expectation to be received back home in an unexpected occurrence neither the concerns citizens nor their governments ever thought of. But, President Donald Trump gave full promises during his Presidential campaign in 2024 to put in full practices his deportation agenda as a means of relieving the U.S in several ways ranging from securing specific jobs to real Americans and security considerations by bringing in new dimensions of his Executive Orders (EO). In fact, the African Continent is actually affected as well as other Continents like South America, Asia, Australasian and Europe. For example, the overall total African involved for the 45 countries stood at 37,186 citizens representing 02.57 percent of a total of 1,445, 549 to be deported in different countries around the World. Therefore, Executive Order (EO) is essentially statements about how the president wants the federal government to be managed, which can mean instructions to federal agencies or requests for reports. An executive order is a directive by the president of the United States that manages operations of the federal government. They allow a president to wield power without action from Congress, but there are limits to what orders can achieve. Executive orders can also play an important role in laying out major policy agendas. While these orders are legally binding, they are not legislation as they don't require approval from Congress. It doesn't necessarily mean the president can enact orders without challenge, as Congress could still block an order from being fulfilled by removing funding or creating other hurdles. In fact, the scrutiny of specialized sources and documentaries facilitate us to use a historical approach by bringing out statistical analyses of each Continent then ranking co

To reduce Federal agency impact on the environment and increase energy security, US Presidents have issued Executive Orders, which along with other legislation aim to improve Federal environmental and energy performance. In order to demonstrate the relationship between policy development at the executive level and management of policy directives, this paper outlines key provisions of Executive Order 13423 and Executive Order 13514, and assesses the effectiveness of the Executive Orders in achieving energy and greenhouse gas reduction in the Department of Defense. The integration of an Environmental Management System with the new ISO 50001 Energy Management System is also examined through a Navy hospital case study to better understand the relation between creating, implementing and managing energy policy directives. A review of how these two management system standards can provide structure in energy and environmental management is discussed in relation to meeting energy goals in Executive Order 13423 and Executive Order 13514.

It's a Full Moon Tonight: Speaker Meaning and the Interpretation and Construction of Executive Orders (with Related Reflections on Legislative Speaker Meaning)

Executive Summary With the Trump administration’s recent executive order attempting to eliminate birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to two undocumented or temporary (nonimmigrant visa holder) immigrants, litigators have been actively arguing against the order, with every case in lower courts finding it to be illegal. Consequently, the Supreme Court is hearing the government’s case in 2026. In light of these events, this paper seeks to provide a set of baseline estimates describing the economic contribution of beneficiaries of birthright citizenship. Based on established demographic and economic methods, we estimate that beneficiaries of birthright citizenship will have contributed $7.7 trillion to the U.S. economy through their income between 1975 and 2074, including a projected $1 trillion by future children not yet born and whose economic contribution would be most at risk under the implementation of the Trump administration’s executive order. Additionally, the U.S. workforce will have benefited from 3.1 million workers between 1975 and 2074, with 2.1 million working in occupations typically requiring some college education, a level of attainment that would have been highly improbable for these workers without U.S. citizenship. In fact, among future children not yet born, we estimate a potential loss of 400,000 workers in occupations typically requiring some college education. The estimates are based on three groups of U.S.-born individuals born to two undocumented or temporary immigrants totalling 3.9 million beneficiaries: (i) current working-age adults, (ii) current children, and (iii) future children. The estimates are based on data drawn from U.S. Census Bureau surveys. Our estimates can be considered conservative as they only take into account U.S.-born individuals in the U.S. for whom both parents are undocumented or temporary immigrants, and were also living in the U.S. as of 2024. The total economic contributions we estimate vary across the country. These contributions are particularly high in the American West, led by California and Arizona, and in the South, led by Texas and Florida. Further research should examine the economic premium of birthright citizenship compared with a scenario where the beneficiaries lose legal status. Similarly, the full fiscal impact of birthright citizenship could be examined. This paper’s goal, however, is to provide an initial set of baseline estimates establishing the economic contribution of beneficiaries of birthright citizenship that have already materialized or are expected to materialize under current birthright citizenship practice.

Donald Trump, an American reality-television celebrity and business mogul, is at this writing a front-running Republican in the bid for the US presidency. His opening salvo as a candidate included charges that Mexican immigrants, particularly the unauthorized, are rapists and criminals and that they bring their problems with them to the USA. He also tied immigration from Latin America to a potential increase in terrorism in the country. Trump may not be taken seriously by some, but his conjectures have revved up antiimmigration sentiment, with other Republican presiden tial candidates renewing proposals for building a wall along the US–Mexican border and advocating stricter immigration laws and enforcement. The underlying sentiment is that undocumented Mexican immigrants represent a clear “negative” to US society, a theory also applied to those from many other countries. A common assumption of today’s proponents of strict immigration reform is that unauthorized (or “undocumented”) immigrants come into the country and use public resources, especially health care, to which they are not entitled or have not earned. However, for sound health policymaking, it is important to untangle and demystify this line of reasoning to get to the facts, and also to understand the potential consequences of excluding undocumented immigrants from access to services such as health care. Let’s first address the fundamental question of whether undocumented immigrants are a drain on our nation’s resources. It is estimated that there are 11.4 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, 81% from Latin America. While their proportion has been declining over the past few years, Mexicans make up approximately 58% of the total, while immigrants from other Latin American countries account for the remaining 23%. At the same time, immigration from Asia, the Middle East and Africa is rising. Six states account for over 60% of unauthorized immigrants (California, Texas, Florida, New York, New Jersey and Illinois). Undocumented laborers make up a bit over 5% of the US workforce. Collectively, undocumented immigrants contribute approximately $12 billion per year in state, local and federal taxes, and this is expected to increase by $2.2 billion under the Obama Administration’s proposed comprehensive immigration reform. Moreover, they pay an estimated $13 billion per year into Social Security, from which they receive no benefit.[1] It is well known that in the USA, not everyone has equal access to health care. In fact, at 40%, undocumented Latinos have among the lowest levels of insurance coverage and thus are more likely to have to pay for health services out of pocket. They also use very little primary or secondary health care.[2] When they use primary health care, they typically seek services at busy, poorly funded community clinics or in more costly hospital emergency departments. These facilities can be of low quality and without sufficient resources to provide language-concordant care. Ironi cally, while some of those 60% without insurance may receive indigent care, the services provided them in safety-net facilities are often subsidized by federal and state provisions—to which their taxes contribute. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) became law in 2010, intended to improve health insurance coverage for the approximately 30 million uninsured in the USA at that time, either through the Medicaid expansion program or one of the health insurance Marketplace exchanges. Recent data show that the ACA is working: some 17 million more people have been insured since 2013, and 9 in 10 US citizens and residents now have insurance.[3] However, undocumented immi grants are excluded from the ACA. Latinos who are legally authorized but have been in the country less than five years are also excluded from participation in the Medicaid expansion program. This exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the ACA raises a number of population health/clinical, economic and moral issues. And all have consequences. On the population health front, because the undocumented have low insurance coverage rates and are blocked from the ACA, they are less likely to receive preventive care, more likely to delay seeking necessary care, and have worse chronic disease morbidity and mortality as a result. On the economic side, the undocumented are also, on average, young, healthy, and use relatively little health care. Including them in the ACA, particularly in the Marketplace exchanges, would be economically beneficial, offsetting higher costs of treating older and chronically ill patients. This would also provide them greater access to preventive services and reduce delays in seeking needed health care, resulting in long-term cost savings to health plans and taxpay ers, not to mention overall better community health.

Race in the War on Drugs: The Social Consequences of Presidential Rhetoric

US drug shortages could continue for years

IntroductionThe Places and Spaces of Latinx Cultures Alberto Varon, Issue Editor (bio) As promised during his campaign, President Trump made immigration central to his administration's goals, aiming to restrict the influx of those who immigrate to the United States through either legal or extralegal means. Almost immediately after taking office in January 2017, President Trump issued an executive order instructing the Department of Justice to prioritize the criminal prosecution of immigration offenses. The current attack on immigrants took further shape in September 2017, when President Trump chose to rescind protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) afforded to the estimated 800,000 people brought to the US as minors. Despite widespread and bipartisan support for the Dreamers, as DACA recipients are often called, President Trump directed the agencies under his purview to phase out the program that enabled DACA recipients to avoid deportation and to work legally in the country. Ending DACA put hundreds of thousands of child immigrants at risk, deliberately undermining these young Americans' chance of success and preventing their inclusion as members of society. The changes to DACA were a clear attack on the social incorporation of a vulnerable segment of the population, paving the way for the immigration crisis the following summer. These attacks deliberately racialize and exclude Latinx people, demanding a collective and concerted response. The immigration crisis requires us to imagine how Latinx communities can engage, resist, and reshape the spaces that structure our lives. ________ From the fall of 2017 into the summer of 2018, under the direction of the Trump administration, the offices under the Department of Homeland Security altered their policies on how to process undocumented immigrants to the United States. On May 7, 2018, Attorney General Jeff Sessions publicly declared a "zero-tolerance policy" for those entering the country without authorization. [End Page 8] Whereas previously authorities working in US border control and enforcement had several options and could exercise discretion, the Trump administration has taken a hardline stance, demanding full criminal prosecution of those entering the country without appropriate documentation and prioritizing deportation as quickly as possible, often at the cost of due process. As part of the drive to criminally prosecute unauthorized immigrants, the administration instituted a "family separation" policy that facilitated the rapid deportation of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers deemed unworthy or undesirable by authorities. Minors, some as young as toddlers, were torn from their families and travel companions, forced into state custody or detained until foster care arrangements could be made. This practice peaked in the summer of 2018, when over two thousand children remained in detention separate from their families and travel companions. Such practices come with untold costs to the mental and material well-being of those being held, and have direct implications for the immigrants' pending cases. Following an international outcry and national protests, the family separation practice was ended by executive order on June 20, 2018, and a federal judge gave the US government thirty days to reunite families. Nonetheless, in order to remain in compliance with the law, officials have shifted immigration strategy so that families are now detained together. While this shift restores some of the basic human rights and dignity to the detained families, immigration enforcement officials continue to treat migrants as criminals. While there is no official US government policy requiring the separation of families, this is precisely what makes this policy especially pernicious. The decision whether or not to separate families relies on prosecutorial discretion. Should an unauthorized immigrant be held for immigration proceedings, they remain in detention centers united with their kin. However, under the revised directive, adult immigrants are to be tried as criminals, and thus sent to prisons separate from the minor children. Although immigration rates have remained relatively stable year after year, by late summer 2018 an estimated 12,000 migrant children were held in government-contracted detention centers and shelters, with over a thousand others expected to join those ranks.1 Mr. Sessions, who in his announcement of the family separation policy expressed skepticism over the legitimacy of a majority of asylum cases, has long maintained a cynical position regarding American race relations. His record on these...

Undocumented immigration remains the subject of contentious debate in the United States. While this debate has increasingly focused on the cultural, economic, and national security concerns raised by undocumented immigration, the work of several cities has highlighted the human side to this debate. Drawing from three months of field work and 21 semi-structured interviews at an emergency shelter in Central Texas, this paper discusses the inclusive health policies of so-called “sanctuary cities.” The inclusive health policies of sanctuary cities, including the establishment of city health insurance and healthcare programs, has the potential to bridge a widening gap in health outcomes between undocumented individuals and their native-born or authorized counterparts. These local policies extend a form of membership to undocumented immigrants and inform new directions for federal immigration enforcement policies, including an enhanced focus on the specific health needs of undocumented immigrants alongside the securitization of national borders. To ensure adequate care of undocumented immigrants, inclusive health policies should be increasingly pursued by local and federal levels of government in tandem.

Andrew Jackson: A Rhetorical Portrayal of Presidential Leadership

Two Hate NotesDeportations, COVID-19, and Xenophobia against Hmong Americans in the Midwest Kong Pheng Pha (bio) In February 2020, I received a xenophobic hate note in my campus mailbox regarding President Donald Trump's negotiations with the Lao government to deport Hmong living in the United States back to Laos. The hate note read: "Deport all Hmongs, Deport all illegal aliens HMONGS, ICE & CBP are law enforcement and should be obeyed, No room for criminals, No Amnesty ever."I was shaken and unsettled. The xenophobic hate note created intense anxiety for me because I know that my advocacy as a Hmong American scholar and professor teaching and speaking to the media about the deportation issues rendered me a vulnerable target for racists and xenophobes. In the following days, I discussed the deportation negotiations with Laos at length in my course, "Hmong American Experiences in the U.S." My students were furious about the larger American public's ahistorical, inaccurate, and misguided readings regarding the Hmong presence in the United States as forcibly displaced political refugees who fought as proxy soldiers for the Central Intelligence Agency's secret war in Laos in the 1960s and 1970s. One Hmong American student commented that the deportation negotiations made her feel unwanted in the United States. How can I convey that I care about her? My spirit was shattered; I was on edge, demoralized, and fearing for my safety. The news reports, activism, and social discourse surrounding the deportation negotiations came to a screeching halt when news of COVID-19 broke out all over the world just one month later, in March 2020. While still recovering from a traumatic racist experience with the hate note, I was [End Page 335] thrust into another world of racism and xenophobia amidst the rapidly spreading global pandemic. A familiar wave of anti-Asian racism swept across the United States, as reckless as the virus itself. I was struck by another racist and xenophobic incident when a hate note was taped onto a Hmong American couple's apartment door in Woodbury, Minnesota. The note read: "We're watching you fucking chinks take the Chinese virus back to china. We don't want you hear infecting us with your diseases!!!!!!!!!!–your friendly neighborhood."1 The explosion of racist violence against Asians during the outbreak of COVID-19 exacerbated my fears of being Asian American in western, mostly rural Wisconsin. For my students, the couple, and myself, it is difficult to shake off that unsettling feeling of being targeted by both the U.S. settler state and racists on the ground. I find myself asking how we can turn to each other for support and care in these times of heightened racism. There is one strand of social discourse that connects the two hate notes directed against me in Wisconsin and the Hmong American couple in Minnesota. The first note conflates Hmong as "illegals" and renders invisible the specific historical context that was the caveat to Hmong political migration to the United States. The second note conflates Hmong Americans with Chinese and China, and renders Hmong Americans invisible and anything but Americans. In the note that I received, the writer deployed the concept of "illegal aliens" towards Hmong to justify our deportation. "Illegal aliens" are understood pejoratively to be subjects whose presence in the United States is unlawful and thus whose existence in and of itself constitutes criminality. The "illegal alien" is reduced to a condition of statelessness because they do not belong in the U.S. nation-state via their lack of legal citizenship and/or formal recognition of their presence. For Hmong, the deployment of "illegal aliens" feels familiar due to the Hmong's historical and political conditions as stateless refugees. Although different from the position of the "illegal alien," nonetheless our deportability even as political refugees serves to remind us that we are neither citizens nor Americans, if not in the legal sense, then certainly in the social sense. The Woodbury note contained an equally pernicious undertone. It aligns closer to the yellow peril discourse attributed to Asians as diseased invaders. Hmong Americans are effaced by racism, even though Hmong Americans make up the largest...

Older adults and people with physical disabilities can get Medicare coverage for mobility devices, like wheelchairs, walkers, and scooters, which are necessary for use in their homes. However they cannot get coverage for mobility devices that are solely for functioning outside their home. Since the institution of Medicare's coverage standards for mobility devices, and other kinds of durable medical equipment, nearly four decades ago, advances have been made in three critical areas: improvements in design of mobility devices that allow people to participate more fully in their communities; widespread societal recognition that with appropriate accommodations many limitations on functioning can and should be lifted; and recent court decisions requiring that individuals with disabilities be provided with the necessary supports to live as independently as possible in their communities. The current interpretation of Medicare's coverage standards for mobility devices does not reflect these advances. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' (CMS) interpretation of Medicare's coverage standard prevents people from getting needed medical equipment to function within their communities. By contemporary medical and legal standards, the [CMS's] interpretation is unreasonable and quite likely unlawful. The Medicare statute neither specifies that durable medical equipment is exclusively for use in the patient's home nor bars consideration of an equipment's use outside the home. There is no indication of Congressional intent to support this limitation of coverage. CMS has both the authority and the responsibility to interpret the Medicare statute so as to be consistent with historical developments in law, technology and social mores. United States Supreme Court precedent holds that agencies are "charged with the administration of [a] statute in light of everyday realities." Everyday realities have changed since Medicare was launched in 1965. Laws such as the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the Ticket to Work and Work Improvements Incentives Act of 1999 reflect a broad, bipartisan commitment to increasing community integration of people with disabilities. This commitment is evident in judicial decisions, including Olmstead v. L.C. ex rel. Zimring, and executive orders, such as President George W. Bush's New Freedom Initiative, a set of proposals to promote opportunities for Americans with disabilities to learn and develop skills, engage in productive work, make choices about their daily lives, and participate fully in their communities. Developing political and legal standards are consistent with medical opinion: the costs of isolation for people with disabilities can include poorer health outcomes and higher systematic health costs. Also, scientific evidence indicates that people who get inappropriate mobility devices given their needs develop secondary medical conditions. In light of technological advances that today make appropriate equipment available and community integration possible, CMS has a responsibility to update its interpretation of the Medicare statute. While CMS must rightly be concerned with costs associated with a more modern interpretation of Medicare's coverage policy, other insurers have found that an appropriate standard has not led to an explosion in the provision of more expensive mobility devices. Specifically, the brief recommends that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services: (1) correct its Medicare coverage policy to cover medically appropriate mobility devices that help maintain or improve functioning for people in the environments they are likely to encounter in their daily routines (both inside and outside of the home), and (2) guard against unnecessary expenses for Medicare by incorporating mandatory equipment evaluations to ensure that people receive equipment that matches their needs. While durable medical equipment encompasses a wide array of assistive devices, this brief will focus on wheeled mobility items, recognizing that this analysis will have varying applications to other durable medical equipment as well.

Underground Money Marieke de Goede Shortly after September 11, 2001, it became clear that the war on terrorist finance was to occupy a central place in the war on terror. The Terrorist Financing Executive Order enacted by George W. Bush on September 24, 2001, made it legally possible to pursue financial supporters of terrorism as terrorists. The Executive Order dramatically expanded the U.S. government's powers to indict those providing funds and infrastructural support to alleged terrorists, and to freeze and block assets. The order also published a blacklist of terrorist organizations and individuals whose assets were to be frozen globally. The order was heralded as "the first strike on the global terror network." In the accompanying press release, President Bush said: "We will starve the terrorists of funding, turn them against each other, rout them out of their safe hiding places, and bring them to justice."1 The executive order was a first step in what the U.S. government calls "the war on terrorist finance," which entails, among other measures, freezing assets, compiling blacklists, designing new financial regulation, pursuing informal money transmitters, and engaging in a global diplomatic offensive.2 In its imagination of terrorist finance as an underground sphere, the war on terrorist finance employs the "discourse of civilization versus barbarism" that, according to Jodi Dean and Paul Passavant, pervades politics since 9/11.3 For example, when the U.S. Treasury closed down a number of informal money transmitters in the name of fighting terrorist finance on November 7, 2001, President Bush stated, "The entry points to these networks may be a small storefront operation, but follow the network to its center, and you discover wealthy banks and sophisticated technology, all at the service of mass murderers. By shutting these networks down, we disrupt their murderous work." Bush continued, "We find an enemy who hides in caves in Afghanistan and in the shadows in our own society. It's an enemy who can only survive in darkness."4 [End Page 140] This paper examines practices of governing in the war on terrorist finance and shows them to be dependent on articulations of an underground world of terrorist money and suspicious transactions on the one hand, and a legitimate global world of financial normality on the other. As such, the war on terrorist finance is part of the everyday "legitimation work" of globalization post-9/11, producing the world of legitimate global finance simultaneously with the world of the illegitimate underground. For Bill Maurer, Susan Bibler Coutin, and Barbara Yngvesson, globalization is not something that exists unproblematically but is a discursively produced phenomenon that performatively creates the categories it assumes to transcend (e.g., nations and sovereignty). They write: scholarly debates about globalization . . . assume that there is a coherent field (of subjects, nations, and so forth) that "flows" of people, capital, and images threaten to destroy or to open up. And yet this field is inherently fractured and is always in jeopardy. It takes work to stitch it together, and abject figures such as the illegal alien or the money-laundering tax haven have a key ideological place in this process.5 They call the everyday work of producing the coherent worlds and subjectivities that belie globalization "the legitimation work of globalization," which "includes issuing and denying documents, sealing and opening records, regulating and criminalizing transactions, and repudiating and claiming countries and persons."6 Since 9/11, questions regarding the resurrection of borders in finance and security have dominated the media as well as academic literature, and legitimating globalization has taken on new urgency. To some extent, the processes that enable the continued legitimation of globalization work through inscriptions of the livable/legitimate/licit and the unlivable/illegitimate/illicit in the context of the war on terror. While questioning the world of underground money as imaged by policymakers in the war on terrorist finance, this article also problematizes the coherent world of global finance as imagined not just by policymakers but also by academics writing on international finance and international political economy...

Both at the federal and state levels, tax credits have proved effective policy instruments to combat poverty, and they are at the heart of President Biden's massive initiative on childhood poverty. However, about one of every five children suffering poverty in the United States has an unauthorized immigrant parent and thus little or no access to tax credits. That is nearly two million children, and 85 percent of them are US citizens. Achieving historic reductions in childhood poverty thus will be impossible without remedying the eligibility exclusions and bureaucratic impediments that unauthorized immigrants face in the US tax system. All individuals who make money and reside in the United States are obliged to pay federal income taxes via a return filed with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). For unauthorized immigrants and others who do not qualify for a Social Security Number (SSN) that requires an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). In this two-tier system, ITIN filers have the same income tax due as Social Security filers, but they do not receive the same credits. ITIN filers have never been eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and some of their children were excluded from the Child Tax Credit (CTC) in the Trump administration's 2017 tax bill. Both credits are highly effective anti-poverty programs, providing immediate relief while also incentivizing work and earnings. The tax credits are the critical policy tool in Biden's American Plan for reducing child poverty, and they would be funded through the budget reconicilation legislation devised by Congressional Democrats in the summer of 2021. As summer drew to a close, ITIN inclusion was beginning to enter the discussion among advocates and legislators about the bill's detailed provisions. But eligibility is not the only barrier. Internal government monitors have repeatedly criticized the IRS for heavy-handed and inefficient practices that have placed undue burdens on ITIN taxpayers and that have hindered compliance with the law. The use of ITINs has plummeted in recent years from a high of 4.6 million returns in 2014 to 2.5 million in 2020. Prompted by the economic losses and the medical toll suffered by unauthorized immigrants during the pandemic and by their newly valued roles as “essential workers,” the federal government and several state governments have taken important steps to lessen the exclusion of ITIN taxpayers. The first federal stimulus package excluded not only ITIN holders but also their family members with SSNs. Congress extended eligibility to members of ITIN households with SSNs for the second and third stimulus checks. Meanwhile, California, Colorado, Maryland, New Mexico, Washington, Maine, and Oregon broke with the federal government and made ITIN filers fully eligible for their state EITCs, and as of July 2021 similar measures were under consideration in four other states. Early evidence from California and Colorado suggests that ITIN inclusion could prove a highly effective means of reaching poor children with the benefits of a state EITC. Child poverty can only be attacked successfully if ITIN households receive equal access to federal and state tax credit programs. This can be accomplished if: Congress and state legislatures permit full eligibility for all EITC and CTC programs. Congress mandates reforms to the procedures for getting and keeping an ITIN that have been proposed in multiple reports to Congress by the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an internal monitor at the IRS. Immigrants’ rights advocates and other civil society organizations, with government support, undertake a multi-year campaign to encourage ITIN application and use. The IRS receives funding to support a greatly expanded ITIN program.

A major United States federal government program to regulate the flow of undocumented workers into the United States-Mexico border region was undertaken in 1954. This program, pushed forward by the Department of Justice (DOJ), was carried out through an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) roundup called Operation Wetback, and a DOJ sponsored legislative package titled S. 3660 and S. 3661, popularly known in Congress as the Wetback Bills (Garcia 1980, Langham 1984). Operation Wetback was begun along the California-Arizona border, then moved to the South Texas border, and was finally completed in Chicago. This roundup resulted in an unprecedented expulsion of about 200,000 Mexican undocumented workers, most of them along the international line. During this same period, the Wetback Bills were introduced into Congress. S. 3660 called for sanctions against employers and S. 3661 required seizure of vehicles used to transport undocumented workers. Neither bill was enacted into law. Still the roundup, along with the proposed legislation, signaled dramatic changes in U.S. immigration enforcement policy, especially along the border. The government's enforcement program greatly surprised not only Mexican undocumented workers but also U.S. agricultural employers. Employers in southern and central California, western Arizona and South Texas used large numbers of undocumented workers. They had for a long time depended on undocumented workers to supply cheap labor to plant and harvest crops. The INS targeted these agricultural employers for the roundup. Historically the INS and the employers had enjoyed a tacit gentleman's in which undocumented workers were often allowed to do seasonal agricultural work without worry about apprehension. This off-the-record agreement had worked since the 1920s (Craig 1971, Reisler 1976). In light of this longstanding working agreement, why in 1954 did the government carry out Operation Wetback and propose the Wetback Bills? This article will attempt to answer this question through examination of (1) relationships between government, workers and employers, and immigration, (2) the larger historical context leading up to the enforcement program, and (3) the actual events surrounding it. This article will additionally assess the impact of the government's policy in 1954; examining how it affected Mexican immigration flow up through the adoption of the Immigration and Control Act of 1986. What emerges is a better understanding of why the government embarked on its new policy in 1954, and what it signaled for the future of federal action concerning undocumented immigration across the border.