Photo from The Nation’s First State…The Nation’s First Police State, published in The Movement, February 1969.

The number of people who know that the Black community of Wilmington, Delaware was occupied by the National Guard for nine months after the 1968 assassination of MLK is minuscule. That is not an accident. The Military/Historian/Media Erasure business is more robust than we realize. It’s so effective that most of us have no idea how many things we don’t know.

One of us, Say Burgin, is a historian who studies the movements of the 1960’s. Frank Joyce is a movement Elder who was personally involved in the opposition to the Wilmington occupation in 1968. We are thinking about Wilmington because of the news from Minneapolis.

Here’s another relevant erasure from public memory. The current brutal mass deportation is the third such program in the last 100 years, not the first. Mexican Repatriation in the 1930’s deported at least one-million people to Mexico. Under the name “Operation Wetback,” the same thing happened again in 1954.

Relatives and friends wave goodbye to a train carrying 1,500 persons being expelled from Los Angeles back to Mexico on August 20, 1931. Many were U.S. citizens.

The U.S. Border Patrol packed Mexican immigrants into trucks when transporting them to the border for deportation. June 1954.

Manufactured Amnesia has prevented almost any reporting on this. But Donald Trump is very aware of the precedent. In a convoluted way, he referenced it in his address to Congress on March 4, 2025.

I have sent Congress a detailed funding request laying out exactly how we will eliminate these threats to protect our homeland and complete the largest deportation operation in American history, larger even than current record holder, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a moderate man but someone who believed very strongly in borders. Americans expect Congress to send me this funding without delay so I can sign it into law.

Did Congress send the funding? They did and then some. ICE is best funded........

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