A new exhibit at the California Museum in downtown Sacramento is drawing a striking parallel between two chapters of American immigration history separated by more than seven decades — and the man who pushed for it says the timing could not be more fitting.
“Help Wanted/Now Leave” opened this week, documenting the 1954-55 federal deportation campaign that swept up an estimated 1 million people, most of them Latino residents of the Southwest. The exhibit’s title references the government’s own name for the operation at the time, which used a racial slur against Mexican immigrants. Museum organizers are pairing that history with video testimony from people detained and deported under President Donald Trump’s current immigration enforcement push — a campaign Trump has said would surpass the scale of the Eisenhower-era sweep.
The idea for the exhibit came from Pablo Espinoza, a member of the California Museum’s board of trustees, who first envisioned it years ago while touring the museum’s exhibit on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans with his son. A former television journalist and Capitol staffer who has spent his career documenting Latino experiences in California, Espinoza said he recognized himself in the history of the 1950s deportations.
“That could have happened to me. That could have happened to my son. We look the part,” he said.
It took years to bring the project to fruition. Now, Espinoza said, the exhibit’s message feels more urgent than he ever anticipated.
The Eisenhower administration’s deportation campaign followed closely on the heels of World War II labor shortages that had prompted the U.S. government to expand the Bracero program, which brought Mexican laborers into the country to fill agricultural and industrial jobs. Within a decade, however, political leaders — including then-California Gov. Goodwin Knight — began casting unauthorized immigrants as competitors for jobs held by American workers, a rationale echoed in Trump’s own campaign rhetoric before his 2024 election victory.
Agents in the 1950s moved quickly, herding people onto trucks and boats bound for Mexico; some deportees died of heat exposure during the journey. Today, immigrant advocates say detainees are often held in overcrowded facilities without adequate medical care. Then, as now, witnesses have described immigration sweeps that targeted people based on how they looked or sounded rather than any specific evidence of legal status. Last month, leaked text messages and audio recordings revealed present-day immigration agents in Los Angeles using slurs strikingly similar to the language embedded in the 1950s operation’s official name.
Among the personal stories featured in the exhibit is that of Victor Ochoa, a San Diego artist and longtime activist who was deported as a 7-year-old U.S. citizen in 1954. Ochoa recalled his mother urging the family to avoid speaking Spanish in public as deportation raids intensified. Federal agents eventually arrived at their East Los Angeles home and gave the family three days to leave the country voluntarily or be forcibly removed. Though Ochoa had been born in the United States, his parents were Mexican immigrants, and the family chose to leave together rather than risk separation.
“I remember them scaring the hell out of my mom, and she cried after they left,” Ochoa said.
That experience shaped the rest of his life. Ochoa later helped found San Diego’s Chicano Park and has spent decades as a muralist and advocate for immigrant communities. He said recent reports of agents detaining parents near San Diego schools have unsettled him deeply.
“It’s meaner now,” he said, comparing the current crackdown to what his family endured in the 1950s.
The exhibit also highlights a more recent case: Vilma Palacios, a 23-year-old nursing graduate who was detained by immigration agents in June 2025, just days before she was set to begin a new job at a New Orleans hospital. Palacios had come to the United States at age 6 and grew up largely in Orange County before finishing high school in Louisiana and earning her degree from Louisiana State University. After spending six months in detention, she agreed to be deported to Honduras.
“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,” Palacios said.
Her story didn’t end there — she eventually found work through her nursing network at a hospital in British Columbia, where she now lives. Still, she views her removal as a broader loss.
“These are good people that are being sent back,” she said. “There are good people in the U.S. that just want to contribute and make it better, that are being deported.”
For Espinoza, who came to the United States from Ecuador on a student visa before building a career in television news and later at the Assembly Speaker’s Office, the project reflects a personal evolution. He once believed immigrants should simply wait their turn for citizenship, but said his views shifted after meeting people who crossed the border out of necessity, with no realistic legal pathway available to them.
“It 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.
Espinoza said he hopes visitors leave the exhibit the way he did years ago at the Japanese American internment display — moved enough to reflect and act. He often thinks of his son Adrian, who died in 2024 at age 25 and who joined him on that formative museum visit years earlier.
“In the end I’m hoping maybe people see this with their children and then think, ‘What else can I do?'” Espinoza said.
Original source: CalMatters
