The California Museum in downtown Sacramento is opening a new exhibit this week that draws a direct line between one of the darkest chapters of American immigration history and the deportation crackdown unfolding under President Donald Trump today.
The exhibit, titled “Help Wanted/Leave Now,” examines the mass deportation campaign carried out under President Eisenhower in 1954 and 1955 — an operation historians say removed roughly one million people, mostly from Latino communities across the Southwest, and remains the largest deportation effort in U.S. history. The federal government at the time gave the campaign an official name using a racial slur against Mexican immigrants.
The idea for the exhibit came from Pablo Espinoza, a former television journalist and Capitol staffer who now sits on the California Museum’s board. Years ago, while touring the museum’s exhibit on the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans with his son, Espinoza had a realization: he wanted to use that same kind of storytelling to document the 1950s deportation campaign, a piece of history he felt had largely been forgotten.
Espinoza, who immigrated from Ecuador on a student visa before building a career in Spanish-language television and later working for the Assembly Speaker’s office, said he believed he could easily have been swept up in the 1950s raids had he been living in California at the time.
“That could have happened to me. That could have happened to my son. We look the part,” he said.
For years, the timing never felt right to pitch the exhibit. Now, museum officials say, it couldn’t be more relevant.
The exhibit pairs video testimony from people deported in the 1950s with accounts from immigrants detained and removed from the country within the past year, drawing striking parallels between the two eras. Visitors will see firsthand accounts of families torn apart, aggressive detentions based on appearance, and federal agents using slurs against the people they were removing — practices that mirror recent reporting on immigration enforcement tactics in Los Angeles, where leaked texts and audio last month revealed agents using similar language during raids.
The Eisenhower-era campaign came about a decade after wartime labor shortages had prompted the federal government to expand the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican workers into the U.S. to fill agricultural jobs. But amid rising anti-immigrant sentiment — echoed decades later in Trump’s own 2024 campaign rhetoric about immigrants “taking jobs” from Americans — officials reversed course and launched sweeping deportation raids. Detainees were often crammed onto ships and trucks under brutal conditions; some died of heatstroke during transport. Today’s immigrant advocates report similarly overcrowded detention facilities with inadequate medical care.
Among the personal stories featured is that of Victor Ochoa, a longtime San Diego artist and activist who was deported as a 7-year-old U.S. citizen in 1954. Ochoa’s mother had urged the family to avoid speaking Spanish in public as deportations intensified, fearing it would draw attention. Federal agents nonetheless showed up at the family’s East Los Angeles home and gave them three days to leave the country voluntarily or face forced removal. Though Ochoa was born in the U.S., his parents were Mexican nationals, and the family chose to leave rather than risk a more violent deportation.
“I remember they scared my mother so much, and she cried after they left,” Ochoa told CalMatters.
The experience shaped the rest of his life, pushing him into decades of activism, including his role in the creation of San Diego’s Chicano Park. He credits the schools he attended in Tijuana with instilling in him a critical perspective on the United States that later influenced his work as a muralist. Ochoa said he now volunteers with groups supporting undocumented immigrants and is troubled by reports of agents detaining parents near San Diego schools, calling the current enforcement climate “more aggressive” than what he witnessed as a child.
The exhibit also features Vilma Palacios, 23, who was detained by immigration agents in June 2025 — just about a week before she was set to begin a nursing job at a hospital in New Orleans. Palacios came to the U.S. at age 6 and spent much of her childhood in Orange County before finishing high school in Louisiana and graduating from Louisiana State University. After spending six months in detention fighting her case, she ultimately agreed to be deported to Honduras.
“They said they were going after criminals and people with records, not people who have dedicated their whole lives to this country and their careers to serving the community. I never thought it would go this far,” she told CalMatters.
Palacios’ story didn’t end in Central America, however. Professional contacts from her nursing career helped her secure a hospital job in British Columbia, where she now lives. She said she views the current crackdown as a loss for the country. “These are good people being deported. There are good people in America who just want to contribute and make the country better, and they’re being sent away.”
Espinoza said his own views on immigration shifted over the years after meeting people who crossed the border simply to support their families, with no realistic path to legal status. In those situations, he said, immigration “isn’t really a choice at all — it exposes the injustice of a system that offers no path to citizenship for people who are economically vulnerable but who provide an important service to this country.”
He hopes the exhibit will move visitors the way the Japanese American incarceration exhibit once moved him and his son, Adrian, who died in 2024 at age 25. The two used to debate politics together, something Espinoza said his son claimed to dislike even though “he was always engaged.”
As the exhibit opens, Espinoza said he keeps thinking of his son. “In the end, I hope people see this with their kids and think, ‘What else can I do?'”
Original source: CalMatters
