Trump, ever the reality-TV showman, governs through spectacle. What could be more spectacular than a massive nationwide raid against undocumented immigrants? Set aside the morality or ethics for a moment, as the president regularly does. Sunday’s planned arrests of more than 2,000 families are a pitch-perfect sop to his base as he gears up for reelection. Cable news will buzz for days with footage of immigrants being apprehended and ICE agents banging on doors. It’s the most expensive campaign ad in American history.

Much about Trump’s presidency is new or unprecedented, but rounding up undesired populations at this scale is not; he won’t be the first American president to try to deport immigrants en masse, nor will he be the first to use multistate raids to do the job. What sets Trump apart here isn’t the methods or strategies that he uses, but the lack of long-term policy goals behind them. Thousands of lives are about to change so the president can hear how well he’s doing on Fox News.

The most obvious historical parallel is “Operation Wetback,” the name given to the federal government’s campaign to deport and drive out Mexican immigrants in the border states in 1954 and 1955. Immigration agents combed through the Southwest to round up more than a million Mexican migrants in the region, shipping them over the border by truck, train, and boat without due process. Though it lasted less than a year, the policy marked the start of militarization on the southern border that continues to this day. Trump himself touted the operation as a model for his own approach.

“Dwight Eisenhower, good president, great president, people liked him,” he told the audience at a Republican presidential debate in 2015. “I like Ike, right? The expression. I like Ike. Moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country, moved them just beyond the border. They came back. Moved them again, beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south. They never came back. Dwight Eisenhower. You don’t get nicer, you don’t get friendlier. They moved a million and a half people out. We have no choice.”

Trump’s upcoming raids will fall far short of Operation Wetback. There are an estimated ten and a half million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Tracking down, detaining, and deporting all or most of them is a logistical feat beyond the federal government’s current resources. And while Trump himself said he would remove as many as possible during the 2016 election, his campaign said it would try to deport two to three million instead. The George W. Bush administration, by comparison, deported roughly two million people over his entire presidency, while Barack Obama oversaw the deportation of a record two and a half million.