When deportation was called repatriation: The US once expelled 1.8 million people to Mexico

My college students are always shocked when they learn that the U.S. deported an estimated 1.8 million people to Mexico in the 1930s, including some who had never stepped foot in the country.  

But this year marked the first time I couldn’t offer my usual conclusion: that the mass repatriation during the Hoover Administration represented a singular and unprecedented violation of constitutional rights. Instead, I had to acknowledge—somberly—that the nation is once again deporting Latino immigrants, including U.S. citizens.

Since I started teaching “Latino L.A.” seven years ago, my central objective has been to help my first-year students — the majority of whom come to my classroom with little to no background in Latino history — connect the past to the world they’re living in right now. 

My lesson about the 1930s deportation campaign — L.A. County officials referred to it as a “Mexican Repatriation” to make the “return home” sound legal, voluntary, and benevolent — became especially pertinent in this context. 

During the Great Depression, politicians struggling to respond to the economic crisis needed a scapegoat, and racialized ideas of who belonged in America and who did not. They made Mexican communities convenient targets. In Los Angeles, where 7.6% of residents were Latino, political leaders began suggesting that Mexican laborers were taking American jobs and burdening public resources. Deporting Mexicans would “open positions for needy citizens,” L.A. County Supervisor H. M. Blaine declared. The Depression would end if only the “aliens would go away.”  

Lecturing to my students about this history, I underscored how economic precarity and xenophobic racism intersected to broaden public support for the mass expulsion. Those same forces are re-emerging as the Trump administration harnesses widespread financial insecurity alongside a persistent narrative that immigrants are to blame. Now, as before, officials are advancing an idealized vision of the U.S. as fundamentally and normatively white. The mass removal of immigrants of color has never been about controlling any so-called immigration crisis, I told my students, but about a desire to shape who gets to count as an American.

Like today’s ICE, Depression-era INS agents indiscriminately rounded up Mexicans, presuming they were here illegally. In Los Angeles, they targeted parks, hospitals, and work sites in Mexican communities, demanding proof of citizenship. High-profile raids and media campaigns announcing impending roundups served as tools of intimidation, creating widespread fear that led to “voluntary” deportation via free one-way train tickets to Mexico. Entire families carrying only a few belongings boarded trains at Union Station, some never to return to the U.S. County officials and social workers went door to door, threatening cuts to welfare aid and heightening panic among working families who worried they would fall into extreme poverty.

I want my class to see the evils of then and now. But I also want to instill in them a sense of hope and agency. We discussed multiple resistance efforts that pushed back against mass deportation during the 1930s. Here in Los Angeles, media, churches, and charitable organizations provided critical help. La Opinion warned about neighborhood sweeps. The liberal Los Angeles Record publicly exposed dodgy arrests: “handcuffs instead of warrant[s],” the paper reported. Catholic churches raised funds to give to local families. L.A.’s bar association condemned constitutional rights violations. The Mexican Consulate helped provide community aid and legal defense. 

Deportations never truly ended, but by 1934, they quietly tapered off as FDR’s administration shifted political priorities and the New Deal offered economic relief. Community resistance played a crucial role by bringing the lawless raids out into the open — abuses that might otherwise have remained hidden.

I hope my class helps students discern what makes this moment unprecedented, and what is a cycle in history, repeating itself. I want them to understand that while deportations have never stopped, it is not normal to see armed, masked men dragging people into unmarked vehicles. It is not normal for the government to detain people in unknown locations, without arrests or trials. 

I also want them to see how daily acts of survival and organized resistance — 100 years ago and today — are proof that Latinos refuse to accept dehumanization. And the Latino community in L.A. is now more resilient than ever before. Around us, grassroots activists organize neighborhood patrols and nonprofit organizations lead “Know Your Rights campaigns,” elected representatives and immigration attorneys provide legal and moral support, and journalists and social media document ICE activity.  

“A major difference today,” I told my class, “is that Latinos are the majority in Los Angeles. And we’re not going anywhere.”  

This commentary was adapted from an essay produced for Zócalo Public Square.