Mexican Repatriation: A Forgotten Story of Ethnic Cleansing in America

The deportation of Mexican Americans during the Great Depression is an oft forgotten act of ethnic cleansing that devastated communities and exposed deeply rooted racism in America

For a nation that has long celebrated itself as a land of opportunity, American history reveals a far more troubling reality.

For millennia, the first ancestors cultivated these lands—long before the arrival of white European settlers. Yet for centuries, their descendants have found themselves betrayed by a nation with the audacity to herald equality and freedom as American values.

From the several hundreds of broken agreements with Native Americans to the targeting of Mexican communities, there is an embarassment of wealth with regard to the atrocities wrought by whites.

During the Great Depression, one such betrayal materialized in the form of targeted policies that devastated Mexican American communities—people who had deeper roots in this country than any so-called Americans, the latter descended from the violent colonizers of this land.

“There’s no way like the American Way” Time Magazine, February 1937

The Great Depression and Economic Instability

The Great Depression was a time of unparalleled economic devastation in the United States. As unemployment skyrocketed and breadlines grew longer, fear and uncertainty dominated public discourse.

In the midst of this turmoil, the Mexican American community became a convenient patsy. Politicians and the media perpetuated the false narrative that these communities were “stealing” jobs from white Americans, ignoring the fact that Mexican laborers had been essential to building industries like agriculture, construction, and railroads.

Ironically, this targeting occurred even as the Dust Bowl decimated American agriculture, making it nearly impossible for many white farmers to produce crops.

The deportation of Mexican Americans—many of whom had intergenerational farming knowledge—further destabilized the agricultural economy.

Mass Deportations

Known as Mexican Repatriation, this policy was a full-scale assault on both Mexican- and U.S.-born citizens; a gross violation of civil rights that tore families apart and has left lasting scars on communities on both sides of the unnatural border.

Between the years 1929 and 1936, an estimated 1.8 to 2 million people of Mexican descent were forcibly expelled from the United States. In California alone, upwards of 400,000 were deported to, what for many, was a foreign land.

What’s more egregious is the knowledge that at least 60% of those deported were U.S. citizens—many of them children born on American soil.

This disgusting chapter in American history saw ethnic cleansing through displacement of entire communities, many comprised of U.S. citizens, but it also laid bare the systemic racial scapegoating that has been used to uphold white power. 

Herbert Hoover: The Architect of Mass Deportations

The federal government, along with state and local officials, played a central role in the Mexican Repatriation.

As economic desperation intensified, Herbert Hoover made "American jobs for real Americans" a rallying cry. His administration actively promoted mass deportations, branding them as “voluntary repatriation” in an attempt to mask the intimidation, coercion, and outright violence behind the removals.

Hoover’s Secretary of Labor, William N. Doak, descendent of Irish-born settler David Doak, orchestrated a campaign that combined workplace raids, mass roundups, and local government cooperation to purge entire neighborhoods of Mexican residents.

Repatriation was not just a federal effort—state and local governments, along with private businesses, played active roles. Employers, eager to cut labor costs, encouraged deportation efforts that disproportionately affected working-class Mexican Americans.

By sanctioning local governments to conduct these operations without due process, Hoover set the precedent for a national purge of Mexican communities—one that was carried out with open brutality. In cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit, police and immigration officers raided homes, schools, and public spaces, often without warrants or any legal justification. Families were forcibly placed on buses and trains, sometimes under the threat of violence.

Franklin Roosevelt

After winning the presidency in 1933, Roosevelt continued many of these practices despite his New Deal agenda, which was touted as a progressive economic recovery plan.

Under Roosevelt’s administration, deportations continued as state and local governments, emboldened by federal inaction, intensified their efforts.

While Roosevelt expanded programs to support struggling white workers, his administration turned an apparent blind eye to the ongoing targeting of Mexican Americans.

This tacit approval allowed local governments to continue enforcing deportations that tore families apart and devastated communities.

Put simply, neither president did anything to intervene in the widespread human rights abuses occurring under their watch. Instead, their policies reflected the broader racial and economic climate that defined this dark chapter of American history.

Local Action

Local governments, operating under federal mandates, enacted policies designed to identify, target, and remove individuals of Mexican descent. These actions culminated in raids, forced roundups, and mass deportations, often carried out without due process.

Under Hooever, one such policy involved the use of “voluntary repatriation,” a euphemism for coercing families into leaving under the threat of arrest or violence.

While some individuals and organizations resisted, their efforts were often met with fierce opposition from a system determined to preserve white supremacy.

Los Angeles became an epicenter of this racist crusade.

In 1931, one of the most notorious incidents, La Plaza raid, occurred when authorities surrounded a downtown park, corralling 400 Mexican Americans—men, women, and children alike—into buses destined for the border. Some were sent to a country they had never even seen.

A gross violation of human rights, the incident was a grim reminder of how quickly the freedoms of people of color can be stripped away when it serves white interests.

To be sure, the mass expulsion of Mexican Americans wasn’t just limited to California.

Across the country, Mexican American communities were decimated. In Texas, the Mexican-born population was slashed by one-third, and between 1930 and 1940, the number of people of Mexican origin in the U.S. dropped by 100,000.

Families were torn apart—parents deported while their American-born children were left behind. In some cases, children were orphaned by a system that almost seemed designed to erase their existence.

The Targeted Expulsion of the Mexican People

An untold number of deportees weren’t even “foreigners“—not even by the standards of the occupying entity.

Many were American descendants of Indigenous populations in places like California, Texas, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico, whose ancestors tilled and toiled on these lands long before they were usurped by the United States and its Puritan ancestors.

Incidentally, the ownership of these lands was determined through agreements made between occupying European parties, without regard for the people of the land.

Meanwhile, the treaties made with the actual Indigenous were disregarded as quickly as they were signed.

The Myth of Immigrant Labor

The same misguided prejudice that fueled these deportations persists today, encapsulated in the infamous "they took our jobs" trope once satirized by South Park.

Of course, this stereotype, like all of those conjured by the best and whitest this country has to offer, employs a uniquely American blend of willful ignorance and oblivious cognitive dissonance.

On the one hand, Mexican Americans are labeled as lazy and unwilling to work, but on the other, they’re unfairly vilified for allegedly stealing jobs from white workers (this, despite the fact that it’s job creators who manipulate the market for cheap, exploitable migrant labor).

The stupidity of these clashing stereotypes makes one thing clear: mass deportation was not about protecting white jobs as much as it was a belligerent exertion of perceived supremacy to uphold white privilege.

Economic Impact

The deportations weren’t just morally wrong—they were pretty economically shortsighted, too.

In one of the greatest ironies of the era, as the Dust Bowl ravaged the Midwest and made it nearly impossible for many Americans to produce agriculture, the U.S. was busy deporting some of the very people who had generational knowledge in cultivating the land.

These families were descendants of those who first created and sustained agriculture on these lands for centuries, long before the U.S.-imposed borders were built.

Rather than potentially utilize this invaluable expertise, the U.S. government expelled them, leaving American agriculture in an even more precarious state.

This glaring oversight would be seemingly corrected during the Bracero Program.

Initiated in 1942, the program invited Mexican laborers back to work the very fields from which they’d been previously expelled.

Despite this temporary remedy, the U.S. would ultimately reverse course yet again, this time under the exceedingly racist “Operation Wetback” of 1964.

Cultural Devastation

In addition to the economic catastrophe, Mexican Americans also lost their homes, properties, and livelihoods.

Local governments often seized their property and sold it off, claiming it as “payment” for deportation costs.

According to California’s 2005 Apology Act, many were defrauded of their personal and real property, which was sold off by local authorities to cover deportation costs.

History Repeating Itself

Mexican Repatriation set a dark precedent for how the U.S. government would handle Hispanic communities during times of economic instability.

This evil, unconscionable act is rightfully referred to by some as a Mexican Trail of Tears, a reference to the deadly displacement of Native Americans a mere century before.

To this day, we see the same tactics being employed.

During the Obama administration, mass deportations of Latinos reached unprecedented levels, earning him the nickname “Deporter-in-Chief.”

During the same period, Arizona, introduced legislation SB 1070, which allowed police to stop anyone “appearing” to be in the country illegally, and other states followed suit.

This was a seeming throwback to repatriation acts, where political leaders were content to throw anyone with a “Mexican-sounding name” onto trains bound for Mexico.

Later, under the Trump administration, these practices became even more inhumane.

Trump’s border policies introduced family separations, where children were forcibly taken from their parents at the border and held in detention centers, many in cages.

Children were lost in the system, and some tragically died due to neglect and inadequate care while in custody.

Trump weaponized xenophobia and fear to justify intentionally cruel immigration policies, using immigrants as scapegoats for the country’s economic and societal challenges.

Unfortunately, these practices did not end when Trump left office, including his penchant for keeping kids in cages.

Despite campaign promises of reform, the Biden administration continued several of Trump’s harsh border policies.

Family separations persist, and the infamous “kids in cages” situation remains unresolved.

Though touted as a more humane alternative, Biden’s approach to immigration policy has mirrored that of his GOP predecessor, with policies that have led to the perpetuation of harm against migrant and indigenous communities.

Presidential hopeful, VP Kamala Harris, has also perpetuated this narrative. Lately, her song and dance on immigration has hit some xenophobic notes, echoing the scare tactics often used by Republicans to stoke unfounded fears.

A Cycle of Racial Scapegoating

For centuries, settlers invaded, massacred, enslaved, and deported—on land that was never theirs to begin with.

They then built an economy like a house of cards, driven by speculation, buying on margin, and proliferating unchecked greed.

When it all came crashing down, they didn’t hold themselves accountable.

Instead, they blamed Mexicans—those whose claim to these lands far supersedes any false sense of entitlement white Americans could ever conjure up.

Meanwhile, xenophobia remains alive and well in American politics, with those of Indigenous blood still being painted as criminals, rapists, and invaders—despite being some of the most hardworking and underappreciated members of society.

The hypocrisy is staggering, but it’s all part of the same tired story; a feather in the cap of the American Way.