President-elect Donald Trump’s recent promise to deport entire families of undocumented immigrants — including those who are American citizens — harkens back to “repatriation” programs of the 1930s, which were used to attempt to pressure Mexican Americans, including Mexican citizens, into leaving the country voluntarily.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker on Sunday, Trump reiterated his plans to attempt to end birthright citizenship and expanded on some of the details around his mass deportation program, including what the incoming administration has planned for the roughly 4 million families of mixed immigration status in the United States.
Specifically, Welker asked Trump what he had planned for families in which the parents in a family are undocumented while the children are in the United States legally. Trump said in response “I don’t want to be breaking up families.”
“So the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back,” Trump said. “We’ll send the whole family very humanely, back to the country where they came.”
When Welker asked whether Trump would revive his zero-tolerance policy from his first administration, Trump responded that “it depends on the family.”
“If they come here illegally but their family is here legally, then the family has a choice. The person that came in illegally can go out, or they can all go out together,” Trump said.
While most of the follow-up reporting and commentary on Trtump’s appearance has focused on his promise to challenge the constitutional right of birthright citizenship via executive order, Trump’s plans to remove whole families from the United States, including those citizens, may have greater historical precedent.
In the 1930s, during President Herbert Hoover’s administration, states like California and Colorado undertook so-called “repatriation” programs during a wave of xenophobia that erupted during the Great Depression.
While “repatriation” is sometimes used as a euphemism for deportations, in the context of the 1930s schemes it was used to convince Mexican Americans, citizens or not, to leave the United States voluntarily.
According to the National Archives, “many chose to leave the country rather than risk a deportation hearing” during the Great Depression. Combined with the economic pressures of the time, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and sometimes even hostile environments created by neighbors, many chose to leave.
“The specifics varied but the results were the same: illegal immigrants and even legal migrants left the country “voluntarily” in large numbers. In some cases they left after being threatened or detained by local law enforcement or Bureau of Immigration officials,” the National Archives’s Spencer Howard wrote.
Through these repatriation schemes, states were able to increase the number of Mexican Americans they removed. According to the Department of Homeland Security, there were roughly 105,000 official deportations from 1929 to 1933. However, estimates of the total number of people removed are much higher.
A California law called the “Apology Act for the 1930s Mexican Repatriation Program" estimated that “In California alone, approximately 400,000 American citizens and legal residents of Mexican ancestry were forced to go to Mexico” beginning in 1929 and that throughout the 1930s, around 1.2 million American borns Citizens of Mexican descent were “repatriated” to Mexico.
“Throughout California, massive raids were conducted on Mexican‑American communities, resulting in the clandestine removal of thousands of people, many of whom were never able to return to the United States, their country of birth,” the bill, which became law in January of 2006, reads. “These raids also had the effect of coercing thousands of people to leave the country in the face of threats and acts of violence.”
These repatriation schemes accompanied more direct deportation tactics as well. In Los Angeles, in February 1931, immigration agents raided La Placita Park in what was then a predominantly Mexican American part of Los Angeles and arrested 400 residents — including those born in the United States — legally.
In a 2001 interview with The Los Angeles Times, the late Raymond Rodriguez, who authored “Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s” alongside California State University professor Francisco Balderrama, described how raids like this and other tactics were used to try to convince Mexican Americans, like his father Juan Rodriguez, to leave on their own.
“If you don’t go [too] . . . you’ll starve to death and maybe worse,” Rodriguez recalled his father saying before he left.
