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January 26, 2026Uncategorized

Before ICE: Historical Echoes

In the 1930s, the United States quietly expelled over a million people during the Great Depression – and more than half of them were American citizens. This episode explores how fear, economics, and bureaucracy combined to erase a chapter of history that sounds impossible but is tragically real. Then we chat with Natalie Keller Pariano of Natterdoodle!

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The Great Depression did not just break banks and businesses. It broke people’s sense of certainty. By 1930, unemployment in the United States had reached levels that were previously unimaginable. In some cities, nearly one in three workers had no job. Relief programs were overwhelmed. Local governments were nearly bankrupt. And when leaders could not immediately fix the problem, they began searching for someone to blame.

Mexican immigrants and Mexican American communities became an easy target.

Newspapers across the country ran stories claiming that Mexican workers were draining public assistance and taking jobs from “native Americans.” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1931 that deportations would “relieve the county of a heavy welfare burden.” Another paper bluntly stated that removing Mexican families would “free employment opportunities for white men.”

This language mattered, because it shaped policy.

At the time, the United States had no modern immigration enforcement system. Documentation was inconsistent. Birth certificates were not universally issued. Passports were rare. Many Americans, especially those born in rural areas or at home, had no official proof of citizenship at all.

So when local and federal officials began conducting raids, enforcement became fast, blunt, and deeply inaccurate.

Raids occurred at factories, farms, hospitals, schools, and public parks. Officers would demand proof of legal status immediately. If a person could not produce paperwork on the spot, they could be detained. If they accepted public relief, they could be reported. If they lived in a neighborhood targeted by officials, they could be swept up regardless of their legal status.

The term often used was “repatriation,” implying a voluntary return. But as one social worker later testified, “People were given a choice between leaving quietly or being arrested and removed anyway.”

Entire families were pushed out together. Officials openly admitted that they preferred not to separate children from parents, even when those children were American citizens. One county official was quoted as saying, “It is better for all concerned if the family leaves as a unit.”

Trains were chartered. Trucks were filled. People were sent south.

By the mid-1930s, historians estimate that between 1 million and 1.8 million people of Mexican descent had been expelled from the United States. Scholarly consensus holds that as many as 60 percent were U.S. citizens.

People born in Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, and Detroit were removed from their own country.

This was not the first time fear reshaped who counted as American.

Chinese communities were violently expelled in the late 1800s. German Americans were surveilled and harassed during World War I. Japanese American citizens were incarcerated during World War II without trials. In each case, the justification changed, but the process did not.

Fear created urgency. Urgency erased nuance.

The Mexican repatriations of the 1930s sit squarely in this pattern, but they are discussed far less often, in part because there was no single law or executive order. Instead, there was something more unsettling – a nationwide alignment of incentives that required very little coordination and almost no accountability.

Los Angeles became the epicenter.

In 1931, county officials coordinated high-profile raids designed to send a message. One of the most infamous took place at La Placita Park, a central gathering place for Mexican American families. Plainclothes officers waited until the park was crowded. Uniformed officers then sealed the exits and began questioning people en masse.

The Los Angeles Times praised the operation, describing it as “a long-needed housecleaning.”

Those who could not immediately prove their legal status were detained. Many others left voluntarily afterward, terrified of what would happen next. Homes were sold for pennies. Businesses were abandoned. Some families simply disappeared overnight.

A woman interviewed decades later recalled, “We were told America didn’t want us anymore. So we believed it.”

What awaited them in Mexico was often nothing. Many had no family connections. Some spoke little Spanish. Jobs were scarce. Housing was worse. Children who had never lived outside the United States suddenly found themselves foreigners in a country they had only heard about.

The deportations did not end with an apology or a reckoning. They simply slowed down and stopped as economic conditions improved and public attention moved on. There were no national hearings. No compensation. No official accounting of how many citizens had been expelled.

When officials defended mass repatriation in the 1930s, they rarely framed it as punishment. They framed it as math. Newspapers, city councils, and relief agencies all leaned on the same basic claim: that Mexican immigrants were taking jobs from American citizens and draining public resources during a time of national emergency.

At the time, that argument sounded intuitive. Unemployment was staggering. In some cities, joblessness exceeded 25 percent. Relief rolls were growing faster than local governments could fund them. It felt reasonable to assume that removing one group of workers would automatically improve conditions for everyone else.

But when historians and economists later went back and examined what actually happened, the numbers told a very different story.

Modern economic studies using U.S. Census data from 1930 and 1940 show that areas with the highest levels of Mexican repatriation did not experience improved employment outcomes for U.S.-born workers. In fact, economists found that native-born employment declined slightly in regions where deportations were most aggressive. Unemployment among U.S. citizens often increased rather than decreased.

That result surprised even the researchers.

If Mexican workers had simply been competing for the same jobs, removing them should have opened up positions. Instead, what the data suggests is that Mexican immigrants were deeply embedded in local economies. They worked in agriculture, manufacturing, railroads, and service jobs that supported surrounding businesses. When those workers were removed, demand fell. Farms produced less. Businesses closed. Entire local economies shrank.

Wages tell a similar story.

If deportations had reduced labor competition, wages for remaining workers should have risen. They did not. Studies found no consistent wage increases for native-born workers following repatriation. In many cases, wages continued to fall, tracking the broader collapse of the Depression rather than any supposed relief created by deportation.

The idea that repatriation would save public money also fails to hold up under scrutiny. While some local governments reported short-term reductions in relief spending, those savings were often offset by reduced tax revenue, lower consumer spending, and long-term economic decline in affected regions. Removing tens of thousands of working families meant fewer people paying rent, buying food, or supporting local businesses.

Historians also note that Mexican and Mexican American workers were already among the lowest-paid laborers in the country. In Texas, for example, crop-picking wages dropped from about $1.21 per 100 pounds in the late 1920s to roughly forty-four cents by 1931. Those wage collapses happened before mass repatriation campaigns reached full force, suggesting that Mexican workers were not driving economic decline, but were being hit hardest by it.

In other words, the economic panic did not originate with immigrants. It engulfed them.

What repatriation did accomplish was speed. It created the appearance of action. It allowed officials to point to trains leaving town and say something was being done. But when measured against employment numbers, wages, and long-term recovery, the policy did not deliver what it promised.

The fears were real. The suffering was real. But the data does not support the claim that deporting Mexican workers improved economic conditions for American citizens.

And that may be the most uncomfortable conclusion of all.

Because it suggests that this was not a hard choice between two bad outcomes. It was a choice driven by panic, reinforced by rhetoric, and justified by assumptions that never held up when tested against reality.

For decades, the story survived mostly in private memory.

It was not until historians began collecting oral histories that the scale became undeniable. Elderly survivors described being pulled from classrooms, watching neighbors vanish, and realizing too late that citizenship papers meant little if you did not have them in your pocket at the exact moment someone demanded them.

One man interviewed by the Library of Congress said, “I was born in California. I thought that meant something. It didn’t that day.”

Records backed them up. County documents explicitly calculated welfare savings from deportations. Federal correspondence acknowledged that removals were occurring without hearings. The evidence was always there. It just was not emphasized.

In 2005, the state of California formally acknowledged its role and issued an apology. It did not include compensation. It did not make national headlines. But it was an admission that what happened was wrong and widespread.

There has never been a comprehensive federal apology.

Responsibility is easy to diffuse. Local governments point to federal agencies. Federal agencies point to local enforcement. Everyone claims necessity.

But the lesson remains.

This did not require a suspension of the Constitution. It did not require new laws. It required fear, speed, and a willingness to accept collateral damage.

Citizenship is not just a legal status. It is a promise. And in the 1930s, that promise failed over a million people.

That’s why this story matters.

Because it sounds fake. But it’s true. The internet says it’s true.