IMMIGRATION

Guardian - It’s a scene many fear will come to pass in president-elect Donald Trump’s second term, especially after he doubled down on a campaign promise to “launch the largest deportation operation” in US history, and confirmed he would use the military to execute hardline immigration policies.

But this particular episode happened in 1931, as part of an earlier era of mass deportations that scholars say is reminiscent of what is unfolding today.

The La Placita sweep became the first public immigration raid in Los Angeles, and one of the largest in a wave of “repatriation drives” that rolled across the country during the Great Depression. Mexican farm workers, indiscriminately deemed “illegal aliens”, became scapegoats for job shortages and shrinking public benefits. President Herbert Hoover’s provocative slogan, “American jobs for real Americans”, kicked off a spate of local legislation banning employment of anyone of Mexican descent. Police descended on workplaces, parks, hospitals and social clubs, arresting and dumping people across the border in trains and buses...

Hoover’s Mexican repatriation program is, among mass deportation efforts in the past, most similar to Trump’s stated plans, said Kevin R Johnson, a professor of public interest law and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. “This was a kind of ethnic cleansing, an effort to remove Mexicans from parts of the country,” Johnson said. “This episode had a ripple effect that lasted generations, and a long-term impact on the sense of identity on persons of Mexican ancestry.”

In Los Angeles, Johnson said, it was a common practice for Mexicans to deny their Mexican ancestry and claim Spanish or European heritage to avoid suspicion. Well into the 1960s, Johnson said, people were afraid to leave home without a passport or identification papers lest they be arrested. More than 400,000 Mexican Americans were deported in California alone, but the legacy of repatriation went unacknowledged for many decades. Finally, in 2005, California state senator Joseph Dunn helped pass legislation apologizing to people who suffered under the program.

Since his first presidential run, Trump has invoked President Dwight D Eisenhower’s mass deportation program as a blueprint for his own agenda. During the second world war, the US and Mexican government enacted the Bracero program that allowed Mexican farm hands to temporarily work in the US. But many growers continued to hire undocumented immigrants because it was cheaper. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration cracked down on undocumented labor by launching “Operation Wetback”, a yearlong series of raids named after a racial epithet for people who illegally crossed the Rio Grande.

Border patrol agents used military-style tactics to sweep up laborers from farms and factories and send them back to Mexico. More than 3,000 people were expelled every day, and many died under inhumane conditions in detention and transport. The government said it deported more than 1 million people in total, though historians have put the actual number at closer to 300,000.