From the article: ... ... For more, Sarah Taber writes on Bluesky about other anti-immigrant campaigns in US history.
From the article:
In the 1930s, the Los Angeles Welfare Department began deporting hospital patients of Mexican descent. One of the patients was a woman with leprosy who was driven just over the border and left in Mexicali, Mexico. Others had tuberculosis, paralysis, mental illness or problems related to old age. Orderlies carried them out of medical institutions and sent them out of the country.
These were part of the “repatriation drives,” a series of informal raids that took place around the United States during the Great Depression. Local governments and officials deported up to 1.8 million people to Mexico, according to research conducted by former California State Senator Joseph Dunn, who in 2004 investigated the deportations under President Herbert Hoover. Dunn estimates around 60 percent of these people were actually American citizens, many of them born in the United States to first-generation immigrants.
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The deportation of U.S. citizens has always been unconstitutional, yet scholars argue the way in which “repatriation drives” deported non-citizens was unconstitutional, too.
“One of the issues is the ‘repatriation’ took place without any legal protections in place or any kind of due process,” says Kevin R. Johnson, a dean and professor of public interest law and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. “So you could argue that all of them were unconstitutional, all of them were illegal because no modicum of process was followed.”
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Hoover lost the presidential election in 1932 because voters—who now referred to shanty towns as “Hoovervilles”—blamed him for the ongoing Depression (indeed, Hoover’s decision to raise import tariffs did prolong the Depression at home and abroad). The next president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, didn’t officially sanction “repatriation drives,” but neither did he suppress them. These raids continued under his administration and only really died out during World War II, when the U.S. began recruiting temporary Mexican workers through the Bracero Program because it needed wartime labor.
For more, Sarah Taber writes on Bluesky about other anti-immigrant campaigns in US history.
From the article:
...
...
For more, Sarah Taber writes on Bluesky about other anti-immigrant campaigns in US history.