As Trump eyes mass deportations, historians see parallels to past campaigns to force out immigrants

Trucks drove through Chicago’s Southeast Side, telling Mexicans to return to their native country while offering to relocate all of their belongings.

It was the 1930s, and there were calls for mass deportations of Mexicans as the United States dealt with the economic hurdles of the Great Depression.

Olga Martinez recalled her father’s experience as a Mexican immigrant living in Chicago in a 1982 video interview that later became part of the Southeast Chicago Archive and Storytelling Project. She said the family never knew who was behind the trucks or financially backing the effort.

“My dad always questioned, ‘Why were we asked to go back to our country?’” Martinez says. “You know, he saw the Serbians, the Croatians, nobody was asked to go back except the Mexicans.”

Her father stayed in Chicago, though thousands of Mexicans in the city left. The calls for mass deportations would return in the 1950s, as the country tried to stop the flow of immigrant workers.

Immigrants have been the first to blame during times of economic crisis in the United States, says Michael Innis-Jiménez, the author of "Steel Barrio," which chronicles the history of the Mexican-American community in Chicago. Many households are facing financial struggles in the post-pandemic economy, which could be fueling those sentiments, he says.

"It's not new — they called it repatriation during the Great Depression and now they call it self-deportation," Innis-Jiménez says. "And the idea is that that's going to help the workers that stay behind. All these myths about immigrants taking the jobs or immigrants taking a lot of public service and funding is very popular rhetoric during times of economic crisis."

As immigrant communities brace for mass deportations that Donald Trump has promised, the public opinion and plans surrounding what could happen has felt like déjà vu, says Xóchitl Bada, a professor of Latin America and Latino studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. In Chicago, more immigrants left “voluntarily” than by force during past eras of mass deportations, Bada says.

“The campaign of fear — these complicated, elaborate narratives — offered by the media, TV, radio, the public, neighbors, all these rumors that you start hearing: 'This is what’s going to happen to you, they are going to round people up,'” Bada says. “...They were convinced up to that point that then it was in their best interest to leave because situations were going to be very difficult in the U.S. if they decide to stay.”

During the 1930s, the Mexican community was a fraction of the city's population, experts say. In other parts of the country, including Northwest Indiana, Mexican immigrants were forced onto buses and trains and taken to the border during what would be known as the repatriation campaign, says Innis-Jiménez.

In Chicago, the Mexican consulate arranged for train tickets to the southern border for those who wanted to leave, and thousands did leave to Mexico or to other parts of the United States as many faced unemployment, Innis-Jiménez said. It’s estimated that the city’s Mexican population decreased by about 75% during this time, he said.

Mexican immigrants near the city — such as those living in Northwest Indiana — also took the consulate's offer, says Emiliano Aguilar, a faculty fellow with the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame. After 1932, Mexican immigrants were usually the first ones fired from jobs, and officials were removing anyone with a Spanish surname from welfare lists, Aguilar says.

There were many European immigrants who were also living in Chicago at the time, which could have been one of the reasons why there weren’t as many deportations in the city, Innis-Jiménez says. Advocacy groups, like Hull House, and the political machine depended on immigrants, he says.

“There was such a strong immigrant advocacy culture in the city,” Innis-Jiménez says. “I don’t want to romanticize Chicago — it still was a hard place for immigrants. But as far as the political structure in the city and the business culture, the big social services community were pretty protective.”

Anton Cermak, Chicago’s mayor from 1931 until he was killed in 1933, resisted efforts by immigration officials who wanted to inspect the city’s public assistance rolls to identify potential Mexican immigrants, Bada says. Cermak had been born in Czechoslovakia.

“The fact that he was an immigrant himself, really colored his support of immigrants and his defense of immigrants,” Bada says. “And his observation that the government was unjustly preying on those who worked the most for the city.”

Those who stayed created mutual aid groups to help the community survive the harsh economic times, and the children of the Mexican families became a generation that sought to establish roots in the Midwest, Aguilar said.

Telling the stories of those who were forcefully or voluntarily deported can be hard because many didn’t return, erasing that period’s history, says Elena Gonzales, the curator of civic engagement and social justice at the Chicago History Museum.

“It’s easy for us to feel removed from the 1930s or the 1950s,” she says. “A time period like we’re in now, it’s easy to feel like, oh, this is not really happening, this is not real. But our history tells us that it’s very real, and it is not bluster, it’s not something that we can just push aside and not worry about. It’s something that we actually need to pay a lot of attention to.”

The Chicago History Museum plans to weave the history of deportations into an upcoming exhibit called, “Aqui en Chicago,” opening in October that will highlight the history of Chicago’s Latino community resisting white supremacy and colonialism, Gonzales says.

One exhibition artifact that will be included is a border crossing card of a U.S. citizen who was deported in 1933 from Indiana to Mexico as a child and who later returned in 1945.

“He was repatriated as a child, and then as an adult he returned,” she says. “The front and the back of the card document his coming and going. So there was not always this kind of paper trail to be found around the actual event of reparation. His card was the first of its kind that I had seen, and I was very excited to see that there was actually documentation of what had happened.”

There were other Mexicans who were U.S. citizens who were also deported in the 1930s and the 1950s, Gonzales says.

The upcoming exhibit will also show a map of a Garfield Ridge factory that the federal government used in the 1950s to detain immigrants during another era when immigrants faced the threat of mass deportations, she says.

One of the differences between the 1930s and 1950s deportation campaigns was the involvement of the federal government, Aguilar says. The campaign in the 1930s was driven by state and local entities, while the federal government expanded the border patrol and became more actively involved in the 1950s deportations, he says.

The book, “Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification,” by Mike Amezcua, details how federal immigration officials used a former factory as a way to expedite deportations, with a goal of expelling 20,000 to 40,000 immigrants from Chicago. Their records later showed that just under 11,500 immigrants were deported by plane from 1954 to 1955, according to the book.

Bada also says many more left because of the hostile campaign against immigrants.

If Trump moves forward with deportations, it's likely that Mexicans could once again face the brunt of them because of the size of the community, Bada says.

The citizenship of Mexicans in Chicago has increased in recent decades, but this population still had a higher rate of non-citizens than other racial and ethnic groups, according to a report titled "Fuerza Mexicana" by the University of Illinois Chicago.

Scare tactics have worked "better because it has been cheaper for the United States government compared to actually rounding people up,” Bada says. But in Chicago, with a large advocacy network and training people to know their rights, "people are going to use those resources to refuse and to resist.”

Aguilar says Black migrants, especially those from the Caribbean, could also be harshly affected by deportations this time as they already are seeing an increase in discrimination. He also sees parallels to the hostile sentiments immigrants faced in the 1930s and in modern days.

For example, he says Brighton Park was one of the Chicago neighborhoods that was staunchly anti-Mexican, and it is where residents in 2023 pushed back against the city building a shelter for asylum-seekers.

"Roughly 100 years after the fact, the same neighborhood, while vastly different in demographics, is still very much much against migrant presence," Aguilar says. "...So it could be ironically, depressingly both a city of hope and opportunity, but also a city of fear and exclusion."