While Mexicans were not the only target in the drive against illegal aliens, they were often the most visible. This was certainly true in Los Angeles, which, at that time had some 175,000 inhabitants of Mexican descent, second only to Mexico City. In early 1931, Los Angeles newspapers reported on an impending anti-alien sweep led by a ranking immigration officer from Washington, D.C. Walter Carr, the federal Los Angeles district director of immigration, assured the press that no single ethnic group was under siege, but raids in the Mexican communities of El Monte, Pacoima and San Fernando belied that official line. The final show of force occurred with a raid on La Placita, a downtown Los Angeles park that was popular with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. On February 26, an afternoon idyll on Olivera Street was shattered by an invasion of immigration agents and local police. Agents searched every person on the scene for proof of legal residence. Though hundreds were hauled off for questioning, few were ultimately detained. The message was in the bluster, not the busts.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in American History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

As recounted in Decade of Betrayal, Labor Secretary Doak’s efforts proved to be highly successful: Deportees outnumbered those who entered the United States during the first nine months of 1931. There were, however, some detractors. A subcommittee formed by the Los Angeles Bar Association found that Carr’s tactics, such as inhibiting a suspect’s access to counsel, fell outside the law. Carr dismissed these charges as nothing more than sour grapes over a lost client base and justified the deprivation of counsel on the grounds that lawyers merely sold false hopes in exchange for cash squeezed from needy immigrants.

Investigations into the alleged abuses began on a national level, as well, by the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, which was appointed by President Hoover in 1929. Named for its chairman, former U.S. Attorney General George W. Wickersham, the Wickersham Commission had made front-page news with its investigations into the rackets of Al Capone and others. Like the L.A. Bar Association, the commission also found the methods employed by Doak’s underlings to be unconstitutional. Regardless of the legality or illegality of the practices, one thing was clear: Mexican immigrants were departing in great numbers. According to a report by Carr, by May 1931, ‘There have been approximately forty thousand aliens who left this district during the last eighteen months of which probably twenty percent [were] deportable.’ Even those who were here legally, he allowed, had been driven out by fear.

In retrospect, other options were available. The Registry Act of 1929, for example, ensured permanent residency status — a version of amnesty — to those who had been in the United States continuously since 1921 and had been ‘honest, law-abiding aliens.’ While this surely would have applied to many Mexicans, the act’s provisions were utilized mostly by European or Canadian immigrants. In many cases, institutionalized hostility prevailed over legal rights. Anti-Mexican sentiments convinced the father of author Raymond Rodríguez to return to Mexico. His mother met with a local priest, who assured her that, as a mother of five American children and a legal resident, she could not be forced to leave. ‘So he left and we stayed,’ says Rodríguez, who never saw his father again.

Instead of driving Mexican aliens underground — as was often the result of raids and other scare tactics — it became apparent to anti-immigrant proponents that it was more expedient simply to assist them out of the country. ‘Repatriation’ became a locally administered alternative to deportation, which was a federal process beyond the purview of the county and municipal officials. ‘Repatriation is supposed to be voluntary,’ says Francisco Balderrama, Decade’s co-author. ‘That’s kind of a whitewash word, a kind of covering up of the whole thing.’

Some 350 people departed on the first county-sponsored repatriation train to leave Los Angeles in March 1931. The next month, a second train left with nearly three times as many people, of which roughly one-third paid for their own passage. The repatriates were led to believe that they could return at a later date, observed George P. Clements, manager of agriculture of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. In a memo to the chamber’s general manager, Arthur G. Arnoll, Clements, who wanted to keep the cheap labor, wrote, ‘I think this is a grave mistake because it is not the truth.’ Clements went on to state that American-born children leaving without documentation were ‘American citizens without very much hope of ever coming back into the United States.’

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to