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Time
August 2, 2019

Citizens Facing Deportation Isn't New. Here's What Happened When the U.S. Removed Mexican-Americans in the 1930s
By Jasmine Aguilera


In a case that garnered national attention — and questioning last week during a House Judiciary Committee hearing that was supposed to be about the separation of families — U.S. citizen Francisco Erwin Galicia was released from immigration detention on July 23 after more than 20 days in custody at the South Texas Detention Facility. In March of this year, a 9-year-old U.S. citizen was detained at a Southern California checkpoint for more than 30 hours after crossing the border from Tijuana while authorities verified her identity. And in April 2018, Peter Sean Brown, also a U.S. citizen, faced deportation to Jamaica after Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confused him for someone with the same name. Brown spent just over three weeks in a Florida county jail before being released, according to a lawsuit. A total of 834 U.S. citizens were issued ICE detainers — which allow local law enforcement to detain people on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement — between fiscal years 2008 and 2012, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a research organization at Syracuse University. A detainer is how Brown was held in county jail despite evidence that he was born in the U.S. In all three of these recent headline-making cases, those with their citizenship status questioned were able to return home. But this isn’t the first time U.S. citizens have faced the threat of deportation — and its reality. It is estimated that about 2 million people, 60% of whom were American citizens of Mexican descent, were removed to Mexico as part of a Depression-era effort known as repatriation, according to the state of California, though the exact number is unknown and estimates range.


Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University
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