Fear and Expulsion: Under Trump, History Is Poised to Repeat Itself

​The U.S. has repeatedly tried to remove nonwhite people from society, often leading to generational trauma.
 January 31, 2025
By
 Kate Morrissey
 
President Donald Trump has wasted little time since returning to the White House carrying through on his vows to stop certain immigrants from coming to the United States and to remove many who are here. Over the past months, Capital & Main has explored and reported on migrants and asylum seekers who’ve been detained at the border, examining their fate and the rules that keep them in custody. This is the first in a two-part series looking at the history of mass deportations in the United States and what it portends for the future.


 
Pedro Rios’ paternal grandparents were both born in the United States, yet the government forced them to move to Mexico in the 1930s. They were teenagers at the time.
Rios, the director of the American Friends Service Committee’s U.S./Mexico Border Program, guesses that government officials sent his grandparents on trains to the border, but he doesn’t know the story. That’s because neither of them talked about the experience. 
He said his grandmother seemed to be unable to forgive the part of herself that led her to be expelled from her home country.
“She despised being Mexican to some extent,” Rios said. “I think it was because of the discrimination that she lived through.”
Over its history, the United States has repeatedly worked to exclude and remove people in moments when xenophobic, nativist and white supremacist voices have been able to sway public opinion towards fear, including the exclusion of Chinese immigrants, forced removals of Mexicans and Mexican Americans and the relocation and incarceration of Japanese and Japanese Americans. The result of those efforts was often generational trauma, with elders unable to talk about what they went through, as in the case of Rios’ family. 
Now, with promises of mass deportation from the Trump administration, many academics see that history poised to repeat itself. 
Roberto D. Hernández, a professor of Chicano and Chicana studies at San Diego State University, said the racialization of Mexican and Mexican American people during deportation efforts of the 1930s and 1950s is similar to the messaging from white supremacist groups today. 
“This kind of fear has long-term generational consequences,” said Kevin Johnson, a professor of law and Chicano studies at the University of California Davis. 
Rios has witnessed that first hand.
“It’s unfortunate that the politics take precedence over people’s lives and the destruction that separation and forcefully removing people from their homes causes to family,” Rios said.
Rooted in Racism
From their earliest appearances, the United States’ laws, policies and practices that limited certain nationalities’ ability to come or to stay were tinged with racist concerns about nonwhite men marrying white women and with fears that immigrants would take jobs and other opportunities away from people born in the United States.
In the 1800s, Western states, including California, passed laws limiting Chinese and other Asian nationalities from entering their territories, owning land and marrying white women. In 1879, California’s new constitution enabled state officials to remove immigrants that they deemed to be “detrimental to the well-being of the state.”
Johnson said vigilante groups also took it upon themselves to scare Chinese residents into leaving. In the 1870s, many Chinese workers lived in the town of Truckee, California, where they helped tunnel through mountains to complete the Transcontinental Railroad.
One night in 1876, a group of white vigilantes went to the homes of some Chinese workers in that town and set them on fire. As the cabins burned, the vigilantes shot the people who fled, killing one. 
The vigilantes were tried for murder and acquitted by an all white jury, Johnson said. The group later received a cannon salute in celebration, and one of the members went on to become the town’s constable. The incident became known as the “Trout Creek Outrage.”
“It’s been often forgotten in California that our citizens as well as our government as well as the federal government engaged in these horrible acts,” Johnson said.
Mass Deportations
With the onset of the Great Depression, state and local officials blamed Mexican immigrants, who had previously been welcomed during the labor shortages of World War I, said Hernández, the San Diego State University professor.
Back then, Hernández said, the anti-immigrant rhetoric was purely economic. He said that’s different from the Trump administration’s tactics, which have used criminalization in addition to economic complaints to vilify immigrants. 
Though the federal government will lead deportation efforts under the Trump administration, the plans include deputizing local law enforcement to assist and pulling in military or National Guard for support. Hernández and Johnson both worry that these plans harken back to practices in the 1930s and 1950s that saw U.S. citizens deported alongside immigrants.
In the 1930s, local authorities, including police, rounded up people believed to be Mexican and sent them south. Most were taken away on trains and ships, Hernández said.
 
More: https://capitalandmain.com/fear-and-expulsion-under-trump-history-is-poised-to-repeat-itself
 
 Resistance material here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cRIJsSJwtF72ckJ8QLQu5cDCGnoeh5OIIjwqRkDKdBg/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.es6myhajhn20
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