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History Seems Poised to Repeat Itself
Ripping America apart
m arian W right e delman
If you are reeling from the
series of executive orders and
memoranda issued by Pres-
ident Trump in his first two
weeks in office, and horrified
by what clearly seems to be
an unconstitutional, un-Amer-
ican and unjust ban on Muslims from seven
countries that has caused outrage at home and
abroad, keep reading.
When candidate Donald Trump first prom-
ised a “deportation force” during the Presi-
dential campaign, that idea sounded inhumane
and disturbed many of us. But did you know
it’s been tried before?
When Emilia Castañeda was nine years old,
she and her brother and father were forced to
leave their home in Los Angeles on one-way
train tickets to Mexico paid for by Los An-
geles County – leaving behind the house her
father had purchased before the Depression,
most of their possessions, and even the small
plot of land where Emilia’s mother was bur-
ied. Emilia wasn’t able to return home to Los
Angeles for nine years. She was one of an esti-
mated one to two million people pressured or
forced to leave the United States for Mexico
in the 1930s.
President Herbert Hoover’s government
called the program “Mexican Repatriation,”
but scholars estimate about 60 percent of the
people forced to “repatriate” to Mexico were
actually U.S. citizens like Emilia. Mexican
Americans were rounded up indiscriminately
by
at workplaces or handed train tickets by social
workers in cities and towns across the coun-
try. Historian Francisco Balderrama esti-
mates one-third of Los Angeles’s Mexican
population was expelled between 1929 and
1944. Many Americans don’t know about
this shameful chapter in our history. Those
who lived through it and whose families
were separated and destroyed in the process
are now watching with horror as history
seems poised to repeat itself.
Families like the deported Castañedas were
swept up in scapegoating that blamed them for
taking away scarce jobs and taking up spaces
on welfare relief rolls at the height of the De-
pression. The same language is back along with
similar tactics. Drafts have been circulating of
potential executive orders by President Trump
that would “deny admission to any alien who is
likely to become a public charge.”
Disqualifying immigrants in the past for
being poor or arriving without a bank ac-
count or a job lined up would have radically
reshaped the narrative of American history
and America itself. It would certainly have
kept out the immigrant ancestors of millions
of current Americans of every color, ethnici-
ty and faith. These new draft orders appear to
have that goal.
Restrictions circulating in draft form would
make it harder for immigrants to enter the
American workforce. Existing federal law
already prohibits undocumented immigrants
from obtaining federal welfare benefits, and
prohibits new permanent residents or green-
card holders from qualifying for welfare and
other public benefits during their first five
years of residency. The draft order would
target immigrant families legally receiving
a certain level of public assistance like food
stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy
Families (TANF), and Medicaid after five
years of residency for being a public charge,
and make that a deportable offense.
In other words, being poor or falling on hard
times during an economic downturn would be
a crime. All this is despite the fact that studies
show poor immigrants are less likely to use
welfare than poor native born Americans and
that immigrants are a net benefit to the Amer-
ican economy.
Executive orders like these, if made final,
would pit poor children of immigrants against
other poor children when all are America’s
children and deserve an equal opportunity to
reach their potential. By targeting those who
legally receive public benefits and marking
them for deportation, the draft order criminal-
izes compassion, sows fear and will rip fami-
lies with mixed immigrant status apart.
The draft order is based on myths and lies,
rather than truth and consequences, and goes
against the most basic tenets of all the ma-
jor faith traditions and American values. For
more than 40 years the Children’s Defense
Fund has been working with Republicans
and Democrats to keep families together in
the best interest of the children. In these dark
days for America, we must speak out, resist
using any and every nonviolent way possible
and never give up until our nation can regain
its bearings.
Marian Wright Edelman is President of the
Children’s Defense Fund