Before They Come for Us Again

My grandfather-in-law was deported from his own country—for looking Mexican. What happened to him is happening again, but worse.

Armed officers rounded up more than 1 million brown-skinned American citizens during the 1930s to forcibly send them to Mexico, which was not their nation of birth. It’s happening again now.

I’ll never forget the first time I met Julian Torres.

I was engaged to marry his grandson, Patrick Rodriguez, a thoughtful magazine editor with a mischievous glint in his eye. We flew from our home in Boston to Patrick’s birthplace of Oceanside, California, to share the news with Julian, who lived there in a small, well-loved house in a predominantly Mexican American neighborhood. Oceanside hugs the Pacific just north of San Diego, a working-class coastal town that feels like the last breath of city before the wilderness of Camp Pendleton takes over.

Julian, a master carpenter and career-long union member, was waiting for us under the carport, next to his pride and joy: a gold El Camino that gleamed like a lowrider shrine. He pointed to a bumper sticker with a wicked grin:
"Next to sex, my truck’s the best!"

Julian was small and stooped, with that strange brassy hair that gave away a history of black box dye. He reminded me of an old vaudevillian, always trying to get a laugh. He showed me the clock he’d reassembled backwards so he could read it in the mirror while shaving. The nude woman he’d painted on the underside of the toilet lid. And then—like a priest bringing me into the temple—he opened the doors of his sacred tool shed.

“He only shows that to people he considers family,” Patrick whispered.

But there was something else Julian didn’t show me. Something no one in the family talked about much: The eight years he spent in Mexico, despite being born in California.

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The Deportation We’re Not Taught About

Five years ago, while researching a book proposal, I stumbled onto something that made me stop cold. Julian hadn’t moved to Mexico. He had been forcibly expelled by his own country—the United States of America.

In the early 1930s, under President Herbert Hoover, more than 1.8 million people of Mexican descent were swept up in a mass removal effort known euphemistically as the Mexican Repatriation. An estimated 60% were U.S. citizens—many born on U.S. soil, like Julian.

This was not a fringe policy. It was the official response to the Great Depression, engineered and endorsed by Hoover to scapegoat brown people for his own economic disasters. White Americans were angry. They wanted someone to blame for unemployment, food shortages, and social decline. And Hoover gave them a target: Mexicans.

Let’s pause and name two crucial lies that made this possible.

First: There is no such thing as “looking Mexican”—just as there’s no way to look American. Nationality is not a phenotype. It’s not skin tone, nose shape, last name, or accent. It’s a matter of law and geography. When the government said people were being deported “for being Mexican,” what they meant was: for being brown.

Second: Even the word “deportation” is a lie here. You can’t deport someone who never ported—who never entered the country from another. Julian was born in Garden Grove, California. He had no “foreign homeland” to return to. So this wasn’t deportation. It was exile. Banishment. A state-orchestrated purge based not on legal status, but appearance and ancestry.

Language matters. And in this case, the term deportation served to sanitize what was actually a campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out against American citizens.

It didn’t matter whether you were born in El Paso or Zacatecas.

If you looked Mexican to a white American racist, that was enough.

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What They Did

Between 1929 and 1936, U.S. officials and local authorities:

• Raided Mexican American neighborhoods without warrants

• Staked out churches, factories, and parks frequented by brown-skinned people with Spanish surnames

• Seized homes, bank accounts, and possessions

• Denied people time to collect medicine or notify family

• Put entire families onto trains to Mexico—often without due process

Julian was among them. He was born in Garden Grove, California, in the 1922. But when Hoover's deportation squads ramped up their operations in 1931, he and his family were rounded up and exiled to Zacatecas. He was ten years old.

They called it repatriation. But you cannot be “repatriated” to a place that was never your country.

Let’s call it what it was: Ethnic cleansing. State-sponsored exile. A form of genocide.

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The Forgotten Genocide

American families, mostly women, wave goodbye to their menfolk, who’d been forced at gunpoint onto trains by the US government and sent to Mexico for the “crime” of being brown under Herbert Hoover’s regime.

I was raised by a history and sociology professor. I have a master’s degree. I taught U.S. history at the middle school level.

I had never heard about this.

The deportation of over a million brown Americans is almost completely absent from textbooks. We teach about Japanese internment in World War II (as we should), but this earlier atrocity—more widespread, more insidious, and more forgotten—has been whitewashed from the record.

It took me digging through resources on The Zinn Education Project to find accurate lesson plans about what happened to Julian and over a million others.

When Julian returned from Mexico at 18, the U.S. government knew exactly who he was—because they sent him a draft notice for World War II.

They wouldn’t let him live in the United States.

But they were more than happy to let him die for it.

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Sound Familiar?

What’s happening in the U.S. right now is not new. But it is worse.

We are once again watching political elites gin up fear against brown people for economic and political gain.

We are once again seeing military forces turned inward.

We are once again hearing the word “invasion” used to describe families seeking refuge.

Only now, the tools of fascism are sharper:

• Surveillance is digitized.

• Propaganda is algorithmically targeted.

• Private prisons are ready to profit.

• And an entire political party, backed by billionaires and emboldened by racism, is fantasizing aloud about mass deportations.

White supremacist criminals like Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump are not being subtle. They are openly describing plans to:

• Use the military against civilians

• Build mass detention camps

• Conduct “roundups” of undocumented people (many of whom are actually U.S. citizens)

• Leverage private companies for forced labor

• Send people to foreign death prisons without due process, to be disappeared forever (outsourcing the death camps this time around)

This whole “immigration” thing is not a “border issue.” This is not about “immigration.” It has never been about immigration. Not in the 1930s. Not when the government did it again in the 1950s with Operation Wetback. And not now.

This is about power, fear, and the age-old white racist American habit of blaming brown people for the sins of the powerful—usually themselves.

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The Media Won’t Tell You. Publishing Won’t Touch It.

When I pitched my book proposal on the Mexican Repatriation, my literary agent loved it. She wept. Editors in New York said it was fascinating, beautifully written, urgently relevant.

Then they passed.

One said, “The whole Mexican thing is still too controversial.”

But it wasn’t a Mexican thing. It was an American thing.
As American as lynchings, voter suppression, and apple fucking pie.

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Final Words

They say history repeats itself when we don’t learn it.

But in America, we go one step further: We erase it.

What happened to Julian Torres in the 1930s is happening again—now backed by tech, privatized enforcement, a complicit and ignorant media (even you, MSNBC) and pure bloodthirsty ambition.

If we don't start telling the truth about our past, we won’t recognize the next train until we’re already on it.

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