Donald Trump has promised to launch the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history if re-elected. That commitment is already taking shape with his appointment. Stephen Miller will become deputy chief of staff, and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem will become secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. Both are notorious anti-immigrant activists. And then there’s Tom Homan, whom President Trump has dubbed the “border czar.”
In a recent interview on “60 Minutes,” correspondent Cecilia Vega asked Homan what such a campaign would look like.
Cecilia Vega: Is there a way to carry out mass deportations without separating families?
Tom Homan: Of course it does. Family members may also be deported.
This muted response highlights the uncomfortable reality that immigrants do not live in isolation. Many belong to mixed-status families, with some members being U.S. citizens and others not. In California alone, 2.44 million illegal immigrants and 3.59 million U.S. citizens live with undocumented family members, according to the California Immigration Data Portal. These numbers make clear that any deportation policies that the next president and Mr. Homan may implement will have a significant human impact. The humanity of these families and the trauma that deportation would inflict are not obvious concerns for the next administration.
And Homan’s interview is not just rhetoric. Homan served as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) during the Trump administration, overseeing the forcible separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents at the border. As we saw years later in the stories of these families, his policy had devastating effects at the time, but they commit to it again.
And as history tells us, these tactics are not new.
I am the dissertation advisor for a student researching the politics of Los Angeles leader Gloria Molina (no relation) in the Huntington Library archives. She wanted help identifying documents she found among Molina’s papers. It was a fax. It could have been a slate from the county archives for her. She asked about “all the mumbo jumbo” at the beginning of the document, the information being sent. I was more interested in the content. It was a 1930s chronicle detailing a shameful chapter in Los Angeles’ history: a repatriation campaign targeting Mexican and Mexican-American families.
According to George J. Sanchez’s history of Los Angeles, Becoming Mexican-American, Los Angeles lost one-third of its Mexican and Mexican-American population during these operations. Nationwide, an estimated 1.8 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans were deported, 60% of whom were U.S. citizens. Although we believe these deportation efforts are federally led, we are clear that they have been primarily enacted by local governments, and that local governments have enormous power not only to harm but also to resist. reminds me. Grassroots activists can push back, hunker down, or rise high when other activists are low.
Although repatriation affected all strata of society, it was the poorest who were most vulnerable. For example, Mexican immigrant mothers and their American-born children seeking basic medical care at Los Angeles County General Hospital were scapegoated as undesirable and deported directly from the hospital. Molina, then a member of the county Board of Supervisors, requested repatriation records when he fought Proposition 187 in the 1990s. This measure denied illegal immigrants public services. Molina fought this proposal vigorously, but the court ultimately blocked it. Molina would have seen the similarities between deportation and the xenophobic policies of the time. By grounding her activism in history, she was ensuring that past injustices would not be repeated.
My own family story intersects with the repatriation of the 1930s. My mother and uncle were both born in Southern California and were 4 and 5 years old at the time. They could have been deported simply for being Mexican-American. But their mother, my grandmother, who had tuberculosis, asked a friend to take them in when she died. This allowed officials to escape scrutiny from city and county authorities who were complicit in deportations. Today, with family separation policies likely to be implemented under the Trump administration, many families may find themselves hanging on a similarly vulnerable thread.
It was the day Carlos and Maria, the writer’s uncle and mother, took him home with their adoptive mother Natalia when he was a child.
(Courtesy of Natalia Molina)
You probably didn’t know about LA’s repatriation story. In fact, a 2023 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that 87% of “key topics in Latin American history” were underrepresented or omitted entirely from textbooks. . Such erasure puts everyone at risk of repeating past injustices.
Donald Trump’s appointment is a stark reminder of how easily history can repeat itself if we don’t face it. As we face another wave of anti-immigrant policies, we must remember: History is not just a tool for understanding the past. It is a weapon for shaping the future.
Natalia Molina is a professor of American studies and ethnicity at USC. Her most recent book is “A Place in Nayarit: How a Mexican Restaurant Grew a Community.”
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