Public immigration sweeps in LA are not new — similar tactics were used in the 1930s

It was a sunny, late winter afternoon Feb 26, 1931. Hundreds of Angelenos, many of them Mexican Americans, crowded into the historic La Placita Park in DTLA to relax and catch up with friends.

The park was a stone’s throw away from where the Pueblo of Los Angeles was founded in 1781 by 44 settlers of Mexican, Black and Spanish descent. As friends chatted on the park's numerous benches, vendors sold food, musicians performed, and soapbox speakers preached. The atmosphere was breezy and calm.

But at precisely 3 p.m., all that changed. Immigration officials, police officers and members of LAPD's anti-communist “Red Squad” stormed the park, sealing off the two entrances so no one could exit. The officers forcibly lined up everyone or kept them seated on benches and began interrogating them as panic mounted. According to eyewitnesses, several people who tried to flee were beaten by police.

“The Immigration employees asked the detainees their name, age, length of residence in the United States, where they had entered, and whether or not they had a job,” L.A. Spanish language paper La Opinión reported. “Then, they demanded their passports.”

While most people were able to prove their legal residency, those who didn’t were roughly handled and dragged off to Central Police Station for further questioning. According to La Opinión, 11 Mexican people, five Chinese folks and one Japanese person were taken to Central Police Station for further interrogation.

Although the raid only lasted an hour and 15 minutes, it sent a chilling message.

“The procedure was not the same as on previous occasions, since the arrests were not made in pool halls or other public establishments, but rather in the form of a 'levy,’ seizing every citizen at hand,” La Opinión stated.

One of the first public immigration blitzes in the country, the La Placita raid signaled a dangerous new era where folks could be detained with no due process based on appearance alone.

'American jobs for real Americans'

The raid on La Placita was part of a larger scheme to remove immigrants and their children from America to open up “American jobs for real Americans” and clear families off the relief rolls during the economic devastation of the Great Depression.

According to Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, by Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodriguez, one of those leading the deportation charge was William N. Doak, the Secretary of Labor in the administration of Herbert Hoover (1929-1933).

"It is my wish that North American public opinion support it in the broadest possible way, in order to expel from the country all foreigners who have entered the United States surreptitiously or who for any other reason, for example their dangerous radical ideas, have made them unwelcome to this nation,” Doak said in a radio broadcast in January 1931, per La Opinión.

“Once the crisis is over, only those foreigners who will actually come to make this country great through its industries and political institutions will be allowed to enter."

As Balderrama and Rodriguez note, Mexican immigrants, in particular, became a major target of local and national officials. In Los Angeles, Charles P. Visel, Los Angeles County Coordinator for Unemployment Relief, began working with Doak and other U.S. officials to deport or “repatriate” immigrants through a campaign of fear and intimidation. In January 1931, Visel bluntly stated: “It would be a great relief to the unemployment situation if some method could be devised to scare these people out of our city.”

Visel, aided by Walter E. Carr, district director of Immigration in Los Angeles, launched a media blitz they hoped would encourage immigrants, particuarly Mexican or those of Mexican descent, to leave L.A.

“The plan Visel immediately put into operation was to use radio stations and newspapers to announce the impending roundup of Mexican aliens by immigration officials and to publicize the arrest of a few ‘prominent deportable aliens,’” Camille Guerin-Gonzales writes in Mexican Workers and American Dreams: Immigration, Repatriation, and California Farm Labor, 1900-1939.

'Sob-sisters'

L.A.’s local newspapers were soon publishing interviews with various officials promoting the upcoming raids. In a statement to the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 18, Carr decried the charitable organizations which sought to protect and aid immigrants he believed were illegally in the country.

“If you will eliminate from consideration the pleas and the influence of the so-called ‘sob-sisters’ and will place the control of the enforcement bodies in the hands of experienced men instead and will give to those enforcement bodies sufficient men and money…giving the officers real moral and other support rather than sharp criticism, the crime conditions may be controlled,” he stated.

Carr also attempted to reassure the larger public that the upcoming deportations would be measured and fair.

“We are going to deport aliens convicted of crimes first, rather than honest laboring men, who may be technically illegally in this country,” he told the Los Angeles Evening Express.

Throughout January and early February, there were calls in Los Angeles for judges to stop “pampering" alien criminals, amid arguments that those who had already broken the law by entering the country illegally did not deserve habeas corpus. Others argued that deportees should be sent to their country of origin at their own expense.

“Deportations should not stop with the criminal, but all who are here in defiance of the law deserve to be sent away,” the Los Angeles Evening Express wrote. “They crowd out and take the employment of American citizens and honestly entered aliens who mean to become citizens.”

In letters to the editors, citizens like E.A. Carlton professed racist beliefs.

“There are a few Americans in Mexico,” he wrote to the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record. “If there were not American brains there they would be back in barbarism in the jungles, and if Americans in Mexico took Mexicans jobs for less pay, they would be massacred and not deported. We should not pay Mexicans. We should deport them and give jobs to the American unemployed and save the country from peonage and ruin.”

But not everyone agreed with the government's new hard line. One citizen wrote in the Los Angeles Evening Post-Record that deporting “alien gangsters” was fine, but ”the real root of racketeering, with its manifold branches, lies in corrupt officialdom.”

La Opinion, 29 January 1931

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UCR Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research and

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Build-up of fear

Throughout immigrant communities, fear was rising daily. Children were kept home from school, and families stayed home after dark. On Jan. 29, La Opinión published an article warning of the upcoming raids, and encouraging readers who had lost their passports to get copies quickly at the Mexican consulate.

“The truth of all this is that numerous local organizations, political, social, labor, etc., are carrying out an intense effort to Americanize as a means they believe to be practical to resolve the situation of the unemployed,” Mexican Consul Rafael de la Colina told La Opinión.

“But the announced step of levies of foreigners seems somewhat unfocused, since the Immigration laws are absolutely clear on this matter.”

Colina also attempted to reassure a frightened community.

“Mexicans who live legally in Los Angeles, in this regard, should not feel alarmed by these announced levies, since the Immigration Laws, I repeat, protect them in the broadest way,” he said.

But Colina’s belief in the U.S. government’s adherence to the rule of law was misplaced.

El Monte raid

On Feb. 15, the first large raid occurred in El Monte, where 13 Mexican men were swept up and taken into custody. Immigration officials began sweeps of ranches and agricultural fields, and launched nighttime raids throughout L.A. county, targeting Mexican neighborhoods and detaining men, women and children. According to Balderrama, people in hospitals were put on stretchers and taken to the Mexican border.

By the day of the raid on La Placita, the Los Angeles Evening Express reported that 200 immigrants with illegal or criminal records had been taken into custody since Jan. 1.

It was later reported that 57 of these detainees had submitted themselves for self-deportation.

But Carr wanted bigger numbers than that. He began planning the La Placita raid days before, recruiting law enforcement officials from as far away as Arizona. “The Placita site was chosen for its maximum psychological impact in the INS’s war of nerves against the Mexican community,” Balderrama and Rodriguez write.

And so, at 3 p.m. on Feb. 26, dozens of agents swooped down on La Placita Park. According to La Opinión, the first people arrested were three Chinese men and one Mexican man who happened to be driving by.

Another passerby, longtime department store employee Moises Gonzales attempted to cross the siege line and was immediately detained. When he showed an immigration agent his papers, which proved he had legally resided in America since 1923, the agents merely sneered and stuffed them in his pocket. Eyewitnesses who attempted to intervene on his behalf were unsuccessful.

A crowd of onlookers began to circle the park, attempting to help the men trapped inside. Two employees of the Mexican consulate, Vice Consuls Ricardo Hill and Joel Quinones, were notified about what was occurring and ran to La Placita, where they were rudely rebuffed by officials until they revealed their rank.

A majority of the approximately 400 people interrogated were quickly released, after they provided proof of their citizenship or legal residency. But a handful of others, including Moises Gonzales, were carted off in police trucks to the city jail.

“Those eligible for deportation received the news calmly, and very few protested, limiting themselves to offering all kinds of excuses,” La Opinión reported. “The Immigration officers who carried out the raid refused to make statements and only explained, smiling, that they were obeying orders from above and that the procedure was completely in accordance with the laws of the country.”

When the Mexican consulate’s Joel Quinones rushed to William Carr’s office to protest the raid, Carr deceptively claimed ignorance, telling him to go talk to W. F. Watkins, the official in charge of the raids.

The effect of the raid was felt long after the officers had gone. “The panic caused by the presence of the Immigration authorities in the neighborhood was such that Main Street was deserted in a few minutes and lasted for several hours,” La Opinión reported.

After hours of interrogation, Moises Gonzales was finally released but “not without one of the Immigration officers suggesting that he be imprisoned for his alleged complicity in communist activities and demonstrations.”

Russian shantytowns

Nine of the 11 Mexican detainees were quickly released after proving their legal residency. But as La Opinión noted, the paltry success of the La Placita raid and its public spectacle did not deter city and county officials, and raids continued on different immigrant communities.

“As proof that the immigration authorities are not only after Mexicans, it is clear that yesterday morning was dedicated to visiting the Japanese neighborhoods, especially the agricultural fields where families of subjects of the Republic of the Rising Sun now reside, and some apprehensions were made,” La Opinión reported on Feb. 28.

“On Wednesday night, the immigration officers paid no attention to either Mexicans or Orientals, devoting the night entirely to visiting the shantytowns where Russian citizens reside, making wholesale apprehensions. In many cases, the victims proved to be duly immigrated.”

The La Placita raids were also the start of what is now known as the “Mexican Repatriation Program.”

“The first train of repatriates left Los Angeles on March 23, 1931, on the heels of Visel’s deportation crusade,” Guerin-Gonzales writes. “Between March 23, 1931, and April 5, 1934, relief agencies in Los Angeles County shipped 13,332 Mexicans to Mexico.”

During the 1930s hundreds of thousands of Mexicans (many American citizens) were deported or scared into repatriating to Mexico, a land many of them barely knew.